basic goodness

Creating Room For Internal Mess

May 31st, 2010

“Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.”

My yoga teacher, Scott reads this teaching a lot — and my guess is, not just because it’s kind to remind us of our basic wonderfulness. I think he returns to this quote because it butts right up against our natural human instincts: HUH? It doesn’t do any good to get rid of our so-called negative aspects? What are you talking about?!! Getting rid of scary stuff is what we evolved to do!

The human instinct to move toward safety and pleasure and way-the-heck-away from danger and pain is hard-wired into our brains. And it would be pretty satisfying if we could spear all our negative aspects and burn them to ashes in a primeval fire. If only it worked.

Reflecting on this natural propensity to “get rid of,” I asked each of my boys Owen (10) and Lucas (7), “What would you do if a scary monster was lurking outside your house?

Their minds, no surprise, spit out solutions at warp speed.

Owen came up with these, without stopping for air:

• We could ambush it from a tree fort with rocks and pine cones,
• We could nail it with the Nerf Heavy Duty Pumper dart gun,
• Lucas could wiggle around and distract it while I snuck up from behind and hit it over the head with a baseball bat
• We could blare really loud, annoying music at it.

And on and on he went. His mind, like all of ours, is a birring-whirring solution-producing machine.

Lucas, Zen master, said we wouldn’t have to do anything unless the monster attacked us, because we should only protect ourselves in self-defense. He then came up with his own staggering list of defensive options including the giggle-inducing idea of using the Wuxi finger hold a la Kung Fu Panda.

Scary monster problem? SKADOOSH!

I noticed neither one of my kids said, “We could try to make friends with it.” Or “Maybe he’s not as scary as he looks,” or anything of that sort. Their immediate instinctive responses to “‘scary monster,” were protective.

And, it makes complete, self-protective sense that we would want to get rid of, or fix, or be done with negative aspects in our inner world much like we would get rid of monsters lurking outside our house.

Loneliness? Fear? Grief? Sadness? Disappointment? SKADOOSH!

But what if our efforts at avoiding, getting rid of, and fixing internal monsters not only don’t work, but bring us suffering and keep us stuck?

What if we spend so much energy and time fighting our emotions that we’ve got nothing left to do the stuff that really matters to us?

For instance, maybe we try to get rid of emotional emptiness by overeating. Then we at least feel full, or numb. Anything but empty. We live in service to  getting rid of emptiness. But the emptiness returns again and again, only it’s hungrier.

Maybe we attempt to banish anxiety by avoiding situations that might “trigger” more stress. We create artificial safety, but our lives get smaller.

Maybe we evade fear by procrastinating. We hide our imperfections, and in the process miss the chance to share our best stuff.

I’ve tried just about every emotional-avoidance maneuver at one time or another, and although I do get the highly sought after short-lived relief, the inner-emotional ICK is only temporarily mollified.

Within minutes or hours, the emotional ICK returns, somehow skewed, magnified, or more insistent by my attempts to evade it. “Mwah, hah, hah, I’m baa-acck!”

When I get all caught up in trying to control my internal space, I miss everything happening in the present. It’s like being on a hamster wheel, spinning-spinning-spinning, while I could be using that glycogen to do something I value instead.

In my experience, efforts to get rid of difficult emotions, thoughts, sensations, or urges lead to a life that gets constricted, smaller, airless.

If it doesn’t do any good to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also lose sight of our basic goodness, our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness then,

WHAT is the alternative ?!

For me that answer has been acceptance, or what I prefer to call willingness. (I don’t love the word acceptance, because it sounds too much like resignation to me, which it’s decidedly not. I like the word willingness which I borrowed from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Willingness sounds to me like an active choice, which acceptance decidedly is.)

Acceptance or Willingness is opening up, making space and room for emotions and sensations, allowing what arises to be there.

Rather than trying to avoid or control my thoughts, memories, emotions or sensations, my practice now, is all about allowing the stuff I can’t change right in the moment to be there — while making oceans of space for it all to float around in.

Which isn’t to say fix it/get rid of/control strategies never help us in our quest for inner peace. Because in some ways they sort of can:

• When I clear out the clutter in my home & office, it’s more likely I will feel more peaceful and I can work better.
• When I keep my kitchen stocked with healthy choices, it’s more likely I’ll experience less cravings and this makes it easier to choose eating well.
• When I go for a run or to a yoga class, it’s more likely I will feel more open, receptive and grounded the rest of the day, which makes it easier to love better.

In a way, these external structures and rituals are control strategies that help me be more open and flexible internally. I have many rituals, big and small that help me cultivate qualities I like.

But sometimes I can go through all the rituals and structures, and still, I feel sad, or angry, or scared. That’s where acceptance is really, really helpful.

My yoga teachers often say, 99% experiential wisdom 1% philosophy. And acceptance/willingness is one of those concepts I’ve had to practice to “get.”

I made a list of some of the things I have learned about acceptance/willingness from my experience. In sharing my list, my hope is I might help you consider an alternative to the endless stuck-in-the-muck struggle of wanting things to be different than they are right now, this second.

What I’ve experienced about willingness:

• Willingness is a choice. I may not want or like what I am experiencing, but here it is, and I can be willing to have it.
• Willingness isn’t tolerance. Tolerance is gritting your teeth, white-knuckling, holding out as long as you can. Willingness is the act of opening and allowing things to be as they are in the moment.
• Willingness isn’t resignation. Or wallowing. It’s an active intentional choice to allow uncomfortable feelings, sensations, urges, or thoughts which arise to come and go without struggling with them, running away, or getting entangled in them.
• I can’t see what needs to change if I don’t look. Willingness opens me up to see things as they are, which helps me contact what is important and meaningful to me. Sometimes discomfort is a sign that I need to make changes in my work, my relationships, my health, my living space, or some other area of my life.
• Sometimes seeing things as they are is exquisitely painful. There may be a big gap between my immediate reality and the vision of how I want things to be. I can’t close the gap right this second or the next. Ouch.
• Willingness is easier when difficult mindy-stuff has lots of internal space in which to come and go. When I’m on the yoga mat, or sitting in meditation, or on a run, I can create some separation between who I am and what I am experiencing. Even the most intensely uncomfortable emotions become less urgent and softer when I give them an expanse of space to move in.
• All the time and energy that was caught up in fixing, getting rid of and controlling my internal space is freed up to do what matters to me. Instead of stopping and struggling and being stuck in place, I can live a vital, engaged life, inevitably touched with natural human pain and awkwardness.
• I don’t have to embrace everything all of the time. Sometimes it’s OK to temporarily avoid, escape or ignore. As long as my avoidance or escape isn’t keeping me rooted in stuckness. Escape hatches are useful now and then when I hide consciously and with the intention to restore and renew my energy.
• I am still practicing, practicing, practicing.

What about you?

Does the difficulty of making painful emotions go away make your life feel more difficult?

Looking to your experience, what have you learned about acceptance? Have you practiced acceptance, and found your life, however painful at times, opens up?