Beloved friends,
Last week I mentioned to you that in my inner journey to the sea I developed a new relationship with fear. Some folks expressed interest in this, I thought I'd share a little more.
Well over a decade ago now James was smitten with sailing, taking lessons and coming home bright-eyed and euphoric. I, on the other hand, felt repelled: ABSOLUTELY NOT. As time passed and I saw how much good this immersion in sunshine and sea with strong use of his body and mind was doing him, I thought about how generous he had been in exploring yoga with me, how much that meant to me. Some of the couples who had been closest to us were splitting up. I wondered: was this something I could find a way to enjoy so that we could keep weaving our dreams? Could I love this not for him for but for myself in my own way, beside him?
Nature, science, athleticism, learning in an oral tradition with ancient roots... these were all things I cherished. James shared Bernard Moitessier's famous sailing memoir The Long Way, which is deeply mystical, and it lit me up with a vision. I saw how this could be wonderful for me – but I was terrified! How could I deal with that?
I brought friendly curiosity to my fears and found that none of them seemed particularly logical; there was just a miasma of NOOOO. I reflected for a good while about what might be leading to this and about the role of fearfulness in my life more generally. I was reflecting, too, on how my thoughts upon waking carried a tone of urgency, listing what needed to happen that day like I was running from or toward something. As my practice had helped me over the years to establish more inner stability, this urgency became more notable. My life was in a good season; there was no external need for this sense of pressure. The call was coming from inside the house! Why?
I identified a tone of thought which I named "the fear loop" and came to realize that all of this – the urgency, the fear loop – was not based in past. My body was still trying to protect me from things that had taken place a long time ago. I did a pair of of EMDR sessions about the long ago difficult thing. This gave me more tools to inhabit my memories with loving skill and to begin to unspool the little tangle at the heart of all that. I came to see that the urgency and the fear loop, that was anxiety. "Oh! THAT'S anxiety!" Isn't it funny how hard it can be to identify things in your own mind, to connect a word with an experience, sometimes? The anxiety began to unravel. Oh, the sense of freedom!
I learned to sail. We sold our house and bought a boat. We began to prepare to wander at sea for a time. I did more study: a self-defense class with IMPACT , wilderness first aid with Ken Johnson of North Coast Fire and EMS Training, a whole lot of time on the water and in classrooms over a couple of years with the good folks at OCSC in Berkeley. All of my teachers had seen a lot of danger. Ken ran into fires on purpose! My sailing teachers had been on sinking ships! They taught me about how to think about and plan for dangerous situations and how to keep thinking when danger struck. I began to understand and experience how fear could be an exquisite experience and a powerful ally, how it could make me sharp and clear and strong how I could relate to adrenaline deliberately rather than having it just strike me like lightning.
We moved onto our boat and sailed it from the San Francisco Bay to Mexico. My first overnight sail we were socked in with heavy fog. I felt anxious sitting in the cockpit in the dark in the fog, but when it was time for us to make a change to our sails I felt bright, pleasant focus while crawling over the cold, wet deck in the pitch black to untie the knot securing our sail, crawl around to the other side of the boat, and retie it again. (Sailors, I'm trying to describe un-and-retying the bowline that secured our preventer when jibing on the downwind sail along the Pacific coast of California.) We crossed the Gulf of California/Sea of Cortez – three times – and the first time dealt with our rudder leaking 100 miles from shore. We climbed the 60' mast secured by a rope harness, again and again. We hit an entire freaking tree floating in the sea one sunny afternoon. I learned that I could do hard things, that did not have to be in control, only to plan as best I could, then meet the living moment with presence and skill. I loved solving problems and meeting difficult moments! Twice I saved our boat from collisions by shoving our 40' sailboat with my body away from something that was going to hit us or that we were going to hit. That isn't possible, and I did it, the way people sometimes lift cars, thanks to the wonders of adrenaline.
Shining moments I reached through fear from top left, clockwise: climbing a line like an inchworm to get to the top of our mast in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, stopping to talk to James about how it was going, paddleboarding in the dark before dawn with crocodiles, whales, and stingrays on Bahia de Banderas, the meme that sent me to bed for a week in April 2020 when I began to see the shape of the pandemic more clearly, me at the helm as we left the US for Mexico (that big black clip you can see on my abdomen just below the top of the wheel in my hands is clipping me to the boat), my smile after swimming with whale sharks off of La Paz -- an invitation that two weeks early I had met with NO FREAKING WAY, and midair into a biiiig jump down into a cenote near Tulum. (Thanks to a kind stranger, James, Gabe Benveniste, and Kristen Wrzesniewski for these images.)
What made all of this possible was meditation. Not meditation in the limited sense of trying to focus or control my attention, but nearly the opposite of that: meditation in the sense of cultivating a willingness to be present with myself and the wildness of my inner experience with friendly curiosity – and also at times through gritted teeth or tears. The wonders of meditation do not unfold for us when we learn to hold the mind steady; the fundamental first task of meditation as I understand it is to befriend ourselves, to befriend our minds, to move past the idea of control and discipline and simply bring our curious, friendly attention to life unfolding with us. This looks like listening to our thoughts and emotions, to understand what moves and drives us.
One of my favorite concepts for this work is something that I first called the chorus of the self: that wild mix of biological drives, socialization, and personal experience which makes up our inner experience. We truly contain multitudes! Both EMDR and Reiki training (they have extremely similar techniques) taught me how to relate to the living memories that lie within me. I've learned more about this from teaching this to others over long years: how our younger selves are alive within us, stored as present-tense memory. How we can relate to that and change it. How to relate to our emotions in order to understand the messages they are there to deliver. Other folks, of course, have noticed these things, and there is a school of therapy having a moment right now that focuses on this: how the different parts of us vary and how we can relate to them. The expereince of Internal Family Systems is not well-conveyed by its name, so it is also often more casually called parts work.
I have been teaching a lot of parts work in my courses this year; I describe it as tending to the aspects of the self. In my own practice I've been developing a relationship with that part of me that I once called the fear loop. She doesn't show up often these days, but when she does, I call her Hypervigilance. I see my sweet inner aspect Hypervigilance visually as a cross between me and Ms. Frizzle from The Magic Schoolbus:she's got a big sloppy bun with tendrils and pencils sticking out of it. She wears a big, vintage, hard-frame olive green backpack with wayyyyy too much stuff in it because SHE MIGHT NEED THAT. She's wearing binoculars, because she's got to see everything.
Nowadays, if she shows up, I take a moment and ask Hypervigilance what she is there fore, what she needs. I've been inviting her to leave the backpack in the house, giving her an apple, a bottle of water, and a soft blanket, and inviting her to go nap in the meadow. She's learning to trust that I've got it, to see that I handle things better when she doesn't send my mind racing in circles and spirals. Relating to this aspect of myself in my mind this way really helps my nervous system ease down out of anxiety. It's amazing stuff.
Recently I was leading a session near the end of the last Lovingkindness course where I invited people to get in touch with an aspect of themselves. I do these practices as I lead them so that our energy is congruent, but I aim to do them lightly so that I am not distracted by my own experience. I guided the group into connecting with an aspect and in my own mind, chose myself-as-crone. When I got to the part where I suggested that folks ask that part what it wanted us to know, I thought that older-wiser-me would have some simple advice for me, some sagely thoughts. But she looked at me through her endlessly wrinkled face and her eyes sparkled as she smiled and said: "All that I am, everything that I am, is YOU. Thank you." She thanked me for making her. Oh! I'm a little teary just typing it again.
So much wisdom lies within us. So much generosity. All of us. We just have to show up. I would love to help you cultivate deeper self-compassion and awareness. For a lot of folks that consists of just beginning to explore the ability to tolerate being with yourself without distraction. I know that's where I began. I'm finalizing the details of my next course now. I hope you'll consider joining. In the meanwhile there are always free tools available on my website, the option to connect with me 1:1, and one more session of the long-running Tuesday morning donation-based Meditation Gathering.
Resources
A Thoughtful, Rollicking Read
James and I have an agreement that if either of us reads a book we are certain will affect our thinking so substantially that we want the other person to read it too, we will do that. That's how I came to read Robin Sloan's Moonbound. I added it to my bookshop right away in case you'd like to join us. Meditation, plurality of consciousness, the vastness of time and history, nonviolent communication, wizards, space, sentient AI fungi: this is a splendid, kind, enjoyable read. I gobbled it in a weekend. If you can't figure out what that song is, message me and I'll tell you! The protagonist is 12, but it didn't occur to me until I'd finished that this might be a young adult book. No heavy violence, cussing, or kissing; likely good for a thoughtful, interested reader of any age, and perhaps a good pick for family reading. Thanks to James.
Enduring and Thanks
A new study on gratitude and mortality showed that gratitude was correlated with longevity in 50,000 older women. Love this coverage of the study with suggestions for cultivating a grateful mindset.
We Are Not Alone
Did you see the release last week of the discovery that marmosets call each other by name?
Being the Change
Numerous people shared that they were joining Vote Forward after I posted about it. (Woohooo!) On the other hand, not a single person reached out to join me in committing to phone banking (reach out if you want to change that; I'd love a buddy to share that with!) I take that to mean that writing is better for folks. Here's another option for get out the vote efforts, because the autumn election is going to be a pivotal one for the future of humanity as a whole: the Blue Wave Postcard Movement. I know that folks are feeling the joy with the new Harris/Walz ticket, but this is still a close election! It will be a lot less painful to mobilize for the election than cope with what will happen if we get an unstable wannabe dictator in the White House. Join me?
Ah, the Mystery
I find it a comfort to contemplate that there is still so much we do not know about the incredible experience that is life in the cosmos. A mystery that I learned about this week is sonoluminescence: the emission of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound. We know that it happens, and it's pretty easy to make happen, but we don't know why yet! Brittanica has a quick explanation of the phenomenon, noticed first in the snapping claws of mantis shrimp and here's someone talking about it for 3 minutes.