Feeling powerlessness over good stuff

I've been aware recently of this feeling of powerlessness that comes over me. I don't know exactly what to do, exactly where to go. It's a time of transition and I feel lost.

Today when I was standing, present with this feeling, a question came to me. Another little experiment. What would happen if instead of feeling powerless over all the bad things that will happen, aging, death, what if I allowed myself to feel powerless over all the good things that are going to happen. The growth that is as inevitable for me as it is for trees. The flowering of my spirit, the blossoming of strength. Can I surrender to being and awareness and easily as I surrender to anxiety? And is the surrender to anxiety--the positive surrender of presence--not the surrender to numbing habits, is that maybe a preparation to surrendering to the good?

And what would happen if I did surrender?

Chaos Training

Most people are able to keep the chaos at bay. They have their routines that keep their house tidy and neat. They have their relationships that keep them secure. They have their money in the bank that makes them feel safe.

I don't, and I may never have these things. Maybe because of my dyspraxia. Maybe because of my upbringing. I don't know. But a life of barely contained emotional and physical chaos is what I live with.

It's stressful, but if I shift my perspective just a tiny bit, it's kind of liberating. People who don't protect themselves too firmly from chaos can become lifetime creatives. Look at my grandfather. He spent his last years singing vs. my uncle the Ford VP who spent his last years alone in a wheelchair with few visits from the many friends he once had.

A few days ago I re-watch part of journey to dyslexia, a film about learning disabilities. The people who embraced their disability and saw it as a gift were able to live rich rewarding lives where they were able to be unique and contribute to society. That's the group I want to be in.

Inner power

In my last post I kind of tossed off inner power as though it should be an addendum to character. But no, let me take that back. Character is something that should grow out of the natural confidence that comes from a strong sense of our inner vitality.

For many years in my practice I've seen vitality and chi as something that exists outside of me.This probably has a lot to do with the dyspraxic thinking that always has me seeing power as and outside thing. Something I need to either surrender to or flee.

Until I can surrender to the power inside of me I'm probably never going to lose this nagging anxiety that continues to block me from getting the things in life that I need and want.

Character

Standing builds backbone. While it's great to have energy, and cosmic experiences, and internal power, in the end I am a believer in the fundamental importance of character. I believe in the practice that becomes discipline. I believe that energy and power should be going towards making people's lives more vital and meaningful.

Standing helps me to build character by helping me to resist the cult of personality that exists in our society. Obviously at some point character was a cult too. Maybe the worship of character in the 19th century made some people rigid and judgmental. That's not what I want. What I want character to bring to my life is stability and security. To my life and to others.

Standing never ceases to be a challenge to me. You'd think at some point I would get up and feel some huge reservoir of power that will never need more replenishing. Maybe it works that way from some people. But it's not that way for me.

Life is demanding. My mother is ill and depressed. The economy is changing and the career I chose for myself, writing, seems less and less feasible every day. My son is sad because he doesn't seem to be cultivating meaningful friendships at his elementary school, and his father doesn't make much effort to keep in touch.

I'm trying to cultivate a saying in our family. With responsibility comes power. But with responsibility comes challenge and this needs the power that you have to give.

feeling of powerlessness

This morning at the beginning of my stand I was overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness. It's a familiar feeling and one i don't acknowledge very often. I spend much of my day driven by this power, and driven by the reflex to avoid it.

It is this feeling of powerlessness that convinces me that an extra ten pounds is an insurmountable barrier that I will never overcome. It is this feeling of powerlessness that convinces me that I am destined for poverty and keeps me underemployed. It is this feeling of powerlessness that undermines the efforts that I make to contribute to the world. It is this feeling of powerlessness that blocks me from using my talents to help other people live better lives.

The first step towards disempowering it is to accept it.

What does that mean? I can accept it for today. Don't try and change it with all kinds of plans for bringing power into my life. Not today. This feeling of powerlessness has been my companion all my life, it's not going to disappear overnight, if it disappears at all. It's like a member of my family. And it's not necessarily a bad member. There are things we are powerless over in life. Death, aging, etc. Accepting powerlessness can be liberating. There must be something about it I enjoy or I wouldn't be so attached to it.

But there is power in accepting powerlessness. This morning I felt it. I stayed with it and then of course, inevitably I began to feel the power building in me, the flow of chi and energy and strength. The feeling of powerlessness cannot be sustained once accpeted, because it is also part of reality that we have great and abundant power to change the life we have while we are alive and the lives of others.

Too often we don't see that because we're so busy fighting our powerless over the things we can't change.

Tao to done

Yesterday I downloaded a little e-book called Zen to Done by Leo Babauta. I've been following Leo's blog Zen Habits for at least a year now and I find his philosophy and advice incredibly helpful.

I've decided to adapt his system for regaining power to my own life, let's call it Tao to done.

The idea in ZTD is that you spend about a month on one of habits. The first of these is collect. Work first on establishing a good method for listing the tasks that need to be done. Carry a little notebook and then at the end of the day dump these tasks on to the to do list.

When I started this yesterday I first thought, wow I don't see how I could need to work a whole month on this habit. I mean it's just writing down stuff that needs to be done. Shouldn't I be able to do that all in one week?

But on my second day, I'm realizing all the ways that not having methods for keeping myself on track are affecting my life. And the idea of collection has expanded beyond just the list of things to do.

My body is my most important collector. Yes, it's good to have a notebook to jot down tasks and ideas. But the fundamental collector of my tasks is my body. If it's constantly battling stress, painful body memories, extra weight, poor posture, poor energy, it's inevitable that all other methods of collection will get derailed.

When I stand in the morning, I'm doing the most fundamental thing I can do, scanning my body for emotional and physical pain, being with it and releasing it. It's like starting the day with a blank page on which I can start to write a more productive algorithm.

This leads into a concern with other collectors: like is my body well supported when I write? How does my poor posture affect how long I can concentrate on a writing task.

Just now I noticed how my neck strains to read the computer because it's too low. And the space around it it too messsy and cluttered. These are collectors too.

It is good to spend a month on collection. It's like anotherer manifestation of awareness. Any habit that increases awareness is always transformative.

From adventure to journey

When you're lost, life is always an adventure.

For most of my life I've been lost in a growth forest of painful, stressful memories. Veering around in part because I was raised in emotional chaos, and maybe because of a neurological bias towards poor co-ordination.

Adventures are great. But more and more I want to turn this into a journey. Find something of an endpoint, a home, where I can gather strength and power and resources.

I now have a lifetime habit of early morning standing. Sometimes I don't stand as long, or with as much dedication as I would wish. But I know that I don't and will never feel right anymore if I abandon this practice.

The time has come to take the power I gather from this practice and use it to get the things I need out of life: a more steady supply of income, a more focussed sense of what my contribution to society will be. And a more entrenched, internalized locus of power.

Believing in my ability to shape my life has to be the central habit in my life. The habit I feed, so that this nagging feeling of being lost and out of control gradually begins to dry up.

Locus of Control

Just read about an interesting psychological concept, the locus of control. Apparently children who suffer from dyspraxia (like my son, and probably myself) tend to have what you call an "external locus of control." They believe that external circumstances are more in control of their lives than they are. People who believe that may be more prone towards underachievement, depression, addiction etc.

So I took a questionaire, just to get a baseline for myself. Apparently I'm 57% leaning towards external.

I wonder how standing might change that. When I'm standing I feel as through there is an outside force controlling me. At the same time I don't connect with that force unless I'm keeping to my regimen (which I confess, I haven't been of late. Stress taking control, or maybe learned helplessness in the face of stress) . So I believe, when I'm standing regularly, that my actions control my external environment. Even if the external environment feels more powerful than I am.

I'm not sure I want to be 8% more internally locus. I like the idea of being a balance between the two.

I'd be curious to take this test again in a month, after really sustained commitment to standing.

Getting the Inside Right

"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place." Wise words from The Power of Now.

Wise words that I keep forgetting. Especially in difficult times. But can I trust these words? Is resolving this financial and personal stress really as simple as staying relaxed inside?

It's experiment time.

For the rest of the month of February, I will stay focussed on my inner tension, breathing through it, allowing it to be a fuel for presence. How will my external cricumstances resolve?

I already saw a bit of this earlier this week. I went to see my mother in the hospital. She was so demoralized by days of diarhea and stories from friends about infections they'd caught in the hospital, and of course facing her mortality in such an irrefutable way. I stayed compassionate, but wry. I could see there was a part of her that was fueling her anxiety because she felt somehow that God would take pity on her. It's a superstitious habit she'd learned from her mother. One I intend to break. All I did was point it out gently to her. Anxiety is not going to protect you, I said, it's going to drain you. My mother felt immediately better. I could see her mood shifting. She told me that my presence just gave her so much more energy. The next day she called me, she felt so much better, she was eating, the diarhea stopped. The tests came back last night and there was no infection. We could all tell she was on the way to recovery.

I need to be that presence for myself now.

future as addiction

My brain is addicted to the future, whether it's in a state of worry or a state of excitement, I am almost always thinking about life as something that will become worse or better than it is now.

Why can't I get addicted to the present? Because the present is nourishment, not addiction. So why am I not finding nourishment in the present?

I pause to do that and so much stress evaporates instantly. Who cares if Mme Fauteux wins this court case? I'll find an apartment somehow. Odds are I'll negotiate an extension at least until 2013. There's really nothing to panic about, other than mystress over winning or losing, which is really just ego.

It's easy to try and make a project out of liberating myself from my ego, but that's really, paradoxiacally just ego. Just more future when everything will be okay without ego. It's all abstraction without the action of actually being in the present, in this present, with this identity that I have now.

Sometimes the present can feel like an addiction. Sometimes I feel the jouissance, a sort of joyful subversive feeling when I'm not doing anything. It's a radical rebellion to the programming of tending to past and future.

Can I accept my present as it is right now?

Messy kitchen. Economic uncertainty. My mother ill. Dripping toilet. Court case pending. Can I accept this?

I don't want to. I want instead to drift off into fantasies about starting a coding camp for kids, becoming a local celebrity on French radio, or how much better things might be if I changed my colour palette. I want to escape into nostalgia about Whitney Houston who died two days ago, at 48. She was born a week and a day after me. To think you can have beauty, talent, skill, wealth beyond your wildest dreams. You can sing the American anthem with such joy and freedom, better than anyone ever has and probably ever will. And still you can be so miserable and self destructive.

I have only a fraction of the things I wanted when I was twenty and Whitney Houston was just becoming a star. But today I'm alive. I have food. I am reasonaby healthy. I'm addicted to misery, maybe, but not really anymore to the things that cause misery. And today I have the wisdom to sit with this misery and watch it shift into peace, if I can keep my commitment to mindfulness.

As for the circumstances in my life. I can accept everything, except the debt. I can live with being forced to move, if it comes to that. My parents will die. As will I. I know I can get the kitchen together. But the debt. What am I going to do about that? That's something I need to sit with a bit.

The Trick

You can't feel self loathing and love together for very long. Eventually love wins. The trick to life is to take the accumulated stress, disappointment, fear, regret, whatever sad and painful feeling you hold in your body and brain and to make the very so slight adjustment that makes this food for consciousness, instead of food for more of the same.

I grew up in a household of hate, and I see how everyday is a choice for me between passing that hatred, and the habits of hatred--constant bickering, fighting, power struggles--and cultivating love, and the habits of love --acceptance, openness, peace building.

It starts in the morning, in the alchemy of my practice where I stand with these painful, tight, disabeling feelings, and I just allow presence to loosen them and start working with the warm energy of chi, bodhicitta, whatever one wants to call it. If I can do that consciously every day, in time my body will begin to do it without my need to sit there and give it instructions.

This is the process of enlightnment.

Transmutation

In The Power of Now, Tolle writes about the process of transmutation. This is where if we stay present with the pain in our body, experience it, but don't form new cognitions about it, our presence is strengthened and our pain is lessened.

I feel like over the years, I've learned to do this with my body, but I still often believe my mind is still a whole cluttered scary project full of unprocessed anxiety and sadness. That belief is an illusion. The mind that my faulty emotional programming is only a small part of is a far greater and stronger entity than my emotional pain. But it takes diligent practice to keep reconnecting with it over and over and over again.

At this moment for instance there is a feeling inside me of confusion and worry. I'm not quite sure what I should be doing on this day when my son is unexpectedly home sick. Should I be learning code, should I be cleaning, shopping, writing? I have less of a clear idea of which my life is heading every day.

Maybe that's a good thing. My life was obviously in something of a rut before, so if the path isn't clear at least it's not the path that was heading me into trouble.

But maybe it is. Maybe my sudden new interest in coding is just a way to undermine the momentum I was making as a writer?

So I sit with the pain of not knowing what I should be doing. I don't think. I just feel.

Eventually the pain lessens, and I have an insight. Usually when I'm feeling in a double bind between two secondary purposes, it's because I've lost sight of my primary purpose: to be. To just allow my natural energy to flourish and in doing that to help other people to manifest their own natural warmth, intelligence and openness.

Vitality

I've written earlier about something Elizabeth Gilbert once said about depression. How the opposite of depression is not happiness, it's vitality. I still deal with depression. I won't say struggle, because I believe I've reached the tipping point where it will no longer drive me the way it once did. But I still have remnants and shadows and blocks that I must be working at steadily and always.

Cleaning up after the depression that gripped me for most of my life is my greatest responsibility. It's easy to get distracted with the outside evidence of my depression: clutter, grime, debt, but the most important work is my internal state of mind. That is where I can make the deepest and most influential changes. In my gut, my tan tien. In my heart, and through that my brain, or whatever that grey stuff is in my head.

Happiness

From The Art of Power:

"When you are happy, it is not difficult to earn enough money to live comfortably and simply. It is much easier to make the money you need when you are solid and free. If you are happy, you are more likely to be comfortble in any situation. You are not afraid of anything. If you have the five spiritual powers and you lose your job, you don't suffer much. You know how to live simply, and you can continue to be happy. You know that sooner or later you will get another job, and you are open to all possibilities.

We must distinguish happiness from excitement, or even joy. Many people think of excitement as happiness. They are thinking of something or expecting something that they consider to be happiness, and for them, that is already happiness. But when you are excited you are not peaceful True happiness is based on peace."

Sense of self

Last night I had a good stand. Chi flowing, connection to the earth, all the things that I do this standing for. When that happens my entire sense of self changes.

Earlier in the day, I'd been gripped in self-hatred, feeling weak and vulnerable to all the things happening in my life right now. But standing I feel like a different being, someone healthy, vital and safe.

Maintaining a committment to Zhan Zhuang gives my life a simple sense of purpose. To just stand today and everyday in this energy. To aspire to health, and wholesome power.