How do you react when you believe that it is true?
I despair.  I get depressed that I cannot find this meaning and purpose within my own life.  I feel dread, and this lump of solid, black, toxic goop settle in my chest.

Who would you be without the belief that there should be a meaning to life?
If I didn’t believe there should be a meaning to life then I would be more peaceful.  I would be open to life showing me great joy and purpose, but also to never experiencing that.  I would be able to accept those times where I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing.  I wouldn’t worry about making sure I was on the right path.  I wouldn’t worry about wasting my life.  I would be more able to just enjoy what is.

How can you turn it around?  And give 3 ways that it’s true for you for each one.

There shouldn’t be a meaning to life.
Without a set sense of purpose I am free to follow whatever paths show up in life.  A sense of meaning is a way to feed the egoic mind, the little self, and keeps me focussed in the future on some end result rather than in the now.  Searching for meaning is a way to keep the searching mind in charge, rather than accepting what is.

My ego is fighting back

I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking over the summer.  It’s led to me digging even deeper still in what started years ago now as a quest to find my perfect job.  Having got to a stage where I’ve shed a lot of unnecessary gunk in my head it seems that my ego (aka little self, egoic mind, sense of separateness, false identity) is fighting back against it’s ultimate demise.  I got all caught up this evening around having no sense of purpose to life and how depressing that was.  It’s fair to say that I haven’t shifted entirely into embracing the possibility of there being no purpose or overarching meaning to my life (by which I mean my external life, rather than my internal or ‘spiritual’ life), but at least I’ve cracked the vice-like grip it had earlier on this evening.

It turns out that planning where our dance group is going, and what we want to be doing, will trigger the same thoughts about me.  I’ve still yet to fully incorporate the realisation that planning is only useful for the bare minimum of getting things done, and is not useful (indeed is counter-productive) when applied to life in general.  This could make it difficult for me to get anything done without freaking out, unless I can keep reminding myself that I don’t need to plan my entire life.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• The journey to nowhere
• Following a thread as far as I can
• What am I learning right now?

Right now I just wanted to talk about how sometimes I can’t write anything down, because before I’ve even got halfway through writing a post my entire outlook has changed.  I can start a rant about something and before I’ve finished the act of bringing my attention to it has changed it.

So what to write about when everything I thinking keeps changing?  The answer: I’ll write about the fact that everything keeps changing so fast I can’t write about it!

A change in focus

The parts that are constantly changing are my patterns, or issues, or unhelpful thinking, or whatever term you use.  These can change so fast that my thinking transforms partway through forming a sentence.  Powerful and also thoroughly confusing when trying to form a post about my thoughts.

So for now I’m not going to write about my thinking.  I can mention that I had a panic about rejection again recently, but then realised that I didn’t need to by the time I’d written it down.  I can write that I suddenly remember how I judge people with my thinking, or react emotionally to what they do, only to then notice that my thinking is unhelpful and have it stop.  But by the time I’m sat down to write about it, or even just grabbed a pen and paper to make a note, it seems like ancient history already.  It’s over, in the past, and no longer important enough for me to need to give it more thought and energy.

I need something else to write about.  Fortunately, I have some new ideas.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Following a thread as far as I can
• It’s ok to have the same stuff keep coming up?!
• Where I release my agoraphobia of the mind

Oh man does that speak to me.  Not only in a dance context, but in all this work I’ve been doing.  So often I find myself falling into the trap of using my usual way of thinking to approach this new thing, and of course it doesn’t work.

One way out of it in dance is to work with a partner.  You both create something, then you learn each other’s.  You can try to really take on their style of movement, to push your body outside of it’s comfort zone.  It’s an amazing way to open up your own body to a different way of moving.

An equivalent with the mind?  I don’t know, but it doesn’t work nearly as well from books/blogs.  I think the most powerful way of trying on new thinking is in that real-time, interactive space.  I think that even the telephone is a compromise.

Again, I’m wishing I had people  IRL that I could share this with.  It’s not that I love you any less, but I want something you can’t give me.

Of course, the responsibility is then on me to go out there and find that somehow.  Now that’s stepping outside of my comfort zone.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• A Dancing Geek’s dream
• Daily Dance
• Getting the creative juices going

Oh, hello fear.

So, I decided to try and find out more about what was going on, because I’ve never been the one to push through yuck and hard, but having learnt other ways of engaging with it I don’t have to ignore it and hope it goes away any more.

Child me

As I sat with the thought for a while, trying to understand what had changed, I realised that when I was thinking about it as a future event I was very calm about it all, I saw all the benefits and really wanted to get some of these things done so as to move towards my goals.  However, once it got into the present a different mindset took hold.  This one was definitely much more of a child’s viewpoint.  The feeling of wanting to stamp my feet and scream “NO!” at the top of my voice, to pout and say “You can’t make me.”

Since I now know that I don’t actually have the mental or emotional age of a toddler, there has to be something else going on here.  So again I sat with the idea as to why I would react so strongly, and in such a child-like manner.

I wondered if, like fear, it was trying to protect me from something.  I wrote out a little note asking child me to let me know what it was protecting me from or wanting to keep me from losing.  I certainly have read enough about adults who have forgotten what it’s like to be a child, and are causing suffering for themselves and others as a result, to want to make sure I didn’t lose the connection to my little playful boy-self but this didn’t explain what was going on for me.  (Which isn’t to say it doesn’t make sense, at least to me, but that it doesn’t have that click-aha feeling attached to it of suddenly seeing what’s going on.  It’s this separation between sense and fit that causes so much well-meaning advice to be completely useless and frankly annoying.)

Team of one

At first, I wondered if there was a way for adult-me to choose what to do, and boy-me to choose how to do it.  So that both were happy.  But thinking this through with examples showed that to blatantly fail very quickly.  It needed a more combined approach, where both adult-me and boy-me were involved in all decisions, which is tricky because I don’t want to end up with a life that looks like a camel and frankly the idea of installing some kind of beauracray in my head just to make decisions sounds terrifying and nauseating.  Rather, finding a way to get back to a feeling of wholeness where I include both these sides is what experience tells me is the route to take.

Still, until that happens I’ve got two competing ‘voices’ to deal with, so I sat them down to talk.

Adult Me (AM): I need a CV in order to improve my chances of X. [yup, I'm still being coy about the details for now]

Child Me (CM): BORING! *pout*

AM: It could be fun remembering all the stuff we did before.

CM: … (ouch)

It turns out that remembering all that stuff actually hurts.

Peeling back the layers

Once I get to an ouch, I know that I’m starting to get underneath the surface of what’s going on.  The next thing I wrote says it all:

I’m still so afraid that people will laugh at me & think I’m odd.

Which triggers shame at still being afraid, compassion at being human, and pain from the memories that caused this protective fear to get put together in the first place.

More to the point, if someone laughs at me I’ll remember what it was like at school.  I’ll remember all the hurt, and the loneliness, and the misery, and the hatred, and the fear, and the anger, and the resentment, and the confusion, and the betrayal, and the pain.

Can’t think why I’d want to avoid that.

My current plan is failing

I didn’t even realise I had a current plan, but it slowly dawned on me that I was trying to forget about all of this.  Trying to erase what happened and give myself a new childhood full of happy thoughts, good friends, fun times and laughter.  And it’s not like these are bad things to have, it’s just that I can’t have them as a child and as an adult at the same time.  And that’s where we come back full circle to the original problem.

I’m trying to be a kid and an adult at the same time.  I’m trying to be fully self-actualised (yuck, spit, ack – need a better word for this) and at the same time to rewrite my childhood by giving myself what I didn’t have before.

Turns out that doesn’t work.

I suppose I could put a hold on the adult stuff and try and give myself a wonderful new childhood, but the lovely denial siren is going off in my head at the thought.  I know that I wouldn’t be satisfied with that, it wouldn’t be real, and it would cause as many problems as it might seek to solve.  So I need another plan.

If I am not able to fix the crappy parts of my childhood, can I accept them?  Can I forgive myself for not knowing then what I know now and let what happened be what happened?  Not let it define who I am now?  Not need to fix it, but rather start from here and move forwards?

Right now, I’m not sure, but it sounds like a better plan to try.  It’s a more mindful plan, a kinder plan, a more compassionate plan.  I’m just not sure how to make it happen.

Soft vs Hard vs Easy

All this stuff is working in the soft still.  That is, working with emotions and mindsets as opposed to real world systems and actions.  Now that I have an idea of what I want to happen for me I’ve this drive to get into the hard stuff as well.  And I can do both at the same time, it’s just that the hard (concrete) stuff will be hard (difficult) whilst I’m still working on the soft connected to it.

Knowing that I’m working on making the hard (concrete & difficult) stuff easier (but still concrete) makes it easier in itself, or more palatable at least.  It becomes a choice between waiting indefinitely or working to get the rewards, rather than a choice between doing the hard (difficult) stuff or not.  It seems that child-me can get on board with the first option (waiting is boring after all) but not the second.

[I'd edit that to make it make more sense, but I can't be bothered.]

Whatever happens, I plan to start letting go of the past, let it be what it was, and instead look at the present and what I can do now to change the future.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Following a thread as far as I can
• What would happen if…?
• An experiment in writing about the process

I had one of those realisations on Friday night / Saturday morning that makes you go “Oh Bugger, Really?”.  The kind where I go, “Oh yeah! Both Joely and Chas have written about this recently, and I still didn’t get it!”.

You see, I haven’t had a weekend off since I stopped being employed.

Oh the irony!

Yeah, by not having any structure at all, I just mushed all the days into one and never made time to stop unless I *had* to (i.e. illness, fatigue, burn out).  Like, duh, hello?  That’s not good and healthy!  But at that point in time, even enough structure to prevent burnout felt repellant, I was in full on reverse swing mode.  FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM!

But this Friday I started to look at what I need to do to get things moving on my secret, hidden plans.  And I started to *want* a little structure.  So I put a very gentle one together and then gave myself the weekends to goof off (which was good, because the next day was Saturday so I got a good start!)

Well, when Saturday turned up and I made sure that I didn’t do anything goal-oriented but just pootled in the garden and read a book – oh wow!  It was fantastic.  I was relaxed, and happy, and spent some much needed quality time with my little family (bunnies and a boy).

I’m not going to chastise myself for not doing this earlier, I don’t think I could have done it earlier, but wow – it was great to finally be able to switch off for a bit after 18 months!

And people actually think I’ve been dossing around all this time.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Too fast to write about it
• The journey to nowhere
• Following a thread as far as I can

I’m not sure what comes next. I just have a really strong sense that I’m going to have to give up something I like to be able to get the new stuff that I want.  This is not so fun.  It’s like the advice that sometimes you have to stop doing the fun stuff that’s also good for your business in order to do the stuff that’s really going to let it grow.

Like the analogy of the glass jar with the rocks, pebbles, sand (& water).

I think I’ve got quite attached to some of my pebbles.  I’m scared to let them go.  Each pebble represents an opportunity, a door that I’m holding open.  I’ve always had an aversion to closing metaphorical doors out of fear of losing that one magical path to happiness.

The way forward?

I think it would be to spend some time being honest with myself about what are rocks, pebbles and sand.  Then be honest about how many pebbles and how much sand I can keep in my jar once I’ve given the rocks their space.  I may have to say goodbye to some pebbles, and reduce the amount of sand I use.

I’m uncertain how I’ll feel about that loss.  In part it’s freeing, but it’s also destabilising, which equals scary.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Too fast to write about it
• Living in the past
• Giving myself permission to be tiny

Then I went and ate yummy food, sat on the floor with a rabbit and read a book.

And somehow, right now, I don’t feel like today has been a total waste.  Which, compared to some days where I’ve pushed and pushed to try and get something ‘big’ done and ended up pootling around and procrastinating till some ungodly hour of the morning, feels like a win.

So yeah, today I gave myself permission to be tiny, so long as I still kept moving forwards, and I feel good about it.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Living in the past
• Too fast to write about it
• Making room for the my beautiful new rocks

But more importantly, my whole ‘Oh My God, I don’t know what I want to do with my life’ thing is over.  Yup, just like that.  Which isn’t to say that I won’t feel that way again, or doubt the decisions that I’ve made now, but that’s the other part to it all.  The ‘it never ends but that’s ok‘ part.

So why am I absolutely bricking it?

Well, the short answer is, now that I know what I want to do, I’m left with the getting on with it part.  And damn it that’s some scary stuff right there!

So I’ve tweaked it out in little bits here and there.  I’ve spewed a lot of the emotional gunk out in a more private space with some trusted friends and I’ve had small conversations with some people who aren’t very close to me or my life but who can tell me about what’s involved.  However, I’m still feeling a big wall of fear holding me back.  I’ve done a little sculptural planning, scaffolding if you like, and thrown away the bits where I started to overplan the details and minutae.  The getting stuff done part, however, continues to elude me.

In fact today I’ve done lots of important stuff, none of which relates in the slightest to my big 3 goals I have written down beside me.  They’re all maintenance and hygiene tasks as it were.  Washing up, laundry, library renewals, car tax.  Oh yes, all necessary, and all doing nothing to move me forwards.

So what next?

My trusty question comes to help me make some progress.  Well, for one, I’m acknowledging that I’m procrastinating here.  I know what to do about procrastination.  I have some awesome resources on it.  So one thing I can do is work on the procrastination, but there’s a part of me that is sat there going “Oh please! That’s just another form of procrastination!  Just get on with it!” and I’m inclined to agree.

“Isolation is the dream killer” is a favourite quote of Barbara Sher’s, by which I mean she uses it all the time on twitter.  So I’m thinking I need to get outside help with this one.  Tomorrow I should be seeing someone (i.e. unless plans change, unforeseen circumstances and all that) who can perhaps help me out with one.  The other I friends online who can give me a push.  The third, well actually that one I am working on a little already, and again I know people that can help me with it.  Time to get some gentle butt kicking me thinks.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Where I release my agoraphobia of the mind
• A pile of yuck I’ve been ignoring
• Accountability & responsibility

There is no “there” to get to

The post mentioned (to paraphrase) the idea that being “nearly there” in terms of personal development is an ongoing situation.  That you don’t really ever get “there” because “there” is the make-believe utopian state of perfection that no person will ever reach.

This makes a lot of sense, but only I think after getting to the point where mindfulness has become a habit, at least for me.  I have gone through a series of steps that means I can, with hindsight, see how this has been true for me.  So far it’s been like this:

• At first there is the learnt numbness (for many different reasons; so many of us do learn it however)
• Then there is the dissatisfaction
• Then the decision to find another way (such a big deal at that time – and it is something to celebrate for each person)
• Then the drive to find some big white light
• And then the gradual realisation that it was something very small all along that needed to change

It’s the last part that I think is the realisation that there is no “there” to get to, that we aren’t broken, that we don’t need fixing, that we can accept ourselves as we are now, that we’ll never be finished and have no issues to work on.

This last step is accepting that we simply need to bring mindfulness into everything we do.

It’s almost disappointing

It’s such a small thing and yet it’s affect is so very profound.  Only when you’ve had time to see the massive impact that it’s had, to not just learn that mindfulness will do this and intellectually understand the principle, but to have actually experienced the massive changes that come about from being mindful, only then does it not seem like the tiniest thing.

So to get to that last step we* have to build up the change into something massive in our heads.  We have to feel that there’s something massively wrong with the way we are at first, we have to break through the inertia of living unaware, and it’s so hard to take that first step that we need an image of some amazing revelation, some bright white light, to get us going and keep us going through the difficulty that follows.

Unless we almost trick ourselves into trying out mindfulness in various different forms (possibly along with lots of other gimmicks) we can get stuck searching and researching for the grand unified theory of life without actually making the final realisation.

*We = people like me, not everyone

It’s rocking my world

For me, right now, this realisation is thoroughly profound.  I’m starting to see how chas can write that we should “revel in it“, it being the fact that we make up life as we go along, make mistakes and keep going anyway.

In fact, I was drafting a comment to respond and started writing things like “I’m not quite there, I don’t think” and “I’m still just not quite there yet.  Even if there’s no there to get to!”  Writing this post however has given me the perspective to see that I am there!  That this was just my “Tell myself I’m not ready so I don’t have to do the big scary thing of being out there in the world” pattern showing up again.

A perfect quote

I’m not a big fan of the ‘stick a quote under a title to make it look fancy’ way of writing, but for me, sometimes, a good quote is able to represent the meaning of a big jumble of thoughts.  It’s not really even a quote since I’m not sure if Byron Katie actually said these words, but it’s something I’ve written down, inspired by her work, and it sums up all of this for me quite nicely.

I’m doing the right thing, I just need to be thinking something different.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• It’s ok to have the same stuff keep coming up?!
• Where I release my agoraphobia of the mind
• Too fast to write about it

Am I really stalling?

I have “perfectly valid” questions cropping up about each of them, things like “What am I looking to get out of this?” and “Is this the right one to go for?” but the thing is that these are both just long winded ways of asking myself ‘Why?’:  “Why do I want to do this?”, “Why should I go for this one?”.

I believe that the empowering question is ‘Why not?’.

“What have I got to lose by doing this?” – Nothing

“What’s the worse that can happen if I go for this one?” – I get it

So those “perfectly valid” questions?  Yeah, they’re real questions, but they’re stalling questions.  It seems I can add ‘needing a very good reason’ to my list of stalling tactics:

• Staying up late and sleeping through the day
• Telling myself that I’m not ready, I’m not prepared enough
• Needing a ‘very good’ reason

Visualising my fear

This came from another extended (2 hour) meditation today – thanks to Joely for “giving me permission” by example.

After clearing my head, like I wrote about yesterday, I started to think about what was holding me back from following through on these two ideas, bringing my attention to how I feel when I think about them.

I noticed a tension at the base of my sternum, where the two rib cages separate.  So I gave it form in my mind and it showed up as this black, sticky, dense rubber ball.  It immediately started pumping out this noxious toxin so I put it in a bubble and ran a tube out of my body to drain the liquid away.

Thing is, I wanted to talk to it, so I tried to make a gap in this transparent plastic cover but every time I did the toxin would get sprayed through the hole (it wasn’t till later that I realised why).  However, I was pretty determined so I put a second ball around the first, put a drainage tube on that and then opened up a gap in the lower half of the first ball and the upper half of the second.  That way sound could travel (if a little muted) but the toxin was safely being drained off.

At this point, I got a strong feeling that the toxin wasn’t wanted by the black ball. So I asked if I could lance it to take away the toxins and it agreed.  A quick prick with a pin and a gush of toxins ran out and down the drainage tube.  The ball began to shrivel and dry out and it suddenly became clear that it was hollow as it split open down one side, being unzipped from the inside.

Out stepped a funny little creature – purple, bloated, but with two definite arms and legs.  It had been stuck in the ball and desperately wanted to take a shower.  So I made it one and it had a wash.  As it washed, the creature lost the purple colouring and bloated look.

It turned out to be a tiny little version of me (which totally threw me at the time).

I was naked, so I gave myself some underwear and we sat with each other for a bit.

I noticed that there was a sense of vacuum where the ball had been so I cleaned out the area with some warm scented water and then let it fill up with this.  As I did, the area expanded into a spacious, spherical swimming pool, fresh water ran in from above (my heart) and drained out below as there was still some ick left behind to be dissolved, and no one likes a stagnant pool.

So yeah, the fact it was right in my third chakra didn’t escape me.  Eventually, I noticed that my tiny little me had erected this protective barrier, complete with defense system, but that it had somehow kept going long after it was needed (namely at school) and had caused my little me to become trapped, deformed and unhappy.  Gee, metaphor much?!

So let’s add to the stalling tactics:

• Staying up late and sleeping through the day
• Telling myself that I’m not ready, I’m not prepared enough
• Needing a ‘very good’ reason
• Keeping everyone away by being toxic
• Hiding behind an unnecessary protective shield
• Trapping myself into a tiny space to be safe, even though it ends up totally disfiguring me

The bit that was missing

There still felt like something was missing after all of this so I decided to do some Shiva Nata to see if I could get anything more to come up.  I went through a few rounds then settled down to see what came up, just asking myself the question “What am I missing about this?” over and over again.  Suddenly I realised that a little story had played itself out in my head.

Rather than type it all out I’ll go with this: think a global version of Cloverfield, but with odd little pixies (blame Alex for those) and everyone running scared.  Suddenly it turns out that they’re terrified of me, my image is splattered across the globe and I’m an instant world hero.  The pixies all run away.  Then the world goes back to normal, except that everyone knows the pixies are scared of me but they don’t know why.  People start avoiding me, they start shouting at me in the street.  No one dare come near me.  I’m completely and utterly alone, I walk into a full dance studio and it empties and I’m left just dancing alone.

So yeah, again with the not very closely veiled metaphors – what can I say, I guess my subconscious understands that I don’t tend to get the subtle cues.

It turns out that I’m scared that if I let myself shine fully again that I’ll end up completely ostracised again.  Oh school, what wonderful things you taught me.  Let’s just pull that out so it’s easy for me to find again.

I’m scared that if I shine fully I will be ostracised (again).

Finding another way to feel safe

I am going to do these things, I happen to be fortunate enough to have a damn stubborn streak for things like this, so I could do with finding to help me feel safe even though I’m putting myself out there.

The most obvious thought is that I need to find people who are like me, find my tribe.  I have some great friends and groups already, but I’m also looking for other Dancing Geeks.  I’m looking for a way to feel like my own little brand of crazy is not so crazy.  I’m not sure how, but I’m sending this intention out into the world and we’ll see what comes back.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Having a good time
• Meditation on time
• Actively seeking stillness