Separation, Specialness, and Suffering–Oh My!

Your feeling of separation will be roughly equal to your feeling of specialness.

Your sense of suffering will be roughly equal to your sense of separation.

It will be easy to catastrophize the world’s disinterest in validating your specialness.

Craving external validation widens the separation between your life force and your life.

If you compound the feeling of separation with a lack of self-compassion—if you meet it with self-loathing—it drives the root deeper into your body.

You are not special.

You are not separate.

There’s nothing to fix.

Congratulations!

Separation is the source of suffering. Opening to intimate connection on all levels, from finger to fern, diminishes suffering. You are emerging from the eros of ecology. All the time. Hot, right? Moist, even. Why turn away? You know you at least want to watch.

If you disconnect, delusion echoes and amplifies in the chasm between your life and your life force. Severing from intimacy brings suffering—the more dependent you are on external validation and the more addicted you are to the power generated by your identity turbine, the farther apart your life and your life force become.

People-pleasing kills intimacy. No matter how busy you are at it. No matter how good you think you are from all the nice and pleasing things you do. You can’t outrun separation with busyness, goals, and manipulation (which is what people-pleasing is at its cold, dark heart).

The vital impulse to connect will catch you eventually and slow you down, reminding you that you can connect or die. You can call that depression, or you can see it as a summons to notice how intimately connected you already are.

Is it mental illness or is it a call to notice intimacy with your fellow humans and the more than human world that already always is? How does opening to all that intimacy feel in your body? How does it feel to turn and clench like a special, sullen brat?

All that juicy intimacy might not lead to productivity tho, you unrenewable human resource, so we’ll be happy to medicate that for you.

Why do I care about your capacity for intimacy? Because without it, none of us can reconnect to the eros of ecology and the ordinary joy that the ecology of erotic emergence so effortlessly brings.

Turning away from that connection is quite literally destroying our world. A sense that we have to “go to nature” assumes exile. This is a false view. You are nature. Not separate. You are it and it is you. It’s right in your belly, under the button. Ah, that old womb-tether. Remember? A whole universe of you and not-you in there.

Notice.

More cells within your skin are not human than are human. You’re never alone. Are you creeped out yet? You mind has to work overtime to convince you of separation. Notice the thoughts that pave that pitted road.

Separation is mind-made and separation can be mind un-made. Your brain is not separate from your mind, your mind is not separate from your body, and your body is not separate from the body of the world.

Your shitty relationship with your body, your loathing of your own skin ripples out. Get it together. We don’t have time for you to be squandering your life force on your puckered thighs.

Yeah.

They’re puckered.

You don’t have baby thighs.

That would be weird.

They would be too small to hold up your adult body.

Jiggle your jiggly bits like the grown-ass human you are. Rub them up against another human’s jiggly bits. That’s so much more fun than fretting over things that aren’t going to change in your preferred direction this lifetime.

Might as well ditch the preference because you need your adorably dimpled thighs to carry you toward compassionate action.

Stroke those thighs. Stroke that oracular p*ssy. Stroke that regal c*ck. Welcome yourself back into your body and the body of the world.

Hi.

Nice to see you.

It’s been awhile.

You’re just in time, hopefully.

The suffering you create is the suffering you endure and the suffering you continue to create and endure.

We don’t have anymore time to squander on that childish shit. Grow up. We need each other whole, adult, mature. I know, I know, mature is an insult in our consumptive culture. Capital idea, devouring the young and plump.

Who wants mature skin? You should really inject that giant shameful organ with botulism, amirite? Again, grow up. Mature lands right in that sweet spot between birth and death. Those potent twin portals! Mmmmmiddle age. Let that radiant paradox light you right the f*ck up. Go to the supermarket like that.

When we see ourselves and our relationships as nouns, roles we perform and the audience we perform them for, we stultify the ecosystem of relationship.

What is your greatest responsibility?

It’s not to store or hoard or claim a noun, but to embody the verbs between the nouns.

It’s not just your partner or your child that is your responsibility, but how you show up in that relationship. How you respond in mutual presence. How present and full you are capable of being. How generously and lovingly you are allowing yourself to emerge from that system. How willing you are to be shaped by that system instead of trying to control it. How deep and clear and self-replenishing your well is.

That is your biggest responsibility.

Tick the box. Kid. Check. Partner. Check. House. Check. Food. Check. Job. Check. Nouns are a solid matter. Verbs are dynamic and always in relationship. They report how we are moving with life. You can stash nouns in a storage unit. You have to be present for verbs.

You don’t need to find your place or purpose in this world. You are already in place and there is your purpose.

The first place to be is in your body. Everything ripples out from there. Far and wide. If you keep grabbing at something “out there” you’re only wandering farther and farther from home. Easy to get lost out there and there are definitely bears.

Boundaries

Setting and holding boundaries is the most essential form of self-care.

“No, thank you,” and “I’m not available for that,” Are great boundary-setting phrases for low stakes, baby step scenarios. Practice saying them out loud until they fall out of your mouth effortlessly. Now sing them. Doesn’t that feel good? Do it again, so everyone can hear you.

Boundaries are not for controlling anyone else’s behavior. Boundaries are for letting someone else know the parameters of your skin and that they will not be allowed to get under it. Boundaries aren’t walls, they’re a statement of skin. You don’t confuse skin and walls irl, do you? Only one of them is rather nice to bang your head against.

We are all interdependent and reliant on connection. People pleasing and other forms of seeking external validation are not connection, though that mistake is common as greed.

Boundaries beget belonging.

Does that sound counterintuitive?  

They enable us to approach all manner of situations with fearless intimacy, because we trust ourselves. Your ability to set boundaries is your ability to have your own back. To not abandon yourself. You’re not waiting to be rescued. You understand that safety’s overrated anyway. You are willing to be fully alive.

Once you consent to that risky business you realize that you’ve been part of the whole wide world all along. You open to the breeze on your skin. You taste the mushroom. You make like a blade of grass, inseparable.

Boundaries are your emotional immune system. They protect you from foreign bodies that would invade your system, deplete vitality, and make you ill.

Boundaries are your interface with the world, not your interference with it. Fence your field well, keep the fucking litterbugs out, and lovelier people will appear at the gate. That sounds magical because it is.

Boundaries aren’t just given by us, they also need to be received by us. Part of boundary mastery is taking in and respecting someone else’s “no”. This can be especially tricky for people who like to rescue—they are sure they know better. Saying no can feel threatening, bringing up all manner of fears around confrontation.

What if they don’t like you anymore?

What if they think you’re a terrible selfish asshole?

If you need someone to tell you you’re a good person, they’ll manipulate you for as long as you let them.

Be prepared for loss. The upside is that it won’t be a loss of self. There is no greater pain over time than the pain of self-abandonment. However, when you start setting and holding boundaries, you will probably lose people. You will see who was only interested in your yes. It can still be hard to lose them. There will be grief that will have to be met with a soft front and a strong back. Let grief do it’s dissolutions until there is nothing left of you but human being.

Some people will just need to step back and squint so they can see you fresh, get a good look at where you’re standing now. Some people will walk away and find themselves a new supply of validation. Some people will keep violating until they feel consequences. Some people will be so happy for you, that they will relish your ‘no’ as they have been loving you and waiting for you to stand up straight for years now.

If you’re offering love where it can’t or won’t be received, keep taking steps backwards until you are where love can be received. You might find yourself in a stand of birches. Just be there.

Boundaries have no force in them at all and they hold a lot of power. If you go to set a boundary with someone and you feel resentment, pity, anger, contempt, or even glee or any other high energy state, you’re not in a place to set a boundary. Boundaries are best communicated from a grounded place of clarity and connection. De-escalate your charged state through the body using a much longer exhale than inhale for as long as needed so you can state your boundary cleanly while staying calm and connected.

You know what’s hard? Holding boundaries with your own preferential thoughts and habits. It takes a lot of skill to set and hold boundaries between your Big Essential Self and your little egoic self and be responsible for enforcing and accepting those consequences.

How do you notice a boundary violation (usually a preference—“BUT I WANNA!”) from your little egoic self against the truth of your Big Essential Sefl?

The body discerns the difference.

Always go back to the body.

A habitual trauma response will pass and shift as you welcome and stay present with it. After all, it’s not happening now. It’s an energetic relic.

A summoning by your life force will persist.

If you have a tendency to self-abandon, there might be flushes of anger as you start to set boundaries. You will begin to see how much of your life you have squandered trying to be “good” and appease people so they will tell you you are “good”.

If you have a tendency to self-abandon, find where you like it. Be brutally honest with yourself about the charge you get. Do you get a thrill in being relieved of responsibility for yourself?

Is it a bit of a self-annihilating kink for you?

Does being held down in your own shadow feel like release?

Are you more habituated to this thrill than holding a boundary?

This work is not all love and light. That’s a pretty good baseline, but first we have jungle to excavate. There’s untold treasure there. The treasure you were born with.

How To Be Too Much

“I’m too much,” is an old story I told myself about myself. Feeling like “too much” was the paradoxical companion of feeling like I was not enough.  A paradox is not a problem. It’s a potent field with lots to notice. Ricocheting between the poles of too much and not enough, trying and failing to control myself, convinced of my brokenness, I felt there was plenty to hide.

Here, look at this sparkler!

“Too much” is distraction and defense. You won’t be able to see me if I’m swinging a sparkler around and that was just the way I wanted it. I found myself leaking energy all over the place, eager to find someone, anyone, everyone other than myself to hold what I could not.

Nothing sincere is ever too much, no matter the vivid volume. But when the ego is so busy trying to please, save, seduce, blame, and otherwise manipulate some food into its belly, it’s hard for sincerity to break through the sludge.

Confidence arises from the ability to fearlessly face the ego’s neediness, even when it feels unbearable.  The love my ego grabs at outside of me, is already in me. Not until I notice that I’m already full can I sincerely share. If I believe something’s missing, I’m constantly grabbing at anything I can to fill that hole. That’s addiction and it’s not just for addicts.

If I can BE the hole, just abide in emptiness, I fill like a self-replenishing well.

Does that sound mysterious or just uncomfortable? I find it easier when I approach the hole with spacious awareness, then I get a real good sense of how it fills. I come to trust this.

Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum, she embraces it. Emptiness, when we notice it, is as elusive as balance. There but for a moment before ripening into something else. Which means I don’t have to force-feed myself or anyone else. The grab and clench is insatiable, because what I would fill is already squeezed shut by the grabbing and the clenching. This is how to become a hungry ghost. Always too much and never enough. The hungry ghost can get no nourishment.

I went from having shame around being “too much” to wearing it as a badge of honor: “You better fucking believe I’m too much, and here’s some more!” But if I really want to connect, expressing myself that way is insincere.  I had to learn to be right-sized and tempered by self-compassion, which will spill out all over the place if you let it. That’s a generous sort of spill. Very different from the self-centered mess of leaking.

There’s value in having the skill to modulate my expression, to wield my energy with agility so I can be responsive and better received. If my full expression just shuts people down, what am I really in service to? Not connection. And if I’m not really connecting, I’m not in service to anything at all.

Being responsible means learning how to hold anything and everything that comes through me. Not hold it in, clenching; but hold it steady, soft. Let everything I am becoming rest within my skin, expanding it, allowing it grow more permeable.

Being responsible is not asking anyone else to hold what I won’t. I don’t throw parts of myself that I can’t or won’t love at other people like a ragged hot potato. Anymore. I used to do that a lot. “Here, hold this thing I think is shitty about myself and prove to me that it’s not. You’re my lover/partner/friend/family. Validate me! That’s your job!”

No, it’s not. It’s no one’s job to validate you. Witness you? Sure. Validate you? No. And if they did? Then what? Like an insatiable hungry ghost, you’d just be back for more tomorrow. No one can transmit confidence to you. No one can transmit self-compassion to you. No one can rescue you. No one can oppress you. The only thing anyone can do is witness you noticing where you are blocking what is already there and point out some clogs you’ve missed. You find compassion in yourself, for yourself, and let it spill. Not until you open enough to give it can you really begin to receive it from anyone else.

When you allow self-compassion your life force starts to flow unabated again and you can see that you are a ridiculous, flawed, and sovereign human. Responsible. Powerful. Loving. Free. There’s never been too much of that, but here’s hoping.