Tag: reparenting

a Burgeoning of Authenticity

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.

in praise of pocket protectors

My pocket protector arrived in the mail today, much earlier than expected. I am happy about this for a slew of half-coherent reasons.

It’s Father’s Day, which I know only because my son reminded me, despite the fact I have been working hard on reparenting myself lately ~ so this is a nice and unexpected Father’s Day gift for myself. #

I am a middle-aged man now, and have been a father for sometime, which gives me “permission” to be as daggy as I like. #

It reminds me of a time when a dear and long-term but currently distant friend playfully teased me about the pocket protector I had fashioned out of cardboard, maybe 15 years ago when I was still in my 20s.

One of my pens had burst in the salvaged army-reserve jacket I wore at the time, and this friend, known to me alone as Knobelisque the Great, commended me for being the bogan-cum-mega-nerd I was back then, with my hobo-chic jacket and my cardboard pocket protector.

That was a time when I was earnestly and successfully applying myself to an unexpected publishing career, and some 5 or so years after my first real girlfriend told me, “Because you are a writer, you need to carry a notepad around ~ all writers do that.”

So I started doing that, and I have started doing that again, as well as now embracing the inner mega-nerd that has always just wanted to confidently wear a pocket protector.

Both of these friends are distant now, but I know they would be proud of me for saying, “Fuck it I’m wearing a pocket protector!” #

It fits perfectly in the new linen shirt I bought for myself recently, alongside the above-mentioned spiral notebook, which I am extra-celebrating since I re-read in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Robert Pirsig also carried a notepad in his shirt pocket.

I have never really identified as having heroes, but if I did I would say Pirsig is one of them, and I am not ashamed to say that I endeavour to emulate the attitudes he articulated in that singular novel.

Also, he depicts himself as 40 in that story, and I am also currently 40. Every other time I’ve read that book I was, obviously, younger than 40, and each of those times I assumed that Pirsig was maybe 60 and that Phaedrus was maybe 40.

This has been a tendency of mine ~ to always assume that wise folk are more adult than I am.

Reading that Pirsig was 40 at the time of that motorcycle journey with his son has reminded me that wisdom is not a factor of biological age, and on that note I am going to link here to an essay I wrote about the problems associated with typecasting young writers as insufficiently experienced to write about improving the human condition.

I was around 25 when I wrote and published this essay, and may or may not have been wearing a pocket protector, I don’t know.

I do know, thanks to recent personal research, that the reason I can’t remember these details has something to do with trauma-induced dissociative amnesia, which I have previously referred to by saying that “there is a blackhole where the recollection of my history should be”. #

I bought this linen shirt, and a pair of linen trousers, because I have recently moved to a Zen monastery in Brisbane, and am in training to become a monastic. This pocket protector complements that whole-arse lifestyle move in a way that I find incredibly punny:

in some traditions of Buddhism, primarily Tibetan, I believe, there is the practice of seeking refuge from fear in what are called “Dharma Protectors”. My practice being primarily informed by Zen, and with my otherwise-secular background, I don’t really go in for relying on entities that may or may not exist outside myself in some dimension of reality that requires special training or mantras or mandalas to access.

Each to their own.

And with Australian larrikinism deeply embedded in my bones and blood, I consider it funny that I would rather seek protection from a … what smells like faux-leather pocket protector … than from, as Carl Jung apparently said, “Imagining figures of light.”

That said, I do very much believe in and value the power of the imagination to heal both psychological and physical injury, but my current understanding is that the power of imagination stops there, at the personal and therapeutic level.

Imagination may also facilitate transcendence of the personal and support the stabilisation of transpersonal awareness, I don’t know.

What I do know is that my pocket protector will save my shirt from getting soiled by ink. #

That’s pretty much it, I think. On with the show!