Living the Questions

 I’m experiencing a lot of unknown in life these days. I see the microcosm-macrocosm relationship between my life and what’s going on the larger world. In our world the way it’s always been is no longer working. Systems are collapsing. Our desire to continue doing things because that’s the way we’ve done them for hundreds of years is in conflict with the reality of now.

     I understand the tug of the familiar. The urge to recreate or cling to what was is a defense against the shadowy terrain of the unknown. I fell that pull to try to reconfigure my life into what was and what I’m used to.

    Beside this fear tinged urge to recreate the familiar and comfortable, I feel something else calling me. There is a startling freedom in standing on a precipice. I feel the open space around me. I feel curious.

     Recent events have pushed me question the assumptions I’ve taken on around what I need my life to look like. I’m more aware of the difference between needs and wants. I’m also very aware that I am not in charge or in control of squat.

     I have a choice to go with the fear and try to recreate what was or to stay with the questions.

     Much of what’s come up to be questioned are the beliefs I’ve taken around what my housing situation is supposed to look like and what I, as an adult in this culture, am supposed to own. How did I come to carry those ideas, even though I don’t truly believe them? I keep going back to a conversation I had with my stepmother when I visited my parents over the holidays.

     My stepmother said something like, “Older people don’t really get sick more. That’s just a myth.” My mind immediately jumped to all the ads I’ve seen advocating vaccinations and flu shots for the elderly because they’re more vulnerable.  I’ve seen those ads over and over. That belief is one that I’d taken on without questioning it. But the idea that the elderly get sick more implies that aging makes us ill. Huh?

      Yes, I know elders who seem to succumb to every germ that comes along. But I know people my age and younger who catch everything too. I also have older friends who get sick less than I do

     A ton of research has been done on the relationship between the immune system and our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Both prolonged stress and depression weaken the immune system. So do poor nutrition and lack of sleep. In contrast, being fully engaged in your life and having a good support system strengthen the immune system.

     An article last fall in the Chicago Tribune stated “Depression is alarmingly common in older Americans.”  We’ve all heard stories about elders and malnutrition. The older people I know who get sick more often are largely inactive, eat poorly, spend most of their time watching TV and have minimal support systems. All of those factors contribute to a weaken immune system.

    My elder friends who are more resistant to colds than I am eat well and have solid support networks. Their lives are filled with things they find meaningful.

    So among the elderly in America, a number of secondary factors often combine, resulting in a weakened immune system. However aging, in and of itself, does not make you more vulnerable to getting sick.

    The conversation with my stepmother stuck with me because dismantling my beliefs around it let me see how those beliefs got cemented into fact. I heard the causal link between age and illness recited over and over. I probably even repeated it. Repetition reinforced the link until it became as solid and inevitable as gravity.

      I didn’t question what I heard; I just took it in. I forgot that just because two things often occur at the same time does not mean that one directly caused the other. This leads me to looking at where else in my life I’ve done and am doing the same thing.   

     Speaking is an act of creation that goes deeper than the words. It’s not only what I say but the energy and intention behind the words. When I repeat something I’ve heard I am recreating it for myself. If I do that with things I haven’t examined, I risk recreating something that doesn’t fit and isn’t really what I want.

    I’m questioning a lot of things right now; including the way I live with questions and finding
answers. With small questions like “where did I put my keys?” it’s important to find the answer. But that answer is temporary. My keys may be in my messenger bag now, but the next time I look for them they could be in my jacket pocket.

     With bigger questions when I find an answer, I often leap to that being the answer.  The answer isn’t temporary. I tend to set it in stone by hanging onto it for months or years. The answer reinforces my beliefs, shapes my experiences and informs the way I see the world.

     The answer also makes it hard for me to hear myself when I’m drawn to asking more questions. When I think I have the answer, it’s easier for me to dismiss further questions. 

     This uncovering has moved me toward a new intention of holding my answers lightly. An answer is temporary respite, not a permanent stop. I have a curious, questioning nature. There will always be things in me that are unresolved. I am better served by living the questions than by holding the answer as a place to arrive.

Unpacking process: breaking patterns

    No matter what kind of process I’m in, the cycle of emotions and the tools I use are pretty similar.

When I am working on breaking a pattern, the trajectory is a bit different. Patterns are the things I do and/or feel over and over in response to certain situations. Human beings are creatures of habit. We all develop patterns.

     Say when you’re nine years old you end in a situation where someone is bullying you. You react by doing X. At that moment X is the best and maybe the only option you have. The next time you end up in a similar situation, you do react the same way because it seemed to work pretty well the last time. If you continue to react the same way over a period of years you create a pattern. Patterns have more to do with defenses and reactions than conscious responses.

    After twenty years may not be serving you anymore, but you continue to do it because that’s your pattern. However when you do X, you don’t like how you feel.

     The process of changing a pattern looks like:

1. I notice that in the past I’ve done X over and over. It’s not working. I don’t like how it

    feels. I want to respond differently.

2. In order to understand my reaction, I need to really look at what I’m doing. I make a

    conscious decision or set an intention to become more aware of when I do X. 

3.  I notice that I did X several times a couple weeks or a month ago.

4.  I notice that I did X twice last week.

5.  I notice that I did X yesterday.

6.  I notice that I did X earlier today.

7.  I notice in the moment that I’m doing X again, but am powerless to stop myself or do

     anything differently.

8.  I notice in the moment that I doing X again. I stop myself but feel frozen or trapped

     because I can’ do anything differently.

9.  I notice in the moment that I’m doing X again. I stop and make a different choice.

10. I notice that I’m about to do X and make a different choice.

     This is not a linear process. Even when I get the place where I’m aware of what I’m doing, I’ll miss something. I’ll catch myself doing X an hour later, but miss that I did the same thing three times yesterday. When I get to the place of being able to make a different choice I won’t all the time. I’ll have an unconscious moment or a one where I just don’t care and I’ll do X again. That’s just part of being human.

    In the awareness phase, the pattern seems to get bigger. It’s not that I’m engaging in the pattern more often, but I am paying attention differently. My focus changes so the pattern is at the front of my awareness. I feel like I’m doing X all the time and am often even more frustrated by it.

     When the pattern I’m changing is emotional or has a strong emotional component, breaking it is a little different.  In the moment, I am rarely able to consciously choose what I feel in relation to what’s happening.  There may be a few people who have that ability…and I suspect they all live in a monastery.

     Feelings aren’t facts. My emotions let me know I need to pay attention to what’s happening. They are raw information, not absolutes. Say the pattern I’m working to break involves feeling abandoned and reacting by practicing preemptive abandonment. (I know you’re going to leave, so I’ll leave you before you can leave me.) If I focus on making myself not feel abandoned, nothing is going to change.

     The feeling is a thread I can follow to find out what's triggering me. Once I know what the trigger is, I can shift from reacting to responding and break my pattern.

      In order to track the emotion back the trigger, I need to ask questions:

            -In situations where I feel abandoned, has anyone or anything actually abandoned me?   

            -What in these situations is similar to experiences I’ve had where I was abandoned?

            -Am I reacting to what’s going on now or something old?

            -Have I abandoned myself?

     Knowing what the trigger is allows me to change my relationship to it. As far as buttons and triggers go, we have what we have. I can’t make my triggers go away. I can take away some of the charge it has. When I really understand the trigger, it doesn’t have as much hold over me when it comes up. The next time I’m triggered, I can see it for what it is and respond differently even if I feel the same. Over time, if I’m able to respond in a new way, the feeling that accompanies the trigger will recede.

     Here again this is not a linear process. (Actually when it comes to process in general, I’m better off if I throw out linear completely. Emotional logic doesn’t move in a straight line.) Even with a trigger I’ve worked through I’ll have a day where I’m tired, off balance or emotionally vulnerable and BAM! The trigger and the feelings around it will come up with just as much force as they had before I worked on them. I may even slip back into my old pattern.

    Moments like that don’t mean I’m regressing. They’re just an affirmation that I’m human. Time to own my stuff, apologize and go on.

Unpacking process: the nitty gritty

Day late on this one..busy in Minneapolis with clients and trying not to freeze my eyeballs. This week I want to write about the nuts and bolts: what I actually do to move through a process. My life is unsettled and bumpy right now. When I go through spurts like this my brain kicks up a fantasy it’s been playing with for years. Dump a few things in my car, drive as far as I can and start over. Run away! Run away!

    Yes I could do that….but I won’t. The urge to flee does bring up a valid question. Why bother with process? Why not just ignore all this till it recedes a bit and get on with life? Simply allowing time to pass often does make the fallout from an intense lessen. If I ignore what’s going on inside me, chances are it will eventually fade into the background where I won’t notice it very often.

    However, when an experience fades it doesn’t go away. It gets pushed off into my unconscious and my shadow. Once there, it’ll stay just as volatile as it is now. The next time I have a similar experience all that old, unprocessed gunk will come back.  Avoiding it entirely isn’t an option. The choice is do it now or do it later. I’d rather wade through the emotional storm now.

     Emotion is part of every process. At its simplest, emotion is energy in motion. It’s meant to move. Part of being in process is being so immersed in what I’m feeling that I can’t see anything else. Immersion is the place to move the emotional energy by venting, having a meltdown or three and throwing a fit. Doing those things lets me move through the emotional storm and not get stuck in it.

    Identifying what I’m feeling is usually easy for me. I have a strong relationship with my emotional body and know myself pretty well. One of the things I’ve learned to do is sit with and be with how I feel. That literally means sitting still. Simple but it can very hard to do when I’m feeling restless. I sit still. If I find myself noticing the dirt on the floor and feeling a sudden urge to get up and clean, I close my eyes. No doing, just be.

    The story is the other place I tend to get stuck. My mind wants a reason. It wants logic and order and to figure things out. When there’s no obvious reason, my mind will make things up. This is where “don’t believe everything you think” comes in. I have to separate what I’m feeling and what’s going on in my internal world from the narrative my mind makes up about that.

    This is tricky piece of discernment. In order to get there I ask myself questions: 
What am I feeling?
    Emotion comes in layers. I need to go beyond my immediate answer to what’s deeper. If I’m angry, is the anger covering fear, vulnerability or powerlessness? I feel more powerful when I’m angry so it’s easy to grab that feeling to mask other emotions.
Where is this feeling coming from?

            Again my first answer is probably pretty surface level. This is the opening to looking at what I’m feeling vs. what my mind tells me about it. If my emotional response was out of proportion to what actually happened, either too big or too little, I’m reacting to something else. That something else can be an old experience where I felt similarly or a fear, a story, etc.

     Feelings aren’t facts. Whatever I’m feeling now is real, but the “why” I’m feeling that emotion may not be real. Process moves according to emotional logic, not brain logic. If I’m feeling betrayed, it doesn’t mean I was betrayed. Now could remind me of a similar situation where I was betrayed. The emotional link between the two situations brought the feeling of betrayal back up.

 Is this something I know or is it a story?

        My mind works best in concert with my heart and gut. When all three are working together, there are things I just know as what is true for me in the moment. When my mind goes off by itself, it tends to create a story about what’s happening.
What else could be going on?

            Even if I acknowledge that I may be getting caught up in a story, that doesn’t change how attached I am to the story. This question does. When I look at other possible explanations, the truth of the story is in question. This doesn’t make the story go away. It does take some of the power away from it and allow me to be less attached.

     Sometimes the story involves projection. My mind can go from this moment to a catastrophe that hasn’t happened (and might not) in a millisecond. Like resistance, projection is often a part of my process. I seem to need to let the first layer of projections run until it’s out of steam. If I find myself continuing to project, I go to being as present as I can in this moment. What’s really happening right now? When that doesn’t work I use an exercise where I name off everything in the room with me, out loud, until I come to present.

    This questioning process is not a one shot deal. I keep doing it over and over. Many times the answer is “I don’t know.” Staying in the unknown and resisting the urge to make something up is always a part of my process. My mind doesn’t like the unknown because it can’t be categorized or quantified. My gut and my heart are more okay with not knowing.

   Internal entanglements are another thing I watch for. We all have past experience. When something happens now that feels or looks like a past experience, the two experiences can get entangled in each other. The content of a past experience can be a vital clue about why I’m feeling the way I do now. It can lead me to what got triggered. After looking at whether there’s something in the old experience that I need to pay attention to, I move on to separating the two experiences. I look at what’s similar and what’s different between then and now.

   At some point I’ll start to make judgments: about myself, about the situation, about the way other people behaved, etc. No matter how intent I am not judging, I’ll go there. While I can’t immediately stop the judgments, I can shift how attached I get to them. When I judge something I want to make it an absolute. Judgments only retain their power if I don’t examine them. When I ask “Is that really true?” and “What else could be going on?” I take some of the power away. Even though my mind may continue to cycle through those judgments, I can let them pass because I’m not long attached.

     To do any of this questioning, I have to observe myself. When I’m able to be the observer, I am simultaneously in the moment and watching the moment. I have some detachment, but am not so disconnected that I don’t feel anything. Often I experience a delay in being the observer. I see what I’m doing a few seconds, minutes or hours after I’ve done it. The moments when I can do both at once are gifts.