Hearing what's said

Notice how attached you are to others speaking to you in a particular way.That you'll only really listen to what's been said, or count it as true, when it fits just the form you wish.

Maybe for you it has to be concise and to the point for you to pay attention.

Or maybe complete, anticipating every angle.

Perhaps it has to be kind, without a shred of judgement or criticism before you'll let it in.

Or maybe direct, untainted by emotion or sentiment.

Perhaps it has to be clever, fresh, intellectually stimulating or else you'll judge it as boring.

Or maybe you insist that it's practical, worthless unless you can immediately tell what to do with what you're hearing.

Perhaps you'll only listen to what's businesslike, and tune out of anything that's personal.

Or maybe you'll listen only when what's being said is deep and poetic.

In every case you're letting your preferences, and quite possibly your prejudices, deafen you to a world of possibility.You're purposefully keeping your world small, familiar.Maybe it's easier this way. At least you won't have to really consider anything that's too troubling.The task for all of us? Letting go of all of this, so that we can hear more and more of what's being said.And so we can tune in - and respond - to ever wider categories of concern.

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An encounter with the inner critic

Sitting in a park, sheltering from the drizzle, I spot a cluster of beautiful, elegant thistles. And I'm immediately called away by a part of myself so familiar I can hardly see it. Knotted in my chest, this part clings, desperately, trying hard to get things right all the time. It is pained, caught up in harsh self-judgement. And it says to the rest of me, with some insistence,

“You are not entitled to this”.

“You are not entitled to stop and look in awe and wonder. You are supposed to be trying, doing, proving. You are supposed to be being hard on yourself.”

And on seeing it - perhaps on its feeling seen - it relaxes its grip a little. I am flooded with joy and gratitude at the beauty before me, and at being alive to witness it.And, for a moment, I am here, at last.

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Welcoming everything

What if, instead of orienting yourself first towards fixing everything

fixing yourselffixing othersfixing this situationfixing how you're feeling

you started by welcoming everything?

welcoming yourselfwelcoming otherswelcoming this situationwelcoming whatever you're feeling

This is not an argument for passivity.

From an orientation of welcome - something so rarely experienced or practiced by many of us - a whole new set of responses becomes possible. And a world that is quite different from brought about by our permanent orientation away from ourselves, others, and the life in which we're always in the midst.

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Lonely at the top

"It's lonely at the top"A common mantra as people take on leadership positions.And in most cases self-fulfilling prophecy. A myth of our own making rather than a fixed way that things are.As long as you mistake leadership with appearing heroic, invulnerable, infallible, all-knowing, flawless, you're bound to feel alone. You're complicit in bringing about the loneliness you complain about.After all, who can you really confide in or talk with honestly, if you're scared they might find out that you're human? But how can you lead with genuine wisdom if you insist on pretending that you're not?

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Cutting through

An experiment, particularly for the hardest, most frightening, most uncertain and doubtful times:Spend a day with entirely opposite explanations to those you're most used to.For example -

She's clearly out to get me becomes She's doing her best to help.

Everything is falling apart becomes Things are just as they should be.

I'll never be able to do this becomes It's right within my grasp.

I'm such a fraud / loser / mess becomes I'm perfect as I am.

There's no hope becomes Everything is right on track.

and also

We're on to a winner becomes We've wildly misunderstood everything about success in this situation.

If you'll do this seriously, you may find at least a couple of things. First, that what seemed so certain about yourself, others and  your situation is in large part simply something you concluded but which you cannot know for sure. Secondly, that there are many more options for action available to you than you had ever imagined.So think the opposite for a while, and consider what actions and experiments might come from it. It can be a powerful way of cutting through the invisible stories that are binding you so tightly.

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What to do...

Don't you think it would be good, sometimes, to drop all the seriousness, the earnestness, the effort to be business-like or professional, to have-it-all-together, to look ok, to be in control, to keep things tidy, to know it all...... and see just how weird, absurd and unfathomable it all is in any case... and just laugh?

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Something to remember

Something to remember.Almost every difficulty in the human world (difficulties in relationship, misunderstanding, uncertainty, hurts, resentment and confusion) can be solved best by talking. And by listening.Not by hiding from it. Nor by thinking it through, over and over. Nor by relying on a process or procedure. Nor, in organisations, by waiting - for annual reviews or a report or a meeting or a chance to assign a different performance grade.And not so often by email.No, by talking and by listening.Easy to say. Easy to forget. And, without courage and practice, easy to keep, conveniently, out of our own reach.

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Love and loathing

It is work of the utmost importance that each of us become aware of, and then find ways of working with, our self-loathing.

Does that seem too strong a way to say it?

This is not an easy subject to write about or speak about. You may find that the merest suggestion that you experience self-loathing stirs up strong feelings that would have you stop reading right away. Anger, ridicule, judgement at what’s being proposed here - all of these have been my stirred within me as I’ve studied this subject, and my own relationship to it, in the past.

But many of us do walk around with an almost perpetual background of quite intense self-dislike. You might be familiar with its more accessible surface manifestation, self-judgement, or the inner-critic which I’ve written about here previously. If you’re prepared to examine further you might well discover that behind the critic lurks a much bigger and deeper phenomenon, a continual assessment that you’re out of place in the world, not welcome, and that it’s all deserved.

In my case it occurs most readily as a continual gnawing sense that I’ve done something wrong already that I don’t know about, but which everyone else does. It can lead readily to shame (even in the most innocuous of situations) and holding myself back, or sometimes an angry, resentful self-righteousness. I’m absolutely sure I’m not alone in this. I’ll wager, moreover, that most people live under the shadow of this for much of their adult lives.

Babies, when newborn, don’t have any kind of self-loathing as far as I can tell, and nor do very young children. Just watch as they express themselves freely without inhibition, far removed from any sense that they may be judged by others or that it is proper and fitting to judge themselves. But if you watch children you know and love acquire language and then start to make their first halting attempts to fit into the social world with its niceties and manners and particular-way-things-are-done you might spot its beginnings.

By the time we’re young adults we’ve mostly fully taken on, and applied to ourselves, the widely shared narrative of our culture, not often spoken about, that people are essentially faulty and need some kind of constant correction. Even if we can’t see it in ourselves we can maybe see it in our interactions with others. It's present every time we find ourselves judging them for, in some essential way, falling short of our high expectations. We can be sure that the unreachable expectations we’re projecting on other people are really just a version of what some part of us is demanding of ourselves.

And while it may be unavoidable that we get some measure of self-loathing by growing up in the particular culture of these times, I think its continuation into adulthood is in a sense quite egotistical. We may not even know that we’re doing it, but our private insistence that we are in some way uniquely broken, uniquely in need of repair, uniquely suffering puts us in the centre of the world in a way that doesn’t at all match how things are. It has us feeling different, special, alone, separated from each other, in some kind of special privileged place of difficulty. And then it has us engage in all kinds of tactics to deal with how all of it feels - getting really busy, pushing ourselves and others very hard, trying to stay in control, becoming cynical, overextending ourselves to gain the love of other people, jumping from one project to another, martyring ourselves to causes (a corporation, tidiness, social recognition, a religion, fame) that we never chose for ourselves.

Our culture has been deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, who many have understood to say that at heart human beings really are broken, a roiling cauldron of barely repressible urges, and the most we can hope for is to find a way to get along with all that in play. This kind of interpretation of human beings would give self-loathing a home, telling us that we must first face it and then learn to live with it. Perhaps it’s the fear that this is all that’s available to us that has us deny its existence at all. We’d rather pretend we don’t feel this way than find out we’re stuck with it.

But I think there’s a different orientation available to us, one that’s hard to talk about without reverting to the imagery and symbolism of spiritual traditions. In Judaism, for example, there’s a strong commitment that human beings are made ‘in the image of the divine’, which is really the claim that at heart we’re not something broken at all but something sacred. In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s the notion of ‘basic goodness’ - the soft, tender centre of each of us that can respond with love and care to the suffering of others, and from which all right action flows.

Both traditions have a strong sense that it’s our responsibility is to find and cultivate our basic goodness, learn to trust it, and thereby bring something of value to the world. By abandoning such poetic and appreciative terms for human beings in our hyper-rational contemporary culture, we’ve made it very hard for ourselves to find ways to work with our self-loathing at all, which is why we’d rather pretend it’s not there, even while we’re suffering from its harshness and projecting it onto others.

But work on it we must, because it’s only when we’ve found a way of uprooting our constant comparisons and judgements of ourselves - and replacing them with love - that we have a chance of really addressing our own suffering. And a chance to make the full, true, and wholeheartedly generous contribution to life and other people that is so much needed from each of us.

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Indecision

A long-standing plan, cancelled at the very last minute. Nothing in my diary for today.And now I have to decide - how will I spend my time?I notice how many internal forces are pulling upon me.A long to-do list. Perhaps if I can just finish it, everything will be ok.The lure of busy-work. I could noodle at emails, browse the web, and numb myself while feeling that I'm at least doing something.A wish to do something that would be nurturing, self-caring, creative or expressive. And a nagging feeling of guilt and shame at choosing that over my obligations to others.An embarrassment of possibilities (and embarrassment is exactly how it feels). Many choices I could make, and really no good way of discerning which will be most of value. Even choosing the criteria by which to choose is disorienting. What will be most productive? well-rewarded? enjoyable? fulfilling? time-efficient? revitalising? beautiful? What will make the biggest contribution?I notice how charged my body feels. It's difficult to settle. This terribly small dilemma - how to spend a day - is caught up with so many narratives and expectations, many of which I'm not sure are even really mine. I could easily spend the whole day in this state, caught between conflicting inner stories and inner longings.I think this is angst, the mood about which I wrote yesterday. A moment when instead of being absorbed in the world, fully engaged simply in responding to whatever comes, the horizons of the world - its limits - become clear. And the groundlessness of any of the decisions I might make about this singular day become clear too.And in that realisation is a path onwards. Because angst is reminding me, quite precisely, how things are. That the particular way I respond to this now-open day is just one of a million ways to be, each with its own rewards and its own limits. That there is no way of knowing.And when I remember that, I can laugh a little at my seriousness and my conviction that I have to get it right. And I can remember that there's boldness and aliveness simply in deciding, even when there's no way of being sure that the decision is a good one, or having any real idea how it will turn out.

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On Angst

Perhaps uniquely among living creatures, we have the capacity to sense beyond the particular details of the situation in which we're living. We can see its limits, and perhaps more importantly we can see our limits. We can understand that there's a ceiling to our power and capacity, that our time is finite, that the future is unknowable, that our understanding is small, and that much of what we depend upon is way more fragile than we'll ever admit.There's a special word for the feeling this evokes - angst.We mostly experience angst as a feeling of absence, because in coming up against the limits of our world, and the limits of our understanding, we quickly conclude that something is missing and that we must be responsible for it. We feel that we ought to change things, make them better, fix them up. We feel our inadequacy in doing so.And so we build cultures, organisations and lives in such a way as to shore us up against experiencing angst. We imagine that if we don't have to feel this way - perhaps if we don't feel too much at all - then we can assure ourselves that everything will be just fine.Of course, in the end this doesn't work out, because behind all our busy activity, our habitual routines, and our constant affirmations that we're doing ok, angst is still making itself felt. In a way our efforts make it more apparent, because living in such a way as to avoid angst means making our world small and tightly sealed. The feeling that we're deceiving ourselves and imprisoning ourselves and that there is some bigger way of living becomes even more present, even as we try to hide it.Running away from angst, it turns out, amplifies it and robs it of its biggest possibilities.The way through this?Firstly, giving up the idealised notion of an angst-free future. Angst is, it seems, built in to the human condition and comes as a consequence of our capacity to see beyond ourselves. And so there can be no world in which angst is fully absent.Secondly seeing angst not as a terrible something to be avoided, but as an invitation, a reminder of the truth of our situation, which is that the world is much bigger, more mysterious, and more possibility-filled than we can usually imagine. And that even though there's really nothing to stand on, there's much that we can trust.Angst is then not a signal to hide away, but a reminder of the uniqueness of our human situation. And a call to step more fully into life.

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