Viewing entries tagged
distraction

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.

Quitting the stage is the deepest betrayal

Thank goodness, a blank page.

My mind has just been racing through pages and pages of news and social media, and I’m exhausted and on edge. It’s not that I’m reading disturbing information - mostly they are fun articles, entertaining stories and interesting facts - but there is an undercurrent of panic that slowly rises through my limbic system, the longer I scroll.

But now, here is a blank page, and it feels like I can finally take a full breath, taste actual air, and set my compass again to the stars above me.

My life is filled with hustle. And beauty. Excitement, conflict, moments of wonder, moments of peace. At the end of many of my days, I don’t feel ready to go to bed. I feel like I want to achieve more, shine brighter, love deeper, write better. I want to do all the things I’m here to do, become everything I’m called to be.

But then I pick up my phone, and start scrolling, and start sinking. My screen is like oxygen when I’m underwater. Sinking into the deep, I take short sharp breaths of instagram, a quick shot of high-octane news updates, and tell myself that this is air.

But that small voice of truth tells me it is not air. It says "you are being entertained, but you cannot see the stars anymore."

This honestly isn’t a rant against social media. Before we ever had screens and internets, we were still finding ways to distract ourselves. At the dawn of the written word, Socrates was arguing that our memory would be weakened by reading - that words on parchment are a weak substitute for lively in-person connection. We've always had the challenge of curating the myriad inputs of our lives for meaning, not just for pleasure.

And I’m also not encouraging you to “do more” or “be better” or any of that. You are doing great. Your life is your life and you are daily discovering more about it and yourself. You're okay.

This is really about staying present, and finding the meaning. There are so many shiny distractions in life, and I find it the most difficult thing in the world to stay clear, and afloat.

I’m adding another metaphor now, but it honestly feels like this:

I am on a stage. It is open, expansive, clear. The floorboards are a rich mahogany and I can dance on them, any way I want.

I am present, acutely aware of my environment, my place in it, the players who will join me for different scenes. We will relate, shine, bond, create. We will share our unique expressions with the audience, who will resonate and respond and celebrate each act.

But then, my phone buzzes, an exciting distraction pops up, or a concern, a fear, a responsibility, a deadline, and I’m gone. My brain exits stage left, heads into the audience, and takes a seat. It stares back at my empty shell, motionless on those mahogany boards, and reaches for the popcorn.

I know not everyone responds like I do - I have friends who are amazing at instantly metabolising information, from any source, into really meaningful conversations, in real-time. But I don't do that - I just end up disengaging. Drowning in the data.

I think that’s why the panic comes. It’s a lump in my throat, a whisper in the back of my mind that says “betrayal.”

Quitting the stage is the deepest betrayal, because I am quitting myself. Instead of actively engaging with life, in all its conflict and beauty and whimsy and power, I am choosing to just be entertained by it.

“Distraction” is the antagonism to traction. Forward motion. In any story, the Antagonist is there to force the Protagonist to change, grow, make decisions.

I think when distractions come our way, we need to be really, really aware of our “traction” - Where am I heading? What do I believe? What will keep me moving towards that North Star?

Because the battle of our lives is right here, in the holding of the course, the mindful forward-motion that daily asks all of us to stay on the stage, to play our parts, to leap and shine and reflect our truth to the rest of humanity.