I've been contemplating gratitude often as of late.
I asked a friend for feedback on my Instagram gratitude posts and while I appreciated her honest and open feedback, I also saw how negative intent seeps in as loved ones attempt to understand our perspective often and we are not transparent to them about our state of being. It's not about explaining so much as clarifying our approach.
When I was in martial arts training as a young teenager, we learned a lot about the Asian traditions of respect and gratitude. I have always tried to remember those as a practice, especially in my adult life. Even though I stopped practicing martial arts as a young adult, there are some aspects of the discipline that I subconsciously carried over into my adulthood. These concepts came in handy for me after I was diagnosed with the the thyroid disorder that basically sent me to bed for six years in my twenties. When we entered the karate school where I practiced, we were taught to bow as a sign of respect and gratitude every time we walked through the door. We also did this every time we stepped on the mat to learn. I quickly noticed that most people, even the adults, did this out of repetition and forgot the reason why we were asked to perform the ritual. I didn't. I was truly grateful for the lessons I learned in that environment. It was something I was determined to never take for granted because even at a young age I recognized somehow that what I learned in that school carried over into every aspect of my life. When we learned Kata, when we learned technique, when we sparred and did self defense clinics. When we spent entire lessons learning about how to feel and shift energy around us. Weapons training especially meant a lot to me because I always had a challenge with weapons. There were so many mental obstacles to fight through when I picked up any weapon to use. All of these lessons taught me something about myself and I became much more self aware of how I interacted with the world around me because of those moments on the mat.
Respect and gratitude have to be fostered and practiced in order for us to learn lessons about ourselves. In the moments when I focus on these concepts I recognize that I open myself to positive energy and positive people are attracted to me. When I become negative and complain, when I forget self respect and respect for others, I push good influences out of my life. I do not wish to preach about how anyone else should live their lives, but one thing I do know is that if I forget the practice, I begin to have a negative impact on my environment. There is one thing that I am determined to not be: someone who only has negative purpose. I do not wish to be a bully. I do not wish to be abusive. I do not wish to look back at my life and notice a pattern of hurt and devastation in the trail of failed relationships that I leave behind me. I also do not want to be abusive to myself. All of these things begin to happen when I fail to recognize that empathy is not natural to us.
In my last blog, I mentioned that we only really see our own perspectives. We are selfish creatures by nature because we only have access to our own consciousness. Think about how many times you've felt misunderstood by someone you love deeply. Think of the rejection and hurt that creates because you felt like that person should've understood you better in a moment. Then think about how that hurt can spiral between two people over days, weeks or months at a time because you are each fighting for your perspective to be considered and even when you acknowledge that another perspective exists; the hurt you feel is still an open wound that fails to mend because you don't feel heard. What if I just closed my eyes in those times and meditated on the hurt, acknowledged it's presence and let the anger go? What if I let rage melt into gratitude for a lesson willing to be learned, or for the opportunity to experience such intimacy with someone that such deep hurt was possible? What would happen in those moments? Would I fight anymore at all?
I truly feel like gratitude is the key to accomplishing positivity and creating a better energy around myself. Instead of looking at someone and seeing their opportunities and then bitching out loud about them to someone else, or saying spiteful things to those people themselves in those moments which I know will create pain for them, maybe I should shut my mouth. Direct feedback to someone about an opportunity you observe is very different than judgement. Judgement is limitation and limitation scars. It is abusive. One hundred percent abusive. If we are criticizing more than we are offering uplifting words, we are abusive. It is also a direct reflection on where our minds are at. If I only see negative aspects of people and point them out, I am saying that I am insecure. I am saying that I feel horrible about myself and I don't want to put the work into fixing the real issue, so I'm going to take it out on you. It becomes a tornado of energy that eats itself as the proverbial snake swallowing it's own tail. We get stuck in those places and can't get out until something so bad happens that the tail of the snake is cut off and then we are a bloody mess on the floor.
I would like to avoid this as often as possible. So I choose to practice gratitude consciously. When I forget and shove it into the sub conscious and forget to put work into it, just as everything else of value in my life requires attention and work, problems arise.
I have a lot to be grateful for through grief and through trauma. I have a beautiful life. I have an awesome home that never fails to fill me with joy because I am mostly a homebody. I have a lot of natural curiosity, intelligence and aptitude for creativity in many ways. I am brave. I am adventurous. My bills are paid and I'm not a drag on anyone financially. I try to take care of my family and my friends when they need support. This most of all has the deepest impact on me. I have fucking amazing people who are willing to come sit at my table and enjoy time with me. That gift is irreplaceable and when I meditate on that alone, I find it easier to displace the negative things that people choose to say about me and how they judge me because they are trapped in their own demons. My roommates keep pointing it out to me in the past few months. You have good friends. You have great people. Like... stable, creative, smart people who simply enjoy sharing a kinetic vibe with you. Last night it came up again: Crystal, you have a lot of really cool friends. People who aren't shady or destructive. People who don't come and talk shit about other people all the time or create drama, or use you because they have failed themselves. They just want to talk about interesting things that are happening in the world or tell stories of their day, or ask questions of things they are going through so that they understand their environment more holistically. These are rad people who I am lucky to even know, much less have say to me that they want to spend the little bit of free time they have with me when they can. So I become the company I keep, like the proverbial circle of Buddhist heaven where the chopsticks are too long so they sit together and feed each other in the round; rather than the proverbial circle of Buddhist hell where they attempt over and over again to feed themselves with chopsticks that are too long and in doing so, all sit in a circle and starve together, alone.
I have to be grateful for this. I have no choice. When I am criticized for being crazy, or someone tells me I have a twisted little mind; what if I zoom out and think of the forty other people who say nothing but kind things to me no matter how long it's been since we last spent time together? When trauma threatens to break me and I can't eat or sleep and there are several people who will answer the phone at three a.m. to tell me that I can't let the lies seep in and I am more than the gaslighting that tries to convince me I am not a good person or not worth anything. When I push people who I think are too good for me away because I am convinced I'm going to ruin their lives and they send me a text to say that they miss me and there's nothing I could do or have ever done to hurt them in the twenty plus years I've known them, besides not spend enough time with them. When I ask someone if people just feel sorry for me because I am genuinely nuts and they burst out laughing because the concept is so absurd to them. Or when my roommates who have both lived with me for over two years, look at me and say that I've offered them a beautiful, safe place to live. And it is warm with love even when we fail each other in our own ways and all know each other in our ugliest moments, there is still peace. My list is endless. Somehow.
I get this feedback when I open my eyes in the morning and say I am grateful for what the day brings, no matter what it is. Life is hard. Why would I make it harder by tearing myself or other people down? So right now? My challenge is to practice gratitude harder. To meditate on beauty instead of destruction so that I can handle absolutely anything the universe throws at me. Doesn't this create the ebb and flow of balance? What if we lived in a world where when someone says something critical to us, we stop, break the cycle and do something kind for someone else instead of absorbing the hurt and paying that forward? The concept of The Buddha is to bow lower in the face of adversity.
So I will not stop saying I am grateful. You can call me names if you want, and they sting in the moment for sure, but in the long run, I can't care. This approach brings reward and blessings to my life. And my legacy to the universe is all I can care about, I can't carry your load too. I can only be responsible for my own output and taking the time to care for myself so I can care for the people I love and add value to my community. At the end of the day, I want to offer the people I love safety, consistency and I want to offer myself... respect. I want to look in the mirror at the end of every day and respect myself, so if I must, I will gladly take a little bit of crazy alongside of that. If those are my goals, the critical voices must be rejected, because as I work hard to maintain balance, remember, the universe has other challenges to test me with. In exercising conscious gratitude for challenges, I only snowball more strength for the next challenge.
"See all of my kindness is taken for weakness..."
Paul McCartney/ Kanye West
Monday, January 14, 2019
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Words. Biology. Relationships. Discipline.
It's been five years since I've blogged or written seriously. I've been trying to wrap my mind around that lately and it's been tough. I've been living for too long on instinct like a cat. Or like a creature under water weighed down by the dimness of the ocean that surrounded me. It did not occur to me until the past two months that I have been missing this outlet as a sure and pure way to analyze my thought patterns and keep my mind in balance. I've never used words in a way to negatively impact anyone. It wasn't until lately when I was accused of writing in a way that I didn't, that I took stock of why I haven't been writing at all. I had somehow become a shell of myself. Opening myself up to the insecurity of constant criticism in a way that affected my analytic behavior. I allowed intimidation to affect how my natural self defense mechanisms and synapsis fire cleanly inside myself. I have always been a writer though. Since I was a child. It has served as a way over the years to delve into my own inner workings and mechanisms to self correct and reconstruct my psyche when it threatens to break under certain types of pressure. How can I experience mental growth and lack of stagnation if I fail to access my own mental processes? How can I avoid falling into the traps and projections of insecurity from others if I fail to hold my own narratives accountable for their shortcomings? Especially when as a human, I truly only have honest access to my own mind. I can't read yours, so I have to guess or trust that you are communicating honestly with yourself firstly, and me secondly. Then there are other variables like whether I am talking to someone in a moment who is emotionally inconsistent or fragmented, or whether I understand the other persons communication style at all. Do you see how this is a trap for someone with a great imagination? If I don't reign in that beast, I can wander in the desert for forty days on possibility alone. If I don't keep myself in check, I can't flesh out a conversation with someone else well and then communication falls apart over time, even if it once had great flow.
I haven't told many people about my failed attempts at therapy over the years. It is disastrous for me every time. I do not do well in an environment where I am sitting across from a highly educated individual, telling them about the things that have caused me anguish. Always, because I can be so sensitive when people are mean, it is because I am hurt so deeply by the actions of someone else. Every single time, I am validated at my communication structures and attempts in the beginning until I start to lose ground and give up. I become unstructured and overly emotional, and end up a soppy mess, using endless tissues. The conversations always end with me asking the pivotal question: If you are saying that I am right and I still feel this way, then what can I actually DO about it?
The answer is always the same: Let it go. This is someone else's problem to fix and you have to release yourself from the accountability of that/those individual/s.
Ugh. Again. I know.
So that is the real problem. I am a good fixer. You have a problem, and you tell me about it? I'm immediately going to launch into a grid in my head of possible solutions. Then I'm going to hone in on the quickest and most efficient solution and try and help you fix it. I should actually get paid money for this. This should be my job. Where this becomes problematic is in relationships. I easily become an enabler which relieves others of their own responsibility and then creates hostility on all ends in different ways. I quickly lose sight of my own needs and self care goes out the window. When you struggle with several auto immune diseases, especially ones that create emotional instability, this is a recipe for disaster. It also causes me to become overly involved in something that I do not need to always be a part of and I quickly become annoying. Ha. It opens everyone up to unhealthy co-dependancy. Sounds like I need to listen more, maybe ask more questions in retrospect and actually do less myself.
Without writing, I fail to identify the pitfalls of these actions in the moment. This blog is an exercise and if you are here and willing to take this journey with me, maybe we can dialogue and learn together. So here goes nothing.
I have this problem. I have identified the healthy vehicle I can use to help begin to solve it for myself and now, as I am often compelled to do, I turn to biology as navigational inspiration. The math. The science. They are clean structures for me to apply to issues within myself that allow for course correction. Remember. Everything is a math equation. If it's not working, your math is bad. Maybe you just need to move some integers around, or maybe you're missing a piece of the equation itself. You could be over simplifying or over complicating. Either way, if you don't allow for the big picture, your equation is broken and you simply need to work from the solution back to the beginning to create the correct formula.
In the plant and animal kingdoms, there are three types of identifiable relationships in an ecosystem: Mutualism, Commensalism and Parasitism. Mutualism is ideal. It means that the organisms involved are mutually benefiting from the partnership. This is highly ideal in people. Commensalism is ok. It implies that the host is not negatively impacted by it's partner, but it is not reaping a reward either. When we apply this concept to humanity, it seems mostly unrealistic as with humanity we are adding in the complexity of consciousness and the emotional backlash that occurs with the way that our society is built. Parasitism is the final example and is especially damaging in human relationships if you relate it to the former sentence. Parasitism is when one organism gains as it's host suffers. If I am striving to create relationships of mutualistic tendencies in my life, what key elements do I need to manifest in myself first? See? Find my ideal solution first, and then work backwards.
Bear with me here as I switch topics for a moment. I promise that it will all tie in together in a few moments.
I love music. I am a musician. I have been since I can remember anything at all. Music is passion to me. In my work as a musician, I cannot reasonably reign that passion in to make any sense at all without rules and structure applied to the situation. Or focus. A good friend of mine reintroduced me to this fact as we sat at the bar about a month ago and she attempted to describe to me how she is able to create so much music. She has to give herself rules because the possibilities are endless otherwise. I am now reminded of the discipline I was taught in my youth. The posture as I sat at the piano. The hours of scales up and down the keys to build muscle memory. The vocal exercises that I had to do before I was allowed to just launch into song, especially when I was attempting to collaborate with others. The structure is necessary to marry different talents together in a moment. Any art I have ever practiced has required discipline as a basic element for success. Martial arts. Weight training. Cooking. Baking. Painting. Even gardening. I can foster endless fantasies of letting my garden grow wild so that gnomes and unicorns can knock at my back door and come have tea with me, but in reality, I'm gonna grow some mealy and puny potatoes that way. I will actually have zero viable output from that garden if I allow it to grow unfettered. If I want to plant seeds in the spring that will produce happy, healthy plant life and beautiful ripe produce; I must create a balanced ecosystem. I have to have the correct soil PH for my seedlings so that they have the essential vitamin and mineral content for ideal growth. I have to give them consistent water flow to avoid mealy or anemic vegetation. I have to exercise pest control to avoid crop devastation. I have to have ideal lighting conditions and plant according to regional weather patterns. The list goes on and on.
In short, I have to do work. There is a strange alchemical recipe involved here. The desire has to be real and present, but the dream is not sustainable without boundaries and focus. So now we come full circle... If these concepts are true of everything else I apply myself to that I adore, why wouldn't the same be necessary of a relationship with a person? Or even myself for that matter? There are rules I must apply to keep the pendulum from swinging too far to the left or right. If I am searching for balance in my human interactions and my own life, I must also apply rules. I must also apply focus. I take one of my heroes, John Lennon as an example. John had to learn to play instruments. He did not just pick them up and dream songs into existence. I mean he did, but how did he actually build the dream? He had to work. He respected hard working people and talked about it often, because he was a hard working dreamer, especially collaborating with others the way he did over the years to create music. We all know about the personality clashes within The Beatles. The struggle to produce and balance their albums out. There was focus involved there to bring the dreams to life. If you ever watch the documentary Imagine, he and Yoko talk openly about the ways in which they had to sacrifice to make their relationship successful. Misguided years spent and space needed to hone in the visions and bring a realistic dream into focus. John talks very candidly about what he had to give up in order to be a great father to his second son and the regret he felt at not offering that environment to his first son. Either way, to me the message is clear. We dreamers must dream. But that's only one part of the equation. The work is the other part of it and doing the work when we don't always feel like it. Experiencing the loss of the dream and then working to build it back from scratch takes much introspection and internal effort from an individual.
Isn't this the hardest part for us? The struggle to always be working when we work so un naturally every day to make money. To pay bills. To afford life. At the end of every day, how hard do I want to work at maintaining a healthy connection with myself or with a partner? The answer for most of us is probably that we don't. Inertia is so much simpler to settle into on any given day. Technology especially affords us so many easy outs. Just sit in front of the tv. Just get on my phone and play some games or look at everyone else's fabulous life for awhile to escape the work of my own. Even now while I am attempting to be creative and apply myself to the discipline of writing, I find myself trying to justify a break to check Twitter. I have been sitting here for about forty minutes. I don't quite think I deserve a break yet in the middle of completing complex thoughts on math, biology and how to maintain a successful life in this confusing world.
I know that my body is not built for a life like this. It is simple science. My body evolved to live a different life and technology took us further, faster than my cells could catch up. As I attempt to simply maintain, my emotional stability is what takes the brunt of the punches. If I blog, if I write, it must be to help enforce discipline. I also have other... ambitions where writing is concerned and always have. More on that another time. For now, I am coming to a place in my life where I am seeking feedback and honesty from friends, loved ones and acquaintances. I'm feeling like transparency is a practice and discipline all on it's own. It is another variable in my equation. And I am truly keen on getting to my solution.
So I would be grateful always for comments and feedback if you read. I would be grateful for bonding and communion in a positive way in this medium as I attempt to rebuild the discipline of writing and just being brave in general. If I am brave, I have to put things out there and not care if anyone thinks it's stupid, cheesy or weird. Being intimidated by the negativity of others, being shy and self conscious only ever got me stuck in a rut. Being brave and bold has only every gotten me strength, love and more beauty in my life. All of my heroes were brave. They gave no fucks if they sounded dumb sometimes and when someone criticized them openly, they recognized the insecurity in the other person and proceeded forward full steam ahead no matter what. Just keep calling me crazy...
Tyson Fury, one of my new heroes says: If I wasn't crazy, I wouldn't be great.
...so cheers to that.
I haven't told many people about my failed attempts at therapy over the years. It is disastrous for me every time. I do not do well in an environment where I am sitting across from a highly educated individual, telling them about the things that have caused me anguish. Always, because I can be so sensitive when people are mean, it is because I am hurt so deeply by the actions of someone else. Every single time, I am validated at my communication structures and attempts in the beginning until I start to lose ground and give up. I become unstructured and overly emotional, and end up a soppy mess, using endless tissues. The conversations always end with me asking the pivotal question: If you are saying that I am right and I still feel this way, then what can I actually DO about it?
The answer is always the same: Let it go. This is someone else's problem to fix and you have to release yourself from the accountability of that/those individual/s.
Ugh. Again. I know.
So that is the real problem. I am a good fixer. You have a problem, and you tell me about it? I'm immediately going to launch into a grid in my head of possible solutions. Then I'm going to hone in on the quickest and most efficient solution and try and help you fix it. I should actually get paid money for this. This should be my job. Where this becomes problematic is in relationships. I easily become an enabler which relieves others of their own responsibility and then creates hostility on all ends in different ways. I quickly lose sight of my own needs and self care goes out the window. When you struggle with several auto immune diseases, especially ones that create emotional instability, this is a recipe for disaster. It also causes me to become overly involved in something that I do not need to always be a part of and I quickly become annoying. Ha. It opens everyone up to unhealthy co-dependancy. Sounds like I need to listen more, maybe ask more questions in retrospect and actually do less myself.
Without writing, I fail to identify the pitfalls of these actions in the moment. This blog is an exercise and if you are here and willing to take this journey with me, maybe we can dialogue and learn together. So here goes nothing.
I have this problem. I have identified the healthy vehicle I can use to help begin to solve it for myself and now, as I am often compelled to do, I turn to biology as navigational inspiration. The math. The science. They are clean structures for me to apply to issues within myself that allow for course correction. Remember. Everything is a math equation. If it's not working, your math is bad. Maybe you just need to move some integers around, or maybe you're missing a piece of the equation itself. You could be over simplifying or over complicating. Either way, if you don't allow for the big picture, your equation is broken and you simply need to work from the solution back to the beginning to create the correct formula.
In the plant and animal kingdoms, there are three types of identifiable relationships in an ecosystem: Mutualism, Commensalism and Parasitism. Mutualism is ideal. It means that the organisms involved are mutually benefiting from the partnership. This is highly ideal in people. Commensalism is ok. It implies that the host is not negatively impacted by it's partner, but it is not reaping a reward either. When we apply this concept to humanity, it seems mostly unrealistic as with humanity we are adding in the complexity of consciousness and the emotional backlash that occurs with the way that our society is built. Parasitism is the final example and is especially damaging in human relationships if you relate it to the former sentence. Parasitism is when one organism gains as it's host suffers. If I am striving to create relationships of mutualistic tendencies in my life, what key elements do I need to manifest in myself first? See? Find my ideal solution first, and then work backwards.
Bear with me here as I switch topics for a moment. I promise that it will all tie in together in a few moments.
I love music. I am a musician. I have been since I can remember anything at all. Music is passion to me. In my work as a musician, I cannot reasonably reign that passion in to make any sense at all without rules and structure applied to the situation. Or focus. A good friend of mine reintroduced me to this fact as we sat at the bar about a month ago and she attempted to describe to me how she is able to create so much music. She has to give herself rules because the possibilities are endless otherwise. I am now reminded of the discipline I was taught in my youth. The posture as I sat at the piano. The hours of scales up and down the keys to build muscle memory. The vocal exercises that I had to do before I was allowed to just launch into song, especially when I was attempting to collaborate with others. The structure is necessary to marry different talents together in a moment. Any art I have ever practiced has required discipline as a basic element for success. Martial arts. Weight training. Cooking. Baking. Painting. Even gardening. I can foster endless fantasies of letting my garden grow wild so that gnomes and unicorns can knock at my back door and come have tea with me, but in reality, I'm gonna grow some mealy and puny potatoes that way. I will actually have zero viable output from that garden if I allow it to grow unfettered. If I want to plant seeds in the spring that will produce happy, healthy plant life and beautiful ripe produce; I must create a balanced ecosystem. I have to have the correct soil PH for my seedlings so that they have the essential vitamin and mineral content for ideal growth. I have to give them consistent water flow to avoid mealy or anemic vegetation. I have to exercise pest control to avoid crop devastation. I have to have ideal lighting conditions and plant according to regional weather patterns. The list goes on and on.
In short, I have to do work. There is a strange alchemical recipe involved here. The desire has to be real and present, but the dream is not sustainable without boundaries and focus. So now we come full circle... If these concepts are true of everything else I apply myself to that I adore, why wouldn't the same be necessary of a relationship with a person? Or even myself for that matter? There are rules I must apply to keep the pendulum from swinging too far to the left or right. If I am searching for balance in my human interactions and my own life, I must also apply rules. I must also apply focus. I take one of my heroes, John Lennon as an example. John had to learn to play instruments. He did not just pick them up and dream songs into existence. I mean he did, but how did he actually build the dream? He had to work. He respected hard working people and talked about it often, because he was a hard working dreamer, especially collaborating with others the way he did over the years to create music. We all know about the personality clashes within The Beatles. The struggle to produce and balance their albums out. There was focus involved there to bring the dreams to life. If you ever watch the documentary Imagine, he and Yoko talk openly about the ways in which they had to sacrifice to make their relationship successful. Misguided years spent and space needed to hone in the visions and bring a realistic dream into focus. John talks very candidly about what he had to give up in order to be a great father to his second son and the regret he felt at not offering that environment to his first son. Either way, to me the message is clear. We dreamers must dream. But that's only one part of the equation. The work is the other part of it and doing the work when we don't always feel like it. Experiencing the loss of the dream and then working to build it back from scratch takes much introspection and internal effort from an individual.
Isn't this the hardest part for us? The struggle to always be working when we work so un naturally every day to make money. To pay bills. To afford life. At the end of every day, how hard do I want to work at maintaining a healthy connection with myself or with a partner? The answer for most of us is probably that we don't. Inertia is so much simpler to settle into on any given day. Technology especially affords us so many easy outs. Just sit in front of the tv. Just get on my phone and play some games or look at everyone else's fabulous life for awhile to escape the work of my own. Even now while I am attempting to be creative and apply myself to the discipline of writing, I find myself trying to justify a break to check Twitter. I have been sitting here for about forty minutes. I don't quite think I deserve a break yet in the middle of completing complex thoughts on math, biology and how to maintain a successful life in this confusing world.
I know that my body is not built for a life like this. It is simple science. My body evolved to live a different life and technology took us further, faster than my cells could catch up. As I attempt to simply maintain, my emotional stability is what takes the brunt of the punches. If I blog, if I write, it must be to help enforce discipline. I also have other... ambitions where writing is concerned and always have. More on that another time. For now, I am coming to a place in my life where I am seeking feedback and honesty from friends, loved ones and acquaintances. I'm feeling like transparency is a practice and discipline all on it's own. It is another variable in my equation. And I am truly keen on getting to my solution.
So I would be grateful always for comments and feedback if you read. I would be grateful for bonding and communion in a positive way in this medium as I attempt to rebuild the discipline of writing and just being brave in general. If I am brave, I have to put things out there and not care if anyone thinks it's stupid, cheesy or weird. Being intimidated by the negativity of others, being shy and self conscious only ever got me stuck in a rut. Being brave and bold has only every gotten me strength, love and more beauty in my life. All of my heroes were brave. They gave no fucks if they sounded dumb sometimes and when someone criticized them openly, they recognized the insecurity in the other person and proceeded forward full steam ahead no matter what. Just keep calling me crazy...
Tyson Fury, one of my new heroes says: If I wasn't crazy, I wouldn't be great.
...so cheers to that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)