Emergence and Other Plumbing Problems

***Emergence and Other Plumbing Problems***

May was for molting. Shedding every last scrap of paper, every relationship, every object, every place that didn’t belong to my becoming. I did not like this. I did not want this. When I wanted it to be different, I suffered.

So I kept showing up, like the diligent ass I am. I asked for help, which was gratefully received.

Which brought the inevitable realization (again): “Oh shit, life isn’t against me, it’s just teaching me how to edit (again).”

I listened for the next right action and did it, kind of like me writing this now. I should be pulling weeds, but no, this first, then that. Thanks, rain. There is an order to things, and my preferences are irrelevant to it. Weather talks too. Listen.

As Dogen says in the Genjokoan, when you’re out in the open ocean, it looks like a circle. It’s not really: our senses limit. What we can see holds clues to the vast motion of the whole ocean (even enough to navigate!) but what we see is not all of it. It’s enough to realize we are part of it, we are held by it.

When trust in that wavers, suffering slips in between the ripples. This is usually my first clue that I’ve wandered from trust. I feel paralyzed and can no longer listen for the next right action through the clench. Then the freeze deepens, and a stagnant cycle begins.

There is always a next right action. Sometimes it’s stillness. Non-action is sometimes the cleanest expression of our life force–we realize there is nothing to force and lots to notice. Most obstacles disappear in time. The broader system dissolves blockages if we soften the clench. The holy plumber is always on call, especially when there’s a flood about.

When it’s time to mop, mop. Mopping is very simple and we can all do it when not future-f*cking ourselves into catastrophe. Just mop.

It’s not the outer circumstances, it’s my response to them.

Repeat: It’s not the outer circumstances. It’s my response to them.

At least two of you will bring up the holocaust. Noted. Now you don’t need to.

I love that when I say things like this to clients, that it’s not the outer circumstances, and your response is your becoming, life then serves up a hot dish of, “Oh yeah? How about now?”

And at first I’m like, “I don’t wanna.”

And life is like, “That’s why.”

And the roots of my practice grow deeper.

The less I resist, the more ease comes. That seems obvious, no? I would like to add here, that people will often think you’re batshit crazy as you metabolize their deepest fears with aplomb. A lot of people won’t take it as, “Hey what’s your secret?”

But rather, “Holy shit you must be totally out of touch with reality because that’s a nightmare!”

When you’ve alchemized a lot of trauma to the point where it has flattened into biography, it sometimes disturbs people, what you can report from joy. Meh. Boundaries.

When I teach boundaries, my fundamental point is that we move away from what denies life toward what is more fully alive. NOT JUST WHAT FEELS GOOD BUT WHAT IS MORE FULLY ALIVE. Boundaries aren’t a negation, though “No” can be a very good place to start realizing differentiation. Yes, we’re moving away from something, so sure, that’s a loss. Let grief open the cocoon. Not your twitchy hands, but grief itself.

There’s no need to knock on closed doors. There are open doors a little farther down the hall. Always. Even if the hall looks dark. Get down on all fours if you feel wobbly. You’re fine. You’re needed. Keep going.

This is slippery when the closed doors are in my own mind–When I point my head toward loss instead of turning my whole body toward emergence and adjusting my position to where I am enveloped in love again.

When I feel the clench come on, I ask myself: “Where can I stand in relation to this person, place, thing, sensation and feel love?” Stand there. Are you backed up all the way into a stand of birches? Fine. That’s the spot for this moment. Touch them. They love the feel of your cheek.

Where can I stand in this moment to be enveloped in love? That feels very different from “holding a boundary”. The only relationship it’s seeking to shift is the one between me and my life force.

Where’s the hairball in my pipe keeping me from that free flow? If I say, “But that’s my hair, that’s ME! Those are precious hairs from MY HEAD! You can’t touch that hairball!” Well then, the holy plumber is not going to stop by because it’s hard to work with toddlers around.

If I can humble myself enough to say, “Yep, that came from my head. That was mine once. That hair looked all good and shiny and pretty and went ping in the sunlight, but I don’t need it anymore and now it’s just blocking the flow. I’m ready to release it.” Then the holy plumber will get to work, spit spot and there you are, quenched and flowing. When this is my sincere request, the result is often this immediate.

We have all manner of trauma responses/habits/hairballs in the pipe. They share our DNA, but they are no longer us. Can we withstand being engulfed in not knowing quite who we are or who we’re becoming long enough to emerge in good form, without pushing pulling and putting our energy on that emergence? Are we going to require forceps and vacuums, or do we trust our body already knows how to do this? Can we not slash open the chrysalis and righteously declare, “See, I told you there was nothing in there but goo!” Can we remove all distraction and dishonesty and attend with humility to the task at hand? That’s all we have to do. Just this.

Can we?

Can you?

Can I?

If you’d like support in this process, I’m a pretty handy plumber’s assistant. My Pocket Coaching program (it happens mostly via What’s App) is open again for June. DM for details.

Now to the weeds, give beauty room to grow.

Erotic Ladies of an Uncertain Age

What is a “Karen” but a woman who’s stopped touching her p*ssy? A woman whose stagnant eros erupts as rage?

Cut the thinning hair, cover the jiggly arms, and for God’s sake leave that pussy alone. It’s no longer fully alive, like you! Shame on you for subjecting us to your wrinkly face, soft belly, and arm waddles. Nobody wants to see that. You’re embarrassing yourself. Let him close his eyes the whole time he makes love to you, it’s only fair. Embodying eros in midlife form just isn’t appropriate. What are you–French? Don’t wear that thing that makes you feel like you’re at a party where people might skate. You look like a bag lady who lost her cart. Stake no claim in eros though your heart still beats, your lungs still breathe and your pussy still throbs. Doesn’t it?

Those are the kind of thoughts that birth a “Karen”, purveyor of dry brushfire. Does it come from the culture? Sure. But we decide how intimately we collude with that narrative, how wide it manspreads in our minds.

We can learn to hold boundaries within our own minds. Those are ninja-level boundaries and not without risk. No thank you, culture, I’m not interested in that story. Will we get pushback? Sure. And we can take that bullshit as nourishment like a peony does. So much is optional. Not death tho. That’s the real bit here. That’s what this whole thing is about, underneath. Trying death on. Who wore it best? Can you dance in it? Can you sit? Can you breathe? I like this midlife cut, it has stretch in it.

I’ve been leaning into the phrase “middle-aged lady” lately. I am also “of a certain age”, which is certainly 48. I’ve noticed people go out of their way to avoid being a “middle-aged lady”. Why? The middle way is a great path to walk. In the middle of those twin portals–birth and death–is ripe treasure that I’m not about to squander. I live in the middle of a lit paradoxical field. I have my full permission to be a middle-aged lady, exactly as I am.

I haven’t welcomed menopause yet (Shatavari!). From what I’ve heard, it has a way of clearing the field. I hope my hot flashes will bring with them a blaze that cleanses the stagnant bits of maiden left in me. Behold the crone and her earth magic. Womb writ new in full emptiness.

How much of middle aged lady misery comes from clinging to the maiden bits because there is no valued new identity culturally available? I mean, clinging to any identity just brings suffering, but still…

How do we meet that absence? By craving the facial paralysis of Botox? Does it really muffle the whisper of skull? I can’t think of a more literal refusal or our full expression. I love the lines that reach from my eyes all the way down to the middle of my cheeks when I’m really happy. No harm no foul if you’re into it. I think our bodies should express our essence just as we see fit.

But in our culture it’s go maiden or go home. Be young or stfu.

So how to live that crone life lit?

I find the first sticky bit is needing to be an object of desire. What if desire requires no object? What if we allow desire to just be the force of nature it is?

Can I just feel the wind in my hair, or do I need someone to notice me feeling the wind in my hair and put me in their spank bank for later to recognize eros in all that sensation?

When we’re tangled in the effort of pushing, pulling, and putting our desire on something or somewhere, we lose our own voice and the luminous perfection of an eggshell. They are not separate. Delight in both of those things flows with ease from embodied awareness. When we’re performing instead of experiencing eros, we lose touch with ordinary joy.

When I let go of being an object of desire and allow desire itself to penetrate me freely, I am restored to radiance. I am it and it is me, like moon and moonlight. I see the erotic perfection in an eggshell is not separate from the perfection of my pussy. Life force energy coalesced into perfect form. Each is necessary, just as it is. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be here.

My erotic life and my sexual life are related though not the same. They feed each other. Sexual confidence in middle age goes against so much conditioning. I don’t dismiss that, I notice it until it scampers off. I let it draw me deeper into the miracle of my body. Deeper into the mystery of sharing my body with another. The smells, the aches, the new softness of all of it. I could bemoan not “keeping it tight”, or I could revel in my suppleness. I think it’s pretty clear which one leads to orgasm, though that’s not the goal. There is no goal. There is no winning, just more playing.

Just this, just now. Just a middle aged white lady, being the be: wild heart, wet pussy, wind in hair.

You have your permission.

Ease

Emergence beyond embodiment. Spacious and permeable skin. Surrender to ease. There’s no need to force anything.

You’re naturally splendid. What you do is as obvious and inevitable as what a plant does. You simply move with the time. You are revealed as it is revealed. You emerge from causes and conditions without friction. Your body knows what to do. Let it lead.

When things move in this way, you know you are with what is yours, doing what is yours to do. You don’t feel confused, do you? No more than the sun and moon are confused about exactly where they belong in this moment and what they are doing. Weather may obscure their light here and there, but sun and moon keep showing up.

Yield to motion like sun and moon, steady and reliable. They make vast and easy progress across the sky, illuminating everything. You are their companion, luminous like this.

You are out of danger of self-abandonment as you feel the ease upon you now. The self of non-self: embedded, embodied, enacting.

You don’t need to wear yourself out going against the way. Continuous ease. Ease brings stability. Relaxation, stability, clarity. Patient, kind, and nourishing. Eternal, intimate, pure, and joyful.

Power flows now, supple as a summer river. Be grateful for this time of ease. Respect what is sufficient. No need to push for more. No need to push at all. Allow the river to run through you. Don’t dam it. Put your feet up and let it carry you. No gushing, just flowing.

Our culture mistrusts ease. I mean, if we embrace ease, can laziness be far behind? Their very different. Only one has self-compassion in it. Don’t confuse them. You will be received how you receive. Receive and be revealed. Only your responsiveness is in your control. Open your system to all available free energy, move with it and order will emerge.

A lot of people confuse slave mentality and work ethic. A good work ethic doesn’t demand extraneous effort. It’s not about showing how hard you can push, but how you can do what needs to be done. Can you feel the difference in your body?

Ease begets confidence. Extra effort limits. When we talk about that je ne said quo or “it factor” that someone has, it’s usually ease.

Ease increases your attractiveness tenfold.

Ease is a metabolic byproduct of Boundaries and Belonging–or is it the other way around?

No matter–it’s all part of the session I’m holding on Saturday Morning. It’s a half-day. It’s 85 dollars. I cap it at 10 people. DM for more.

Let’s Talk About Middle-Aged Online Dating

One useful thing I learned over my last two rounds of app dating is this: A man who wears sunglasses in his main pic is avoidant 100% of the time. Give it about 10 messages and it’ll be clear. You can also give it a year–the data comes out the same. I don’t have a giant sample size, but big enough. Do with this data what you will.

I’m 48–a middle-aged woman–and by all accounts I should really hate online dating. It should make me feel terrible about myself, less than human, disenchanted with humans. I would have had to feel pretty terrible about myself already for this to be the case. Like all of our social media tools, feeling victimized by them seems a dishonest position. Yes, they’re manipulating our attention. Exercise discernment.

My mother suggested I leave Maine and move back to Philly where the numbers would be better. I told her I only want one and was far more likely to be resonant with someone who loves Maine as much as I do.

This time, I added in my bio, “What’s your attachment style?” I figured some self-awareness around this icebreaker would be a good way to vet. It was. When they didn’t know I offered a link to this NPR quiz. https://www.npr.org/…/whats-your-attachment-style-quiz

No one said no to taking it and sharing their results. This surprised and delighted me. It led to some interesting conversations about the value of such a metric, how it changes, and how we’ve been and how we’d like to be. It was heartening. There were also jokes. It opened the field to vulnerability from the start. And why not? Nothing squashes pleasure like defense. And why not meet each online dating encounter from a place of pleasure?

Also tho, in the app-based stage of a connection, I don’t give anyone the “benefit of the doubt.” What is that anyway? If I have doubt about someone in the space of ten text messages, there is unlikely to be benefit in continuing. There’s mutual curiosity or there’s not. There’s openness and play or there’s not. By the time we’re 20 messages in, there’s a plan to meet. I have lots of wonderful online friends. I’m looking for irl smells.

This has made the whole enterprise feel like an adult round of duck duck goose. Not everyone was up for play. Some people really see online dating as more of a job interview. Some people feel really resigned about the whole thing. Some people really hate their lives. Some people tell jokes about murdering their wives. That was just one guy, but still…

I had just one full yes right up my midline this time. He was way outside my usual preferences. He is an unvaxxed, gun-owning, libertarian who listens with actual interest to Tucker Carlson and has only the vaguest notion of who Beyoncé is. His love language is, “Underpromise and overdeliver.”

Instead of clutching my delicate liberal pearls, I found this polarity irresistibly hot. When he gave me a hands-on archery lesson, I found it even hotter. Preferences! They really do swap surprise for suffering.

He is those seemingly unaligned things. He is also open, present, comfortable in his skin, has a deep secular spiritual life including being expert in human design (?!), plays guitar and sings, has mad skills, and I feel seen and cherished. I’m received how I receive. I’m available for that.

Will it last?
Does it matter?
What is happening?

I only ever ask that question when I mean “What WILL happen?” When I just can’t abide the uncertainty. What IS actually happening in this moment is usually pretty clear. Clarity is received, not grasped at. And even more than that–it’s fun to be surprised by what emerges. Like really fun, if that’s how you’re turned.

Emotional investment is in this moment. Relationship is in this moment. We can agree to have more moments, but everything else is wide open. I welcome this deep play.

So yeah, I’m basically just writing this today to celebrate all the replenishing pleasure in my glorious middle aged white lady life as I hum along between the portals of birth and death and find this spot drenched. Do the swiping! Do the swiping! It’s just people, just like you.

I’m also letting you know I’m holding a Boundaries and Belonging session on Saturday April 23rd which is a half-day where we pick up a whole lot of litter from your field so you can have a clearer view of what belongs there and what does not. It’s fun to be surprised by what emerges there too, even along the wet cave wall.

There’s also a new 3 month F*ck Suffering group starting on 4/26. DM for more…or email hi@reihance.com

After I Was Raped

Three days after I was raped, I called a friend. She had been a volunteer at a rape counseling center and I thought she would be good to call. She didn’t come to give me a hug. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to put her out. I didn’t want to know what would happen if I was held. I didn’t want to know what would happen if she said no. I needed a rote task. I needed someone to tell me what to do. I could not abide whatever was happening in my body. I did not want it. Nothing fit together. My small sentences sounded like they were coming out of another person’s mouth. I’d been severed from my body and the body of the world.

The friend made me an appointment at the counseling center and told me to go there.

I pulled down my skirt to show the counselor my blackened pelvis and told her how it hurt when I sat down. I gave her some small sentences so that she would give me sense. I expected that transaction from this stranger. I wanted her to hold what I could not. What happened? I don’t remember. I woke up in the next town over and two men were still asleep. Can you tell me what happened to my body? Can you tell me what comes next? Today is the last day you can get a kit done. You will not have to press charges if you choose not to. We will not report this to the police unless you want to. Do this today and you will have time to decide what is right for you.

I was traumatized and ungrounded. I had an urge to feel safe when I didn’t. This urge is the true source of danger.

No one can give me safety when I am out of trust. Turning away from the reality of the moment and throwing it at someone else to hold like a ragged hot potato was very expensive. It took me six years to pay it off.

We drove an hour to a place in her car. The one where these things usually happened was closed today, so we were going to the one where they did rape kits for children. Kit is an imprecise word here. It is a forensic exam. When I left, they gave me a blanket and a small teddy bear wearing a tshirt with the name of the hospital. My dog didn’t want it, even after I took off the tshirt, so it went to Goodwill. The rage about the teddy bear came long after it was gone.

“I’m a state-mandated reporter, I have to report this to the police.”

This is what the forensic nurse said while holding the kind of camera I’d only seen on Law and Order before. She’d been taking pictures of my pelvis, which was too damaged to allow me a choice. My body wasn’t mine now, was what she meant. It was a crime scene. My panties went into an evidence bag and the nurse left the room. I lay on the exam table naked from the waist down, with my legs still in the stirrups and I shattered.

“You were supposed to protect me.” I sobbed. Big sobs. Old sobs. Deep sobs. The rape counselor was on the other side of the curtain, so I said it to the fluorescent lights.

“I’m so sorry.” She said, this stranger I gave my trust to, because of her job.

Because I was severed from my body.

It didn’t even occur to me to get off the table and take my panties back out of the evidence bag and leave.

It didn’t occur to me that I could determine that this was my body again and not a crime scene.

It did not occur to me because I was severed from my body.

I can’t set boundaries when I’m not in my body.

And I was told to think of the others. The possible future victims. It was for the greater good. I felt the lead cloak drop. I stopped crying. I felt nothing. I took the rape counselor out for Pho and made jokes. My treat. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. People watching would have thought we were pals. Doubling down on this-never-happened. Preserving that murderous self.

I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a trauma response and a real-time no for a very long time.

I didn’t tell anyone else for a year. That didn’t go well. It was beyond the capacity of the person I told. They hung up on me. I deepened into the story of how broken I was: I will never be fixed. I will never be loved. I am barely human. Again I found myself sobbing, “You were supposed to protect me.”

I didn’t talk about it again for two more years. Doubling down on separation. Doubling down on I don’t belong. My mind lapped it right up because it meant we could keep doing what we were doing. Nothing would have to change.

The rape happened in year six of an eight-year dark night of the soul. That’s a lot of nights. That’s a lot of lost years. It precipitated a descent into alcoholism, depression, an extended period of living in my car, and overwhelming urge to be as dead outside as I felt inside.

I had fallen for my mind exclusively. No one else was welcome, not even my body. My mind and I were completely enmeshed. There were no boundaries. It was a self-centered and joyless coupling and the sex was non-existent. My mind was very controlling. Abusive and prone to gaslighting. I needed my body back–but my mind had me drinking to blackout from morning till night to numb the call.

Fresh from a rare shower, bloated and sad, with eyeliner I scrawled across the bathroom mirror that quote from Rumi, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” A part of me knew. A part of all of us always does.

I realized that no one was coming to save me. I realized that no one could save me. I realized that my mind was an abusive asshole.

I could just stop. This could just stop. This could stop right now. None of the things I’m afraid of are happening. Not even one. What if I have everything I want right now? What if this squandering is all I want because it means I never have to be seen again? Never have to be responsible for my life?

Uh-oh.

I think of these as uh-oh moments rather than ah-ha moments, because let’s face it, do any of us really delight at the thought of all the change and uncertainty that just became totally f*cking inevitable?

I mean, that nude and bloated moment was my uh-oh, but I was on my way into an afternoon blackout, so it was another 5 months before I really let it all the way in and decided I wanted to live. That meant having no idea who I would become because everything I’d already been was dead beyond your wildest necromancy.

That meant uncertainty and her sidekick existential dread and I were about to get real intimate. I was going to have to let myself be loved by others when I couldn’t love myself. I was going to have to let myself be seen. Not just regular seen, but seen by whole rooms full of strangers while in sloppy cycles of rage and grief. I was going to have to get down on my knees and atone for shitting all over life like that. For rejecting my body so violently. For trying to kill it with vodka. For declaring so much war.

I was going to have to belong to my own body and the body of the world again, as was my birthright all along. No one took that from me. I gave it away because I did not want the responsibility for what I’d been given to hold. Until I did. Until I loved those gifts so well it felt like Christmas morning.

I tell you this because metabolization is not complete until what has nourished me comes back out as nourishment for others. When I have fully opened it, it becomes my gift to give. I have fully opened the gifts of that time.

One of the greatest gifts of my lifetime has been restoring my body to full trust, full eros, after rape. I crawled through mud and fire for as long as I needed to, according to my very stubborn nature and for as long as I needed to stay deluded about the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Which was almost exactly eight years. My mind has been through a whole lot of training since then and like a good companion, it shits outside and sits nicely. It’s quite a lot of fun, really. Ever-curious and always up for a caper.

I want to be very clear here that I don’t blame myself in any of this. I don’t blame anyone in any of these events (anymore). This is my path and I feel very tenderly responsible for walking it, even for the times I crawled it. The seeds of compassion were planted in this loam. Somehow, they sprouted.

That’s why I can and feel I should write about it and share it with you.

There was so much shame in me for so long that drew in new relationships that led to new trauma that confirmed and calcified the old. I had to fully embody the whole cycle of trauma and retraumatization by bringing in so much of what confirmed the story I was carrying about myself until it became clear that it was false. I don’t see those years as lost anymore. I see them as training.

“You were supposed to protect me.”

This phrase is the seed of so much trauma and retraumatization. And the slow hissing leak of life force that victim identity brings. When that is lovingly witnessed, first by myself and then by another loving human who does not try to fix what is not broken, my trust is restored. When I move out of trust and expect safety to come from outside first—when I ask to be rescued–I move away from freedom. When my trust in myself and in all-that-is is primary, I know when I am safe. I trust when I am not safe. I trust myself to set and hold a boundary that will move me away from what will harm me and toward being fully alive. I trust others because I trust myself first. I trust my embodied intuition. There is no other kind.

Violence is carried in our own minds and ripples out. It severs us from our bodies and the body of the world.

Peace is carried by our own bodies and ripples out. It grounds us in our own bodies and the body of the world.

Releasing suffering is intimate work, no matter how vast the need for it looks from a distance. Whether it’s war, rape, or the grinding poverty of a working family who has to chose between gas and food now–how we meet and metabolize it matters. How we witness it in our neighbors and around the globe, matters.

We are all in this together, with every breath, every sound, every beat of our very messy human hearts.

Holding a Boundary Through Loss

Breakup suffering came from:

1. Wanting my partner to be different.

2. Fear of loss

3. All the things I made it mean about myself. (A solid break out of self-compassion and into self-centeredness)

4. Fear of uncertainty. The chasm that loss opens.

5. The visceral loss of one body to another.

These are all the same sources of suffering that keep people from holding boundaries, holding your sovereign self. The threat of loss is very real. Self-abandonment leaves deeper scars. I owe it to myself to be absolutely authentic so I know who belongs with me and who does not.

It turns out that the man I had been in a relationship with for the past year does not.

The grief happened when the loss became clear.

The suffering happened when I wanted it to be different.

There’s an important nuance within grief around suffering. How much am I going to resist? Resistance is the measure of my suffering.

There is no loss of love. Love, like all energy, is never lost. Untethered, it finds a new gradient. My love for him ran deep. The boundary had matching roots. Right in my own field.

I didn’t abandon myself. I held the boundary and I kept my skin intact. This meant stepping away from the relationship. There’s so much love in that, too. I guess that self-compassion practice is going pretty well after all. I can eat the blame, and with it cleared from the field, take a good look around. Where is the love and innocence here? I know it must be here somewhere. I’ll back up until I can see it again.

When that backward step is the next right action, it’s clear.

When I found out he lied again, I went for a walk. I was shaking like a dog, let go let go let go. The thunderbolt ran up my midline and made my legs shake. Shake it off. It wasn’t the down-drop of a lead cloak, the way a trauma response pulls me, though I had plenty of that with him too. What’s current feels like a current. The clarity could no longer be denied.

What am I willing to know?

How much am I willing to suffer for this preference?

If I can ask myself these questions, I can be responsible for my choices.

For awhile there, I was willing to suffer for this preference. There was rich soil there and an essential seed. If I left too soon I would have missed it. I had to find out the difference between a trauma response and the “no” happening in my body right now. I honed that with him. I couldn’t have honed it without him. I thought I had. I hadn’t. The stakes were too low alone. There are places we can only touch in love with another.

I can love him as he is, from back here, back home. I’m not interested in extracting anything from the people I love. What’s not freely given is not mine to have.

Once it became clear what was being given freely and what was not, I had to make a choice. Am I okay with this? Am I being an entitled brat asking for what is not being given freely, or is this a place for a boundary? I had to sit long and soft with that, until I didn’t.

Because it hurts, we still ate pizza and slept in the same bed one last time. I left in the morning after a hug that had all the tender distance of a last hug.

Why do I share this with you? Because when I say fuck suffering, I don’t mean avoid it. I mean let it all the way in. Let it make a fucking mess. Clean up after it, it’s your toddler. You are responsible for it. I cleaned up as best I could. I drank the tea he made. I swept the kitchen floor. I left.

Boundaries aren’t toys. If you can’t hold them, don’t set them. It might take a couple of tries to really honor them, but if you keep setting a boundary without holding it, it’s manipulation, not love for yourself or anyone else. Boundaries aren’t for changing someone else’s behavior or landing a hook. They’re not a rejection, they’re protection. They’re a f*ck yes to trust.

They emerge from everything I know of myself and the world in this moment and allow me to restore intimacy with everything I don’t.

Is this situation incongruent with that knowing?

Is this situation repeatedly incongruent with that knowing?

Yes? Then it’s time to step away, back into the intimacy of not-knowing.

When I trust myself, holding a boundary through loss doesn’t have to be hard. It can be very very soft.

It doesn’t make it hurt less, but it does let it hurt shorter.

I’m holding a one-day Boundaries and Belonging practice session on 2/26, while it’s fresh. DM for details.

Belonging is Our Birthright

It’s been a really challenging couple of weeks. Every time I thought I’d opened, I took a deep breath and opened wider. I also learned when to close. I’ve become a better asshole, basically.

It’s been a tender time, where I’ve learned intimately all the places I’m held. I’ve softened into this trust in a way that is new for me. I’m standing in a place I’ve never stood before. It’s scary and it’s not easy, but there is so much ease enveloping it. I hope that makes sense. It’s not for the mind, but a felt sense in my body. There is trust enveloping the fear. And so much love.

I got this message from a client yesterday, that he gave me permission to share with you. It came right on time, as things do.

If you’re looking for this kind of support, DM me for a one-on-one, or the F*ck Suffering group. Or you can go right to my website www.reihance.com The start for the group has been pushed back to March 1 while I give myself some space to grieve.

Working with others really does help me realize in my bones that we’re all in this together. We’re never alone. Belonging is our birthright.

Here’s part of Daniel’s message:

“It’s like a seed was planted and something very beautiful has began to grow. I’m sure you speak with many people and don’t remember every detail of our talk but one of the main points you brought up for me was to listen. I have taken that and ran with it. Lately, I find myself wanting to speak only if it improves the silence. I’ve really began to put into practice listening to my partner, loved ones, my manager etc. without that selfish, bad habit of preparing my responses based on my own feelings.

Since I’ve put my meditation first, I find myself relinquishing all control. Life is fucking messy, complicated, constantly evolving, and it will always remain that way.

I feel one follows the same rules for meditation as one would when experiencing psychedelics. A taboo statement I’m sure but it definitely feels that way. I sit with myself as I am allowing all thoughts to flow through me without any control or judgement. I do not resist. I come innocently to the practice not forcing or “trying” to have an experience.

The only difference of course and most rewarding thing is it is teaching a sober, clear mind. Resistance only brings suffering & my god, it’s like a light has turned on. I feel like Dorothy returning from Oz. We all have the power within us. It just takes one particular journey for each individual to believe in it.

While I’m still learning & by all means am no master of this, it has created a yearning to continue to dive deeper and return home to myself. I feel you’ve really helped me shape a very important focus and for that I thank you immensely.”

–Daniel LA, CA

Even though there’s lots of loss around here over the past week, there is also so much to be grateful for, so much to love.

Blame, Boundaries, and Belonging

When I blame someone, I get curious:

1. Was I asking someone to love a part of me that I don’t?

2. Was I afraid that if I held a boundary and didn’t abandon myself that there would be loss?

3. Am I seeing the situation as “abandon yourself or be abandoned”?

That’s one of the more painful false dichotomies, over time.

If I’m pushing blame around on my plate, I’ve moved out of compassion.

If I’m self-abandoning instead of holding a boundary, I’ve moved out of self-compassion, which is the prerequisite for sincere compassionate action toward others.

If I’m blaming anyone for anything (including in the public sphere—try it!) I’ve left my fundamental trust in all-that-is behind. I’ve forgotten (just for a moment!) that I’m held by life itself, that we all are.

I’ve forgotten that clinging and aversion are the root of suffering. Pain is inevitable and suffering is a choice.

I can return to being held at any time, just like Dorothy only ever had to click her heels.

Eating the blame is not taking the blame. The first metabolizes, it nourishes if I take it all the way in and let it break down into its rich components in my very own belly.

Taking the blame is holding and hoarding and cultivating it, allowing the atonal hum of resentment to reverberate through every part of my field.

That’s not such a great option.

If my field is full of resentment, there’s no place for love to grow. I have to do some weeding. Dandelions too, are nutritious.

Every emptying leads to a filling, even if I can’t see it yet. The tide comes in. The tide goes out. Twice a day. Invisible forces made visible.

The tides teach me to trust what I can’t see. They trust me to metabolize blame, wherever I see it. The less I try to do this, the better. I can stand very still in the sand and listen to what I can’t see, be moved by what I don’t entirely understand.

When the tide goes out, all manner of life is revealed on the shore.

Want to practice this with me? Msg me to join the Fuck Suffering group, next one starts 2/15.

Truth and Consequences

When do I suffer? When I want things or people to be different than they are.

There’s been a lot of suffering around here lately. I’ve been continuously f*cked open by it. Grief has opened me wider and rage has made sure to clear the field with its holy fire.

Recently, I’ve been feeling like someone I love has been doing everything possible to avoid intimacy, jumping from one distraction to the next in search of numbness. There’s been proximity, but that is no substitute for intimacy. Really, proximity without intimacy is one of the loneliest situations. And a reliable generator of anxiety—which is a vivid call to action.  

When I stop trying to control and start being honest (starting with myself), everything becomes easier. When I let people’s positions be in alignment with their character, everything becomes easier. When I stop asking people to be what they’re not, gentleness replaces resentment. Sometimes it takes awhile to really see someone’s character, especially if they’re fundamentally good, just not very good for me.

After commenting on one of the brilliant Hannah Taylor’s posts, she reached out to ask a little more about my comment. I told her a little more and she said, “It seems like the part of you that wants to know is in conflict with the part of you that doesn’t want to know.”

I decided to let the part of me that wanted to know win. And, as is so often the case in these situations, I learned that the part of me that didn’t want to know was protecting me, like any reliable trauma response. Getting stabbed in the heart again in that same way that I was 7 months ago wasn’t fun. But it was true. I needed to know how I was valued (not much!). I needed to know that the man I loved was more interested in the validation and ongoing attention of other women than being honest with me or anyone else, including himself.

A little openness, or willingness to take responsibility for hurt caused would have gone a long way in this situation. It would have gone just about all the way, really. I have nothing but respect for eating the blame. Once eaten, it’s cleared from the plate and things can be seen clearly. Another great thing about eating the blame is that it becomes pretty clear in time if you’re the only one eating.

Jeanette Winterson once wrote, “What you risk reveals what you value.” This sentence landed deep from the first time I read it over 20 years ago. I didn’t really understand it at first, but it has grown in me like a koan these many years.

Painful decisions get easier the more painful they become. Pain is a signal that something is out of alignment. Or that some hard thing has hit your soft tissue, even down to the bone. Pain has a way of making the risk inherent in change more welcome. Could my next compassionate action result in less pain and suffering? Can I let this pain move me instead of needing it to be different? Can I thank it for being just as it is and alerting me to this lack of alignment instead of complaining about it? Not that there’s anything wrong with complaining, if you know how much it costs.

The risk of walking away, away from pain and numbness, into uncertainty, reveals what I value. What am I prepared to sacrifice for those values? Comfort? I’m always ready to sacrifice comfort for my deepest values.

And what are they?

Responsibility, practice, compassion (and that starts with self-compassion), intimacy, honesty, love, and humor. I find the other good stuff, like trust, emerges pretty easily from those and not without them. The gifts those values provide are something more abiding than comfort, though they often bring that too. Not the kind of comfort that requires my control of all manner of nouns, but the kind of equanimous ease that comes from looking at exactly what is, just as it is, without needing it to be different. Even when my preferences are something very different indeed.

Let me say it again: Needing things to be different is the root of all suffering.

Just noticing when where I am and what is in that spot with me is not nourishing, leads me to the next right action, eventually–comfortable or not. What I risk reveals what I value. The bigger the risk, the more clarity I get on the depth of the value. Each time I am required to shed my preferences in order to complete the next right action, my values root deeper in me, and my character grows.

The rage subsides once it has done its clarifying job, and I eat the blame again, gratefully nourished. I was hungry after all that rage! It lit the whole field!

As I unbutton my pants and lay back on the couch (so full!) I have time to ask myself–Why did I continue to chose this situation after the first few times I was shown how little I was valued? Why did I instead beg to be valued? There’s still a tiny battered old part of me that I thought I’d held and loved so well that it had scampered off. A part that still believed begging for love and honesty was how to communicate desire, instead of choosing to be in relationship with people who emerge from love and honesty and can’t help but give it freely. It’s an old way of being loved and protected on someone else’s terms, based on scarcity. It turned out I had one more ride on that drama carousel left.

Healing is not a game we win, but a game we get to keep playing, always on a new and deeper level. Love is same same. So much of healing is how willing we are to emerge from love within this fluxy and uncertain world, in the matching field of this body.

I have ended my relationship with scarcity. If it comes for tea, we’ll have tea, but it definitely can’t stay over. We’re just not compatible. Scarcity struggles to grow, for obvious reasons. I see it for the hungry ghost it is–gaping mouth, pinched throat, muffled heart, insatiable belly–unable to be nourished. I can bake scones all day for hungry ghosts, but they have to remember how to eat. And my scones are even more delicious than blame.

My BF and I Had a Fight Yesterday and Here is that Practice

I can show you this part of me. This part that yearns. This part that yearns to be seen whole. The part that yearns to be love and be just as I am. These things are not mutually exclusive. They amplify each other.

I won’t ask you to love a part of me that I won’t. I can promise this. I won’t require you to extract my courage, but to witness it as an emergent property of my much bigger trust, not just in you, but in everything. In the creaminess of white beans made in the slow cooker and the coming blizzard. Those things are also shaped by so much more than I can see.

We all made those beans together–the whole system. The bird that shit in the soil to feed the beans that feed us. The microbes that coaxed the roots open to nourishment. The farmer who harvested. The truck driver that brought them to the store. The people that built the highway. The person that invented the machine that bagged them and the person who fixed it. The beans come through time and space into this crockpot. We are also this miraculous.

Under my deepest fear is my deepest yearning. My fear is protecting the yearning and keeping the thought in place: this yearning can’t be met. I can’t have it. I can’t hold it. The fear keeps everything my mind believes in place so I can keep being exactly as I am, justified in my fear, entrenched in this identity. When I think I have to win, when I’m afraid that love is scarce, please remind me, all of you.

How can we be better people, for ourselves, for each other and for the world? Is that not somewhere buried in our deepest yearning–that generosity? That intimacy?

We live in a culture that would have us feel separate and like we are competing in a game that has winners and losers and are we clearly indoctrinated into wanting to be on the better side, the “winning” side. That’s Game A. It means we need someone to lose and that won’t be us. No way. No matter what it takes, we’ll achieve those goals and reign triumphant, amirite?

But what if we knew that the only objective of the game was to keep playing? The ordinary joy of that. The love. That’s Game B. How can we shift our lens from Game A to Game B first with our most intimate thoughts? I don’t need my yearning to obtain something. I need to allow it to run free. To allow it to free me. I allow it to blow me open to the world and all that is emerging in it in this moment, right now, just as it is. Embedded in place, encountering people. There is no person, place, or thing that I can hold on to, including my own body. I can only cherish what’s here. I can also cherish the way it ripples out into all the other forces I can’t, from here, perceive. I receive them anyway. I meet them right here. I can make wind with my hands. I am that powerful.

I’m emerging alongside the weather, rather than grabbing and needing to turn the process of life itself into a series of object-anchors so I can remove myself from the intimacy of not-knowing. Can I love this person in front of me as he is? Can I love this aging skin I’m in as it is? Can I love this impending blizzard as it is?

This moment is where I am embedded and embodied. It’s where I belong. How welcoming and permeable can I be to all that is here, regardless of my preferences? Could I be of better use if I emerged like that, from that? Well, duh. Will I always do it? Of course not. You can’t keep playing the game if you keep trying to play it perfectly.  

How much of how we perceive the human condition comes from how we’ve internalized the myth of Game A? What if the human condition were much vaster and softer and more ecological? What if we didn’t privilege our consciousness over that of a bee? What if we de-centered ourselves and listened like whales to the space we’re in rather than the space where we used to be or the place we’d like to be, surrounded by the things we’d like to have?

Would that global intimacy be bearable? Would it be excruciatingly erotic? I find Thich Nhat Hanh’s sense of interbeing fundamentally erotic. Interpenetration is just what it sounds like: the ecology of erotic emergence. Every pore a portal. Every petal, ditto. Devouring and devoured. Can I let the world fuck me open like a peony? Can I be that intimate with everything? Can I welcome the world with that much generosity? Be that fearlessly fragrant?

Game A is embedded in me. I embody it every time I spin out into comparison, control and complaint. Every time I believe I have to take something in order to have it. Every time I believe there isn’t enough.

Every time the part of me that trusts emergence, has total confidence in emergence turns away from that fundamental truth and clenches in jealousy, insecurity, greed.

What’s the benefit of my practice? What’s the benefit of community? Noticing. Having people reflect for me the part of myself that I’m losing to Game A, in myself, in relationship, and as a systemic element in the broader ecology. To remember, as Ram Dass said, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

We all lose Game A. We are all actively losing in Game A. There is something so much more ordinary and miraculous emerging in each of us, for all of us. We can’t play our best until we notice every last Game A routine that we circulate and carry. We all have this option. We all have this responsibility.

Every complication is an invitation to deeper intimacy.

In our own bodies, the bodies we touch, and the whole big body of the world.

I’m clumsy AF and wholeheartedly committed. How about you?

If you’re interested in the F*ck Suffering practice group, DM me. We run the whole range, together.

How to Open When You Want to Close

To open when you want to close is to let things your mind makes hard rest softly in your body. Your body opens when it’s time to open.

You dilate, and if your mind impedes this sweet effacing, you cramp. You harden around a point in space and time the way muscles cling to a stabbing blade. This is how trauma embeds in the body. It takes more conscious effort to pull it out than it took to put it in.

When you soften, fewer things land like a stab—they have a chance to land like a poke in the belly of the Pillsbury dough boy.

To open when you want to close is to crawl into the lap of the world like a grandmother and breathe with all beings through her. The pace and scent of your breath are your signature. You are signing up for the work that is yours to do. What is the thing that no one can do quite like you can? What summons you at 3:33 in the morning? Do you remember? That’s way more helpful than thinking you know.

To open when you want to close, love people as they are, including you. You can’t know compassion until you surrender control. A crow doesn’t do what a fern does. There is no surer poison than comparison. Metabolize it. Find the medicine there. To open when you want to close, listen like whale, with your whole skin enveloped in home. Receive each subtle homing signal with every open pore. Feel who is beside you, humming even in silence.

To open when you want to close: soften, soften, soften.

Safety Kills Intimacy

I asked the question last week, “Do you want safety or intimacy?” Most of you wanted both. Good luck with that.

I think these notions are often confused, much to the diminishment of eros.

We starve for intimacy, even as we push it away in pursuit of safety.

The pursuit of safety is an attempt to make external circumstances “just so” for our comfort. Intimacy requires risk. All true things do, as they’re always changing. We crave the stillpoint, but as soon as it comes, it’s on its way to becoming something else.

A peony in full, glorious bloom soon drops its first petal and begins another cycle of renewal. The peony doesn’t clench and cling. It would only limit the renewal already begun again at the point of ripeness. We tend not to respect this cycle in our relationships. We bring the capitalist ideas of limitless growth and consumption to our most intimate spaces.

We reject the ecology of erotic emergence, but it hasn’t gone anywhere–we ourselves have turned away from it. We ourselves have brought about our own starvation. We only have to turn back toward the whole of ecology of which we are a part and welcome the full energetic range of life without arrogance or self-loathing.

When we realize our role as co-creator and bring self-compassion to every breath, trust and intimacy emerge naturally. So does joy.

Intimacy asks us, “How willing are you to be fully alive?” Turning away from this question, we instead ask people to validate us and demand they behave in all manner of ways to provide certainty, no matter the deadening. Pursuit of safety is asking the world and the beings in it to remain the same. I hope you can see the absurdity of this demand. The peony laughs, her petals scatter.

We demand to be kept from the edges of our fear, so our fear stays in place. When we pursue safety we are asking others to reiterate our fear. This leads to stagnation. Intimacy moves. Intimacy is fully alive. Intimacy trusts and so is fearless. Trust is our capacity to meet the world just as it is, whatever it is in any particular moment. We trust that since we’re still here, we’re held by life. We trust that whatever causes and conditions life is presenting now are ours to meet, intimately, in all their rich flux. The petals open, the petals drop. The fragrance persists.

Our capacity to trust brings stability. Stability is not coming from outside, it comes from within and welcomes the world. Trusting that you can metabolize whatever comes is the only true stability. Trust demonstrates our willingness to be fully alive. Ours. Each of us, together.

There is nothing for anyone else to prove to you about trust. Trust is yours to share, not to demand.This notion that someone must prove they can be trusted before we can open is really limiting. It’s also manipulative. It allows no space for that person to just be who they are. The “prove it” position asks for their every move to be devoted to establishing your comfort. You are asking them to open you, instead of you having the confidence to show up open and welcome the truth. The arms-crossed and tight-lipped “prove it” position doesn’t invite much, it only demands. Where is the bottom of the burden of proof? What would be enough for you? Who wants to take on that burden? Who wants to kiss that tight little mouth? We are received as we receive.

If we are skillful in setting boundaries with people who turn out not to be trustworthy, we don’t have to stop and clench in the “prove it!” position when relating to anything, be it a peony or a person. We can put our face right in and inhale deeply. To demand proof ahead of relationship is to thwart relating from the first instance. I see so much of this on dating apps and the way conversations move on those platforms. And then people blame the apps, like blaming a hammer for hitting your thumb. It’s not the tool, it’s the skill with which you use it.

In my experience, those who are keen to tell you they are trustworthy are those who most often aren’t. Sincerity permeates. It requires no adornment.

I don’t say any of this lightly. I say this as a veteran of two abusive relationships who had to do a lot of letting go of old stories in order to meet the present as it is, without historical overlay. For a long time I thought I had a fear of intimacy. What I actually had was a deep desire for intimacy and a terror of being hurt again. I had to move toward one and away from the other. I had to commit to that choice and take full responsibility for it.

I had to learn how to set boundaries, so I could live in trust and intimacy with all that is. Boundaries allow us to hold ourselves as mature adults rather than foisting off the things we don’t like about ourselves to another in a ragged game of hot potato. Only when I held those hot, sharp shards of me in my own warm hands, could I witness them and the stories they stepped out of, like the fictional characters they were. Once witnessed, they were free to go.

What shifted for me? I stopped asking people to hold the parts of myself that I couldn’t and wouldn’t love. I learned to be with the discomfort of holding them myself, of witnessing what I deemed unlovable about me, the parts of me that I devalued.

When we ask people to hold those parts of ourselves that we can’t and won’t, when we make this a prerequisite for trust, we kill intimacy. When we know how to set a clean, loving boundary, we are able to go deeper at a pace that honors our edges and keeps us growing past them. We are able to titrate our trauma and be witnessed as we do. When we practice boundaries and self-compassion, we invite those in relationship with us to do the same. This opens the field to deepest intimacy.

Safety is avoidance of risk. Intimacy is meeting risk with open arms. Trust is our stability in that flux, the liminal flux of not one, not two. There is always the risk of abandonment and the joy of union available when we are willing to come together and move apart, fearlessly.

Safety is knowing.

Intimacy is not-knowing.

Trust is your becoming.

The Care and Feeding of Anxiety

Care and feeding? Of anxiety?

But this feeling is terrible! I don’t want to care for it, I want to annihilate it. Make it stop.

My heart is pounding and I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin. Make. It. Stop.

Energy is blasting thru me like geyser erupting from forces I can’t see or understand! Is this anxiety? Or is it just surging? We surge to meet demand. Even Uber does this. Sometimes the rest of us doesn’t want to come along. Our vital life force energy is waking us up anyway. There is no need to hit snooze. There is a need to notice what’s being demanded.

Energy is fundamentally neutral. Anxiety is what we sometimes call an energetic surge, a turbo boost. It would be a response to danger, if there were danger, but these days it’s more a reaction to an old mental loop. “What fires together, wires together,” goes the old neuropsych saying.

How often do you wire a surge into an anxiety circuit?

The more we choose to adorn a surge with existential dread when no actual, physical danger exists, the more we get to call ourselves “anxious” and the more we allow the misfiring thoughts to wire into identity.

“There’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just an anxious person.”

What if you’re a high-energy person who just doesn’t want the full responsibility for what you’re capable of doing with all that vital force? I mean, that would be a pretty big responsibility, I can see why you’d resist it. As a species though, we kind of need you to paddle onto that wave and stand up. This takes practice. This takes failure. This requires you to let the thoughts be released from the surge.

You can’t outrun the energy you’ve been given. You can expand the capacity of your nervous system until you can receive whatever comes with ease. When we call it a surge, we can soften and expand. When we call it anxiety, we clench and restrict. It’s harder to feel victimized by a surge and a bit easier to feel invigorated by it.

When a surge comes to move you, move. Move toward what is yours to do. Welcome the uncertainty until the next right action becomes clear. Let yourself feel fully overwhelmed. “Overwhelming overwhelms overwhelming…” as Dogen wrote. Which is to say, allow yourself to be engulfed and taste what is engulfing you.

Give it time. Let that all that sensation permeate your stillness. Wait for what it feels like to truly be moved.

If you’re still here, life is holding you. I learned what anxiety was made of by having my existential dread scenarios actually come true. Grief and failure whittled me down. They revealed my true shape, hidden for so long in a block of wood. Everything that fueled my anxiety actually happened. And I was still here. What seemed like a full decade of catastrophes, freed me. There was actually nothing to be afraid of. Surrender really is the most powerful position.

Nothing revives anxiety for me as reliably as procrastination. My body and mind are primed to serve. I’m full of energy. Poised and potentiated for all I am required to do as my essential self in the world. But fuck, what would that mean? What would be required of me after this thing in front of me? Like, another thing? And another thing after that? Wouldn’t that soon be a pile of things? How would I do it all? What if people don’t like it? What if I am not pleasing? What if I am despised? What if I am abandoned? What if I die alone, smelled before I am missed? Does any of it even matter?

I mean, even if we destroy this world, it will rebalance, it’s really just us destroying ourselves. How we treat ourselves ripples out. How we tend our own bodies is how we tend the body of the world. It’s so easy to let one old loop expand into another until I am humming along, alone in my room, tipping over into paralysis, burying myself alive until I am good and dead inside, too numb to move. Anxiety thrives on this black comedy. I’m being devoured by my own self-abandonment. My own reluctance to be responsible for myself and my gifts. I’ve taken the energy given me for the next right action and squandered it. I’ve used it for self-immolation instead of self-compassion. I’ve brought this on myself. I mean, what can I do, I’m just an anxious person, right? How can I dig my way out of this grave grave grave? How can I use the energy given me to show up instead of leaking it all over the place in a squander wander?

I can learn to hold this energy by learning how to regulate my nervous system. I can learn to hold this energy by increasing my nervous system capacity with practice. I can learn to hold this energy by landing in my feet and breathing deep into my belly with very long exhales. By noticing how all that intense sensation is moving through my body without needing anything to be different. What is its texture, temperature, tone? By building my capacity to notice how much energy my system can handle before tipping over into the clench. By committing to expand that capacity. By committing to notice before I react. By noticing the thoughts that encourage the spiral to drill down deeper instead of trying to banish them. By understanding that what I wrestle with, I lend power to. By realizing that I can just let the surge be what it is without the adornment of existential dread.

I invite the surge to dance. As it breathes on my neck, I ask what it wants. The answer is, “Oh, you know.”

Me, all breathless: “Tell me again.”

The Surge: “To help you do your work, dummy. It’s only your resistance that makes it uncomfortable. If you dance with me, we shall delight. If you resist me, you think you’re dying. Because that is what you’re choosing. To deaden yourself against the motion of life. Move with me. Shake that ass. You’re not in charge here, I am. I am here to serve. I’m here to dance. Are you?”

Me: “I want to feel you inside me.”

The Surge: “That’s what I thought.”

Welcome the surge like a lover. I mean, so many underground forces had to gather in the dark for this geyser to erupt inside me. The surge will eventually run its course. It will come, it will go, it will come again. To pathologize the surge is to squander a gift. To welcome the surge and move with it is to open that gift, this present, and all of the potency it is so generously offers. Anxiety by any other name is here to propel you toward what is required. Why are you turning away?

Buddha Pudding

Before Gautama was officially THE BUDDHA, he was an ascetic. Which is some kind of fruitless exercise in separation, if you ask me.

When he first arrived at the fabled Bodhi tree he was sick and weak and nearly dead from the denial of his body that he was convinced was the path to enlightenment. Such is the way of the immature masculine. He thought he could get there by controlling his mind. He thought there was a “there” there.

So Sujata, a milkmaid, comes to the Bodhi tree to make her devoted offering to the tree sprits for giving her a child and a wonderful husband, as she did on the regs. She sees Gautama there, a bag of bones. She thought maybe he was the tree spirit, somehow exiled from the tree itself. Not far off, really.

She went home and filled a golden bowl with rice pudding, as an additional offering, because how miraculous is it when spirit is made flesh? Even when that flesh has been so diminished. She presented him with the pudding, hoping that it would make all his wishes come true, as hers had. 

He ate it.

He was utterly rejuvenated by this feminine offering. To thank her, he threw her golden bowl into the river as a form of divination to determine his next steps. Apparently he didn’t trust his intuition yet.

Thus fortified, he was shortly thereafter enlightened and became the Buddha that we all know and love.

So the story goes.

In all the celebrations of Buddha’s enlightenment, Sujata is rarely mentioned. And nowhere can I find what happened to her bowl after Gautama threw it in the river. I’m guessing he didn’t return it.

I tell you this story of Gautama and Sujata to emphasize how simple life on the path can be if you’re Sujata and how complicated it can seem if you’re Gautama. And yet Gautama’s story is the one we all hear about. The one who made life difficult and then didn’t and then became a historical figure for telling everyone that it’s easy as pudding without giving credit to the woman who gave him the pudding. 

A classic religious trope. 

Let’s not embody it, okay? 

Sometimes things happen that we most definitely don’t want. We lose people, we lose things, we lose money, we lose our golden bowl—but we don’t have to lose our shit. We don’t have to create loss, create failure, create suffering. We can meet and metabolize everything as it comes, as simply (though not always as easily) as we can eat pudding. We can open wide and take it all the way in. We devour the invisible meat of viruses, spores, pollen, and so much more with every breath. We can’t be separate no matter how much we try. We are always devouring and being devoured. Know this. Taste this. Trust this.