My time in Ruidoso has felt surreal. I'm temporarily residing in this peculiar town for a deliberate reason, and outside of that there is little to do. I take pleasure in repeating a few beautiful hiking trails, enjoying casual conversations at a local market and coffee shop nestled between corporate chains, savoring generous hours to read and write and rest, and, of course, receiving the exquisite gift of finding a practitioner with the unique constellation of skills to facilitate specific and transformative healing of my inadequately treated brain injury.
And also, in the vast expanses of time I have to myself, numerous uncomfortable edges within me are calling my attention. I'm swirling in the throes of so much heavy content brimming to the surface from the depths of my interiority. I'm not exactly surprised by this, even if I feel a bit pummeled by the rumbling storms within. The distractions are so much softer here, the pace of life is so much slower, that my chronic self-criticism and worry patterns are luxuriating in all this s p a c e. And also, I'm intentionally pulling at so many threads entangled with one of the most traumatic experiences of my life: feelings of familial abandonment and neglect, my tendency toward hyper-independence/self-reliance, defensive withdrawal from intimacy, debilitating self-criticism, workaholism and other addictive avoidance patterns, and the impact of all of this on relationships, work, health, well-being.. It's a lot.
I have tended to each of these chronic areas of struggle with countless hours and dollars, modalities and practitioners, books and podcasts, workshops and retreats. And I often feel myself teetering toward tenuous paradoxes:
I frequently reach places of total fatigue with always doing "the work" on myself to grow... and then I pull back from this train of thought to avoid self-victimization, recognizing that I am in choice about how I spend my time, money, and other resources and acknowledging the immense benefits I gain from these endeavors.
I feel burnt out by my compulsive spiraling into obsessive self-focus... and then I zoom out and appreciate that healing at such a deep level is integral to a commitment to collective liberation: as within, so without.
One of my mentors says: "we are all whole and we all hold a piece of the distortion that generates mis-creation. It is each of our responsibilities to correct what was born from lies, deceptions, and separations away from unconditional love."
I grieve the degree of day-to-day loneliness/alone-ness that infuses my life and feels antithetical to my values, my dreams, my intentions, and of course, my preferences... and I treasure how much time and room I have had to develop an immense, expansive, beautiful relationship with myself and how that serves broader intergenerational healing.
Internal Family Systems invites me to greet all the wounded, confused, aching places in myself with compassion, to listen to the parts of self that are in pain and pulling on outmoded survival patterns instead of healthy alternatives. Meditation, mindfulness, and prayer practices from Buddhist to Jewish to Native wisdom traditions offer me the medicines of acceptance, surrender, gratitude, humility, and presence. My relationship to spirituality encourages me to embrace the unseen allies and unknowable intelligences holding a field of optimism and abundance and empowers me to step into my role as a co-creator of reality. I am grateful for all the tools and teachings available to me.
At a cultural level, I love that we are being softer with ourselves. I love the ways we are cutting paths through the trenches toward the beauty and awe and magic and joy that we all deserve. I love the pleasure movement and making more room for our humanity and engaging in psycho-spiritual discourse.
And also, something new is cracking open in me, some permission to see things for what they are not what I wish them to be, to name it clearly: this human-orchestrated experience on planet Earth is so fucked up and we are all sensitive and permeable to it and it requires constant day-to-day coping. Being planted in Ruidoso is such a blazing reflection of this: confederate flags, Trump banners, strip malls filled with either ammunition stores, fast food restaurants, cannabis shops, gyms or churches, unnecessarily large trucks pumping smog, reservoir banks packed with people casting lines around dead fish floating on the surface. I don’t feel the desire or the pleasure in any of this. I feel the desperation, denial, dissociation, and defaulting to a repetitive routine. In the bleakness of a place like this, the broader societal coping mechanisms make more sense, so do my own. I’m not sitting in the around-the-block line to McDonald’s, I’m trekking trails as a relentless script of inner cruelty and comparison dogs me with each step, taking all this pain and internalizing it reflexively. We all have our ways. To survive the mess we’ve made of this place almost demands the very things exacerbating the very crisis we’re in.
And I don’t mean to suggest I’ve ever denied the dismal realities of our times. As y’all know, I speak to that often here. I am reaching toward a level of nuance that wants to honor the overwhelming amount of coping we’re all doing without always needing to fix or filter or even fight it. This feels like one of the most liberating resources I have right now: to simply be honest that at the root of the root of the root of what feels hard in my life is that it is hard to be alive on planet Earth.
And it has been for many generations. It feels lonely to land here and to be totally transparent, a part of me feels (and expects) that some of you may stop subscribing to this Substack after reading this vulnerable share... and for exactly that reason I feel I must speak to this place today to say "I see it too, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise."
And I wonder: what would it mean if the whole world stopped and felt the agony of this insanity -- the pipelines and pumps, the gas guzzling trucks and overflowing dumps, the strip malls and junk pile wastelands, the fishing nets and border walls, the cages and prisons, the bombs and bullets... what would it mean to land here for a minute. Instead of fighting endless blood baths to respond to how fucked up we've made it here, what if we stopped and simply acknowledged that fact and let our grief guide our way forward?
Here is a paradox I feel increasingly committed to these days, to create a more hospitable internal environment for myself:
I will no longer downplay the horrors of this place and how excruciating it feels increasingly to be on this planet right now. I will only grow my capacity to bear witness as best I can and practice what I'm offering above -- to be with it and to listen.
I will continue to weave with all who walk beside me toward beauty and possibility and thriving with and for all beings everywhere from a deep recognition that all of us are suffering here in this way, and all of us deserve our birthright of belonging to this prolific, abundant, garden of a planet.
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Farm daughter…
Your last four posts have been most profound…your willingness to share your history, innermost struggles, revelations, possible paths for healing and lingering questions provide some insights for moving forward for me in particular (& possibly for all of us) seeking solutions to functioning/growing/creating in this most bizarre of recent rotations around our life-giving star…
May we all pool our collective energies while we peel back our layers of self-protection to embrace new ways of taking steps in the right directions providing the greatest good for the greatest number🙏❤️🩹🍀☮️🌈🎉🤗❤️
Farm dad
With you