#365Gratitude: A long walk with a particular burden

So I went for a long walk today.  Just got back from it.  Spent a good deal of it talking with my friend Snow Cone (not their real name, but a great nickname), about some Heavy Stuff Going On In Their Life™.

Snowy was particularly upset at how life kept seeming to just poop on them, unrelentingly, and how little anyone around them seemed to give a shit about it.

I told them all about a different way to see things that might prove helpful, something I call The Burden of Expertise.  I was glad I got to share it with them, and now with you.

Here's a video log all about it.

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Here's a list of some of the stuff I reference in the video:

Pema Chodron's Getting Unstuck

Alan Watt's On Spiritual Authority

Verse 2 of the Tao te Ching:

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.

 

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

 

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn't possess,

acts but doesn't expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

#365Gratitude: Boot Operations

This whole find-new-house-pack-old-house transition has been crazy stressful. Lately I've become QUITE aware of how my body manifests and processes anxiety. ​

Stress putting its best foot forward, on me.  

When something troublesome comes up (like say, getting a house I wanted yanked out from under me, or mistakenly having my internet service turned off too early, purely hypothetical examples <insert slow sarcastic wink here>), I have been feeling this giant pressure in my chest , somewhat akin to someone stepping on me in a big, heavy boot.  

Here's the thing - after a few weeks of it, I was pretty freaked out. I thought maybe I was having heart problems. (I'm not.) I researched it a bit, and had just had a big if checkup anyhow, which I passed with swimming colors. (Because they were all out of the flying ones that day.)

What I figured out was that it was an autonomic bodily response to stress. Basically, it was me giving myself a nice little panic attack.  

Now that I knew this, I knew what to do about it too, practice mindful detachment. Stay with the feeling, witness it, honor it, move through it.  

I still feel the boot sometimes, when stuff comes up, but I'm aware of what it is, why my body is feeling it, and I can move through it quickly. I actually had one this morning about cutting off my internet this morning (so, maybe not so hypothetical after all <insert saucy wink here>), and just taking the time to think about it, breathe, and write this blog entry has shoved that boot right off my chest. 

Good stuff.  

#365Gratitude: Jars & Boxes

We picked up the keys to our new house Wednesday night.  It's been a difficult time, lots of moving parts and pieces to juggle. I was so grateful we got this house, and so excited to pick up the keys that I made sure the very first thing I moved into the house was my Gratitude Jar. 

There it is! 

My gratitude jar is a ceramic jar I made (well, painted). Every so often that I feel spontaneously grateful for, and I'll dash off a little note about it, and stick it in the jar.

​Putting the jar in my house, let me drop a sort of arbitrary line in the sand. Now I really live there.

Well, almost.

Boxes, and tigers, and furniture, oh my

I just have to move these many many boxes, and our furniture, and our cats, and our home network, and our utilities, and every other little thing I haven't thought of yet.

But it's okay.  Because life is filled with these sorts of arbitrary crossroads. Yes, I'm moving, but I'm also, you know, still moving.

#365Gratitude: Pandora's Box (and well spanked ass) are in your face again.

Pandora Blake

So there's a British pornographer whose career, aesthetic, work, and drive I really admire, Pandora Blake (NSFW link).  She ran (past tense) the very lovely website DreamsOfSpanking.com.

There's this evil, patriarchal, boundary-overstepping British regulatory agency, ATVOD, that passed a law/regulation/encyclical/evil-scroll-of-doom banning all sorts of pornography, back in late 2014.  Here's a relevant quote from an article from the British newspaper/blog The Independent.

The Audio Visual Media Services regulations (AVMS) banned sex acts that were deemed morally damaging or life-threatening, including strangulation, face-sitting and fisting. Spanking beyond what was deemed to be a gentle level, humiliation, full bondage and restraint (which involves a gag and all four limbs), female ejaculation, and depictions of non-consensual sex were also forbidden under the laws enforced by the Authority for Television on Demand (Atvod), which has since been overtaken by Ofcom.

(The boldfacing and italicizing are mine.)

What a load of sex-negative, woman-hating trash!  Female ejaculation is morally damaging and life threatening?! 

I was outraged, as were many.  There was a protest, a face-sitting sit-in in front of a government building.

Pandora wasn't going to take this sitting down.  (Pun intended.)  She protested.  She rallied.  She went on British mainstream news programs to discuss it.  She mounted a legal defense, and would not be silenced.

And you know what?  She won.

Ofcom, the British Office of Communications ruled that the law didn't apply to her site at all, and that the ATVOD overstepped their bounds.  Ofcom in fact has completely taken over that sort of regulatory work from ATVOD, effectively shutting the agency down.

Sometimes, the good guys win.  

WAY TO GO PANDORA!

#365Gratitude: I (mostly) shut myself up

So, a friend of mine posted this pic today:

(Looks like Darryl from the Walking Dead.  It's a bearded, dirty looking man, in a forest, standing with his face upturned, eyes closed, sunshine on his face.  Caption: "I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE DAY... THAT PEOPLE ENJOY LIFE AND STOP BITCHING ABOUT EVERYTHING.")

My knee-jerk reaction, which I at first followed, was to leave a comment.  "Don't you see that this is just more bitching? How about you just enjoy your own life and don't worry about other people's bitching?" 

Not a split second later, I realized I was doing it too, by leaving the comment.

So, I started to add to the comment, that it was super funny how I got caught in the self-sustaining bitching whirlpool of it all.

Then, a few seconds into that, realized the ludicrous nature of even that, and deleted the whole thing.  

Alright then, great - why am I writing about it here then?!  

Stick with me, this is a pretty big gratitude, and potent enough to stop me in my tracks, and get me to actually write a gratitude post, which to be honest, I've been too fried and busy to keep up doing lately.

In the space of that two to three minutes between see stimulus, deliver  automatic response, edit it, rescind it utterly, and lastly achieve mindful silence, is one of the practices that I work really, really hard to cultivate within myself.  It's a constant fight, endless work, but so very worthwhile.

I'm struggling to name for you exactly what the practice is.  Perhaps it's called emotional hygiene.  

It's so easy to get caught up in attachments, in shenpa.  That particular meme is an example of the anger shenpa, which is an expression of outrage about anything in one's life.  It can be inward focused or based on something outside oneself, about another, or life in general.

Examples:

Here are some nice juicy inner ones that I have been hooked with lately: 

"Why am I so fucking fat?  I hate that.  Once I'm thinner, eating right and working out again I'll be happy."
"I better start writing again.  I can't stand it when I don't write."
"I hate when I feel like I treat my partners like sexual gratification ATM's.  I'm going to alienate them if I don't get that under wraps."
"I better get all the various things related to moving from my old house to my new house right, so I don't cause myself a giant financial disaster."

And now for a bunch of saucy outer examples:

"Why are people such goddamn sheep, ready to be angry at whatever everyone else is angry about?"
"Why do so many overly religious people not see how they use their religion to fuck up the lives of other people?"
"Why is social media such a cesspool of group think, vanity, and human ugliness?"
"I wish (estranged relative) would just not be such an intolerant asshole so I could do something about being estranged from them."

 The thing I did when I deleted my comment to the picture above was something I learned about from Pema Chödrön in Getting Unstuck.  I caught myself swept up in reaction and mindlessness and then consciously made the decision to stay.  What I mean is, to stay with the feelings I felt, ride them like a rough current on a river, and see them through before acting.  I realized that the little electric zing of unhappiness and snarky response I was feeling to the picture came from me.  Then I realized that even the attempt to point it out was that same feeling, just misdirected a bit.  

"When you think everything is someone else's fault, you will suffer a lot.  When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy. -- Dalai Lama"

I was making myself feel the snark and unease.  It was me.  This is like 300 level zen thinking.  Sometimes it rains.  Sometimes that rain is an absolutely torrential downpour.  And you don't have to stand in it, getting wet.  You can go inside, put up an umbrella, bust out the super serious grade rain gear, whatever.  You have tons of choices.  You can't change that it's raining.  That's what's happening.  But you can observe your own emotional hygiene, and not get sucked into a cycle of action-reaction.  

That doesn't mean you don't get upset, angry, fearful, disappointed.  That does happen.  It's like the rain.  You can't selectively shut off your emotional response.  It's part of being alive.  But once the emotion happens, you do have the chance to mindfully observe it, and decide what to do with it.  That's what the Dalai Lama was talking about, and that's what Pema meant by staying.  

There's a verse in the Tao te Ching that speaks exactly to this, which I think I understand just a bit better today than I ever have before.  This one:

56

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.

Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.
It can't be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

Closing my mouth, blocking my senses, blunting my sharpness, untying my knots, softening my glare, settling my dust - these are all staying.  I give up, for now.  I'm grateful that I can.