Emotion Toolkit.com

Death
is to think oneself
too broken for love.

She gallops into the burning barn,
where the future is a black concrete wall,
and random memories are rusted iron spikes,
of beauties lost, impaling,
of ill chosen words, severing veins,
and thinking is a mirror
of one’s contorted face.

Because this is where she must go
to enter the golden gate.
Because the bottomless pit,
the infinite darkness,
is the portal,
god’s gaping mouth.
Because resistance
to the chance of entering this abyss
is the wall between oneself and
light.

At the event horizon,
she is outside his periphery and
exiled from touch.
She is ugly, a mutated calf
with missing legs
and oozing skin, a source of misery
to the farm,
best put down.
She is unwanted,
yanked into the eddies
to drown
while they stand and watch.
She, a dark dusty little planet,
is on her way
to being nothing.

On the other side
of Kali
after one has disintegrated
into a million pieces of dust
and the dust has dissolved
into the ether of souls,
and finally,
after this journey of eons, one
loves
the emptiness,
a billion stars illuminate hell.

From the singularity
a fractal procession,
photons marching
in a whirl of spite,
merging into molecules of light,
self-creating, self-sustaining,
drawing others close,
she rematerializes
whole.

Before, she sought a sun
to illuminate and warm her surface,
but now she glows
from the core of her being,
a life-giving star.

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
~ Anais Nin

In the world of friendship, perception is everything.  There are certain ironies and paradoxes in how people interact.  For instance, Dale Carnegie suggested that the best way to get someone to like you is to like them.  And there’s a tendency to make fixed judgments about people, but the personalities and dispositions of others are influenced by our judgments of them. 

The most important lessons I’ve learned about friendship over the years:

(1) Assume the best.

Always assume that your friend has good intentions and values love, compassion, and forgiveness.  Always assume that you matter and that you are loved and appreciated, even when it’s not coming across.  If you assume the best, you’ll often soon see proof of it, or you’ll bring it out in them.  People have a deep need for others to see the good in them and recognize when they’re expressing love and appreciation. 

“There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person’s eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living.” 
~ Don Marquis

“The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, adapted

“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.”
~ E. M. Forster

(2) Go with the natural cycles and preserve the capacity to be alone.

There are natural cycles in the intensity of engagement, an ebb and flow in the level at which people focus their attention on a friendship.  When you’re out of phase (one person is flowing and the other ebbing), that can be difficult (see #1), but if you can get in phase, that can be really satisfying. 

Also, if you forget how to be alone, not in the sense of being isolated and disconnected but of feeling your own presence and inner strength and wisdom and enjoying your own company, without this it becomes difficult to be a true friend.   

“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.”
~ Elizabeth Foley

“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.”
~ Simone Weil

(3) It’s not you.  And it’s not them.

If you consistently feel as though there is something wrong with you, it’s possible that the friendship is simply a bad match (or at least a bad match in that area).  People relate in all sorts of different ways as a result of cultural background, relationship history, and a million other reasons.  Harmony, understanding, and social pleasure are not possible with everyone.  What one person judges negatively (e.g., sensitivity, reticence, sharing of insights) could be absolutely beautiful to someone else.

Conversely, if you feel as though there is something wrong with the other person, perhaps it’s not them.  Perhaps the friendship is simply a bad match, but staying friends out of a sense of obligation is just plain awful. 

“A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations.  People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.”
~ Bertrand Russell 

(4) Focus on what you’re giving not what you’re getting.

If you feel spurned, excluded, or unloved, there is a very good chance that your focus is on what you’re getting rather than what you’re giving.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but shifting focus on what you’re giving, even if it feels asymmetrical, always and quite paradoxically makes it suddenly possible to see and feel that you are in fact loved and appreciated. 

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

(5) Seek those with whom you can be vulnerable.

The depth of a friendship is limited by the extent to which you can share those aspects of yourself that fall short of your ideal: your weaknesses, flaws, sadnesses and frustrations, and those awful emotions like jealousy and anger.  A true friend accepts these things while not making them worse.  In the space of nonjudgment and tenderness, you feel safe to open up and really see these things in yourself, and this makes it ever so much more possible to improve (especially if your friend assumes the best in you, see #1).  If you can’t experience the full range of emotions with your friend, in what other context can you be human?  If you can’t be vulnerable, see #3 above.

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

(6) Never underestimate a friend’s sensitivity.

I’ve always had this prejudice that people are thick skinned and invulnerable, but I’ve seen again and again that the little things I do and say can in fact hurt a person’s feelings.  People deserve the utmost gentleness and tenderness.  If things must be brought up, best to start lightly, with a little tap (and see #1), before resorting to a sledge hammer.

A thought experiment:

Let us say that, as an enlightened soul (meaning, a consciousness standing outside of time and space, connected to everything and capable of dreaming anything), you take upon yourself the task of weaving into this tapestry of human existence the thread of a human life that will result in a most beautiful, awakened work of art, the cessation of suffering in those who cross your path, and light and love and joy.

What if everything that you are in this small thread, everything you’ve done and said, even your confusion and grief, have perfectly served this purpose?  Suppose there are “enlightened beings” who choose to forget who they are, because somehow this forgetting serves the purpose of relieving suffering and awakening others.  They choose amnesia, confusion, and turmoil, because this is the precise causal thread that would weave an overall pattern of love and light. 

Suppose our small selves are like a spider who knows only to move to the next beam of silk.  He just keeps going in circles and seems to get nowhere, but he is following the exact narrow compulsion necessary to create a vast spiral that will capture the most insects.  And you are capturing hearts and minds in a net of awakening, even if your spider self seems to be traveling a fruitless path.

Look back on things you’ve done, hypothetically in this light, back to regrets, perseverative impulses and instincts from the obviously ineffective to the subtle strategies of the mind, everything that seems inarguably wrong and bad, injurious or thoroughly not okay.  Has the cosmos gone awry?  Has your soul mission gone askew?  Has your bodhisattva vow been postponed, set to take effect at a later date?

Or, could there be in this vast perplexing tapestry a burning need for the precise thread of your life, even its knots and frayed ends?  For every supposed mistake or seemingly foolish act, while our little spider eyes see only the simple, immediate consequences, the true effects reach into the oceanic depths of existence where unimaginably complex currents of life and consciousness swirl and flow and ebb, throbbing to the pulse of the One that is the light shining throughout the abyss, and what returns to the surface is that which was originally intended by your deepest self but ignorant of the “how.”  Healing, love, and unadulterated joy. 

In our small fumblings, we may cause pain while at the same time, with the same motion, sowing the seeds of healing and joy.  There are no words to trace this or express this, because the story line exceeds the usual dimensions.  There is only the need to trust who you are, already perfect in every way, perfect even in your perceptions of imperfection.

An ancient proverb states that many of those we call heroes are simply those who lack the courage to be a coward.

I recently saw the movie “The Return,” a 2003 Russian film about two boys whose tyranical father returns after twelve years to take them on a fishing trip. The ambience throughout the movie is stereotypically Russian: harsh, gray, drab. In the first scene, the boys are leaping from a tower into a cold lake far below. The youngest boy is too full of fear to jump. He sits in the tower for hours after the others leave until his mother comes for him. The other boys call him a chicken. However, when the abusive father shows up and wisks them away on the fishing trip, the older boy offers him unquestioned loyalty while the youngest rebels, stealing a fishing knife with plans to defend himself. Eventually, stranded on an island, he runs to a nearby tower and climbs to the top out of spite. His father attempts to reach him and falls to his death.

The two boys responded very differently to danger depending on the type of danger. There is the danger of injuring oneself and the danger of being seen as a coward. One may strive to be brave, as in relationships, to choose love instead of fear, but it’s not always clear whether a given road represents the way of love or simply a fear of being afraid.

The first time I went skiing, fifteen years ago at Lake Tahoe, I spent the first half of the day learning to glide slowly down the bunny slopes before my boyfriend took me to the diamond slopes (intermediate advanced) and set me in front of the moguls. I was so terrified, I eventually had to be escorted down the hill on a snowmobile. My boyfriend was very disappointed in me, which only intensified my shame. The second time I went skiing, a few years later, I started on the moderate slopes which were so dramatically less scary that I was soon flying full speed ahead straight down the hills like a maniac. I had no fear at all. Soon, however, I wiped out. I didn’t hurt myself, but I was startled by the sudden awareness that I could in fact get hurt. After that, I was more cautious. I eventually reached a state of equilibrium, a balance between enjoyment and fear.

Being afraid is not a pleasant experience, but it can keep you from slamming head first into a pine tree or falling off a cliff. Rather than suppressing it, it takes courage to be afraid.

A short film about the power of positive regard:

Jungian psychologist, Robert A. Johnson, wrote in his autobiography:

When I praise India to friends, I often tell people about esoteric things such as the quality of the light, and it’s true the sunrise looks different there, which may have to do with something as mundane as the humidity or the polllution in the air.  In truth, it is not the light, the heat, or the humidity that bathes me in warmth in India, it is the people.  America is, collectively speaking, an extroverted culture that prizes rational thought above all else and values people accordingly.  We also place a high value on material things and how much money one can collect, and in that way we are a very sensate culture.  Our thinking and sensation functions have brought the scientific, technological, and mechanical aspects of existence to an apex in the West, of which we are justly proud.  But we have done this at the expense of our feeling.  Practically everyone in the West becomes lonely, discontented, and uneasy because our capacity for feeling is in a terrible state of disrepair–worse than India’s roads. 

Politicians and officials lament the loss of family values in American society and rack their brains trying to figure out how to repair our social order.  Perhaps the root of the problem is that our feeling function is nearly bankrupt.  As an individual, I have spent much of my professional life working as a therapist to help patients develop and gain access to their feelings.  I am, by birth, an introverted, feeling person–just the opposite of what is prized in American culture.  One of the things I want to argue with God when I get the chance is this: Why on earth did you drop someone like me into that kind of family, in that kind of society, and in that century?  I was a total misfit!

In any case, in India I was in the majority for the first time in my life, for the culture favors introversion and feeling… I felt a kinship to the people and the culture there.  And after arriving on Indian soil I gradually understood why I was continually bursting with happiness: my feeling sense and my quiet, introverted nature were respected and even valued.  I also found the people there to be much happier than I had ever encountered before.  In the days and weeks ahead, I would find peasants in rural villages with greater contentment than most Americans I know.

So, for the most part, I’ve been feeling swell.  I mean really truly happy, like how did this happen?  My perspective on life and on my relationships in particular has transformed into something quite stably positive.  I’ve had less attachment to my own identity, less sensitivity to rejection or exclusion as I understand that what I value most is to simply go with the flow and be what I can from wherever I am.  I’m like, I’m getting into this!  It’s sticking, and it feels really good.  I feel larger than myself, part of something bigger, released from some sort of ego shell, not afraid to run into the fire and die in love.  Trust has grown and grown, until I can’t help but trust, as over and over again I see just how taken care of I am in every moment, how everything that happens falls into a larger pattern of love and oneness.  I’m high on life.

Insert sound of screeching record needle.  Every now and then, perhaps maybe once every couple of weeks, my bike hits a pebble in the road so to speak, and even though it’s just a little pebble, I’m thrown off and hit the ground hard.  Maybe two hours or maybe ten, I feel small again, cut off.  My mind falls into old habits of thinking, old ways of seeing things, as my body aches with sadness and grief, disappointment, embarrassment and regret. 

The Old Perspective

My old perspective is not so much a set of beliefs as a focus of attention on certain perceptions, which include:

• The absence of social contact in that moment and the desire for physical affection (which is often triggered by physical pain, like the flu or fibromyalgia)
• Ways in which I’ve hurt other people (coupled with a distrust that all things make sense in the end)
• Personal failures or things I’ve done that make me look bad or unworthy of company (coupled with sudden amnesia for accomplishments and positive qualities)
• Ways in which events did not follow my expectations, or wonderful things I anticipated that turned out quite differently

I remain fully aware of how my old perspective pales in contrast with my new one, and how I have repeatedly switched from the old to the new with great success.  I can feel the inaccuracy of it, and my sadness feels unnecessary, yet it persists.

Switching Frameworks

Entering the old perspective is less like adopting a belief and more like switching modes from one network or framework of perception to another.  Like seeing the contrasting shape in an optical illusion (like the Necker cube or the two facial profiles that form a vase). 

However, my attempts to exit the old perspective usually involve the gradual (teeth clenching) introduction of individual beliefs (e.g., “I’m good enough.  I’m smart enough.  And gosh darn it, people like me”).  This works sometimes.  But it’s like trying to see the vase between the two facial profiles by pointing to individual elements and saying, “Well that part is the top of the vase.  That part is the lip of the opening, and there’s the bottom.”  Again, that helps a little.  But the most effective means of changing perspective is to look at the situation holistically and just SEE the other pattern in front of you.  To just see it there, still there as an equally if not more legitimate way of perceiving what is there.

The Benefits of Reverting

I did a decent job of coming to.  It gets easier, sometimes.  But there is something even more important about this whole experience, something that I’ve been missing up until this point.  I keep thinking that every time I enter my old modes of perception, it means that I’ve failed.  But actually, I think it’s the opposite. 

What seems to strengthen my new perspective is not simply the process of having it but the process of entering it.  The act of moving from the old perspective to the new perspective, of making that shift, gives greater strength and definition to the new way of seeing things.  Perhaps this is then a natural and beneficial process in the development of a new paradigm.  Not only do we gain perceptual flexibility and the agility to change our perspective at will, which is important if you want to approach life intelligently, but we further solidify the perspective that makes the most sense and proves most rewarding.

Perhaps oscillating between the two perspectives is exactly what has to happen in order to properly give birth and establish the new one.  Having a bad day, or a bad night, going back to bad feelings you thought you overcame, is maybe then not a bad thing at all, not a failure at all, but an experiment of sorts, a process of contrasting and comparing, an opportunity to emerge once again into the viewpoint you know better nourishes you.  If that is true, what feels like a step back is really a step forward.

Is self-assuredness always a vice?  Think carefully.  The answer gets to the heart of what it means to have worth and love the world.

Over the years, I’ve recognized a blatant, rampant, sometimes flambuoyant and borderline-irreverent sense of self-assuredness in my approach to psychology and emotion research.  I never felt above anyone or better than anyone.  In fact, I’ve been more prone to feel lower, less worthy, and less like I belong.  I value humility to the point of self-denigration, and I’ve been in a constant battle to destroy my own self-assuredness by actively absorbing others’ doubts in my abilities.

I’m also a one-man-band when it comes to research.  I have my own ideas, which I’ve been pursuing for more than a decade.  Most of my colleagues seem to find my ideas counterintuitive.  Some find them ludicrous.  Very few have supported my endeavors, and even fewer have wholeheartedly agreed with me.

And yet, the theoretical model I’ve proposed for years is now published in someone else’s paper along with intriguing experimental evidence.  Even more bitterly, I had proposed a nearly identical experiment a couple of years ago, but the reaction was one of constrained disapproval.  I’m still recovering from the impact.  Rather, I’m still trying to determine the full impact.

Some consequences… I’ve deeply questioned my worth as a researcher, my place in the field of psychology, my ability to contribute something of value to the world.  Intellectually, I know it can’t be that bad, but I’m still in shock.  Still.  I’ve been doing this for eleven years.  That’s a long time to be devoted to one goal, struggling to be heard, frustrated that no one would listen long enough to realize I was saying something important.

Yet, one thing I am learning is that if you are brave enough to pursue an idea or a goal from within your own heart, one that you know deep down is important, self-assuredness is critical.  Maybe you’re wrong, or maybe you’re not entirely correct, but you can scrutinize the accuracy of your ideas without abandoning your faith in yourself.  I was succeeding at that for the most part, I think, but over time, I can see that I did abandon some goals when I felt unsupported. 

Anyone who endeavors to contribute something truly new or have truly original ideas must inevitably face threats to self-assuredness.  There’s a tendency in society to squelch anyone who departs too far from the beaten path, especially if they look inexperienced.  Despite a decade of obsessive contemplation and readings on the topic, I’m sure as a graduate student I looked like I shouldn’t know anything.

Self-assuredness offers comfort when moral support is nowhere to be found.  It creates a capsule of belonging when you don’t really belong anywhere, which is exactly the case when you struggle to do something really new.  When I feel self-assured, I feel as though my sense of belonging is greater than the small group or facility immediately housing me.  I feel a sense of belonging to the earth, to higher goals of truth and love.  I feel a committment to making the world a better place regardless of how it receives me.  When my self-assuredness is crushed, I become sensitive to how the world receives me, and as a result, my love for everything is stifled. 

I don’t think I can give what I believe I have to give without self-assuredness to see me through.  And so I’ve decided to value that quality in me.  If you have a problem with that, well you can keep it to yourself (wink).