So you’ve cleaned your room–now what?
Learn to take responsibility for experience itself
A few weeks ago I wrote about how I came to start working on myself using a mix of dharma as taught by Paul, my mentor, meditation, positive masculinity practices, and Jordan B. Peterson’s teachings. A few days later this happened:
The attention has been a bit overwhelming, but I am grateful for the support–so thank you!
In this post I dive deeper into how I’ve learned to take responsibility for my actions, words, and thoughts in the context of my marriage.
The red pill praxeology has been deduced and distilled online over roughly the last fifteen years from millions of men’s experiences. It is a loose set of pragmatic guidelines and principles that describe intersexual dynamics, intended to be applied, tested, and refined in everyday life. It is not a belief system, ideology, or prescriptive dogma. There’s a lot of misperception and confusion about the red pill out there, I’ve already said a bit about how I’ve come to see it in the post Peterson tweeted. I will continue to unpack my experiences with it in future posts.
Red pill is based on the assumption that humans engage in purposeful behavior. I’ve been experimenting with many red pill principles in my life to see if they are effective, so far, their utility has exceeded my expectations.
Peterson uses the Biblical stories to talk about how to take responsibility for our inadequacies from a mytho-psychological perspective:
“Imagine that you have the capacity to live truthfully, courageously and forthrightly and then imagine why you might not do that. Hiding from recognizing their own inadequacies is what stops people, they look at themselves and they think: How in the world am I supposed to live properly in this world with everything that’s wrong with me? Well go sit on your bed for five minutes and ask yourself: What have you hidden from in your life?” –Jordan B. Peterson
Peterson’s basic instruction to people just learning to take responsibility for their lives is to clean your room. The principle is: start with a small, manageable task with concrete observable results. Do it daily, see success, build from there.
There’s overlap between the pragmatic way Jordan Peterson advises taking responsibility and the collective discussions happening in the manosphere. The ‘Own Your Shit Weekly’ threads in /r/marriedredpill for example, function as a mechanism to help men do just that. The core principle of both being: stop blaming women for your faults, failures or weaknesses.
The weekly thread started two years ago and continues to this day. The group defined purpose of the thread is to help men look at areas of their lives they’d rather avoid, to understand their weaknesses, to accept them, and to make a plan to overcome them. It works because the active, anonymous community share an intention to take responsibility, and use blunt, anonymous feedback to hold themselves and each other accountable.
What red pill theory and Jordan Peterson’s work don’t cover, is how to take responsibility for experience itself. That’s where Buddhism fits in.
Work with what is
Buddhism is all about taking responsibility for and working with experience itself. In order to work with your experience, you first need the attention to notice what is happening. Attention is developed through practice. With training, it can be refined and stabilized. Meditation develops the faculty of attention and increases your ability to take responsibility for your experience–and by extension, your life.
But what is experience?
In Buddhism, experience is broken down into categories. There are a few different models depending on the lineage you look at (the six sense bases, the five aggregates, etc.). Here’s one way of parsing experience described by a modern Tibetan master:
“All those things which appear to us as external objects — visible forms, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations… [and] the thoughts that arise in your mind: thoughts of pleasure and displeasure, of suffering and joy, and so on.” -Thrangu Rinpoche
There are a limited set of ways you can exert agency over your experience of life. For practical purposes we can sort all of ‘What I experience’ into a few categories: actions, speech, and thoughts/feelings.
To start, I worked with my meditation teacher Paul Baranowski to focus on how to take responsibility for each domain of my experience. Divide and conquer.
Generally speaking, it’s easiest when starting off to bring attention to actions, then speech, thoughts, and then to feelings. I found words and actions easier to work with than thoughts and feelings because they are external: actions are visible, speech is audible. Thoughts require more capacity to notice. I’m not going into working with feelings in this post.
Developing competence in recognizing bodily sensations enabled me to start using my body like a GPS, and to notice where emotion was as it happened in my body. As I became more fluent in recognizing changes in my skeletal positioning and posture, body temperature and perspiration, muscular tension, tightness or throbbing, and skin itches and tingles, more possibilities of action opened up, when before I could only react.
Practicing with speech is pretty straightforward with a reliable framework, but takes dedication and effort. I use the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) technique to clarify and state facts, uncover emotional data, identify and connect to my own–and others’–needs, to see if those needs are being met or not, and to ensure everyone’s needs are met through direct, action-oriented requests. NVC’s definitions of each step are critical: Observations, Feelings, Needs, Requests. I will unpack them more in another post.
With a deeper, more stable connection to my body, I started to become aware of recurring patterns of thought and feeling, and to see how they related to the actions and decisions I made in my life. With all this has come an increased awareness of what I want and value, an appreciation of the people in my life, and a tsunami of gratitude for the precious, fleeting experience of being alive.
“To act differently, you have to have free attention. Free attention is energy that is not consumed by habituated patterns. With it, you see and experience events differently. New possibilities of action open up.” — Ken McLeod
Growing and stabilizing awareness of body, speech and mind has helped me plug into my experience of life in a higher resolution. It’s also helped me to more effectively take responsibility for the way I live my life.
Nervous Ticks
Last summer, after many difficult months at home, my wife went away for three months to practice meditation and rest. She left her job and visited a monastery nestled in the tick-infested Catskill Mountains in the tradition of Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn (pronounced ‘tic nat han’).
She spent her summer living with around thirty monastics. When she asked me what I thought of her idea to go away for a few months, I gave her my full support. To be honest, I was as grateful for the space to sort myself out as she was to rest and heal.
While my wife was away on retreat, I set out to examine how my recurring behaviors, words, and thoughts contributed to the difficulties in our relationship. I was done blaming her for my problems and competing in the unending victim olympics. Last summer was a crash course in taking responsibility for my experience, and my life.
Actions are noisey
Looking at actions is the most concrete way to identify reactive patterns (more on emotional reactivity in the next post).
Over the the summer, I sat with and reflected on how my actions in the moments leading up to a specific conflict would affect me, were I the one receiving them. I noticed the emotional chain reactions play out and experienced the related underlying needs they pointed to as being met or not. I wrote my inferences down, I ran them by her when she got back home. She was so surprised by my observations she started to cry tears of joy.
As I slowly uncovered the needs she had that my actions did not support, the reactive patterns operating in me started to become clear.
Here’s what I discovered about my actions:
What these little repeated behaviours served to do, was train my wife to be needy, anxious, and insecure in our relationship. This is the opposite of what I want in a partner, and taking responsibility for my part in contributing to this dynamic of confusion for over nearly a decade is still difficult to accept.
I wasn’t trying to intentionally confuse her, hell I wasn’t even aware of the contradictions between what I wanted and how I acted until I started paying attention. But as they say in the manosphere, hypergamy doesn’t care that I was oblivious.
Hypergamy has a specific definition in red pill theory. It’s said to be a biologically conditioned sexual strategy women have evolved to always pursue high status men, and shit test potential mates.
The purpose of hypergamous behaviour is to verify that the woman’s needs are taken care of during the vulnerable pregnancy term, and safe after childbirth, protected by a man who is capable of providing for and supporting healthy offspring. Here’s a great break down of shit testing from Kitten Holiday:
“When you “answer” her shit test, you are acknowledging that there is a crack in the foundation. If you acknowledge the crack then you are liable to be responsible for it. You will be blamed for causing it and you will be made responsible for repairing it.” — Kitten Holiday
Until doing the exercise above I was failing shit tests all the time without even realizing it, and basically training my wife to act crazy.
Evolutionary psychologist Dr. Diana Fleischman notes that in long-term committed relationships this kind of ‘training’ happens both ways, but that the actual training “is so subtle that it’s not offensive, malicious, or even something we do consciously. It’s simply interwoven into the fabric of our social interactions.” But hypergamy doesn’t care about subtlety.
By owning these habitual micro-actions I was able to finally start to reduce how much and how often I made matters worse with my wife in the following specific ways:
- I started to make eye contact when we spoke–especially about difficult topics. At first I was awkward and at times, obnoxious, but it’s gotten more natural over time.
- I began to acknowledge her comments with an audible ‘mmm-hmm’s’. This went a long way to helping her feel heard.
- I made it a point to slow down my decision making process, to loop her in as I researched multiple solutions to a problem, to share my findings along the way, and to ask for her input before making a decision. I didn’t always apply her input, but the transparency helped us connect.
- I got out of her way more and let go of responsibilities that I wanted her to own. For example: I’d always been the cook, but I wanted her to prepare meals. To my surprise, she was thrilled to learn to cook, and happy that I got out of her way!
Love is not a magic word
The next mode of being I brought my attention to was my spoken life and how I used language. During meditation, I started to notice the way I use the word ‘love’ was sloppy and often half assed. I’d use it in distraction without intention, as a means of filling up space and silence, or trying to please her.
I’d rarely pay my wife genuine, original compliments rooted in my actual experience of her. Instead I tended to repeat the same banal platitudes I’d heard in songs or movies.
I started to notice that I imagined that saying the words, ‘I love you’, would somehow magically conjure up connection, warmth, and joy out of thin air and saturate her with it automatically. But that’s not how love works.
I’ve tried to use the word ‘love’ throughout my life as if it were a magic word. I used it the way my dad used it with my mom, or my mom used it with me. My parents would often use the word ‘love’ too, but just as often their actions and decisions would contradict what I thought the word was supposed to mean.
On reflection, it’s clear now that I often felt confused, disconnected, nonexistent, and powerless growing up–and glancing back up at my chart, my words and actions generated the same difficulties in my own marriage.
On some level, like my folks, I meant what I thought saying the word ‘love’ could do. But without the intention or capacity to cultivate joy and connection the word ‘love’ is just a word.
I’ve learned through studying dharma that love is a skill, and it takes practice.
Even with the pain I’ve experienced in my marriage over the years, I care about my wife’s happiness and well being. Her joy brings me joy. I’ve reflected for months on why I love her. I’ve allowed my thoughts to explore nihilistic rationalizations, and they’ve all felt forced and contrived. I don’t know if she’s the one, but she is the one I chose to make a go at creating a life with.
What has become clear through investigating how I speak to my wife is that there is a disconnect between what I want, and what I say and do. Sloppy communication is really just one symptom of this disconnect, and it’s only served to train her to be unsatisfied as my woman, and leave me frustrated as her man. This is unacceptable, and so I use it as fuel for my practice.
Thoughts as thoughts
More subtle still, are the thoughts. The nonstop, yammering commentary going on in what feels like the area just behind my eyeballs. While she was away on retreat, I had no choice but to deal with my thoughts, opinions, and assumptions head on.
I noticed that I tend to assume to know what she wants or needs, or how she’s feeling or might feel in the future, rather than asking her directly what she wants or needs, how she feels–or just waiting to see what happens.
Then, as the pattern goes, I try to give her what I imagine she wants or needs to ‘make’ her feel the way I imagine she should. This strategy again, causes a lot of trouble, not only in my marriage, but in every relationship I try to use it.
Entertaining mental gymnastics like this (and the ones listed below,) leave me feeling, exhausted, confused, and disconnected in my marriage, and growing bitter, needy and resentful towards my wife. And of course they did. I wasn’t actually connecting with her, I wasn’t establishing frame, understanding her needs or speaking my own truth. I was too busy imagining her thoughts in my mind, ‘hallucinating’ her experience, and simulating a connection with that.
Looking back, it’s no wonder I’d react all sore and snarky after wasting so much energy like this and feeling alone in our relationship.
To help see thoughts as thoughts, I find it helpful to identify common patterns during formal practice. Here’s a nice map* for identifying negative recurring thought patterns:
- Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
- Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”
- Catastrophizing. You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
- Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
- Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do — so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
- Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
- Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
- Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
- Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
- What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”
- Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
- Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”
* Source: A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’s Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012)
Begin again
For all the detail I’ve gone into, this is only part of the story. Just as I’m not blaming my wife for the state of my marriage, I’m not blaming myself either. I’m just owning what I have agency over without expecting her to change and seeing what happens next. I know that at the end of the day I have no control over her or anyone else, and trying to manipulate her to become some idealized woman is a futile waste of time and energy.
I don’t know if we will remain together forever, and I don’t really care. I’ve literally stopped thinking about it. When thoughts of our future come into my mind, I notice them as thoughts, let them go, and stop giving the stories my attention. Then I bring my focus back to my breathing or my body, rest for a few moment, and go on with my day.
Right now, I’m focused on developing myself as a man, uncovering my weaknesses, working on them, problem solving, and asking for guidance when I need it.
And I’m far from perfect in my execution.
When you make a decision, take an action, or speak without awareness of why–even with the best intentions–there’s the chance that an unmet need is operating outside your awareness in the background, hijacking your agency to justify it’s own existence.
I’ve been reflecting on my practice of taking responsibility for my experience and trying to write with clarity for a few weeks. And yet, just the other day I was reminded of the galling pain of realizing I’ve been operating on autopilot, speaking, thinking and acting out of reactivity.
I had borrowed Paul’s car to go do a retreat with some friends, and returned it with no gas in the tank, for, well… reasons. When he asked me a few days later why I returned it on empty, I thought about it, and with utter, disarmed sincerity, evaded ownership and blamed the world.
I got the following text on a Friday morning after a bit of back and forth with Paul. As soon as I read it, my entire body felt like it was trying to eat itself. I had to stop working, get up from my desk and practice walking meditation in the hall outside my office for ten minutes just to calm down.
In Buddhism, the meditation teacher-student relationship is a unique thing. I’ve been working closely with Paul for a few years now. The way he bluntly points out my patterns comes from a motivation of fierce compassion and and an intention to end the suffering generated by reactivity in my life. It’s very uncomfortable to receive these kinds of nudges because it forces me to see things as they are in the moment, not as a helpless victim.
This technique has been a massive catalyst for transformation and development in my life over the years, and I’m insanely grateful to learn from such a skilled mentor.
What’s next?
I’ve seen first hand through my meditation practice how easy it is to slide into the victim mindset, to expect the world to take care of me due to conditioned entitlement, to shift blame around to others with sneaky semantic ploys–or to crucify myself for mistakes and getting lost in sinkholes of despair.
When I make a decision, take an action, or speak without awareness of why–even with the best intentions–there’s the chance that an unmet need is operating outside my awareness in the background, hijacking my agency to justify it’s own existence. This causes a lot of problems in my life, marriage and relationships in general.
So far, the red pill principles I’ve tested in my life have rung true, and blending them with my mediation practice, had helped me focus my energy, and prioritize my life in a way that my personal development and transformation practices come first. As I continue to sort myself out, I’m better able to stop making this worse, and to make good on my best intentions.
Though I’m far from done, this mix of practices has made me a better man, a better employee, and a better husband. What’s been really amazing to see as I’ve elevated myself through game and meditation, is how my wife has been matching me in her own life. Each of us are focused on transforming our own patterns, and taking responsibility for our own experience, and are as a result experiencing a better relationship and having more fun.
In the next post, I’ll explore how conditioning works and how to practice cutting through it with meditation practices.
