may enthusiasm reign superior
In my living experience of recovery from complex trauma, I being … lol, a relevant typo there … I begin to feel enlivened and enthusiastic again about the things and activities I have been passionate about all my life, but which I learnt to hide from a world/culture that considers them foolish or idealistic, such as reading, studying, applying and writing about the New Psychology, meaning books like Transcend and the Tao De Ching.
This work has always been my purpose, and I have known this on some level since I was a child. The culture I was raised in did not value this at all, so I harboured these passions in secret except from a few trusted friends. Otherwise it was repressed, hidden from the world, and the psychological force required to maintain this secrecy and to project a false-image was profoundly injurious, but also created a kind of counter-pressure, such that when my authenticity comes punching through again I experience it as almost overwhelming. (The Incubus song “New Skin” comes to mind.)
(Curiously, the first stanza, not the one about fallacious cognitions that has always been a kind of mantra for me.)
And I experience shame when I “indulge” this passion to wake-and-write, when I spend hours at a time writing page after page of longhand that over the years has become boxes and boxes of journals and scraps of notes that are now gathered around me like … not like … as a cache of half-written books.
The experience of wanting to bound out of bed and resume this life’s work is characterised by a burgeoning of authenticity that makes me happy. It may be a relative happiness compared to the genuine happiness of sukkha, but I’ll take it, because the energy of this motivates me to do the training of letting that relative happiness go so I can continue moving toward the deep contentment I know is my and everyone’s birthright.
I’ve been getting about 5 hours of sleep a night because I often wake up bursting with enthusiasm to be awake answering my calling, and weirdly I feel a mild shame around this as well, that I am not getting the amount of sleep that the “establishment” dictates is what an adult needs. (Jonah Takalua comes to mind.)
That shame says, If I am not getting the sleep an adult needs, then I must be an immature adolescent, like reading by torchlight under the quilt until stupid o’clock in the morning is some kind of heinous sin.
I understand that shame is an egoic attachment to one’s sense of inferiority, and I am grateful to be letting go of this as well.
I don’t actually read until stupid o’clock in the morning anymore, because I have sleep-hygiene skills I have taught myself on the journey of re-parenting, but I do often wake up before my alarm feeling energised and ready to seize the day (Dead Poets Society comes to mind), which is a feeling that has been far-too-infrequent in my adult life because our culture is not conducive to this kind of bounding-puppy enthusiasm.
Well, I plan to … not plan to … I am changing the culture of my own life, one morning leap out of bed at a time.
Kokoro 心 Heart 