The Clench...and Psychedelics: Part I
/At this end of this past week’s Disintegration Group I wrote on my notepad, “Let go of the struggle and have faith in the process,” which now as I look at it, needs some explaining. It came out of the ideas of people in group who were talking about their psychedelic journeys that meeting. One spoke about the fact that “letting go” corresponds to turning from two clenched fists to two open hands. Sounds good, except that open hands don’t get to hold anything, suggesting that “letting go” means we have to be okay with having nothing. There certainly are philosophies that talk about groundlessness, but having nothing is not actually the most appealing notion in the world, as anybody in Las Vegas would tell you. But then this person’s trip showed another stance that hands can take: a giving/receiving pose. Hands that are neither clenched and uptight nor flat and empty, but cupped and ready.
We approach so much of our lives with metaphorically clenched hands. We struggle. We struggle to survive, to do well, to impress, to excel, to be above shame, and in the wellness culture we struggle above all to improve our silly selves. Ever had this headache – that you struggle to get away from the struggling self? It’s not entirely our fault I would say, because we are born into a culture where our basic education is about nothing but struggle. Struggle to get good grades, to behave well in class, to impress our classmates, do well in gym – it’s endless. How often do you hear a parent or a teacher tell a kid, “Good job!” They are saying it with positive intentions, but they are putting the kid into a rating system, and this time kiddo, you’ve done well enough to duck the bullet of abject failure and humiliation. Tomorrow, however, is a bright, fresh new day, with new possibilities for doing bad jobs and the attendant shame state. And after that an endless succession of tomorrows – until I suppose, the day they suddenly stop. Meanwhile, we are all of us, all the time, feverishly working on getting our 6th grade homework in on time, to some phantom, unforgiving internal teacher-in-chief.
And then the letting go. We sometimes do this quite naturally while tripping, as we enter a wider perspective, let’s say the broader air of the spirit, and we have no more need of the clenched-hands mindset, in fact it suddenly seems quite sad and ridiculous, as we no longer see our own selves as an object – an object of success, or failure, of accolades or derision. If we were to walk through a forest, we would be part of the forest, or even part of the town or the city that is our human home. In the non-tripping state though, we are busy improving, of getting ourselves up to speed, as we try to criticize our way out of bad habits and into enlightenment. “I said I wouldn’t eat any donuts today! I said I wouldn’t get anxious in that meeting! I said I wouldn’t get lost in ruminations!” And look at that, I just did. It’s what the Buddhists call the second arrow, the optional suffering we inflict on ourselves, layered on top of the unavoidable suffering of life. The good job/bad job evaluation has nothing to do with the process of change. It’s a convenient stick to beat ourselves up with.
But, just letting go of self-scolding does not make for a process of change. It may, if we manage to achieve it, leave us with empty hands, but not with giving/receiving hands. The second tripper in last Tuesday’s group addressed that question when they said that they saw how the act of engaging with all this evaluative stuff, rumination, and even digging around in trauma memories, was not helpful. To them, it was simply: don’t engage with the devil and his machinations, turn to God and pray. This may or may not be your symbol system, and if it’s not, no matter, the basics are the same. We tend to approach our life issues in the closed-handed way, straining, and trying, and blaming ourselves when things don’t go right, probably exhausting ourselves, when in fact, the process of change is happening quite independently of that strenuous activity. We should put our energy and our will towards that process of change, and water that garden, not the weird Addams Family garden of self-blame.
Next week: Part II!