A bit of wisdom about dealing with challenging situations/patterns in relationship.
When someone cares about you and is reflecting you back to yourself, you ignore that reflection at your peril, no matter how distorted that reflection may be. Your job, of course, is to try to see the undistorted image as best you can, but remember this: the easiest person of all to fool is yourself.
In the three years since I wrote what follows about the social significance of perceiving energy, I’ve only distanced myself further from accepting the consensus view of how the world works.
This admittedly brings up some fear. In trusting that viewpoint, how do you avoid devolving into alienation or worse with the rest of the world? You know–“Oh, when will these poor benighted people come to their senses!”
I see it this way: energy awareness is like bringing color to a world that had previously been seen only in black and white. Given how vastly better my life has become since my awakening into the reality of energy flow, a vast potential for a change for the better exists in our world, as more and more people have the opportunity to finally see the world in color.
It’s a funny thing when you start having experiences that you realize (a) are actually happening and (b) you can’t talk about with just anyone because you’ll sound crazy. And it’s true, too, that sometimes you’ll feel crazy. Because what’s the evidence that (a) is true? Your subjective experience? Isn’t trusting your subjective experience over the consensus reality of those around one of the signs of craziness?
And yet I have no doubt that what I’m experiencing is, in fact, there to be experienced. It’s not a crazy piece of mind-created nonsense. That not everyone perceives it so directly … well, that’s just how it is. If you’ve ever listened to music with a highly skilled musician and heard her describe to you things that you cannot hear until they’re pointed out, or maybe cannot hear at all–subtle gradations of intonation, for example–you might have a sense of what kind of perceiving I’m talking about. What she hears is there to be heard. You just haven’t developed the skills to hear it.
As I’ve published bits and pieces from my old zero drafts, and especially as I put up the excerpts from that old notebook over the past four days, I feel that in those older drafts I am seeing higher quality writing than what I’ve been doing recently.
In order to not make myself crazy, I need to treat this as a testable proposition and keep reading over the zero drafts and see what I think as I approach the present day.
So has my technique actually degraded over these past three years? This prospect genuinely scares me, for obvious reasons. But if that’s the case, then what do I do about it? Because I have experienced, again and again, the value of trusting the zero drafts.
What occurs to me is that, if there has been a degradation of technique, it’s not the fault of the zero draft process. It’s that, because of my deadlines, I have tended to z.d. with most of my attention toward getting a piece out quickly rather than doing a pure zero draft. That is, all the zero drafts are to a certain extent first drafts, and first drafts and zero drafts are meant to do different things.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the next several months as I deepen my primary focus toward larger-scale writing.
Still from August 1st, 2014. Where the fuck did I find it within me to write something like this?
For yea, I say unto thee, and verily, that there is enough for all. We think, falsely, that we have been given the Earth, but actually the converse is true: the Earth has been given us, and it is no error that we have been placed here upon this blue spinning jewel, for the Earth loves us and wishes to provide. Scarcity is an illusion. Fear is an illusion. The pain in my heart as I write these words is not the truth. It’s not protecting me from making a mistake. It seeks to chase me away from looking, from opening up and striving to find the words to describe what lies here in front of me, also a blue jewel that shines, which is love.
From August 1st, 2014
All of us have genius, if nothing else than in our innate capacity to love and to be love, and all of us do battle with demons that seek to thwart us. I don’t why it’s this way. I don’t know if there’s a reality atop this one that is purer, or one that is within this one that is more refined, more subtle. I am merely describing what is there for all to witness.
Also from August 1st, 2014. An observation that still resonates today, expressed with a boldness I’m a little awed by.
All around me, the most beautiful and powerful people I know are flailing, as though wrapped in chains and thrown into frigid waters, or suspended above scorching flames. Pain radiates through each of us–I can see it, etched on our faces, hear it in voices strained hoarse as though from screams, feel it because within that buried terrible panic I resonate too.
I rarely do much reading in my old notebooks. They’re for a posterity more distant than today. But I opened this notebook to the first page, and saw the date of the first writing–July 31st, 2014–and said, “Holy shit. Things in my life had been pretty intense when I wrote that, but I had no fucking idea just how brutal a ride I was about to go on.”
Three days later I hit Bottom.
What follows is from August 1st, 2014. I had no recall of ever having written anything like this, and seeing it pretty much blew my fucking mind.
About a month later, I started working with Jerry.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
I never understood that I could feel energy, feel vibration, until last Thanksgiving, when I realized that the madness surrounding Black Friday was making me crazy. “Just don’t pay attention,” people counseled, not unwisely. “That’s the thing,” I told them, wild-eyed. “I can’t not pay attention. I feel it.”
It was true, too, and since then I have begun to explore, in my halting, uneducated way, just what this sensitivity means, and also what happens within myself when I open the channel to energy and begin–again, with no skill save what I ignorantly stumble upon–to wield it.
At this point the truest statement I can make about the impact all this has had in my life is that the highs are higher, the lows lower, and there’s less in the middle. Oh, and despite the newfound sensitivity and the power I have discovered sometimes flows through me, I am every bit as stuck in my life as I have ever been. Maybe that’s an understatement. Maybe I have never been this stuck.
The practice of energy has been enlivening beyond all expectations, because whatever expectations I had came from my mind, and since I couldn’t conceptualize the feeling of clean energy flow, there was no way to imagine what the practice of feeling everything would feel like. The idea that it was something I could learn and practice and get better at and see in my day-to-day life and see expand in my day-to-day life was not something I could have previously understood.
Though this z.d. harkens back to a time already eight months into my work with Jerry, from my current perspective, everything I’m talking about here was still incredibly new. When I came back across this z.d. a couple of days ago, it left me agape–the feelings expressed here seem so long ago now, and yet at the same time remain incredibly salient.
Today marks the three-year anniversary of the beginning of my daily publishing practice here on Free Refills. That first piece was entitled “Planting a Seed,” and it concluded with these words: “Today is the equinox, and right here I am planting a seed. And I still don’t know what exactly is going to sprout.”
I said I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I hoped and expected that through the process I’d figure it out. I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but I’ve published a piece every Monday through Friday for three years, so I guess you’d say that, whatever it is, I’ve definitely been doing it. Not without a lot of angst and struggle sometimes, but I’ve been doing it.
I’m now three years in, and as of today I’ve published 795 pieces. I’ve earned the right to call this a major project. I’m deeply, deeply proud of it, but the process is no longer leading to growth. I’m going to keep doing it, but it’s going to look a lot different now. I’m done with the struggle.
I see now that writing a piece every day doesn’t work–it keeps my focus on the immediate moment, it’s not fun, and it’s getting in the way of the larger-scale writing that’s so important for my growth and my future goals. There needs to be a greater separation between the weekly drafting, the daily Refill, and the process (draft-revise-iterate) of creating more substantive pieces. Each and every part of my writing process needs to be done in a spirit of joy, giving and gratitude. I teach that we don’t have to live in struggle. Why am I not practicing what I teach?
Many, many years ago, I came up with Ben’s First Law of the Internet, which I express most often as: You aren’t the only one. For every one of your interests, there is someone out there–actually many, many someones–who shares that interest. In some cases, this wasn’t obvious until the internet made it possible to share those interests with the world. But if you had your own website (in some ways no longer necessary in our world of social media), no one could stop you from talking about whatever you wanted to.
Recently I’ve been looking over the oldest zero drafts from this project, and I see things that I like–sentences that delight me, ideas that seem exciting. When I combine that realization with Ben’s First Law of the Internet, it strikes me that the daily Refill can and should be about process: “Here’s something I worked on/am working on. I think it’s interesting/fun/cool. I hope you do too.”
To put that another way: someone somewhere might read something I’ve written, even just a brief excerpt from a zero draft, and find it interesting, or enlightening, or delightful. In our challenging world, they might find themselves for a few moments feeling a little less alone. And that’s all the reason I need, or will ever need, to keep sharing.
What follows comes from the same zero draft as the piece I published last Monday. I cut this part because that piece was already overlong, and because this part felt unwieldy to include. But I kept thinking this was actually the most important stuff that I wrote, so I decided it deserved a piece all its own.
I recently had a ski day at Breckenridge with my friend Andy. After a warm-up on Peak 8, and some icy cruisers and so-so bumps on Peak 10, we took a snack/water break and discussed where to go next. Perhaps we’d find good snow on Breck’s high-alpine terrain? Worth a shot, we decided. So after one more run on Peak 10, we hopped on the SuperConnect and started heading up.
On the ride up the SuperConnect, I checked in with myself and noticed that I hadn’t actually been having much fun. Initially, I tried to explain the recognition away: the coverage was just so-so, a lot of the runs were icy, I wasn’t skiing my best. Plenty of good reasons to not be having fun.
Except on reflection that looked like bullshit. I was on a beautiful mountain on a beautiful winter day. I had skis on my feet. I was out there with a good friend. If I wasn’t having fun because of the conditions, then I should have said to Andy, “Hey, let’s go do something else.” But I didn’t want to leave. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
So as we rode the SuperConnect, I turned my mind to something I’ve been exploring a lot this winter. I spent many years, most of my adult life, in a moderate anhedonic depression. Even after my studies in flow presented me with a path out of that depression, I remained unhappy about many aspects of my life. Over the course of all those depressed and unhappy years, I had habituated to being an unhappy person. I frequently experienced my life without much pleasure, felt disconnected from the world around me, tended to isolate myself, and expected (and thereby created) negative outcomes. All of this, you have to understand, happened pretty much invisibly. These were habits, and thus essentially unconscious. That the situations that initially brought about these habits no longer obtained was not nearly enough to change them.
So I asked myself: Was my mood the result of the so-so conditions on the mountain that day? Was it simply that I wasn’t skiing very well, and was therefore disappointed with myself? In asking these questions, it struck me that the last time I was on Peak 10, and the last time I’d gone up to the high-alpine terrain of Peak 8, it was almost certainly around this time last winter, almost exactly a year ago, during which time I was in fierce debate with myself about my future and the future of my marriage. Could the path of growth and change I was finding myself on co-exist with the person I had grown to be within the marriage? Our respective desires for the lives we wanted to live no longer seemed to move in parallel. While just asking yourself about a significant change in your life can be a step on the growth path and be therefore positive, these were sad questions, and so this time a year ago was a deeply sad time in a life that had, in general, been quite sad.
As I looked into it, it seemed highly likely that my experience on the mountain reflected habitual emotional energy far more than anything actually related to the specific conditions I was experiencing that day. And if that was correct, then the right choice was pretty simple: to try to change the energy within my body by getting very in-tune with the present moment.
I took some deep centered breaths and opened my eyes to what was actually in front of me, and suddenly as if by magic the day got vastly more beautiful. I became aware of the myriad shades of green of the trees along the lift-line cut, and the particular topography of the treetops as seen from the tree-top height of the lift chair, and for a few moments things got almost psychedelic as my perceptions made the transition into this new energy. I felt deeply connected to all that surrounded me, the earth and the terrain and the snow and the light. I had to hook my arm around the back of the chair, because I found myself right on the border of being dizzy.
From the top of the SuperConnect, we dropped down to ride 6 Chair, and a few minutes later at the top of 6 Chair it was time to ski again, and my skiing–and my mood–improved right away. Over the course of three runs off 6 Chair, I made some of the best turns on steep bumps I’ve ever achieved, and my runs through the flatter run-out back to 6 Chair, the run known as Boneyard, were fun and joyful.
After a break for lunch, we went over to Peak 6, where I could test my hypothesis about my experience that day reflecting habitual sadness from my past. I skied Peak 6 a lot last season, including during the late season when I’d made the difficult decision that the best path forward was to move on with my life, and I’d had a handful of really truly joyful days over there. Sure enough, the feeling on Peak 6 was totally different. Fun and pleasure seemed to inhere in the terrain itself, with no real effort or focus from me.
It’s been rare during this winter’s exploration of these habits that something has come up as starkly as it did on the mountain, and that I could bring myself into the present so quickly. Nothing seems particularly out of line when I’m making dinner and my mind wanders–it’s not nearly as stark as noticing that I’m not having fun while skiing. But it’s at least as insidious and as corrosive. So much of life is just … life. It’s taking showers and doing the laundry and keeping up with my writing, and if I am engaging in habits of disassociating myself from these moments, if I am in essence refusing to notice the inherent beauty in just being alive, I am quietly missing most of what being alive has to offer. I can’t say that I have vanquished these old habits, but on days like what I just described, when I can bring myself forcefully and intentionally into the present, I get a little better at it. It may be no exaggeration to say that this is the most important work I’m doing in my life right now.