Beyond Beliefs

You can lis­ten to the ses­sions online

“I really need to get a hold of myself…”

After I wrote This End­less Moment, I sent copies out for review and com­ment. One of my friends e-mailed me with the idea of talk­ing about what I am ‘in,’ as com­pared to what I have ‘learned’—in other words,

to talk about my process for deal­ing with my issues or problems.

OK. Here we go. I notice that my process, over the years, has not shifted much at all. I tor­ture myself in one or two famil­iar ways—this is one of those slip­pery insights—we don’t have a lot of issues.

In gen­eral, there is:

The process—a sin­gle, over­rid­ing pat­tern or dysfunction—the ‘thing that doesn’t work,’

and

The con­tent—the topic of the day—the details—how the cur­rent drama ‘presents itself.’

Because our minds are look­ing for com­plex­ity as opposed to Sim­ple Pres­ence, we resist the idea that the ‘many, many’ issues we think we have are the same issue, in dif­fer­ent guises. My favourite way of say­ing this is, “Baskin Rob­bins has 31 flavours(content), and they are all Ice Cream (process).”

My ‘sin­gle’ issue is that I end­lessly choose to cre­ate a sense of
dis–sat­is­fac­tion, as in ‘never satisfied.’

The Buddha’s First Noble Truth is that “Life is suf­fer­ing.” The word trans­lated ‘suf­fer­ing’ is dukkha, which is a San­skrit word mean­ing ‘unsat­is­fac­tori­ness.’ When you trans­late the state­ment as, “Life is unsat­is­fac­tori­ness,” you see that the con­cept flows both ways.

On the one hand, we could say that life is unsat­is­fac­tory, in its intrin­sic nature—that the nature of life is to suf­fer. On the other hand, we could look at the sen­tence and think, “Life itself is neu­tral, and I suf­fer because I choose to judge it unsat­is­fac­tory.”

Let me draw a word picture.

My inter­nal, ‘how I am feel­ing’ ther­mo­stat setting—what I con­sider ‘nor­mal’ for me—is what I describe as “Melan­choly.” Now, I cer­tainly have, for peri­ods, felt dif­fer­ently. My deep nature, though, is to feel sad or melancholy—extremes in either direc­tion are aberrations.

When I go off the rails, I first have a judge­ment that I shouldn’t feel how I feel, and then I look around to find some­thing exter­nal to blame for how I feel. I thus move from melan­choly (my nature) to unsat­is­fac­tory (my expla­na­tion and judgement.)

Here’s an exam­ple of me play­ing this game: one week­end, Dar­bella was won­der­ing aloud about our upcom­ing retire­ment adven­ture in Costa Rica. She described really, really want­ing to go, and how that was not yet hap­pen­ing. I lis­tened to her talk about her imag­in­ings about the future, and ini­tially I main­tained Sim­ple Pres­ence. I reminded myself that the future is never here, that wor­ry­ing about it is actu­ally wor­ry­ing about fig­ments of our imag­i­na­tion, and I sug­gested we dis­cuss what, if any­thing, we could do ‘right now.’

So far, all well and good. Then, the ‘lit­tle voice’ of my ego kicked in.

The ego’s job is to main­tain the sta­tus quo, to point out ‘our fail­ures,’ and to assign exter­nal blame. Egos love mis­ery. This time, my ego used lines like,

“This is your fault. You should work harder. You should make this hap­pen. Get a job. No one likes you any­way, and you’re not help­ing anyone.”

I felt my ‘self’ slide down an old and famil­iar ‘slide.’ I made myself quite mis­er­able. Rather than sit at home and stew, I decided to get out of the house, and be mis­er­able else­where. So we went for a drive to check out a restau­rant we had been mean­ing to try. The town is a lovely place, right on Ontario’s Grand River, and is near where my first train­ing place­ment was in 1981–82, as I stud­ied to be a therapist.

We sat in a cof­fee shop, on a beau­ti­ful spring day, over­look­ing the mighty Grand, sip­ping lattes. Dar­bella talked some more about Costa Rica. Then, she asked me how my mood was.

I told her, and I really milked it. Since the town was a famil­iar place for me, I told Dar I’d been beat­ing myself up about how lit­tle I’d accom­plished since I was a stu­dent there in 1981. I told Dar that I was a failure—that, in ’81, I never imag­ined that I would be where I was today, woe is me. I whined about the mis­er­able and bro­ken state of every­thing and every­one in the Universe—and how all of it was entirely my fault. I won’t bore you with all the details, but as usual I con­cluded by stat­ing that I was going to stop writ­ing, stop coun­selling, close shop, and go live under a bridge.

Dar sat and lis­tened. And gave me a hug.

This is my pattern—this is how I make myself miserable.

This time, the osten­si­ble topic (the con­tent) was money, bills, tim­ing and Costa Rica, but it could have just as eas­ily been about client num­bers, pub­lish­ing, or what­ever. I took this ‘seed con­tent,’ and esca­lated it—this is how I cre­ate the very famil­iar feel­ing of ‘unsat­is­fac­tori­ness’ for myself—I take a neu­tral bit of con­tent and awfulize it, add to it, and cre­ate more and more sadness.

Here’s the inter­est­ing part. I go off the rails by think­ing that any of the things I am mak­ing myself mis­er­able over are either ‘real’ or ‘true.’ Sim­ple Pres­ence is know­ing that the game I play in my head is a part of my present real­ity. My real­ity is not found in the content—the details—the story I tell myself.

My real­ity is noth­ing more than the game itself, for as long as I chose to play it.

Back to the cof­fee shop. Rather than get into the ‘right­ness or wrong­ness’ of the sto­ries I was invent­ing, I needed to first notice, and then report the game itself. It was essen­tial, then, that I shared what I was doing with someone—and that some­one, for me, is Dar­bella. I do not do this to get her to ‘fix me’ (she can’t) or to make it all go away (she can’t, and there was noth­ing hap­pen­ing ‘right now’ that needed to go away—it was all a fig­ment of my imagination.)

My job, using total hon­esty, was to share with Dar the story I was telling myself.

I admit freely that I am quite good at tor­tur­ing myself. I am also quite good at let­ting go, exit­ing my sto­ries, and get­ting back to ‘real­ity.’ And real­ity, for me, is often melancholy.

I have learned to com­mu­ni­cate in the ‘here-and-now,’ even when my ‘here-and-now’ focus is on the sto­ries in my head, which, by def­i­n­i­tion, are always about past and future. As I share my crazy-making inter­nal the­atre in the ‘here-and-now,’ as opposed to clam­ming up or plac­ing blame, the edge comes off of the stuff I am telling myself.

Dar­bella and I lis­ten to each other with lit­tle judge­ment and no need to rush in and fix.

Do I want to res­cue? Of course! I love Dar, and do not like see­ing her hurt­ing. I rec­og­nize, how­ever, that there is noth­ing I can do, inside of her head. That’s hers—I am curi­ous, and not respon­si­ble for what’s hap­pen­ing inside of her.

I do not scare myself over Dar’s stuff, and so far, she hasn’t scared her­self over mine. This is a skill that requires practice—sitting with another with­out judge­ment or the need to res­cue. We prac­tice this all the time.

I am aware of what I do inside of me, and I stop ‘unsatisfactoriness-making’ when I choose to stop. And then, because I am me, I do the whole thing again. Do I want res­cue? Of course! And I know that res­cue is impossible.

The prac­tice part is, ‘prac­tice until you die.’ There is no cure for how we abuse ourselves—other than death, which finally shuts our ego up. There is only notic­ing our drama-making, and then shift­ing how we act.

Have a look at ‘all’ of your issues, and see if there is not an under­ly­ing theme of ‘unsatisfactoriness-making’ going on (hint: there is!) Notice all of your self-justifications, the blam­ing, and the fin­ger point­ing. Then, have a breath, and remind your­self that all of this is noth­ing more than a game you are play­ing in your head.

Hold your­self and your inter­nal processes gen­tly. Find some­one with whom to share your games and dra­mas. Let him or her know that you do not expect them to ‘fix’ you, as you are not bro­ken. Be hon­est. Be brave. Let go.

And be gen­tle when you do it to your­self, all over again.