Let the pendulum swing

You might need to do a bit of to and fro before your swing becomes a gentle sway.

We have invented so many cliché idioms in English to describe the nature of of our turbulent feelings and how we shouldn’t upset them. Something is an emotional rollercoaster, there are ups and downs, you don’t want to rock the boat or it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie or you shouldn’t poke the bear. I contend, through my own experience, that you should be poking all the bears you can possibly find, prodding their bellies and pinching their noses and really pissing them off, and partying like it’s 1999 on that boat, making it a real celebration. Only when you have consciously disturbed what has settled throughout your life can you begin to welcome the peace.

I tend to drift between extremes but not in the way that you’d diagnose it as a mental condition. Your capacity for joy is equal to your capacity for sorrow and the more deeply you can go into one emotion, the more deeply you can express the opposite side of it. It‘s like the rollercoaster cliché — the higher you climb the bigger the drop will be and depending on what state of mind you’re in that can chill your bones or excite your soul. That’s how I’ve felt it as I’ve explored my existence in these past four years. Some days are so intensely sad that I’m barely functional and drifting in and out of painful sobbing fits; others are so insanely happy and blissful and I’m positively glowing.

You can’t do it alone, you were never supposed to do it alone!

The key to doing this is always consciousness, because if you’re fully aware of what you’re doing and where you might be headed, then you are in a much stronger position to come out of it in one piece, or without partying too hard and falling overboard. That’s the danger we avoid by leaving certain things undisturbed, and why it’s important to understand that it’s okay to bring a therapist, some other professional, or someone you really trust to be supportive, along for the ride with you. You can’t do it alone, you were never supposed to! They’re the people who have already gone through this and can see when enough is enough and you need to come back down to earth again, and they will repeatedly remind you that it’s okay to swing back and forth so extremely while you’re finding your own rhythm.

This is an aspect of self-help writing that I think is often edited out. You can read The Power of Now or many of Osho’s books and what you are receiving is the experience of someone who has already found their enlightenment and, on some level, has forgotten what it feels like to do everything it takes to reach that point. The trauma, the addiction, the temptation, whatever it is. It’s absolutely true that consciousness and meditation is a beautiful solution to many problems — take your mind out of the picture and go into your body and your will have a completely different reaction to what you normally would—but there are so many misconceptions about meditation and the spiritual aspect of it (such that it is also called mindfulness in order to strip out the spiritual) that it’s quite dangerous to plant that seed and allow it to grow unattended. You’re responsible for that seed. Those words that were meant one way can easily be changed into something else because when you’re writing about these things you have no idea what state of mind someone is in when they’re reading the final result.

I spent a couple of years operating on the completely incorrect assumption that embracing aloneness means to grow content with the idea that there might never be a woman in my life who can love me as a man, be my partner, my wife, whatever. It created such a dissonance that I wasn’t really aware of until this last week when it exploded out in frustration: how can these people who have all experienced happy relationships before enjoying being by themselves really tell someone that they can skip all of that and go straight to the end result? These books talking about being alone and loving yourself spoke to me in a way that suggested that experiencing relation and connection was less important than just finding a way to be happy and kind of isolated. It was such a relief when I was told that isn’t true at all, it’s about being happy alone even when you’re with someone so you’re not relying on them for your happiness or wholeness. My past traumas totally controlled the narrative on that one and it’s no wonder I was drifting through so many kinds of horrible and depressing states as I tried to comprehend this idea that I was destined to be alone and unloved in a sexual or romantic way.

On some level I think this was the lesson that needed to happen. I have a pretty strong trust in the universe giving you exactly what you need (dismiss this as spiritual woo-woo if you feel like it, I’m not trying to convert anybody) and if I needed to live with that awful misconception for a good few years in order to get to where I am then so be it. Thanks to that faulty understanding I was able to commit very strongly to what I wanted for myself without falling into a state where I depended on another person to bring me joy, and would leech it out of them until they had nothing left to offer. These lessons sink in so much more deeply when you come to the realisation yourself, and then it all transforms from a received knowledge into an ingrained wisdom.

This is exactly what it means to find your truth. It doesn’t mean to cherry-pick articles on the internet that support your biases and to dismiss facts as lies because they don’t fit into your world view. It doesn’t mean to dismiss science in favour of religion, or to construct a completely paranoid, fantastical reality for yourself where the government is out to get you and the moon landing was fake or your doctor is wrong about your health because you’ve taken the concept of acceptance to an unrealistic extreme. It’s not okay to accept you’ll die at 46 years old because the mere utterance of the word ‘weight’ means you are being body shamed, or because your drug or alcohol addiction is just part of the hand you were dealt. This isn’t acceptance, it’s resignation and you’re not taking care of yourself. And all of this doesn’t mean to invent your truth to support that narrative, which is what so many of us do because it’s so fucking easy.

That’s like me saying it’s okay to be traumatised and suicidal because that’s just how it happened for me and that it’s fine to think about killing myself. As if I have no control over my own story, as if I’m not the author of my own biography. It’s resignation, it’s giving up, it’s wanting the pendulum to only swing in one direction. What is okay is to recognise that it’s there and to acknowledge it, and to accept that your reaction to some situations is exactly that. You are not resigned to a particular outcome that way, you are just telling yourself that you behave in such a way given a certain trigger and you have something to work with in order to grow through it. Again, not alone — it takes a hell of a lot of time to reach that point; you can’t just magically do it without a lot of help along the way because you absolutely will misconstrue.

I’m writing about this and almost ranting because this is how my pendulum swings. It goes to one extreme and then I often feel inspired to write something. And for me, I think for some time it has to happen that way because a pendulum that starts at rest means the clock hasn’t begun to tick yet, and the single circumstance of being born into this world means it has already been set into motion for you, and people are going to tug at that: your parents will try to manipulate it, your family will, bullies at school will. Whether through curiosity or malice it all ends up the same.

Such as it is with the quest for enlightenment and finding your own balance along the way. That balance won’t come to you until you’ve dealt with all of that shit that keeps leading you astray. Past traumas, forgiveness (or the lack thereof), hate, your shadow side—all those unconscious behaviours that cause you to act out or float into space and completely lose your grounding and stability. This may come more easily to some than it will to others but, if nothing else, at least you will understand what your extremes are and what it feels to be at equilibrium.

I suppose that is one of my own truths. It’s been pretty painful to shake up all that nastiness from the past in order to work through it, but it’s all for a worthwhile cause. Take these books and these stories with a pinch of salt until you know you can relate to them.

ૐ