boxes to be unpacked

From Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea Judith, third chakra chapter:

“The first thing I tell my clients or group members when they wish to develop their third chakra is to give up the attachment to being safe.”

What? Noo!

“This involves giving up wanting everything assured ahead of time and accepting that there might be criticism, challenge, misunderstanding, rejection, or a possibility of failure. While safety may be important for survival issues and developing emotions [the first two chakras], it is no challenge to our power if everything we do is already removed from any real risk.”

And:

“Dancers, atheletes…and even yoga practitioners sometimes run their bodies like machines, working them hard, pushing them with their will, or forcing them into submission by the rigorous regimen they have chosen. They may ostensibly choose such a program for spiritual, artistic, or health reasons, but close examination may reveal a need to bolster the ego by how well the body looks or performs.”

Okay. Then. These are not such good things to ponder about myself, not so easy to realize or read about.

I don’t think I’m afraid of taking risks, per se – I just like to be on time for things, and I like to be fully prepared for most eventualities every time I walk out the door. I never connected the hoarding that I do (survival issue, first chakra) with my need to organize and control everything I do and every situation I walk into (power issue, third chakra). But they’re sort of the same thing – wanting to be safe.

One of my very favorite quotes from the Simpsons, though, is sort of revealing about whether or not I’m actually afraid of risks. Lisa has joined Bart at the military academy, and he’s secretly training her at night to be able to complete a terrible physical fitness test. She’s hanging from a rope, and she says she just can’t do it. Bart says, “I thought you came here looking for a challenge.” Lisa: “Duh! A challenge I could do.” I love this quote because it’s very me. I’ll challenge myself intellectually all day long, heck, all year long if you want me to. But if you ask me to teach elementary school, spend an afternoon at a retirement home, or play a touch football game, I will say no, and I will hurt you bodily if necessary so I don’t have to complete that kind of challenge. I know I cannot do those things. I don’t want to face any challenges I know I can’t do.

I’ve done a great many things in my life that I didn’t think I could, and a great many things that I never want to do again. I’ve lived under my father’s thumb. I’ve slept night after night in a 40-degree room. I’ve done what was required of me without protest in situations I should have run away from, screaming. But never have I imagined that I would have to cast off the safeties I depend upon in order to straighten out my personality.

I’m deeply afraid of criticism, yes. And in times of trial I have fallen back on my self-control – a needled cushion to be sure, but it has kept me from breaking bones. But to open myself to criticism (by being myself, out loud), and to loosen my hold on my self-discipline…are these good things for me to do? Will they help? I’ve never lived that way…I’ve never known and understood anyone who lives that way. How do you get through a day without being afraid of the things you’ve said and done and thought?

Realizing that I have used yoga as just another method of control is like the dawn breaking in my mind. That’s why I injured my hamstring. That’s why I never missed a weekly class until last week. That’s why it hurt so much for me to stop going on Wednesdays. (Yet it also felt good to stop, freeing. Hang on tightly, let go lightly?) And most remarkably, I realize it doesn’t have to be that way. I can go when I want to, not fret about my “performance”, stop worrying about whether I’ve gained a pound this week from not practicing, and let be what is. Whether I’m ready for teacher training next year or not, it really doesn’t matter. It will add to my happiness if I am, because it will mean (hopefully) that I can start living the life I am visualizing sooner rather than later, but my journey is happening the way it’s happening and if I push, I’ll only go backward (hamstring).

There’s a yogic principle about having faith that you will be provided with all the things you need. What you think you need beyond what you have been provided is actually unnecessary. I’ve interpreted this principle to mean two things: do with what you have and do not yearn for what you do not have, because that’s a waste of effort; and trust utterly in the universe to give you what you need. I am getting much better, almost by the day, with the first thing, but with the second thing I have a little more trouble (survival wound).

The problem for me with giving up a non-risk-oriented life is that suddenly I don’t know what to do. Quit my job and start writing books? Make more generous payments to my debts, so they’ll be done faster, even if it means I might overdraw or have to depend more on BF? Tell MP what I really think of them? Move to Seattle? I’m spinning without a compass if I stop being afraid. I’ve never lived a minute of my life without fear of or for something – judgment, money, privacy, loss, myself.

I keep reading page after page in this book, and the overriding confusion I have about the whole system is this: how can you be sure that, behaving this way, you are a good person? How can you be sure that people will still like you, if you’re so confident in yourself that you just act the way you want to act, and be who you are consistently, constantly? (I wish I knew what that felt like. It seems crazy, crazy on the level of running through the street naked with tribal makeup on, yelling in tongues.)  How can you know that you’re not hurting or offending someone by being who you are, or that your behavior doesn’t make their opinion of you go down?

If the answer is, well, you don’t think about that because you’re just sure, I say that’s insane. How can you not think about what other people think of you?

HOW??

–

In a dissimilar yet related topic, I cleaned out some of the garage closet today. I threw things away with abandon. Early on I was starting to feel awful and I went in to get a cuddle from BF to bolster my confidence, and he was in the bathroom (and I could tell it would be a while). This explained to me that I had to go it alone. So I did. I only spent two hours out there, but it was horrible. Nearly everything I looked at reminded me either of a failure of mine, of a terrible, awful time in my life, or of a splendid time or relationship that was lost and that I would never, ever get back. I threw away so much…I kept so much. (I should have been even more ruthless, I think, but not this time.) And I have so much more work to do.

So often I would pick up an object, turn it over in my hands, and be ready to put it in the “keep” box just because I had always done so. I have gone through these things so many times. It may be something like a dozen times that some of these things have been thumbed through and re-stored, because of all my movement and ratpackage. Then I would look more closely at the thing, ask myself why I was dragging around this piece of the past, what it really meant to me other than another several ounces that I did not use and did not need and which would eventually have to be gone through again and put in another box to take to the next stage of my life. And into the junk box it would go.

I threw away a plaster “K” that I made when I was in preschool, broken many years ago but kept because it was so old and had always been kept. I threw away dozens of letters from FBF, to me in my London apartment. I threw away debt collection letters, employee policies, lists of CDs I had once wanted to buy, Rolling Stone copies I had kept since 2002. And in the giveaway box I put toys, card games, CDs, mementoes, paperweights, an ashtray that kept me company on the long nights in Alexandria when I watched near-silent TV long after bedtime, smoking, listening to the silence, feeling the clean, expensive carpet between my fingers in wonder, trying to convince myself that my life in New England was really over, that I was going to be okay. Into that box went one of the most meaningful objects I took away with me from my relationship with FBF. At first I tried to tell myself that I could use it now, in my house with BF, that it could lose its old meaning gradually and be ours, useful in a different fashion. Then I looked at it, I thought about it, and I realized (again, again, again, again) that it was time to let the fuck go of the old life, the old BF, everything that would ever remind me of him, as best I could. Use it? In my new house? That’s an insult to BF, and to all the work I’ve done to get over that life. I almost cried when it clanged into the giveaway box. Cried in sorrow, and relief.

But I swallowed my tears and dove into the old box again.

–

Tomorrow I will go to yoga, and I will do my best. The day after that I will go to work, and I will do my best. In another week I will start school again, and I will do my best. It is so hard, and so simple, to realize that my best is absolutely all that I can do. My best: it’s mundane, and it’s a precious gift.