June 21 2020

It's Sunday and I'm still stressed about my job.  There is no real reason why I should be but our minds create our own reality.  Right now my baggage and my self awareness of my limitations are creating this story of failure.  I don't like that.  There is this Negativity Bias principle where you need at least 3 good things to offset the bad experience.  I've not been getting enough good things at work to offset my angst and fears.

I really work on creating good things in my life.  I seek out friends and having connecting conversations and visits with them in order to uplift myself, to validate myself, to feel more inspired.  I am aware of my limitations at work.  Somehow this positive experience outside of work does not offset this sense of failure.

I crave the weekends though it seems almost every weekend I feel obligated to check my email to see what is in store for me on Monday or what I missed from Friday.  This sense of dread does not serve me in fully relaxing.  I still drink in order to alleviate my anxiety and fear.

I think how I am disconnected from my body and don't have a full range of emotions, that I judge myself as not able to fully immerse myself in joy or happiness.  This is the downside of numbing my fears.  But you know what?  I'd rather have it that way.  I have trained myself to be ok being unhappy.  I had modeled feeling that way by my parents.  Both parents learned to moderate their expectations for a happy life.  They forgotten how to be happy from those hard experiences they had to go through.  I learned that was the way to deal with life.  This is how I am now.

I suspect that ultimately does not serve me but facing the pain is more scary than any upside that I can envision.

June 19 2020 Semi Automatic writing

I've been told again and again over the years that having a daily writing practice helps me.  I believe in that as well.
https://health.usnews.com/wellness/articles/2016-08-31/the-health-benefits-of-expressive-writing

Automatic writing, Morning Pages, whatever you want to call it.  It's therapy. It's a spiritual practice.  It's putting down our ego and uncovering a bit of ourselves that normally keeps hiddent.

I feel like I'm running on empty.  I am running away. I lost discipline in my eating and exercise.  I am drinking to deal with the pain.  I lost the care for myself.  I lost hope in creating a more peaceful and fulfilling life without the fear of being living on the edge of poverty or at least a very reduced lifestyle.  I am tried of worrying about that financial part of my life.  I am feel more and more at a loss about my life, my lack of accomplishment, my not being able to make a mark in this world with my talents.  I am tried of my lack of passion, lack of life energy.  I'm at the denouement of my life.  I fighting it for I have not done what I am came here to do.  I am also giving up.  I feel spent in this long, long hard effort on the back end of my life where decades of trying has not moved the needle.

Yes, I have had many, many blessings.  I know that on our death beds that it is not the accomplishments that we will be remembered by or that we wish we had more of but the people in our life who love us.  I believe we all can have it all.  I really want both.  I see that accomplishment looks like having my talents combined with my heart manifest into something tangible that is recognized by people who experienced me and it.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it despite that I have tried and tried over and over not to hold onto that definition of a well lived life.  I totally believe that this is in alignment of who I need to be and do. I keep on bumping up into sadness and yearning by not having this manifest as my reality, my experience.

Doomed to Fail

I am a fan of podcasts. Hidden Brain and Freakonomics are some of my favorite ones.  

After listening to Hidden Brain podcast on Choices which the subject was about choice, the interviewee Sheena Iyengar mentioned something about Asians that really struck me about how I navigate in the world especially now in my work life.   

IYENGAR: Well, I think in American culture, we have a very deep assumption, which goes like this - if a choice affects me, I should be the one to make it. By God, I'm the one who should make that choice if it's going to affect me. How could you possibly think otherwise? And in the Asian culture, they have an equally valid assumption, which says if a choice affects me and is important, then, by God, somebody really important to me is going to tell me or assist me or guide me on how to make that choice. How could you do it any other way? And that's an example of how a choice should be made, what constitutes a good or bad choice-making method. These are cultural constructs.

I still look for outside validation, for someone to tell me tell me/guide me/assist me as I fumble my way through my current job.  This is not the model of American work life.  This is not what they hired me for.  Hence my struggle of fitting in.  This has been a life long issue for me.  This helps explains some of it.

”

Negative experiences were discussed in a Freakonomics podcast.  I think that from my upbringing and background, I have an imprint of negativity in my psyche.  Epigenetics shows that it is possible even from previous generations.  My guess is that as a product of both my parents that I had my Mother's Internment Camp trauma and my Father's pain of losing two of his brothers who were in their early 20s when my Father was still in high school.  Being a racial minority in a white, middle class suburb of New Jersey certainly did not contribute to having less positive experiences than negative.

The negativity bias, the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than comparable good ones.  In general, it takes about four good things to overcome one bad thing  (4-to-1). The negativity effect evolved because it helped keep our ancestors alive. As we say,“Life has to win every day. Death only has to win once.” I think most of us have lived a life of little positive things that offset the bad. I fight to focus only on the bad and would rather focus on the good.  I do know that I feel deep inside that the bad has outweighed the good.  

The takeaway from these podcasts is that my life has been unconsciously influenced in so many ways.  Knowing that there are evolutionary, cultural, ancestral, societal factors affecting how I am, who I am and what I am makes it both comforting and frustrating at the same time.  I am not the master of my life.  Do I really believe that I am doomed to fail?  On my bad days, yes.  I still cling to the notion that I can control my destiny or at least make conscious decisions that make my life better or at least happier.  This is still a struggle for it is that darn 4-to-1 "rule."  I seek to have those four good experiences and more or at least to find ways to escape the bad ones. 
 
I discovered two quotes that I had on my Facebook profile which I thought was apropos to this post:

"If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further." -Mohandas K. Gandhi

 "I'm not a loser. I'm in my sacred moment." - Julie Piatt aka SriMati

I am an intensely needy person.

I am an intensely needy person.  I think that is why my close male friends are scared away.  I realize that as I reflect about those people in my own life whom I feel are wanting to release their fears and tribulations on me.  My presence encourages those around me to release their pain and troubles.  I both feel honored and irritated by that.  I realize that I too would withdraw from their life.  I would distance my self from their neediness.

I wonder if my former guy friends felt that about me? I wonder my need to connect deeply and share myself with another guy scared them away?  I wonder my desire to spend time, to be pals and have real guy time that is safe and fun scared them away? I wonder if they sense that neediness of mine to connect deeply with another guy scared them away?

If this is true then it only came to me just now.  An aha. I crave deep and trusting connection with another. Maybe I do latch on someone when I think that s/he is someone I can do that.  And if so, then I can understand I would drive people away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4Yu9Utdw0

My axiom is that relationships are self selecting, I.e. if it doesn’t work out then there is a good reason why.  I have lost several guy friends.  Friends whom I’ve had a bromance with.  Guys whom I felt safe with and had fun with.  These are the men who ghosted me, who walked away without a goodbye.  Three close male friends dropped off the map in my life.  I mourn that. I am pained by that.  I see that the common denominator is me. So here I am trying to figure out the “why” of that.

Interesting that I come from a family of two brothers and a father but needing to draw around this male energy I felt I have lacked in my life.  I attribute that to my mother was the alpha to the men in my family.

I am open to own my neediness.  I will ponder this.  I will be more mindful in connecting with my own self more, connecting with my own maleness, my own yang, my own masculinity rather than trying to source that from another guy.

Accepting my spiritual journey

I just wrote an email to my former partner who could not accept my spiritual path and practices.
This both dismayed me and puzzled me for my practices are simple, fairly conventional and non-threatening... or so I thought.

I tell people that my spirituality is what the Dalai Lama says, "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."  My practice is kindness, being in the present moment, integrity and authenticity.

What was not understood was that I strayed from conventional medicine and logic by spending money with a psychic healer and an energy Body Talk worker.

Was this a red flag on my sanity? my gullibility?  my intelligence?  my common sense?  Perhaps, though I do feel that I am pretty grounded on all of those areas.  I point to this fascinating documentary of this "false prophet" who fooled people to follow him despite he telling them not to.
 
I tell people that my spiritual journey is driven by desperation. I seek out the woo-woo because the logical, the pushing hard toward goals was not working for me.  I look in skeptical askance, do some due diligence in testimonial proofs, but at the end of the day it's a leap of faith for me.  But then again, it's that way when I do the logical thing as well.

All this has brought about being viewed as  someone whose life and views on life cannot be trusted.

This pains me for, I work hard on being transparent with my vulnerabilities and open questions about myself known to all whom I share my life with.  Even though I know the risks of being judged and not being trusted as someone who knows how to live their life "well," I open my kimono anyway. I can only be who I am and hiding that does not serve me for I tried that before and did not serve me.  I lived another person's life that way.  This is my practice to live in integrity.

Even though I am not for everyone, it does give me pain to not be accepted by people whom I have felt a heart connection with.  Therein lies the paradox of friendship and what that truly means.  I view those people who I feel are close to me are people who accept the core aspects of me as I do with them.  They understand me or at least trust me enough to accept me without negative judgment.  I believe understanding begets acceptance and it is harder to accept something or someone without having an understanding.

I don't understand this journey myself.  I have made leaps of faith and cannot explain why.  It comforts me that those around me accept who I am despite or because of how live my life.  It pains me to have those who I care for, love, or respect that do not accept this aspect of my life.

I relate to what this author has said here in an article on what she got out of Ram Dass' teachings:
Most spiritual seekers have tried it all. Yoga, meditation, energy healing, psychic readings, shamanic work, plant medicine, to name just a few. These are wonderful tools, mind you. Practices we can utilize to bring us into deeper presence with ourself and our world.
We do need to practice. But, at the end of our lives, all we truly have is our inner awareness and ability to connect to that. We may seek external means to do so, until one day, we realize the heart of the matter is within us. As we connect to the sacred heart, the sacred matter that holds and loves us infinitely beyond the point of our own passing, we more fully know who and what we are, and where we come from.

I continue to practice connecting to my heart, sometime using tools that may not work and look foolish, but my goal remains that I get into my joy and my life's purpose.

Reflections on Communication, Integrity, and Reliability

I reached out to a former BFF guy friend of several years who ghosted me about 3 or so years ago.  The reason why I reached out now was because we both RSVP'ed for the same Christmas party and I did not want to be awkward.

I used the Marshall Rosenberg Non-Violent Communication model of identifying my needs and the negative emotions that came out of those unmet needs with the behavior specific request.  My needs of respect, acknowledgment, and consideration were not met when J stopped responding to my texts and voice mails.  I told him that I felt confused, hurt and angry from those unmet needs.  I requested that he acknowledge his part in this stoppage of communication.  I requested closure. I was not so much looking for his reasons for ending our relationship but more of him informing me that he no longer wanted to be my friend and that he is stopping any more communication with me.

I have learned that more often than not, I have experienced people rather just stop returning my texts, emails and phone calls without telling me why.  This behavior baffles me.  My view of people that I have met is that they theoretically adhere to the Golden Rule.  I brought that up with J who thinks of himself as a moral, honest, kind man who is courteous to people around him.  How would you like it if a friend of several years with whom we have been vulnerable with each other and shared hard and joyful experiences together suddenly drops out of your life without explanation?



I see this from more than one person who has entered and exited from my life.  It pains me.  Sure I deal with it by saying to myself that they don't want to deal with difficult emotions or explain them.  I can see that almost everyone I meet are prone to avoid confrontation which shows itself to passive-aggressiveness and lack of integrity.  I try to deal with my pain and anger by employing spiritual solutions of letting go of expectations for respect and an attachment to people behaving a certain way.  I know the Buddhist view of why we suffer is because of we don't acknowledge the impermanence of things, like friendships.

I also experience people telling me that they will do something, e.g. call me back, do something for me, or follow up on something but they never do.  I come to expect this kind of untruth.  They may have the best of intentions but, well you know the saying about the path to hell.  This is another learning for being attached.  I believe that there is a Twelve Step saying that "expectations are pre-meditated resentments."  It is easier to not believe the promiser in these instances of them telling me that they will do something for or with me.

I define Integrity as practicing your moral values.  I value honesty.  I value that when I tell people I will do something then they can trust me that I will.  I value being reliable, for myself and for others.  I only set goals for myself if I know that I will work on achieving them and have a reasonable chance that I will.  This is being reliable to myself.

This values of being honest and reliable along with communicating with clarity, honesty and compassion are very important to me because connecting with people and developing close relationships are important to me.  I keep being reminded that we are all different, that people have different beliefs and different values and different ways of behaving.  I am reminded that most people do not have the wherewithal to actually live with integrity.  Moral convenience and avoidance of adherence to core values can be difficult and easier to not live that way.

I do not claim to be the paragon of virtue and I can readily admit to my shortcomings and lack of consistency in living according to my core values.  I do know that this is very important to my day-to-day way of living and it still pains me that to expect this in most people who I meet.

Post Op Lessons Learned

There is an African saying “The blessing is next to the wound.”

I am now able to step back from my bowel obstruction surgery which took 9 days of hospitalization and look at the blessings from it.

I got to see my children and their partners all together on my first day of hospitalization.  We rarely get together all at once and this got to be a time we did.

I got to really experience and take in the deep love and caring from my children.  I tend to discount myself as someone who makes a positive difference in people's lives.  I look at myself as someone who can always do better, especially as a father.  I really felt in a deep emotional way that I am truly cared for, valued and loved by my children.

My surgery in this particular area of my body seemed to be a metaphor for what is blocked in my life.  I think the First/Root Chakra is associated with my blocked colon.  This chakra is associated with survival, stability, acceptance, grounding, fear, safety.  I suspect that acceptance is the key aspect that was blocked.  Now that I am recovering, I do hope that not only physical my life energy is back flowing but also having my self acceptance energy there as well.

My Second/Sacral Chakra could be the chakra that is associated with my colon.  I have been working on freeing this chakra for it is associated with creativity, passion, sexual energy.  I have felt that I have lacked passion in my life.  I don't have a dream or a drive to do something that excites me for I have no real excitement aka passion.  I think this is the underlying issue that is holding me back in my work and personal life, or just life in general.  Hopefully this operation will also let loose this passion energy so I can have a life of passion.

The outpouring of love and support from my friends shocked me.  Again, I guess I thought little of my "footprint" in this world and even though I cared for my friends, I did not expect such caring back.  I heard from those I had not had much communication before.

I have learned that even in when I was in this seemingly never ending cycle of pain and relief, pain and relief I was cared for by strangers.  This was not just dispassionate, clinical, perfunctory care.  This was care from people who did not see me as one of a string of other sick and recovering patients but as a fellow human who was in pain and needed their care. These people who connected with me as another person who also had feelings, who shared their humor as well as their professional skilled care.  I learned that the world can be/is a friendly place.  These caregivers were shining lights and examples for me to show me how I can treat strangers as if they weren't but as connected human beings with feelings.

Perhaps this unblocking Root Chakra acceptance energy has showed up as well?  Regardless, the blessing of such demonstrations of caring through words, deed (offers of meals and errand running and anything else), and even money were unexpected positives from this most physical painful experience in my life.

I am so humbled and grateful to have these people in my life.

Blind Boys of Alabama - I Shall Not Walk Alone

I am sure that I will continue to gain wisdom and insight from this experience of hospitalization and recovery afterwards.  I now look at my new touchstone of self-acceptance as a means to help me navigate my life.

I still have this sense of stuckness for my job/career/means of living.  However I embrace this new faith in life, in the Universe, in myself.  Hell, what can be more powerful than painful colon surgery to give me the message of acceptance; for myself, for my life?