Viewing entries tagged
awareness

Looking for the exits

Last year, I wrote about Rach's shakti mat. It was all about distributing conflict, so as to avoid one piece of discomfort becoming so sharp and urgent that it takes over our whole life. It's a great read, I think (and you can find it at nathanmaddigan.com/blog) but it turns out, I'm not done with this damn shakti mat.

Yesterday, I was lying on it again. And it hurt so much.

First I tried to ignore the pain - you know, think happy thoughts, tell myself stories, replay a tv show in my head - but that didn't work at all. So then I tried to get away from the pain somehow. I'd sit up, try and roll over a bit, arch my back so that less tiny spikes were stabbing me. But nothing helped.

It was exhausting, and frustrating, and somehow, the pain kept hurting. And it felt broad, like it was everywhere. Any mental exit I ran to was suddenly blocked by the pain. Happy thoughts, stories, the tv show, they all had this cloud of discomfort that dropped between us, so that I couldn't find the door handle and escape.

My mind felt like it was rolling around in a soft panic, unconsciously pushing back against the pain, searching for a way out.

After a few minutes of this torture, I tried something new. I gave up.

I stopped looking for exits and just leaned all the way into the mat, and focussed my attention on the needles pressing into my skin.

It was a completely different experience. My mind cleared, the panic subsided, and I felt free to just put that pain into its own compartment. Once I allowed myself to focus directly on the pain, I could see its edges, and it wasn't as huge as I thought. It wasn't all-consuming.

It was there, but it wasn't EVERYWHERE. When I was ignoring it and searching for relief, it felt like it was everywhere, and it was trapping me, controlling me. When I looked directly at it, I kind of trapped the pain instead. I could see all the exits now, I had some perspective back.

As I kept doing this focusing-thing: eyes closed, attention narrowed to the pointy daggers in my back, I began to notice something else: the pain was becoming less. My body was getting used to it, my mind was observing it, and I began relaxing, softening.

It was doing its Shakti-mat-healing thing, I suppose. The pain was slowly replaced with a warmth, as the blood flowed to areas on my skin that needed it the most.

Whatever was happening there, five minutes later I was so comfortable I had a nap. Truly. Right there on a bed of nails.

Now, please, please hear me: this post isn't really about pain, per se. I'm in no way suggesting that I have some kind of zen-like solution to pain, especially debilitating chronic pain, and I'm definitely not playing it down. Experiencing ANY amount of pain sucks. It hurts, sometimes a whole lot. Sometimes it takes over your entire life, and every day is a struggle to keep going.

With deep respect to those who experience this kind of life, it would be daftly naive of me to profess to know how you feel, or give you some kind of solution. This post is not *that*.

If anything, this experience with the shakti mat might just be a metaphor for the way many of us deal with discomfort.

In storytelling, characters will always try and avoid discomfort. They look away, turn away, walk away, avoid, ignore, distract... It's human nature, and it's okay. If a character didn't do it, we wouldn't even believe the story. It would seem somehow false.

The problem is, while the characters try and avoid all discomfort, the writer is spending all their time focusing on it. Writers know that stories need conflict. That conflict drives change, decision, transformation, all of that. So the writer will be considering the pain in great detail, finding the best way to get it right up in the face of the characters so that they must engage with it, and respond to it somehow.

I hate discomfort. And conflict, and pain. I'd choose comfort every chance I get, just quietly.

But, this shakti mat helped me realise that when there does happen to be a pain, a discomfort in my life somewhere, things do NOT go well for me or those around me if all I do is run about in a panic, looking for exits. I don't treat people well, I don't think straight, and I often don't even know exactly what it is that is hurting me. I only know that it keeps getting in the way of my exit strategy.

It's only when I stop unconsciously reacting to the hurt, and deliberately look at the source, not the exits, that I find my way forward.

So, with all that Rach and I have on this coming year, I know there will be great discomforts, great challenges and conflicts and hurdles to get over together, and as a character I'm completely terrified of that.

But as a writer, I'm wildly excited about this story. This year is going to be great.

Haben Girma

This week, Rach was speaking at a two-day online conference run by the incredible Mary Freer, called Compassion Revolution. Seth Godin was speaking too, but the really intriguing human that was sharing the stage with Rach was a woman named Haben Girma.

Haben is a deafblind woman of colour, the first deafblind person in history to graduate from Harvard Law School. She chats with presidents, advocates for greater human and disability rights, and is beautiful and funny and gracious. She delivered a keynote over zoom that got us all thinking deeply about our biases and identities and potential.

Incidentally, for those who, like Haben, are reading this post (yep, it’s possible) I am a tallish white male in my forties, currently folded into the back corner of a coffeeshop with a notebook and a laptop. I’m wearing a dark blue t-shirt that is splashed with white flowers that have pink edges. There are so many humans around me, but I can’t hear them, because I have headphones on, listening to “Games” by Bakermat. The music is joyful and melancholic, and feels like someone is shaking both your hands, but in time to your heartbeat, so that your whole body bounces in rhythm to your pulse.

Anyway, the morning after the conference, Rach and I are sitting in bed drinking coffee and she says simply, “my Instagram is ableist.”

I ask her what that even means, and she explains that without choosing to, without even thinking about it, she has built a collection of imagery and art that only those with sight can enjoy. There are videos whose auto-captions would barely make sense to someone without hearing who rely completely on captions.

“That’s hardly ableist, though.” I say, trying to defend her honour or something, “It’s not like you’re deliberately marginalising anyone.”

She stares into her cup, the steam backlit by the early sunlight. “But that’s the thing. It’s not deliberate, but it is ignorant. I’m being lazy, Nath, because I’m comfortable doing things the way I’ve always done them.”

“So it’s ignorant ableism, then?”

“Yeah, I think it is. By not even thinking about inclusion, we are by default EX-cluding people."

This is how we talk sometimes. Big concepts (at least big to me), just casually introduced at 5am before the caffeine has even kicked in. I try to keep up. “How can your Instagram be more inclusive then?”

And she comes alive. Descriptions for each of her artworks, captions that are accurate, commentary on the visuals of our white papers, multi-sensory experiences. And then I get excited too, and together we come up with all these ideas around experiential art exhibitions, better websites and identity descriptors, and other stuff that just feels powerful to talk about.

We talk about community, how it has always shined the brightest through service. Helping, lifting, sharing, encouraging, contributing, they’re all elemental traits that build humanity. Though all of us prefer comfort, as soon as we react to someone else’s need, we feel a sense of forward motion for humanity. Like we actually contributed to a meaningful story.

I know right now this is talk not action, but the talking helps remove the ignorance. It shines a torchlight in a corner that I forget to look at. Ignorant ableism is absolutely a thing I do. Along with ignorant racism, climatism, sexism, and every other big conversation. I just don’t know what I don’t know, and that’s a whole lot.

And, I don’t know what to do, all the time. What the right things are, the best way to act, etc. But I do know that I’m built for this: for learning, growing, serving, assisting. We’re all built for it. My challenge is to stay aware, and to not be fearful of the discomfort as I learn and grow. Because finding ways to lift each other up and value everyone equally is soul-edifying, it is life-giving, and it is absolutely human.

Learn more about Haben, and buy her memoir, at www.habengirma.com

More about Compassion Revolution: www.compassionrevolution.care

Giving voice to the radio waves

Hemmingway once said "write drunk edit sober," which I love. Not that I often do exactly that, but the idea of freewriting is a strong one - that open-minded, hold-it-lightly, stream-of-consciousness that just plucks words out of the ether and tosses them to the page.

So, this post is a freewrite. I'd normally refine it, simplify it, whatever, but after reading it I thought it would be most authentic to just leave it as is.

Enjoy.
__________

What if everything is just flowing through us like radio waves all the time?
Energy and creation, messages from God, voices from the past.
And what if most of us, most of the time, were just oblivious to it?

The few who are sensitive to certain frequencies would “see” something that others don’t. They would “feel” something. An intuition, a 6th sense, a premonition, a prophecy.

In the pentecostal church I grew up in, we were encouraged to reach our senses out, stretch our sensitivity to “discern” spiritual movements in the world. And we did, and we felt stuff. We saw things, and heard things, we dreamt dreams and saw visions.

I have a friend who sees feathers. Not “I see dead people.. and feathers” kind of thing, but she just notices them. A feather in the wind, a feather on the ground, a feather in a doorway. She is very aware of feathers, and she assigns meaning to them. It's never just a happenstance, when a feather appears. The moment is elevated, and my friend feels seen and known by forces greater than herself. I see way more feathers now too.

I have another friend who feels the darkness someone else is holding. He says it's like a black wave, like ink, and when he gets that feeling be becomes more interested in the person, more attuned to their words, their fears and masks. And when the time is right, he calls it out. He asks them about their darkness, and they respond with surprise and relief, and they leave with a lot less ink in their waters.

I’ve been wondering whether this might actually be the masterplan for us humans: That we each see different things, interpreting the same event in an entirely unique and personal way, so that together we can be a full-spectrum community. I see X in that event, and you see Y, and instead of arguing that only one is correct, we consider that both frequencies are valid. An attitude like this would allow us to paint all the dimensions of something that would otherwise be limited to our single-perspective shape.

Like, if a giant cylindrical pyramid landed on its side in the desert, and there were two groups of people, one at the south end, and one at the west end. Those in the south would declare that what they see in the distance is absolutely a circle. Those in the West would say it’s definitely without a doubt a triangle. If neither group moves, then no amount of conversation between them would result in a change of opinion. They both have the absolute truth, and therefore the other options must be false.

It’s a dimension thing, and a perspective thing.

The solution of course is simple. Somebody leaves their fixed viewpoint and takes a journey of discovery. They do a lap of the cylindrical pyramid and realise that there are other dimensions in play. And when they return, they can share with the others the new, broader, wider truth:

That both sides were true, and neither had the whole truth.

But in our lives, we often can't move. We're stuck in our spots, and when we hear of new perspectives it's very hard for us to shift our understanding to believe it. Even when someone who has taken that journey of discovery explains it to us. But I think it's our unique privilege to try.

Perhaps what makes us human is our ability to intuit, to NOT take a “fact” at face value. To ask of everything, not “what is happening?” but “what do I make this mean?”

To incline our hearts towards the radio waves, and allow everything flowing through us to have a voice.

In story, we know that truth is NOT the facts. Nobody really cares about the facts. The audience is not here for the facts. That is just information. What the audience is most interested, in, and what we all actually need the most from each other, is an understanding of what we made the facts mean.

Meaning is not found in a list of facts, but in every unique and differing perspective of humanity. None of us alone can build a complete picture of our world.

We need each other.

Peace

When I think of peace, I think of silence. Not sounds particularly, but more an attentive quietness of mind. That space between the asking, and the answer.

Peace isn’t a boring thing, and it isn’t a forever thing. It’s a breath, a beat between moments, that point at the top of a roller coaster, where time slows and memories freeze and every single piece of existence just presents itself for inspection, as if it has all the time in the world to be taken in.

And then the rollercoaster drops, the next battle starts, the question is answered, and the whole machine of life flies into action again, all go and hustle.

And that moment, forgotten by our surface consciousness, ends up being the most memorable and nourishing morsel of the whole day.

You are an explorer

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

- Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist (1946-2000)

Between the problem and the solution

The way a problem works, is that it arrives out of nowhere, we scramble to find a solution as fast as possible to avoid any discomfort, and then when we have the solution, the problem goes away and we move on.

Which, unfortunately, means we’ve learnt nothing about ourselves.

If we are truly going to grow in life, if we are going to actually transcend our “normal” into a life we’d be proud to live, then we need to step back and notice what’s happening between the problem and the solution.

We need to see ourselves, watch how we react, consider why we are doing what we are doing. No judgement, just compassionate honesty.

Is it fear? Chasing comfort? Ignoring the obvious?

If we are not aware of ourselves when a problem hits, then we’ll just automate our response to it, and it will cycle back again.

Being aware allows you to move forward. Grow. And when you’re done, you might even be able to thank the problem, instead of fearing it’s return.