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ОглавлениеWEEK 2: THE HEART THAT EMBRACES
Acceptance
As we begin to explore the spirit, we naturally begin to look for ways to accept ourselves and others. Writing can be a wonderful aid in this process. Even just to write your name with awareness on the page is to write your name on the world. The awareness of connection that we began to develop in last week’s writings begins to follow us in all our mundane tasks and all we see. We begin to notice the mud at our feet or the egret’s nest high in the trees. Our hearts open and part of this opening has to do with love recklessly and wonderfully unzipping toward us.
“Birds sing after the storm, why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?”
—Rose Kennedy
As we become aware of connections, we begin to notice that the world gives us all of itself to accept: the mowed lawns, satin sheets, shortbread cookies, a smooth bowl to hold your tears, the rattled bone to mourn, the leaded mirror. In The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, Mansfield writes: “Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.” We count on reality, change with all its good and bad manners.
Of all the spiritual qualities, I have found acceptance of myself the most difficult. As a child I had a sense of joy, and my creative activities made me feel happy, but I was expected to conform. I wasn’t to have many needs. My parents valued creativity but they wanted me to fit in. These conflicting values made it hard for me to accept the exploring self that was me. I couldn’t accept the self who just wanted to experiment and wander, but I also couldn’t give up my curiosity. I learned how to sneak in what I wanted to do, and then felt bad about myself. I would curl up with my lined tablets and write out my wishes and then write how to be good.
“Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can’t bring down.”
—Olive Schreiner
I hid out in my bedroom with my diary or wrote letters to a pen pal to explore my conflicts. I wrote letters to the school guidance counselor, Mrs. Ellis, but never sent them—she was for troubled kids. Already, though, writing was a tool I used to explore how to accept myself. As we view ourselves through the lens of acceptance, we begin to drift to the center of softness. We begin to forgive what went wrong with ourselves and forgive how hurt has made us act. Our writing today will be about what we need to learn in the accepting of ourselves.
“Keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.”
—Mae West
Acceptance of ourselves asks us to deal with the loss of our real selves, and to say there is enough that is good. We may have lost some of joy and innocence we had as children, but we have enough to live on. Our real selves have everything: every feeling, every reaction, all of human life. We remember how relaxed and balanced our bodies once felt before hurt, and we work to gradually regain that. We are asked to recognize what is true for us, feel it, and move on, with hope and trust that all will be well. We are asked to live life as it is and value differences in others.
When we shift into self-acceptance, we live in a wise speaking way.
Day 1: Loss
So many times we try to avoid dealing with what is troubling us by escaping into television or addiction or just being too busy. We head home after work to eat and watch television or spend the evening with a good bottle of wine to soften the edges of our stress. We make plans for every night of the week so as not to have the time to be alone with ourselves and do the reflective work the spirit needs. We lose our wise person’s counsel.
Loss is one of those things we so often try to avoid. Loss of a job, a loved one, a part of ourselves. We don’t have channels for dealing with loss. But being asked to accept ourselves without dealing with our losses is like asking us to leave behind one hand, one foot, our eyes, or our shoes on the side of the road. Give up our love of writing. No more listening to stories. Sit still and learn to like it. No more laughing. There now. Just act happy and well and in spirit and everything will be fine.
“Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
—Helen Keller
But it is our human right to feel the pain of loss. It will not consume us if we acknowledge it and work toward acceptance. In An Interrupted Life- The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, Hillesum writes, “[S]uffering has always been with us, does it really matter what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.” The way to acceptance is to understand what happened to your spirit and to be sympathetic to the pressures you were subjected to and how you gave up. With caring and coaxing through writing, you nurture and reassure the young self you once were and ask yourself to live as you once wanted, with rainbows twined in your hair. You give your wise speaking a voice. You give yourself a spirit who accepts all that you are.
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
—Rita Mae Brown
Begin with acceptance of your writing. You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need to be sure of your grammar. Accept how you write and think of it as a tool to find your wise voice. All that matters here is finding the wisdom you have within you.
It takes a certain fierce determination to live your life in a way that includes despairing feelings. Today we’ll use our writing to begin to accept how we feel, to accept those things that are beyond our power to change, and ask the higher power for serenity in spite of all the difficulties. In The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller wrote about the fact that we are now the person who must notice and remember the child we once were. We must accept ourselves and yet press on for all that we can be. Writing can help us do this. You won’t get stuck if you enter the well of hurt. Just remember the ladder that goes down the well also goes up.
“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”
—Charles Simic
Writing brings us closer to the waters churning within us. These waters can be stilled with the help of the soothing balm of the spirit.
Part of experiencing pain is accepting the loss that comes with being alive. With loss, we may feel a sense of protest that includes feelings of disbelief, denial, shock, anger, and self-criticism. We may experience changes in our sleep, appetite, and digestion. We may cry and experience forgetfulness. Then we may feel despair and agitation and want to withdraw socially. Next we may detach from our feelings and feel apathy. We may find ourselves acting in a “zombielike” way and feel that nothing has much meaning. We may feel all of this at the same time.
Writing helps us become new in the awareness of ourselves. There is a wise force within you waiting to speak. Let it.
Exercises
1. Use streaming to explore what your well of loss might hold. How deep is it? How wide? What would happen to exploring past feelings of loss if you lowered a ladder into the well so that you could go down into the well and climb out whenever you wanted? What experiences of loss do you need to explore?
2. Use gazing into the waters and then the technique of dialoguing with a teacher about loss in your life. Acceptance is saying yes to what the day brings. Write down what loss needs more work so that you could live this way.
3. Although you would never choose pain, write about the gifts of those hard times. Write what you know about going into your feelings and then becoming more than the feelings. Find out where the hurt settled in your body by just sitting quietly for a while and noticing where the hurt and anger seem to be residing. Does it need understanding, soothing, a promise from you? Speak to and for that part. Look for any lessons that may be hidden in the pain. Use these random phrases to do streaming on the losses in your life. Then write down random phrases from a book you have and do more streaming on losses. Examples of the phrases are: rebirth of tall trees, anything can be moved, horses move through me, mirrors and dreams and moving things.
4. Write about the dark. Write about the light. Write about the changing of the night to dawn and what you see.
Day 2: Anger
Often, one of the hardest things to accept in ourselves is anger. It’s not considered a “nice” feeling, and we often want to pretend it’s not there. After all, we don’t want to be seen as an “angry person,” do we? A little mad, perhaps, but not angry. Instead, we justify our behavior (“I had a good reason for that outburst!”) when what we really should do is accept the fact that we are angry and that we have a lot to be angry about! Okay. That’s a fact. Where our wise person enters is in how we deal with that fact.
“Anger stirs and wakes in her, it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.”
—Toni Morrison
One of my clients is able to express anger with true kindness in her voice. It’s amazing how easy it is to listen to her anger. Her words are clear. She holds no threat of retaliation or violence in her words or tone. She speaks to express herself and not to defend herself. She tells her boyfriend she doesn’t want to go camping because it’s too much work. Yes, the sky was heavenly and the sound of the crickets comforting, but, for her, it was too much nature and not enough soap and water. And she didn’t like all the setting and packing up. She doesn’t say she is right or that she is justified in her feelings. She doesn’t demand he change. The request to go camping again is not an affront to her ego nor does it need be to him. She has an opinion and she feels strongly enough about it to express it. She feels good about herself in doing so and accepts that some things make her mad, even in memory.
When you feel righteous anger you can ask yourself: How can I feel my anger, and what can I do and how can I change the situation? Do I have to accept that this is out of my hands and feel the anger and go on? Am I mature enough to know that in some situations I lose and some I can affect? Do I choose my battles well?
Say your girlfriend read your journal without permission. You might well get mad. You might tell her the journal is private and you feel violated. You can tell her how much it would mean to you if you could have a private place for feelings you are working through. What’s important is that you take care of your resentment and your spirit. Streaming (see appendix, pg. 181) is a great technique for exploring the feelings that are triggered by someone reading your private thoughts. You can then share these explored thoughts with your friend so she knows your feelings. This is using anger for intimacy, not to hurt someone.
I have one friend who has learned to speak up when she’s angry with me. Because she cares about me, she says, she wants me to know how she is feeling. Sometimes I wish she wouldn’t! Once she told me she was upset because I was in a new relationship and spending less time with her. She asked me to reexamine my priorities. My response, of course, was up to me.
She taught me that anger is appropriate when it is expressed in a compassionate way. She reminded me that anger is the place in us that says no. It is a warning sign that something is going too far. She confided in me that she writes out what she will tell me so she doesn’t blame me. I think to myself that it must not be so easy for her to express anger compassionately without practice either.
Compassionate anger is an expression of feelings. It informs and communicates. It desires a response but does not insist on one. It never includes violence. Once we express compassionate anger, we let the outcome go and feel satisfied in the expression of the feeling.
In accepting your anger you need to understand that anger is not a waste of time; it is carrying a message for you. “Anger is a signal worth listening to,” says Harriet Lerner, in The Dance of Anger. There’ll be no flooded world left behind compassionate anger. You’ll be a person others can trust because you’ll be telling the truth. A feeling, anger, was triggered in you and that’s fine.
When we repress anger, we sometimes experience anxiety, jealousy, self-pity, resentment, stress, physical discomfort, and depression. Needless to say, these feelings don’t allow us to rest as the moon circles the night sky. The restful place inside of us is painted with conflict. Unreleased anger can take up too large a place in our feelings and body. Think of people who seem crusty. We know enough to be careful of them because we sense the hidden whip of their anger. If we stop and consider their lives, we know that they would be better served if they would acknowledge that their rain barrel of anger is overflowing.
“Through anger, the truth looks simple.”
—Jane McCabe
Accepting the fact that others may get mad at you is a sound step to intimacy. We have every reason to believe, just as the sun sets in the west, that the time will come when we will trigger anger in our dearest friends. A student in a community college class on anger once said that she trusted her friends only after their first fight. It wasn’t until then that she knew whether she would be treated well or mistreated. Her wise voice wanted to see a whole person and then determine who could be trusted.
Through our writing/spiritual practice, we are learning to accept ourselves as human beings even when there are times when our anger feels like seawalls bursting in the pounding tide.
It’s hard to get to a place of compassionate anger, but writing can be an enormous help. You can lift yourself from a situation of despair by reminding yourself that anger will pass and you will dance again. Let the midnight garden glow under the moon’s light and appreciate darkness for what it offers. Enjoy the morning; welcome the noon. We promise ourselves to be angry in a way that we can accept and practice, practice, practice.
Exercises
1. Write down the times in your life when you felt and expressed anger. Was it compassionate or closer to rage? Explore how knowing the difference might have helped you accept the voicing of anger. Would the anger have been easier to accept if you had expressed it differently?
Use streaming to explore how your anger is “the shape of your family’s eye.” Another way of saying this is: How did your original family express anger? Now compare this to the way you express anger. How are you the same? Different? Are you reacting to someone’s anger or choosing how to deal with your anger for yourself?
2. Name three things you are currently angry about. Can you change the situation? Yourself? Or is this a matter of acceptance? Can you think of some ways to release your anger without hurting yourself or others? Write about that.
Day 3: Ourselves as We Are
Acceptance is like saying yes to something to which we usually say no. Today we’ll begin practicing saying yes to ourselves as a person with behaviors we both like and dislike, and no to the patterns that take us away from our natural self. We’ll begin to recognize an important distinction: We can love ourselves and not our patterns. If we want the spirit to become more alive in our lives, we must do the hard work of accepting ourselves.
“The fabled musk deer searches the world over for the source of the scent which comes from itself.”
—Ramakrishna
Many of my clients come to me feeling as if they have problems, but their families are pretty healthy. Their problems, they say, are “just them.” Others feel anxious but think they’re the only one who has managed to break free from their family’s dysfunction. Neither is true. We are a part of the family we were raised in. We can’t help but be affected by them. Accepting that truth is part of our growth path.
Writing your life story can bring you to better acceptance of your history and yourself. This can be done in fragments or as autobiography. Autobiographical vignettes can help you better understand yourself and how you were affected by your family.
A student of mine moved around a lot as a child, so now she likes to stay in one place. She wants her family around and tells me she only really relaxes when they are all home together. She brings to her marriage a sense of anxiety and doesn’t like it when her husband travels for his job. She says he is compassionate but that he finds her fear draining. Her children have developed fears of their own. The youngest, however, seems to be a daredevil, requiring a lot of the family’s attention.
This woman found that writing vignettes about growing up helped her anxiety. The thought of each apartment would jog her memory. She wrote of her fears and how she both hid and faced them. Writing helped her see how resilient she was. She realized she did very well at facing a lot of change and saw her resiliency as a strength she hadn’t recognized before. She wrote out her courage and now reminds herself that fear is one feeling among many that she holds in her body’s memory. Writing helps her accept what is happening in present time without triggering the past.
“Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.”
—George Sand
Many of us carry the sounds of the nights when we were cold and not cared for. In fear and anger, everything is caught; even the soul’s attention. We must write to the wise person within us and ask for help.
As Buddha said, “We are the lamp.” We are the source for our own light. No one can restrict us or make us feel a certain way, not for long anyway. We are either open to our spirit or we aren’t.
Clustering is a technique to use when we’re not sure what is triggering our feelings. It opens us to new possibilities. Sometimes we feel that something is holding us back and we can’t put our finger on the source of the discomfort but we sense it’s from our past. Clustering is useful because the free association method of the technique helps open the doors to our subconscious. Clustering may give you clues as to why your hatchet is swinging today. You may see what you are doing today in a different way and this insight may change your mood or actions. Here are the instructions for Clustering. We’ll be using it in the exercises that follow.
Clustering
Begin by choosing a word you want to write about. Write it in the center of the page, then write down every word that comes to mind even if they don’t make sense. Write down words that seem out of place or silly. You can work in a circular fashion. Keep concentrating on doing this and you’ll feel a change in your consciousness and words will just occur to you. Write them down quickly before the judge within censors them. Start with the word muse and write three words that muse brings to mind, such as writing, music, and nature. Write down an association for each of those words as they appear. Below is an example of a completed cluster.
Notice how one word leads to another. Sometimes your mind will jump to a more concrete word or one that is most unexpected. Do the clustering in whatever way works for you and you’ll seed your fertile soil. Start with the word muse and see where it takes you. Later you can do some streaming from the ideas or feelings that emerge from the cluster. You can take a “wing” of the cluster and do some streaming on that section and see what new insights arise.
Exercises
1. Remember a recent situation in which you didn’t like the way you reacted. What feeling was evoked by that situation? Sadness? Anger? Use the main feeling as the center of a cluster. Cluster for five minutes. Look at what you’ve written and select one word or section of the clustering and explore it further with the method of streaming; write for ten more minutes. Underline anything you’d like to return to later. Underline any insights. How does this exploration help you accept your feelings?
2. Look out your window and find two unrelated objects. Write what these two objects have to do with accepting yourself so you can better feel your spirit. Cluster for two minutes. Use streaming for five minutes. What did you find out about yourself? For instance, say you saw a fence and a chair. The fence may be about the way you hold yourself back, how “fenced in” you feel.
The chair could be the place for judgment, to have a time out and to sit so you can better develop spiritually.
3. Write about a miracle of acceptance that you would wish in your life.
Day 4: Differences Between Us
It’s quite a job to accept ourselves as we are. A lot of us get hung up thinking that acceptance means agreement. But to truly accept means to look upon different people with kind regard, whether we agree with them or not. Accepting the diversity within the human family means letting others be. When we do this, we can stop pushing the river and relax.
How can we be generous in spirit to those different from us? Sometimes it’s hardest to accept differences in the ones we love the most. We have been taught that we are safe when others agree with us and confirm our reality. In You Just Don’t Understand, Deborah Tannen talks of how “the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing suddenly unsure” when those closest to us respond differently from us. We can explore in writing and ask our spirit to help us not feel threatened. We can ask what our fearful feelings are about and how they can be released. Were you hit when you differed from your family? Shamed? What feelings come up now when someone opposes your view?
“The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.”
—Simone de Beauvoir
As we go along our spiritual path, we no longer want to automatically erase people from our lives because they say or do something that hurts us. We need to accept other people’s actions, and our own involvement with them, with more compassion.
As we learn the skills of speaking up and talking things through, our acceptance of the strengths and weaknesses of others grows because we can be honest and clear the air. We can learn to live beyond black and white, total rejection or total approval.
“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the past, Mara would have ended her friendship with Tim, her ex-boyfriend, because she was angry when he tried to date a friend of hers after their intimate relationship was over. Instead, she told him it felt too close for comfort and that she didn’t like it. With writing and prayer, she better understood how much she had hurt him when she ended their relationship. Writing helped her look at the whole picture and better accept that she and Tim had been going through the difficult process of breaking up, trying to be friends, and now regrouping in new partnerships. She needed to be kinder to him and accept that they would find their way with their friendship intact. She might not have felt comfortable with what he did, but she needed to hang in. She needed to ask her wise speaking voice how to be honest yet generous.
It is easier to accept differences if we become aware of the messages within us. These messages—possibly things said about other races or foreigners—may have been said to us or around us when we were children. The more we explore these internalized messages from our past, the easier it is to reject or accept them, and live according to chosen or newly thought-out values. Values that are sorted out are easier to live by even when challenged. It is when we feel conflicted that it is difficult to live in a world whose values are different from ours.
“Poor human nature, what crimes have been committed in thy name!”
—Emma Goldman
Once you have come to terms with the various voices within, you can choose your values without so much anxiety over what others are doing. You can be joyful and happy even when your values are not those of the majority.
Exercises
1. Write on what the authority figures of your childhood had to say about making lots of money, about spirituality and religion, about taking it easy between tasks. Write on whatever makes you feel different from the group and determine how that affects the way you feel about yourself. You may not believe in these values even if you have deeply internalized them. Make yourself current by writing. It’s important to know what you now value and what that does to your self-image if judged by the new valuing.
2. Use streaming to write out how you deal with people who have values different from yours. Give the details. Reveal a secret. How can you move toward the unknown?
3. Choose an image that repels you and write about it. How can this be related to your shadow life? Your spirit life? How does this tie into accepting differences in yourself and others. Use the technique of gazing into the waters and then do streaming.
Day 5: Life as It Is
I am sometimes asked if accepting one’s life makes us too passive. The message of acceptance can remind some people of the religious message to serve the church and accept our humble lot.
I think acceptance is more active than that. Accepting your life gives you a sense of peace in what you have been able to create for yourself and what you’ve been given. Why not see the good in all that surrounds you and accept the difficulties for the lessons and wisdom they bring? This acceptance will make your days more serene. Why not give any change you want a time to mature and accept this day?
