Psychology + Zen = Philosophy and methods to relieve suffering and reveal happiness.
Psychology: We project onto others what we reject in ourselves. Some call it a Shadow. Healing comes from making the unconscious conscious, taking responsibility for our projections, integrating what is split off as our own thing.
Zen: There is no separate self. When we can be at one with every aspect, then we belong everywhere and we reject no one.
We heal the world by becoming intimate with our whole selves.
Defined as: move in or pass through a restricted space.
Adaptation is my dance, always has been. This is how I straighten a carpet.
Had a bit of fun. Made a bit of firm ground.
Loved my feet. They loved me.
Today I provided life for a bunch of mosquitoes.
July 9, 2021
Spotting a bauble the toddler bursts into action. The detective chasing a bandit bounds up the stairs. A woman late for the train sprints through the closing doors. I see it or I read it and I think, does not apply, but not before I feel myself doing it.
I never realized before how much I imagine motion. Not that I could ever run and jump normally but I still felt the potential of the actions in my body. Now, though, the dis-synchrony has grown sharper and become a koan. Normal life does not apply. Normal expectations have vanished. I can't pretend I will grow stronger, can't motivate myself with a plan of action, can't wait until the illness recedes. There is little in my future that I can reasonably look forward to. Even worse, I don't feel a part of this world. Sometimes I feel a creeping bitter jealousy about the simplest actions, even as I thank, thank, thank all those willing to do for me what I cannot do.
How do I live then?
Last week I wrote about how trauma makes it harder to empathize because we organize to defend against danger. Then on Sunday at a little gathering at my house a vivid counterpoint blasted through decades of suppressed shame.
I was wearing my neck brace, unadorned, with a ruffled collar in the style I favor. Several weeks earlier my friends had helped sew a cover for the brace because I felt the silicone brace to be obscene. The problem was that the cover was super hard to put on and take off, so on this day I defiantly left it bare. My daughter's girlfriend, who is a trans woman, whom I had not met before, whom I will call xo, exclaimed, "I like the medical aesthetic."
What? There is a medical aesthetic? And then we embarked on a lively discussion of prosthetics. It was a bit like coming out.
I used to say it to my patients/clients when they were sick or had family visits or did overwhelming admin stuff like answer email. It's an athletic event. The idea is to give yourself credit for things that may be commonplace or may be invisible but require a shitload of internal work. The world, the audience, will not cheer you on because they don't know what's going on. But you can.
ALS is an athletic event. Functioning that was once automatic now has to be skillfully directed by a compassionate sentient attention. Balancing requires making sure that my weight is well distributed on the horizontal planes of my moving foot, and also that my pelvic floor and tailbone are properly compensating for the droop of my head, and also that my eyes are in line with my head even when tiny people or dogs are whipping around my legs or saying "good morning" in that friendly way that I should be grateful for but actually curse. I've thought about wearing a sign around my neck that says, "please, I can't talk, yes it is a beautiful morning, just keep moving and let me concentrate."
You can't see what I'm doing but I'm lifting my pelvic floor. You can't hear me but I'm humming. The hum sounds like a growl then graduates to a stutter as the vocal cords begin to get the message. I practice the vowels in my throat. I read a sentence without the consonants, then I practice the consonants in a whisper, then I add a bit of voice. When I get to conversation I am still stymied because there isn't enough air to get through more than a few words. I stop to breathe but my thoughts keep going, so I have to deal with the collision and make a choice, and then attend to the pelvic floor and make a note to remember to practice breathing, easy to avoid because it is so hard.
Continuing my campaign against gratitude even as people in my community escalate their preaching I feel more and more like an alien. Spring! Prayers! Moments! Meanwhile I struggle to breathe and talk and walk and I am not fucking grateful. I do not prefer this. If you just give me my body back, why, then, sure I'll be grateful.
So Monday I bent down to check on the water in a vase and I guess my head dropped and my eye landed on a dryish flower. If you've never felt a corneal tear it is hard to convey the intensity of the pain. All consuming, as if your eye is on fire, there is no way to shift attention away from it. My thoughts went immediately to oh my god what if I have to go to a doctor what if I have to go the ER what if I go blind! and then, please god if you make this go away I'll be so grateful...
Who knew so many people were paying such close attention to CDC guidelines? It was just this morning that the vaccinated were given a mask pass, and the park is blooming with smiling faces. I walked among them with my own, breathing the lilacs, brushing the fresh green on the old trees.
I whisper to myself as I watch the leaves overtake the buds, who, having done their job, having flourished and amazed their audience, simply fall away, no big deal. But it always breaks my heart a little, the brutality of spring. Slow down, I protest, I don't want to miss a thing. It reminds me of when my daughter was very young and very adorable her father and I would joke about an age freezing shot. For sure she has grown more beautiful and more complex, and I am entirely for it, no way would I prefer a toddler. I just want to savor it again, more slowly.
Time has always seemed to move too fast for me. Trains arrived at my station a minute earlier than I did.
Updated on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:37AM by
Elena Taurke
This weekend I'm participating in a Dharma Dialog on love and anger. I'm also participating in teaching a monthly workshop on White Work on Racism.
And I also strive to stay alive by eating and walking and washing the dishes. Why does washing the dishes come up so often in Buddhist conversations? I've written about it before, in some semi state of semi enlightenment, one of those recurrent episodes when I think I really Have It.
"SELF LOATHING" by Treforlutions TreVizionz is licensed under CC BY 2.0How to understand the oldest of crimes in a fresh way during a news week when we must argue about whether the killing of six Asian women is in fact a hate crime. This is a legal designation that interests me only in what it could help us acknowledge.
The dude who did it claims that he was not targeting Asians but rather eliminating temptation. Not new. Men have been blaming female 'temptresses' for centuries. Does that make it misogyny? What about men who kill gay men? Misogyny is part of homophobia, I've argued for years, but so many elements intersect here that I feel dizzy trying to make sense of it. I am not really trying to understand this particular man--we hardly know a thing at this point. I am trying to understand, I am always trying to understand, how to heal from self hatred.