It's complicated

 

I’ve been noticing a lot of lingering purity-and perfectionism-chasing in myself. I started really noticing this earlier in the year and have been trying to let it go, but it keeps coming up in different ways. I noticed it even in my last few blog posts about Benjamin Franklin and poop-train education. I’ve reread them several times, and I wonder and worry how they come across, particularly the one about money. I haven’t given away all my money; I feel confused about money and privilege on an almost daily basis. I also don’t know how to reconcile the reality of teaching and education with my values. I write such blog posts as a way to remind myself what I value and aspire to—and perhaps build in some accountability—, since it feels so easy to lose sight of amidst the everyday chaos of life, but I worry, actually, that such posts are just condescending and make people I love feel bad. I buy things on the internet. I ignore requests for money from strangers when I feel overwhelmed and caught up in my own world. I get really caught up in the surface-level, just like everyone else. And actually, to pretend otherwise almost seems like denying my humanity; I’m NOT “pure” and I don’t believe that anyone is “good” or “bad,” including myself. It’s true that I’ve been reconsidering my teaching career in light of thoughts I wrote about in my last blog post (and many more); I’ve many times felt like the only right thing to do is to stop teaching and therefore refuse the inherent power dynamics. It’s unclear to me how helpful such an idea is, and how much I’m just stoking my own inner sense of ‘specialness’ or purity rather than actually committing myself to living in right relationship. I do think there’s something there, and that revolutionizing education or any institution requires white and otherwise privileged people to give up power on a large scale, but I don’t want to lead my life or form my intentions out of an inner striving to be ‘good’ and ‘worthy.’ It feels like a tenuous and small sort of orientation towards working towards social justice, which really should be about groups and communities of people struggling and creating together, not out of a missing inner feeling of goodness, but because it makes sense and because it’s actually easy and natural to want happiness and peace and safety for all people when we step back and slow down. It can come out of compassion, for self and for others, and a realistic sense of how much any one person can (or should) do on their own. 

 I don’t know how I feel about those posts or about the way that they seem to position me; I feel that the ideas and intentions are worth putting out there, but I in no way feel absolute certainty about any of it (outside of a more general and unshakeable conviction that we all deserve better than the systems we have) , and I feel that they belie my own contradictions and the imperfect way I show up in the world. Martyrdom can feel like such a seductive approach; it’s simultaneously a way to ‘erase’ or cancel one’s privilege (which, by the way, can’t happen), and also a sort of hail-mary born of a noxious combination of perfectionism, urgency, and desperation. Maybe if I flagellate myself so much that I no longer have to take responsibility for my privilege or my actions? That’s sort of what it can feel like. Like, if I stop teaching or if I give all my money away, then I’ve really done it (whatever “It” is), and I’m finished with it all (and I got an “A”). All accounts settled. It’s really, really easy for me to think this way. I feel like that black-and- white- thinking easily nestles into the larger white, colonialist savior framework which entails people in power “helping” the disenfranchised, often without any input or feedback, and emerging as heroes. The harder thing, actually, is to commit to living responsibly, responsively, compassionately, AND imperfectly in an ongoing way, both to oneself and to others. To committing to living in the nuance, the grays, and the real-life relationships and contexts that we are enmeshed in while still fighting for liberation. This means flexibility, openness, and a capacity to be with the complexity of what actually is happening, even when we might not fully understand it. Most difficult for me, might be a willingness to see and treat myself as worthy of love, respect, and nuanced consideration and by extension, other white and class-privileged people like me. It’s almost like how we treat ourselves matters and maybe ripples out to how we treat everyone else.

 This quest for purity shows up in a lot of parts of my life. I was lucky enough to go on a three-week silent self-retreat in November through my involvement with Common Ground Meditation Center. Sometimes I’m unsure of my expectations (the wily and perfectionistic bunch that they usually are), but it became apparent that one of them was the very special expectation that I’d be the ‘perfect retreatant.’ This very vague idea seemed to entail sitting for exactly six times a day without exception, never eating past noon, and you know, not doing other shady things that perfect retreatants never do, like taking naps or getting distracted. The retreat center itself had very few rules and only a few specified times per day of sitting as a group; the rest of the time was mine to fill. I also had the more invisible and deeper-laid expectation of solving all my life problems, such as what I’m going to do about teaching, for example. I strictly obeyed my inner marching orders for the first few days as my knees and lower back throbbed and my stomach growled with hunger. Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, I helpfully reminded myself as I sat for hours a day. Throughout the days, my mind fell into mini hell-realms of suppressed emotion and wild, frantic thoughts. I woke up in the middle of the night, wide-awake and nicely-prepared for a panic attack. I NEED TO SLEEP, I told myself, eyes wide-open at 2:15am. I WON’T BE ABLE TO SIT FOR SIX HOURS TOMORROW IF I’M TIRED. I lay awake for hours, hating it, struggling against it. I did everything I was supposed to, dutifully sitting when I was supposed to sit, walking when I was supposed to walk, all the while wondering where all the softness and love that I had previously discovered in meditation—the reason I was even on this retreat— was nowhere to be found.

 A week in, I had a practice check-in call with a wonderful teacher. I was all ready to report how ‘good’ I had been in addition to asking some probably unhelpful questions such as, am I sitting enough each day, and, actually, can you give me a specific number that I can blindly follow? Instead, I surrendered some sense of control, and told them that I had been struggling a lot—it was like I was putting in so much effort all the time even while all the dharma talks and guided meditations were telling me to relax—, that it all felt a bit sterile and unfriendly, that I was being attacked by crazy-making thought loops, and that I was noticing a lot coming up around food. “It’s only this moment that we need to take care of”, they said first; “we just need to care for and respond to this moment”. We talked about the difficulty of retreats and food for people who have had eating disorders or body dysmorphia, something that they had also experienced. They told me that I should really strive to not lose any weight on retreat, that I should go eat illicit bananas every hour, and most importantly, that what I really need to work on, for my practice, is breaking rules. “Ilse, you need to expand your idea of practice. I want you to break a rule everyday.” I exhaled quietly after the words evaporated, feeling some sharp things breaking loose inside of me. I believe that they were referring to the retreat center’s rules, but being that there were so few and that it was actually such a spacious container, this instruction felt like it was squarely about breaking my own rules (of which there seemed to be many!). 

 After that conversation, my scope of my practice expanded. While, nominally, it seemed to still be about sitting and walking and paying attention, it actually swelled to include everything that I was experiencing and feeling; it started to include reality as it actually was in the moment. The practice became more about how I was supporting and responding to myself; I was able to see that the initial sterility of the retreat was something that I had been enforcing and that I actually had access to the warmth and love that I needed. How I treat myself actually matters; how I actually treat myself matters, and especially when no one is looking, I thought with clarity one day. I was eating dinner now, taking more naps, wrapping myself in blankets when I needed some extra comfort, and accepting the fact that I would indeed be tired and sometimes fall asleep while sitting (and that this didn’t signify anything morally-loaded; it was just sleepiness). I sometimes would walk outside instead of sit in the meditation hall, which felt much more supportive when I had low energy. I sometimes even forgot to count how many sits I did a day. It was all so morally neutral. And, I started noticing the sometimes absurd amount of effort that I put into something that was apparently supposed to be about relaxing, allowing, and simplicity. It all felt like less of a struggle, more of a movement towards accepting reality as it is and myself as I am, sleepiness, anxiety, unfinished business, wild thoughts and all. 

 I didn’t necessarily come away from the retreat as a ‘better’ meditator or yogi, although I certainly have the sore knees and back as proof of many hours on a cushion. I have felt really distracted and sometimes confused since coming back, wishing I didn’t feel so far away from the quiet and simplicity of the retreat center, but I also feel less willing to criticize myself for it. Of course I feel less mindful, honey; just look around at what it’s like right now, I whispered to myself, as I started to reintegrate into the complication of my relationships and activities. I’m still feeling pretty sensitive after three weeks of heightened mindfulness, and so I’ve started to notice so many more purity and perfection tests emerging throughout my days, so many small ways that I fail to reach unrealistic expectations that I have for myself, and that sort of fog of shame that descends on me each time. 

 And just as there was no grand conclusion on any of my ‘life problems’, I have no grand conclusion for any of this. I just know that I felt a lot of tension writing and reading my recent blog posts, feeling like I was only allowed to be consistent and stick to one thing. Like there’s only space for me to be a moral absolutist about money, even while in practice, I feel unsure and complicated about it and so many other things. There’s this tenderness—what I felt welling up during the second half of my retreat—that seems able to hold all of it: the convictions and intentions that I fully-heartedly believe and aspire towards; and the inconsistencies, and the uncertainty—basically just all of my messy humanity. And, the desire to bring these parts into conversation with one another, even though it feels difficult and unwieldy. I know that I often feel fairly difficult and unwieldy as a person experiencing myself, but I want to somehow be connected to it all: the Ilse that wants to give away all of her privilege and the Ilse that needs safety, love, and acceptance. I know that all of my selves actually work together to seek individual and collective liberation, healing, love and happiness. And that, maybe, the willingness to open to not-knowing, rather than a dogmatic fleeing into what’s ‘pure’ or ‘bad’ provides a ground for the self-compassion necessary to continue. 

 My teacher once said that, given how hard it is to be a human being much of the time, kindness is really the only appropriate response.