Meeting Your Programs, An Essay
I experienced a knowing of something this week that seems to be opening a floodgate of awareness of my self. I’m going to spend a minimal amount of energy on organizing things linearly and instead focusing on trying to express for myself what these realizations have been.
There is nothing wrong with me.
I know I’ve asserted that in the past. It was something I started toying around with maybe 3 months ago as an idea. But it was just an idea and hadn’t extended itself into my internal experience of thought and the labyrinth of walls I’d built up inside of me to not have to see parts of myself I learned weren’t okay. That’s the thing about Self-Awareness. You can hide things from yourself. Especially as you explicitly begin to explore the idea of awareness, you can hide from yourself the thoughts and judgment about awareness that you have about yourself because you sense they are exempt since they’re about awareness itself. So I’d been exerting all this cognitive energy on being hypervigilant and controlling over what I was paying attention to, what I was thinking about, how I was handling those thoughts, how I was handling the impulses. It wasn’t enough to become aware of awareness, but it was realizing that a new layer of thought and protection can be created very stealthfully in your own mind that it becomes a blind spot to you and you remain believing that there’s something wrong with you,… that you aren’t mindful enough. You aren’t present enough. You aren’t kind enough. You’re not meditating enough. This layer of awareness judgment in the name of enlightenment has secretly wedged itself into me in this process of “awakening” over the last two years. However, it is eerily familiar. I gave it a name because it reminds me how I felt when I was desperately trying to make Christianity fit into my brain. I call this programming “Evil Jesus”. Evil Jesus is fascist and wants everyone in my head to do what they’re told, think what they’re supposed to, be present when they’re supposed to, be kind, be aware. Or else. And when that’s obviously difficult, the conclusion is that I am fundamentally flawed as a human being. I have no self-control. I am at odds with my own will. I can’t do anything I intend to do. Which turns out, is because I am trying to be a particular way instead of letting my way just BE as it already is.
There is nothing wrong with me.
I am evil and I am good. I am heaven and I am hell. I am god and I am the devil. I need not be anything other than what I am. I can hurt people. I can be impatient. I can overeat. I can contribute to pollution. I can perpetuate unconscious bias and complicity in social injustice. Of course I can. I am only human. I can have beautiful thoughts. I can have hateful and violent thoughts. I can be scared silly by the people that I love. I can be brazen in the face of aggressive strangers. I am all that I am.
There is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with my thoughts. There is nothing wrong with my awareness. There is nothing wrong with my compulsions. There is nothing wrong with my insecurity. There is nothing wrong with my fear. There is nothing wrong with my conditioning. There is nothing wrong with my judgments. I don’t need to be anything other than what I am.
Can a more pleasant, harmonious, and loving experience be nurtured within my internal experience? Yes, it can. Do I need to do that in order to be enough? No, I do not. I am as I am. I am as I should be given my experiences. I am only human. Do I need to have compassion on myself? Love myself more? No, I do not. I think it’s a natural byproduct of accepting the nature of being a human, though. Maybe love is acceptance of truth.
I went to a meditation event on Monday this week. And I went with this new attitude. This realization that I’ve been beating my own mind into submission through these meditative and spiritual and trauma-healing endeavors. Trying to get it to feel what it needs to feel, think what it needs to think, release what it needs to release, focus on what it needs to focus on, and finally “be present”. It was after watching an episode of Little America where I realized that my experience in the meditative communities has been eerily like the foundational experience of Christianity. There is this felt sense that we’re all here to work on ourselves. To clean house. To pay penance for being such “monkey minded” humans. To be responsible. To be better humans. So sad. So serious. That episode popped my brain open and the last pedestal of spirituality pursuits fell out. I realized I had been forcing myself to do these activities, been forcing my mind to play along because it was the “better path” and would refine me and make me more cognitively coherent and responsible. Evil Jesus. At it again.
So when I went to this meditation event on Monday, I came in with a very different mentality. I did not place any expectations on myself for experiencing anything in particular at all. Even when they asked us what our intentions were, so many people had intentions around healing this or that. Me? I said my intention was to experience pleasure. To enjoy my company and my body and the sounds of the singing bowls. I wasn’t going to put any effort into any expectation. I was letting go of the reigns. Folkx,… I have NEVER … EVER…. done that before. My whole life has been me holding my mind’s reigns with a tight grip. Trying to domesticate it and improve its enunciation to be acceptable to the world of enlightened thinkers. I’ve said many times that I feel “underqualified” to own this body. Underqualified to live. Of course, I do. Of fucking course I do.
So I let go of my mind. I let it be totally free. Pay attention to whatever it wanted. So I laid there. Unaware that I still held an expectation of experiencing pleasure. But I didn’t experience pleasure. I didn’t feel engaged. In the past, I would deal with my mind like one would deal with a child who needs to eat vegetables. Use my parenting voice and say, “Come on mind, eat your vegetables… pay attention to this mystical, somatic experience that is in front of you. This is what you need”. But now I don’t know about that. If I really needed that, I think I would have paid attention to it. Because I no longer feel like domesticating my mind at the cost of believing there is something wrong with it and what it naturally wants to do.
I stayed disengaged from the sound bowls. My mind chattered. I was tempted to judge it and reign it in, but then I remembered we aren’t interested in Evil Jesus being in control anymore. So I let go. I acknowledged that my mind is completely disinterested in paying attention to the sound bowls. And I began to wonder if I ever even liked the sound bowls in the first place. And without the noise of me trying to domesticate my mind, without the noise of the shame of my mind not behaving, there was a kind of QUIET… and FREEDOM. I said to my mind, OK, you don’t want to pay attention to the sound bowls. What should we do? Should we leave? I didn’t feel up for the task of just walking out. I was too curious about what other experience I might have in this environment given how I was driving my mind. And so I laid there and just “sat down” with my mind as if in a waiting room with a friend. “So,… what’s up with you? Thinking about anything cool these days?” And in that FREE BOREDOM my mind began to play. It conjured up an image of someone dancing. Like one of those little screensaver avatars you could install back in the early 2000’s that would wander your desktop. He danced a little and then started feeling especially silly and stuck his butt out, waving it all around, trying to make me laugh. Which I did. Egged on by this, he wanted to be even sillier, so he started to fart, but… REALLY POWERFUL FARTS. So powerful he rocket-shipped up through the space of my visual awareness and flew all around with his fart fuel. And that was it. I had a flying fart man in my head when I let go of the reigns of my awareness. I don’t remember the details of everything else I experienced that night, but I felt freedom. When the end of meditation happened and the facilitator asked if we’d like to share our experiences, I simply could not. Everyone else began to share, talking about how the spirit moved them to focus on this wound or that wound or gave them clarity on this issue or the other. All very sober, healing-oriented languages. Meanwhile,… I was thinking,… can this group handle my experience? Maybe they could have. But I just couldn’t envision myself disrupting the vibe I felt they were trying to create. So I privately realized in that moment that I don’t think I’ll be going to another meditation group for the foreseeable future unless my uncontrolled mind says that’s something it wants.
There is nothing wrong with me. I can let my mind be the wild, beautiful horse that is. I’m taking off the fucking saddle and not apologizing for how it runs wild through the prairies. Nope. Not anymore. My mind is not an apology.
whew. I need to take a breath. Do you? Pausing a second here for a cognitive palette cleanser. All the text above is meant to say, simply, that I am on a different path now. I believe it started last Friday, so it’s been about a week or so. But the experience on Monday really put a crown on it.
So since this release, I have been feeling more freedom to defer to my mind/heart/allthoseparts. To let it lead without judgment. Because it is not bad. No child is bad. So what is a parent’s job? To mold them into what society expect of them? Or to give them the freedom to express what is unique to them without judgment? And the fear here is that un-judged minds are bad minds. Un-judged humanity is irresponsible and lazy. But my belief on that is rapidly changing. My mind is not a miscreant. OH, what could my mind make of my life if unrestrained and supported? That’s exciting to think about.
So the last few days have been quite a snowball now that I’m learning to let go of my mind and stop judging it, even when it says scary things. Everything it says and does makes sense and has a purpose. That is my new presupposition. I always believe it. Maybe not verbatim. But I believe its experience. So this week I found myself finally able to admit to certain programs that have been playing in my mind LOUDLY for a while. Programs that make it hard to feel safe with others. That’s the whole point. They’re defense programs. They’re not my wounds. They are my strength. They are my ability to protect myself from a very early age from harm.
One defense program I identified this week, one that takes up a huge bandwidth and is present in every interaction I have with every person I meet, is an effort to control the perception that others have of me. It’s a program that doesn’t completely rely on factual data about the individual in question but pulls a lot of its sources from past experiences going back to a very young age. I’ve said at times I have ADHD. But that is a superficial name for something that can be intimately known, and it is this. These programs. These defense programs. For me, they are the cause of my symptoms of ADHD. Getting distracted. Not learning well. Because I am always running a heavy-loaded defense program which is concerned with making sure that I am what I need to be to be acceptable. But a part of me deeply believes and knows that I cannot be those things that I deeply believe I need to be to be acceptable and so it runs a congruent program of masked neutrality. Its purpose is to not let anyone know that I know that I can never be enough but it doesn’t bother me. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. It’s why I wear very neutral clothing. Were I to wear something feminine or fitting, everyone would know I am trying. And then they could judge me about how well my attempts at trying to be acceptable are. But if I don’t try, there is nothing to judge. And so whenever I am interacting with people, I have been (unconsciously up until now) running this program that keeps judging parts of me I think are unacceptable so that I never get the gall to think that I might be accepted only to find out that my true fear of being unacceptable is true. It was my experience growing up. Trying to reach out. Trying to be seen. Trying to be understood. Trying to be nurtured. And instead experiencing people being overwhelmed by me, confused by me, disgusted by me, annoyed by me. I learned very quickly to not show need or interest. To be cool. To be chill. To be neutral. To not need you. To not reach out. You might not answer. You might not reach back. You might not tell me you see me. You might not understand. You might say you don’t have time. You might look at me with a blank stare. You might pity me. You might tell me I need to talk to someone. You might tell me you can’t relate. You might not understand the words I’m using. You might not want to think such complicated thoughts like I do. And so I don’t show need. I don’t show a desire to be desired. I don’t show you what I’m thinking about, what I need, what I’m afraid of. And this is why despite all the romantic relationships I’ve had, I have never felt loved or safe. It didn’t matter if it was with my first husband who wasn’t a good match for me or my second husband who was very patient and present with me. It didn’t matter if it was someone I had a lot of sex with or someone I just went on one date with. It didn’t matter. I protect myself from everyone, especially romantic/sexual partners. That is where the critical acceptance piece is for me. Will I be accepted for my fully emotionality? My full intelligence? My full, bright, talkative mind? My endless curiosity? My desire to play and pull things apart? My defense programs inform me that I’ve learned clearly that I cannot trust that I will be treated that way. So despite how any of my partners have behaved over my lifetime, they will never dismantle my defense program that has been in place for as long as I can remember.
So in giving myself permission to admit to what I’m experiencing in my mind (e.g. defense programs), I’m finally able to put them into words. So in no particular order and with no particular coherency, here’s some stuff I’ve been understanding about my thought programming over the last week.
I get distracted frequently when trying to focus on a human who is talking to me, especially when they are storytellers and can talk without collaboration for a long period of time. Why do I get distracted? Because “I have ADHD”? Nah, that’s just a label for something deeper. I can finally admit that I get distracted while listening to people talk (especially my partners or my crushes) because my defense programs are so loud. I’m checking or criticizing myself for not sitting in a flattering way, making the wrong/awkward facial expressions, whether I am following the story closely enough to understand what they’re telling me and so that I can reflect back showing I’ve listened well. Plus, on top of that, there is another layer of programming that is criticizing me for running this overbearing, insecure program in the first place.
I resent those I’m talking with (particularly my partners) if they don’t express any awareness of the fact that I am not actually listening (I’m distracted by my defense programs). I am getting lost in the story they’re telling, even when I’m telling the story! I’ll feel so self conscious about whether what I’m saying is making sense to them, if they understand me, that I’ll get distracted by that defense program and utterly forget what I was talking about. And so to cover my tracks, I’ll say “anyways!” and move the conversation onto something that focuses on them. And I’ll resent them when they don’t notice what I’ve done and/or don’t point the conversation back to me, giving me permission/encouraging me to take up space to talk through my thoughts.
I have had to learn to stop showing outwardly that I believe others are interested in me or enjoy me because I learned early on that they are not and do not. and so I embody this chill, detached, non-clinging vibe that just listens because “I have lots to give but need nothing”. “i could take or leave you” vibe. because god forbid i WANT you, if I showed I wanted you and you didn’t want me back, it would be true: that no one finds me interesting or pleasant to be with. i believe i am unloveable and unenjoyable.
My attention sucks because I believe that I need to protect myself from looking like I believe I am loved or accepted or can be myself or want love because I so clearly am not acceptable for many reasons. So I expend my cognitive resources on managing the factors I've decided are integral to my acceptance, lending very little space in my awareness to notice if I am enjoying myself or how I feel or what this relationship feels like. i’m rarely directly interacting with my experiences or interactions because of the heavy loaded defense programs I am running.
In mind auditing, I noticed another really heavy loaded program that has to do with sustainability. but it is built on the same kind of perfection platform as Evil Jesus. Pretty much everything I am surrounded by reminds me, in a previously unconscious way, that
It makes my head loud when I drive a car, throw away food, eat meat, go to grocery stores, thrift stores. I am distracted by the excess and waste. Every choice I make is hurting the planet, other humans, and or my own body. Everything in civilization is a reminder of what we are doing to ourselves, each other, and the planet.
Moment of Truth: This post has been sitting in my drafts for a week now. I’ve cognitively moved on so I’m just gonna publish this. K bye!
