We Must Love Ourselves, Part 1

If we want the world to be a better place, we must love ourselves. I’m not saying that this is the only thing that needs to be done. I’m not even necessarily saying it is the most important thing. I think there are emergency situations around this planet, like the suffering of the incarcerated in the United States, like the world’s oceans and coral reefs, like the abuse of women in India and around the world, like torture, like drones, that need attention right now. There is so much to be done I would never deign to weigh one issue over the other. All I know is if we want to make a real change, at some point we are going to have to dive in head first to one of the hardest tasks in life. We must love ourselves.

I know that in the midst of all the suffering of the world the call from some damn woo-woo hippie like myself to feel the love might sound annoying. But to me it’s only annoying if I try to make it sound easy. I’m not trying to make it sound easy. If all we had to do is wake up in the morning, look ourselves in the mirror and say, “You’re the best! I love you!” and then our problems would be solved well then why do we have so many damn problems then?

We must love ourselves, and it is not an easy task. Actually, it is really fucking hard. If you don’t think it is hard, then you probably aren’t really trying to do it. The task of falling in love, deeper and deeper, with yourself and what you are capable of as a human on this planet never truly ends. It hurts like hell, makes no sense, and it is both infinite and terrifying. Everyday I set out to succeed in this task and everyday I fail in infinite ways, in ways I am aware of and in ways I have no clue about.

Why must we love ourselves? Well for one thing, when we don’t, we live out an illusion, an illusion that has very real effects on the world around us. This illusion could be called narcissism. Some people think narcissism is loving yourself “too much”. But really it is a complete absence of self-love. Narcissism contends that the central task in your life is to be the person you “should” be, or to be some idea of a person you have created in your mind, instead of just accepting yourself as you are.

Instead of loving yourself for precisely who you are, whatever you are, no matter what you do or how you have been treated, narcissists spend their whole lives focused on living out some set of self-concepts they decided a long time ago was ‘who they are’. This identity is usually tied to a lot of external, societal standards of appearance, opinions, values, assertions, and judgments. These factors, taken as a whole, can usually dictate what kind of jobs the person should take, what kind of partners they should have, and how much money they should make. This identity can be more or less unusual, tied to individual experiences, where and how you were raised, what you were taught, but to whatever extent it involves you not being in a state of acceptance and love for who you are right now, it is narcissistic. It is not about loving yourself, but rather a state of being enslaved to some idea about who you are or who you should be. 

When narcissists fail to achieve these standards they hate themselves, believe they are unworthy of love, and can act out negatively in a myriad of ways, mostly because they did not make the original commitment to truly love and accept themselves. When narcissists succeed in achieving these standards they feel pride, entitlement, perhaps some sense of satisfaction, but they still can not experience truly loving themselves in an unconditional way, because for them, love will always be conditional upon them succeeding to the standards they lay out for themselves.

Who we really are is so much more complicated and astounding and mysterious than any ideas we come up with about that person. It is not that we can’t know ourselves but rather the understanding that there is always more to know. To love ourselves is to understand we are living a life that is unfolding every moment in ways that we cannot imagine. To truly love ourselves is to understand that whatever we do, whatever has been done to us, whether we fail or whether we succeed, we are still, on a basic fundamental level, just because we are human beings on this earth, lovable. 

Needless to say, it can be confusing. How do we know when we are really loving ourselves, or just trying to live up to some idea of who we should be? Well, one clue is that feeling love can be one of the hardest things in the world. It burns like cleaning out a wound with hydrogen peroxide. It is startling and uncomfortable and incredibly vulnerable. It has the power to make everything you’ve made so important and argued for and lost friends over and feel like a huge lie. It has the power to make all those times you walked away or chose the safer thing or stayed silent so incredibly painful. From the perspective of loving yourself, all the things you did when you didn’t look very ugly, and it takes enormous courage to face into that. Love has no limits, and thus humbly reminds us of our own. 

For all of these reasons, and more, love feels almost exactly like pain. Really they are the same thing, seen in different ways. When we let ourselves feel our pain, we lose all of our defenses. We can no longer hide beneath the shells of our personalities and our ideas and our accomplishments and our assertions, because we are in pain, and thus we just are. And when we just are, we can feel love. The strain of the contradiction almost breaks our hearts but it is actually expanding them. This is the power of a good cry. This is why deep love brings tears to our eyes.

It’s good to keep in mind that there is illusory pain. A tip-off is that it has no energy, felt in the mind instead of in the body. Some names for it are self-hatred, nihilism, shame, embarrassment, guilt, anxiety and the like. It says you don’t matter, it says the world doesn’t matter, it says nothing matters. Or it says you will only matter if... you will only feel love if… It denies how difficult it is to feel love, it says there is something wrong with you because you don’t feel it. It says everything in your life is your responsibility, that it is all your fault. It denies how scary the truth is, that you have no real control over anything. It tells you that your individual version of true love, that version of love that you only let yourself fantasize about for brief moments long ago, is a total lie, that you will never get to have it. It convinces you by saying it is rational, realistic, practical. It gives you the illusion of control. It makes you doubt and judge everyone, because in thinking all of these things, you doubt and judge yourself. It is lonely, isolating, numbing, and persistent. It definitely sucks, but it is not the same as real pain.

Mostly because real pain doesn’t need a reason, doesn’t need to be explained, doesn’t need to be justified. It just needs to be felt. Pain is always the doorway to expanding our ability to feel love. This sounds like a contradiction, I know, and because it is a contradiction it is very difficult to explain. But just the mere fact that through enormous hardship and injustice and trauma individual humans still harbor the capacity to feel love for themselves and others demonstrates to me the enormity of what’s possible. It is in understanding that even in the darkest corner of our hearts there is still a way feel loved that we come to feel it in an even more visceral and intense way. It is this increased vitality feeling of purpose and joy that being loved by another person can give us that we always have the opportunity to give to ourselves. 

We must love ourselves. It is a challenge and it is a responsibility and a journey. But most of all, it is the most thrilling ride possible in life. 

Stay tuned for Part 2, Loving Ourselves Through Relationship 

Acknowledgments to my teachers at North of Eden, especially Marc Bregman. To learn more about the psychological/spiritual work I do, you can visit my website, www.dreamitout.com

My Archetypal Dreamwork Website

Hello all, when I'm not failing to update this blog, I have a practice where I work with clients one-on-one doing Archetypal Dreamwork. If you'd like to learn more about this work, please visit my website,

www.DreamItOut.com

Every Interaction Is A Social Interaction

What if we considered every interaction with another human being a social one? I was just thinking about how weird it is that the definition of my “social life” is purely the individuals that I choose to interact with, when and where I choose to do so.

This is how most people define social life, but it’s pretty arbitrary. What if we thought of social life as the parts of our lives when we are around others, period?

Considered this way, my usual confidence in the robustness of my social life falls flat. I realize for most of my day, I pretty consciously ignore people. I live in New Orleans, and my travels have shown me that there is perhaps no other city that can boast the same level of friendliness to strangers. It’s hard to take a walk without someone looking you in the eye and asking you about your day. I love this about my city and try to adopt the practice as much as I can, but even in a place that embraces neighborly interaction, I still fall short. I may say hi, how are you, I may even ask you about your garden or your dog or your work, but can I actually say you are my friend?

Not to mention when I have something that I need to get done, and a timeline to complete it in. Then, just about all of my effort at some kind of social exchange can fall to the wayside as my world closes in upon the task that needs to get done. Any external attempts by others to engage me socially I will very consciously thwart.

Day in and day out, I am not really looking to make friends except in circumstances that I have deemed acceptable times and places where friends can be made. If you are introduced to me by someone I already trust, perhaps we’ll connect and maybe after repeated meetings become friends. If I am near you at a party or a bar and we have a conversation that I feel comfortable with, maybe I will be friendly towards you if I see you again. Maybe if your work or some other activity you do is related to mine there is more of a chance that I’ll make an effort to connect with you. But maybe not.

I think I started realizing the narrowness of my own social life after spending weeks at Occupy NOLA last year. Suddenly I was in a diverse environment that spanned the spectrum of privileged organizers like me to people without homes who lived under the CCC bridge, and the real kicker was--we were all suppose to reach some kind of consensus about what we wanted the place to be like. Even though 20% of people in my state don’t have a high school diploma, I didn’t actually know anyone personally who didn’t have one. Compared with the make up of the city, I realized the make up of my friend group was way off in terms of race, income level, and many other factors.

I figured out one reason I don’t have a lot of these folks in my social circles: it’s hard. It’s hard to have genuine interactions with people when societal structures have made it so you meet each other on unequal terms. When you have money and someone else doesn’t, it's easy for you to feel taken advantage of, or just feel guilty about your own privilege, or be condescending. When you don't have money and someone else does, it's easy to feel resentful, disdainful, or just plain uncomfortable. When you’re educated and someone else isn’t, it takes effort honestly listen and respect the other person's ideas as equal to your own. Roles reversed, it's easy to feel intimidated and like your ideas don't matter.   When you’re from a privileged group and someone else has to deal with the daily reality of racism or discrimination, it’s easy for both parties to get offended, angry, and feel diminished as individuals.  

Beyond the social, it's just plain scary to trust people that are different than us. It isn't a pretty thing about humans, but it's true. Fear motivates so much of the disconnection we feel amongst ourselves. It is scary and vulnerable to trust.

So that’s probably why most people hang out with other people that are mostly like them. It’s a lot easier. It makes it easier to not worry about the social problems that surround us, it makes it easier to feel like there’s a big fat difference between people like you and everyone else. It makes it easier to feel confirmed and safe. It provides an atmosphere where you can feel confirmed in your own opinions, judgments, and ideas about how the world is and how you fit in it. Often these are the very ideas that form the bedrock of our own identities, and to be in social situations that challenge them are extremely uncomfortable. 

At the same time, for many people the bedrock of their identities is the social lives they have cultivated. We come to understand who we are through our connections with other people. But if we expand the definition of social life to include all of our interactions with other people, how often are we judgmental, dismissive, impatient, or downright abrasive? How often do we deny others the benefit of the doubt, how often do we refrain from showing kindness when we have the opportunity to do so? How often do we just straight up ignore the humanity of people around us because of our need to complete daily tasks or just because we don't feel up to it? 

If every interaction is a social interaction, how great are our social lives, really? And thus, what kind of people are we?

New Blog

Hi everyone!

I've decided to start a new blog that focuses on the dreamwork that I have been practicing over the past few years. I hope you'll join me over there at the new site. This has been a great blog for me over the years. Thank you for reading and being so supportive of me.

It is called ZapalaSpeaks.

http://zapalaspeaks.wordpress.com/

A Rare Poem

I wrote this at the retreat I went to last week. Hadn't written a poem since sophomore year of college. Felt great!

Black Eyed Meadow

Can you call something blind that was never meant to see?
Flowers are like that, deaf to the bees and the thunder
to my sighs, my breath.
There's no time for the flowers.

No waiting, no regrets, no tomorrow.
Death comes each day when the sun sets.
Why can't I have faith like that?
Simple petals waiting in eternity
for the sun to shine again.

Can you call something blind if it was never meant to see?
I can be like that, deaf to the cries of agony
echoing across the generations.

I can only watch, the tears crowd my Eye.
Yesterday pulls, tomorrow strains, right now explodes
into a thousand beams---except the one that hurts the most.

I can only barely hear you, time is so deafening.
A whisper of a promise, I can only just feel.

My soul waits with the flowers in the meadow.

What it is like when I am not writing.

I think one reason I named this blog Full of Baloney because I wanted to to be clear with everyone--I don't really know what I am talking about.


That was the way I wanted to present myself--don't worry, everyone else, I won't stomp on anyone's toes. I don't really mean what I say. This was because I was afraid.


I feel like I am very slowly becoming aware of the intense fear that is almost always present in my entire body. It burns beneath my stomach, threatening to take over at any moment. It has the threat of flame and its aftermath, extinction. Where does fear ever end?


At first, it feels like never. The fear feels infinite. So then what is the point of feeling it? So I just try to avoid it, as much as I can, just go on with my life.


Little did I know, that I was carrying this fear in everything that I was doing, all the time, regardless. We have no choice over which emotions we feel. We just have choice over how we interpret them, contextualize them, attach them to a 'story' about who we are, rationalize them, ignore them, project them on to other people, etc. The best thing we can do is just to experience them, as raw as possible. I don't want to make that sound too simplistic, though. It is extremely challenging. 


This is why I often do the same destructive things to myself over and over--this can be repetitively seeking out abusive dynamics, all shades of addictions, or just preventing myself from my own inner desires. When you are caught by fear, you just want anything that has a predictable outcome, that is highly controllable. In moments I know that these behaviors don't make me feel good, but I can't stop them because then the feelings just come floating in, pervasive. It is a difficult trap, but the opening is knowing that not only am I avoiding the difficult feelings, but I have prevented myself from so many of the positive ones as well. 


Avoiding fear, for me, has lead to a paralyzing, frustrating numbness that pervades my life. One of the hardest parts is that I know this and yet it is still there, ever present, lurking.


Writing has always been such a challenge, because I am someone who wants to please people and had been quite willing to sacrifice my own desires in order to do so. But it is quite impossible to both please everyone and be true to your own voice. I have a ways to go in this department, but if nothing else I no longer want to claim that I don't 'really' believe in what I am writing. I don't want to hedge my bet in any way. This is me, trying to be as real as I know how to be. I will fail. There are so many things I haven't figured out yet, I know I'll write stuff that will look so ridiculous to a future me. But I have to embrace my own transformation if I want to change.


There have been so many twisted excuses that have prevented me from writing. There's no point to writing, it's not something I need to be doing, I don't have a clear enough idea of what I want to write about, I am just trying to write for some imagined fame or fortune, if I don't do it perfectly the first time, every time, there is no point. I will think of anything to stop myself. This is what it is like all the time when I am not writing, just a circular, hysterical anxiety. Excuses that go through my mind, pulsing, intense, seemingly air tight, logical, sensible, correct, and yet, somehow, I have stayed up long enough to write this piece, and will publish it. There is this incredible energy that is released when I do what I am afraid of.

Raging Pelican Article

Here's my Raging Pelican article: http://ragingpelican.com/radical-hopes-radical-challenges/