Author: Ingrid Hoffman

May 21, 2015 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Try

“You can’t do sweatpants. Ladies, number one cause of divorce in America, sweatpants, no!” This statement apparently “went viral”, or so the friend who tossed this scanty frivolity across cyberspace into my inbox explained. And the purveyor of this relationship advice? Celebrity Eva Mendes. Unmarried. And presumably wearing sweatpants.

My friend was intrigued. Did this mean women who wear sweatpants “let themselves go? And if so, do women who wear sweatpants deserve to lose their husbands?”

It was this conundrum to wear or not to wear sweatpants that got me thinking today. Not about how the media and social networking sites send our serotonin plummeting. Not about the millions of women on this planet who either cannot afford to buy sweatpants or those who are forbidden to wear them. I thought about how we spend our whole lives in search of our uniqueness and yet as little girls we begin to lop off, dislocate, hide away those parts of ourselves that are different. I thought about how we hard we try to conform.

We talk so glibly about being “goddesses”. The pretty ones with long blonde hair. Not those with ravaged faces and hair as tangled as a mango pip. We talk so glibly about women empowering other women. Yet around boardroom tables, in our schools and universities, in the shaded streets of suburbia and amidst the ceaseless chatter of social networking sites we criticise, complain, control and compare.

We’re hardwired to compare. In western culture this primitive survival default has evolved into competitive comparison. We are initiated in our families of origin by the voices of others who say we are too loud or too big or too greedy. We are told that we must try harder to be more, do more. We endure what Tara Brach calls the “hell realms” of schooling. We learn how to look, how to succeed in certain prescribed ways in order to “fit in”.

As adults we enter the portals of “hell realms” that require us to have certain credentials, to behave in ways that conform to group or company culture. We imbibe injunctions from the world around us and move through our lives in what Tara Brach calls this “Trance of Unworthiness”.

Poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, “Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”

Our quest for self-improvement leaves us with an insatiable thirst. We criticise, second-guess, don’t dare to question, to ask ourselves, is this True – for me?

Control. It’s something we are taught early. Our bladders, our anger, our hunger, our fear, our desires… we wrestle with the animal instincts of our bodies, we tame our appetites, we harden the soft roundness of our bellies, flatten ourselves against the struggle of life. We want to belong, so they like us. We try hard, so very hard. And we give it all away.

Author and philosopher, Sam Keen warns, “think of these signs as similar to the warning label on a cigarette package. Caution: these practices may be hazardous to your spiritual heath.”

Most forms of psychotherapy suggest that change is slow and often painful. That it may take us years of silent struggle to untangle the twisted roots of shame and self-loathing that reach through the bleached bones of our ancestors. That we are enslaved by our genetic inheritance.

And yet neuroscience suggests we are growing new neural pathways, re-wiring our brains, continually. We have the ability to visualise outcomes. Change limiting beliefs (and remember that no-one has forced us to believe what hamstrings our joyous movement through life) and chose new beliefs, new stories about our past, our present. Our imaginations are universes of infinite possibility. Metaphysics suggests that change can occur quickly if we revel and delight in the changing circumstances of our lives and befriend our beliefs with kindness and gentleness. If we act “out of character” and embrace our impulses, act as if our beliefs were true in the here and now. Any mantra or affirmation that makes us feel calm and at peace, any thought that feels like an opportunity to learn or experience something new. So, as we journey down this river of life, we dip our school-shaped, society-sculpted oars into the ambiguity of our humanness… perhaps we will see our own reflection and gasp at our own unique magnificence – in sweatpants.

With thanks to Nedra Fetterman for sending me the link to Colbie Caillat’s – Try

May 12, 2015 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Sea of Air

Today I heard a famous man ask his wife, “How did I do?” Her smile was received by his eyes only. The nod of her head, indiscernible to the sea of faces in the room, her whispered, “Wonderful!” dissolved in the air that shimmered with applause.

Inside us the little girl or boy seeks comfort, validation, perhaps approval. Certainly love and acceptance. “Am I OK? Do you love me? Did I do something wrong?” As adults we may hunger and thirst for these words: You matter to me. I appreciate your uniqueness. I love you.

And yet what if we can’t get the love and acceptance we yearn for? What if, despite our best (conscious) intention, our belief in the formulaic “The Secret”, our prayers of supplication, we don’t get the love we want in the way that we want it? What if the support we need from our colleague, the recognition and praise we yearn for from our boss, seems to leave us hungry for more? What if we spend the rest of our lives floating adrift on a sea of air, not waving but drowning?

In the 1970s we were collectively “ready” to accept the notion of “the Wounded Child Archetype” as used by self-help movement pioneer, John Bradshaw. Robert Bly wrote in A Little Book on the Human Shadow, “When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualise as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of the body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy…but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like, “can’t you be still?” Or “It isn’t nice to want to kill your brother.” Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parent’s love, put it in the bag… by the time my brother and I were twelve …we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.”

Modern psychology tends to favour the disease model and focus on our experience of suffering. It is enormously helpful to our own soul’s evolution and certainly eases out some of the Gordian Knots in our relationships when we heal the wounded child within with gentleness, compassion and understanding. And most certainly, it’s in the shadowy world of the unconscious that we find our richest treasure, our own redemption. As Jung wrote, we “do not become enlightened by imaging figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” But like most children who are indulged with too many sugary platitudes and left to run the household while parents cower and hide behind their incessant demands, our Wounded Child may grow up to be a tyrannical “ Wounded Brat” says teacher and author Caroline Myss acerbically.

In an interview back in 1997 she admonished: “How long are you going to waste the precious gift of life mourning over the fact that you didn’t have this perfect childhood, when in fact nobody has a perfect childhood?

At some point you’ve got to say to yourself, I’ve got to get over this because I’m wasting my adulthood. Many people are waiting. They have confused healing with becoming perfect and with making their life perfect. Until they reach that state of perfection they aren’t moving on, that is nonsense. It is this kind of attitude I really cannot support anymore. I tell people, get rid of your wishbone and get a backbone. It’s time to really move forward with strength instead of identifying yourself by your weaknesses and your wounds.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his beautiful book, Reconciliation, Healing the Inner Child adopts a more compassionate approach. He suggests that we talk tenderly to our inner child several times a day. “When you climb a beautiful mountain, invite your child to climb with you. When you contemplate the sunset, invite her to enjoy it with you. If you do that for a few weeks or a few months, the wounded child in you will experience healing.”

So in our own healing we heal generations of our ancestors and our descendants. In moving forward in life with strength and fortitude, in focusing less on the Wounded Child and more on the Magical Child we may find comfort and joy in our own creativity, our Core Aliveness in our resilience.

Backbones not wishbones. Caroline Myss calls for action, not procrastination or wallowing in Victim consciousness. So how would that look? Perhaps we start something new to signal a new cycle of growth in our life. Perhaps we focus on gratitude for what is right in our world instead of continually lamenting what is wrong. Perhaps we leave a relationship where two Wounded Children huddle together and moan and whine and expect some one, something, outside themselves to make things better for them. Perhaps it is not another human being who is the surrogate parent who dispenses the love, the validation and the support we crave. Perhaps we spend more time in silence, tuning out the babble and the brouhaha and find out how to truly love and value ourselves.

Chogyam Trungpa taught the practice of the awakened heart. “The genuine heart of sadness” which he said was natural to us all when we allow ourselves to receive the full experience of life with open hearts. It is in this “genuine heart of sadness” that we discover our repressed grief, our forgotten anger, our thin shard of shame,our intoxicating joy and our boundless capacity to Love.

Portugal. The Man – Sea of Air

March 20, 2015 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Glorious

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” wrote Annie Dillard. There are times when the silt of our experience clogs up the arteries of joy. When we spend our lives in days devoid of mystery and wonder.

Finding fault with things outside ourselves becomes habitual, a dripping tap that depletes our lives of the glorious rush of joy and wonderment.Our obsession for thrills, shock and catastrophe corrupts our innocence with the corrosive cyanide of cynicism.

The stories we tell ourselves shape our world. We see what we expect to see. Mystics and shamans, artists and poets have known this for centuries. “Where you look affects how you feel,” says psychologist, author, and developer of brain-based therapy, Dr David Grand, author of “Brainspotting”.

Psychologist, Ken Wilber, suggests that each decision we make, every action we take, requires a construction of boundaries. We can choose and choose again to remain in our relationships or our jobs. We can draw a boundary around what we choose not to choose. We can choose to be grateful and we can choose to be unhappy. We can choose to spend our days trawling through Facebook or watching news which drowns or lifts our spirit.

To the alchemists mercurius was the world-creating spirit. And the spirit imprisoned and concealed in matter. So our mind (Mercury) determines the boundaries of world we live in. We may trap ourselves in a world that we have created by our own perception of reality. We may stay stuck in our own creation. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the very act of observing itself affects that which we observe. The way we observe and evaluate our inner and outer landscape will predispose us to notice a sunflower thrusting its face towards the sun or a discarded cigarette butt lying in the gutter. The way we observe and evaluate our inner and outer landscape will predispose us to see the love we have been yearning for in the eyes of our partner. Seeing with the heart requires faith and hope and a willingness to look through and beyond the boundaries that confine us.

Pollyanna said, “there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.” And in the midst of the horror surrounding her family during the German occupation of the Netherlands, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.”

So if we can learn to see with soft eyes this world around us. And if we can be patient and self-loving in our hunt, we may seek out the magical, the wondrous, in the ordinary everyday things that gladden our hearts.

Seeing with our hearts is an art that comes naturally to the very young and those fortunate few who “trip the light fantastic” all through this lifetime. It is an art that must be cultivated with gentleness and diligence in our relationships.

The Magical Child archetype can be constellated more easily by those that notice the dragons swirling in ouroboric circles through diaphanous skeins of cloud than those who consult an app to know that today will bring rain. Faith and hope come so naturally, so easily to the very young and to those courageous enough to allow Hope to fly on white wings. Hope and Love endure in all great works of literature, art and film. And yet, for some, “hope is a tease,” as the Dowager Countess of Grantham of Downton Abbey says to her former lover Prince Kuragin, “designed to prevent us from accepting reality.” Perhaps the magic trick is to balance discernment and intelligent thinking with faith and hope. To make space in the busyness of our lives for unbounded dreams and curious observation. To trust our intuition to guide us into chance encounters and surprising new experiences.

Anna Quindlen writes, “you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul. People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn’t look so good, or when the doctor writes “prognosis, poor”… Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.”

So look around. Allow your eyes to soften as you gaze without words into the face of the one you love today. Life is Glorious.

Natalie Imbruglia – Glorious

February 9, 2015 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

My Oh My

We may not be who we think we are. Our mistaken identity lies at the core of our searching. It is the denizen of collective and personal beliefs and eons of conditioning. It’s a theme that’s stitched into the warp and weft of myth, fairy tale and literature, superbly depicted in movies like Maleficent.

“We are caught in a trance, a belief that “something is wrong with me” that can be fixed or controlled by growth hormones, mood sensors, happiness meters or surgery, smoothed away by Botox, cured by finding a new therapist, improved with a new lover.

We all have a longing to be seen, to be understood (mindful seeing) and to be loved for what is seen. The wound of unlove is heart-breakingly evoked by Debra Nystrom in her sublime poetry. When we feel unlove we feel we do not belong, we are invisible, cast aside, uncared for. The wound of unlove festers, becomes a necrosis. Our inherent sense of our unworthiness sleeps lightly and wakes each new day when our inner world meets the outer world. For most of our adult lives we learn to re-parent ourselves, to weave together new narratives, new ways of being accepting of who we are. Yet for most of us the voice within keeps asking, “how am I doing? Or am I enough?”

South African poet, Arthur Nortje wrote of his own exile from his country, his people and from himself. He was exiled in the darkness of depression, his life force dissipated by drugs. He wrote, “The isolation of exile is a gutted warehouse at the back of pleasure streets,” and died at twenty-eight years old, never having known his true face, his spiritual heart, his pleasure street.

There are many paths to awakening.

For some of us it is a descent into the Underworld where we are dismembered by depression, an illness that ravages our body, a loss that dissolves the life we once knew, exiles us from ourselves. We cannot see past ourselves until the time comes when we are ready. “when the veil of the trance lifts, the pleasures and pain, the hopes and fears of our small space-suit self still come and go, but they no longer define us,” writes Tara Brach in her book, True Refuge.

The characters in the 16^th Century Commedia dell’ Arte were stock characters. The actors had no lines to memorise though they did need to understand and embody their roles –they improvised, fleshing out the plot, making up the dialogue as they went along. Shakespeare knew that “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players,” and as we go through the scenes in our lives we make up the dialogue and the action, the conflicts, the dramas. And yet, writes Byron Katie,“reality is always kinder than the stories we tell about it.” In her work she brings fear-based beliefs and the wound of unlove into the light of awareness where they dissolve with questions that deepen our attention, invite us to pause, to inquire whether the assumptions about our “reality” are really true.

Sometimes we may pause long enough, breathe deeply enough, to recognise a purposeful pattern, a deep Intelligent Design at work. We may feel a connection to the Greater Whole, or be reminded of the gossamer veil between life and death.

Ram Dass in Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart says that like Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers what we have been looking for has been here all along. And yet, “spiritual practices can themselves become hindrances and obstacles.” Our lives can become performances requiring perfect delivery, problems seeking a solution, reminders of the rigid roles we play that mask our True Self. Tim Leberecht writes in his excellent piece, Un-Quantify, we “focus on measuring multiple aspects of ourselves to achieve an unreachable nirvana of human optimization.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek philosopher and celebrated author of Zorba the Greek, said pragmatically, “you think too much, that is your trouble. Clever people and grocers, they weigh everything.”

“Only the examined life is worth living,” another wise Greek philosopher famously remarked.

“But it is important to remember that we can examine it without quantifying it. In business and beyond, we can manage what we can’t measure, and in fact we do it every day,” says Tim Leberecht.

To claim a life worth living, he recommends “unplugging from your tools and your carefully cultivated matrix of data. Instead of tracking how many calories you torched during a workout, concentrate on the movements you make, what burns, and what doesn’t—are you able to get out of your head and let go of earlier stresses? To be truly open and present for moments that will bring you what tools can’t track—joy, laughter, happiness, wonder, and love—it is necessary to be attuned to the world around you. What will make you feel more satisfied? Six-months of sleep data, or a belly laugh with a co-worker? You will maximize and optimize but lose the romance of getting to know.”

To claim a life worth living, Buddhist teacher, Ajahn Buddhadasa suggests that we “don’t do anything that takes you away from your body.” Mindful awareness is one way to connect with a safe home base when we are flayed by worry, lacerated by fear. Our bodies live in the present. So when we become aware of our bodies, our inner landscape; when we quieten our minds, connect with our own breath, we connect with the earth that is our Home.

Leonard Cohen’s voice as smooth and dark as molasses sings out for all of us who have loved and lost another or ourselves …

“Held you for a little while
My, oh, my, oh my
Held you for a little while
My, oh, my, oh my…”

Yet we are not in exile. We are Home. We are here now. Doing the best we can.

My Oh My from the album Popular Problems by the inimitable Leonard Cohen

January 19, 2015 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Guardian

We say we want peace on earth. We want wars and genocide to end. We say we want forests to grow and rivers to run with sweet water. We say we want to watch our children play. A Course In Miracles says, “just like a sunbeam can’t separate itself from the sun, and a wave can’t separate itself from the ocean, we can’t separate ourselves from one another. We are all part of a vast sea of love, one indivisible Divine Mind.”

We know this in the deep stillness at the Centre of our Beingness. And then we fall asleep once more to waken to the savagery and tragedy in the offices of satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and brutal scapegoating of Raif Badawi.

We’re crucified by polarity, still living in the tribal mind that acts out of scarcity and survival. Still demands an eye for an eye, a precious life for a precious life that must be weighed in the bloodied scales of blind belief or castrated custom. The ponderous form of Pluto’s slow transit through Capricorn will bring the darkness of our personal and Collective Shadow into form: Stasi States, the Cyclops eye of Big Brother, the silent trawling through great lakes of data by Google and Facebook, the porous walls of private chat rooms.

Religious oppression, where human dignity, creativity, uniqueness and freedom of expression cower in the shadows. Where whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Paul Assange are silenced. Where Raif Badawi faces, what astrologer and blogger, Joanna Watters calls “barbaric consequences” for his thoughts and words which challenge the tribal mind and threaten the status quo.

Bruce Lipton writes in his book, The Honeymoon Effect, “There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms. Whether you’re thinking about it consciously or not, your biology is pushing you to bond. In fact, the coming together of individuals in community (starting with two) is a principle force that drives biological evolution.”

And yet how are we bonding? Are we seeing without sight, hearing without ears when we grip so tightly to our need to be right?

We all see the world differently. Or we like to think that we do. It depends on which lenses we choose to wear. And it depends on how we wear the lenses that are chosen for us.

“Some toxic co-authors live in our world, and others live in our minds,” writes clinical neuropsychologist Mario Martinez in his book, The MindBody Code. “Discarding toxic co-authors involves both literal and figurative action.”

Nelson Mandela said, “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Tolstoy believed that if only we managed to see through our superficial differences and our fear of the other’s otherness, we’d recognize instantly the universe’s basic “law of love”. It is something to which we are born and attuned, only to forget as we enter adulthood; until we choose, consciously to question, to let go of our learned bias and to see in the other their differentness, even as they brush against our tender places.

Where and how will we be the Guardians of each other’s hearts? How do we demonstrate by our words our actions, Tolstoy’s “law of love”? How can we be the Presence, the Peace, the Generosity we want to see in this world, if not by daily remembrances, daily demonstrations of Grace, of compassion for ourselves and all other sentient beings?

How do we guard ourselves from slipping into the stagnant mire of old thinking without sitting back and saying, it’s just human nature, or more eloquently, the real problem is in the heart of man? Where do we draw the line, erect the wall, raise the drawbridge in this permeable, digital world, stripped bare of mystery, bleached of nuance, devoid of dappled delights, empty spaces, pauses in the bustle of busyness? How do we become Guardians of boundaries when our primitive impulse is to become ensnared in hot-blooded, self-righteous outrage at a world where insanity postures as politics and madness dons the cloak of religion?

Perhaps we can be vigilant of our own energy leaks, the thoughts that fly like stealth missiles towards nations or leaders who provide a convenient hook for our own Shadow, our own primitive survival impulses which feed on fear and superstition, good and bad, them and us.

For me, it is the poets, the artists, the musicians who live among us who dust our dull minds and open our blackened hearts with the shimmering sparkle of their Divine Vision. 13th-century Islamic scholar, poet and visionary,Rumi writes in this exquisite verse from Wetness and Water:

How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Do not try to put out a fire
by throwing on more fire.
Do not wash a wound with blood.

No matter how fast you run,
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it’s in front.

Only full, overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.”

Three Hearts – Benetton. Photograph by Oliviero Toscani

Alanis Morissette – Guardian

December 8, 2014 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Making my Way Back

We all have a natural habitat. A place of comfort and ease that connects us to our natural state of Beingness.

Yet, in the straggle of human settlements that stretch like bleached coral reefs across the landscape, many of us are harnessed to thoughts, beliefs, situations that chaff and constrict. In the dissonant babble of other people’s voices we lose our way, forget what it is that we truly need to nurture our soul. We may wander in exile, lost in the endless surge of sensory stimuli that pluck and prod us off course. Our dreams and longings discarded, forgotten in the sweet meadow of distant memories.

Our neuroses may be a response to being removed our natural habitat. Our pliable brains adapt to places and situations, while our wise animal bodies speak to us in metaphor, show their dis-ease in symptoms.

Like humans, animals have an inner nature. And while some of their behaviours and defenses are not always due to overt abuse, their adaptations to an alien environment may distort and warp or erupt in aggressive behaviour.

Anna Breytenbach has devoted her life to inter-species communication. In The Animal Communicator, a documentary in which Anna demonstrates how animals and humans share the same need to be seen and heard, we see how animals and humans display similar trauma and defenses when out of balance with their natural state of being.

Katrina Clay, publisher of Healing Springs Journal, describes a Navajo Horse Blessing she witnessed recently in Saratoga County. Each race horse was blessed with the intention that they would heal, let go of past wounds. Many of the race horses distracted themselves with habitual behaviours.

She writes, “good race horses have every physical need met in order to perform well. What is often neglected, however, is experiencing life true to the nature of horses – outdoors in strong social groups, eating 20 hours a day on a variety of nutritionally low plants while travelling as far as 20 miles a day finding them. While some horses and people are well adjusted to domestication, others habitually fill the empty time ordinarily satisfied by searching for food with hollow patterns of behaviour… For a horse, it may come out as cribbing or biting. For a human it may be workaholism … or any multitude of obsessions.”

Over the past thirty years we have all experienced Promethean changes in technology which has changed the way we think, communicate, behave. March 2015 will see a solar eclipse and the final Uranus-Pluto square in the series of seven which have reflected global events, particularly in the use and mis-use of power as well as the unprecedented proliferation of new technology. Perhaps this final square will bring a sense of resolution for some of us in some deeply personal way. A decision to take the action needed to make those changes that reflect inner growth. A choice to replace habitual thoughts or behaviours with new ways of being in this world that resonates with an authentic place within.

Change is unsettling, even threatening for humans and animals. We, like the other animals on this planet, are hardwired for danger. Our anxious brains have kept us alive for eons. Many of us tend to become more calcified as we age, more fearful, more sealed into our ticks and twitches. For most of us, letting go of our defenses is threatening. For some of us, we will never be ready or willing to embrace the changes which terrify us. And yet, it is in the taking of baby steps that we can truly follow our bliss and find our way back to a place where we feel a Belonging.

“We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination,” writes poet, Ben Okri,in Tales of Freedom.

Beneath the surfaces of our lives our yearnings flutter and soar like the summer swallows on thermals of delight. Our places of nurture which will be different for each one of us. Like the brave green shoots that thrust from cracks in pavements and the trees that stand sentinel alongside swirl and swish of traffic, we live amidst noise and fumes of humans in continuous motion. Yet some of us may know those places of silence. If we allow ourselves to go there, we may re-visit that spacious zone where we expand into our Belonging. Perhaps making our way back will require one day a week where we switch off the phone, leave the incessant demands of our in-box, turn our eyes away from the twitter stream or the distractions that become our armouring and our straight-jacket. Perhaps then we will glimpse our natural habitat. Perhaps then we will know that private place, where we feel our Belonging.

Gemma Hayes from the new album Bones and Longing

Making my Way Back

October 25, 2014 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Damn You

We talk glibly about someone being “a narcissist.” We detonate the word like a Catherine wheel on Hallowe’en; toss it over our left shoulder like a pinch of salt, and like the origins of Hallowe’en or the ritual of tossing salt over our left shoulder, we’re unaware of the moist kernel of meaning beneath the brittle husk. It’s a label that sticks tenaciously in the Victim Perpetrator model of relationships, and in a culture of self-aggrandisement that puts Self above all other sentient beings. It multiplies like an algal bloom in a culture where we consume other people’s ideas, gobble down advertisers’ enticements. We’re plugged in, eyes down, thumbs moving. Tuned out to silence.
In a particular brand of blame and shame psychology that has lodged unquestioned, unexamined in mainstream consciousness, a narcissist is our boss, our ex, a friend who has offended us in some way. They’re the ones who are utterly self-absorbed, aggressive, and abusive. They’re the cause of our divorce or our unhappiness at work. Despite popular assumption, a narcissist does not truly love herself. She doesn’t even know who she is . In her self-absorbed flaunting, in his amplified bravado, in her need to stand apart in her frenzied desire to need to be seen, is an emptiness, an isolation, that echoes pitifully across the babble of voices that tweet and twitter and stare into the glazed eyes of a masturbatory Selfie.
As human populations flourish across the surface of the earth, millions of souls jostle for space, air,work and food in Gotham Cities all over the world. We contract our energy, seal our body space, tune out the noise, the smells, avoid the eyes, the bodies, as we weave and glide over dirty streets, plugged into our I Pods, eyes down, caressing the smooth surfaces of our Tablets.

Therapist Esther Perel suggests that the merge model of relationship is challenging to the Millennials. I would suggest it is challenging to so many who ascribe to The Cult of the Individual. Working in collaboration with someone requires compromise, empathy, and an ability to accept that being “needy or weak or vulnerable” is part of our humanness.

Solitary bliss has an elusive, dreamy quality that advertisers have crafted into a make-believe bubble of desirability, perhaps even mandatory if we are to be normal well adjusted, differentiated human beings. The pursuit of Happiness has become a full-time occupation in the affluent Western World, the belief that we are worth it, that we have the right to have something more.

According to authors of The Narcissism Epidemic, Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge, we are living in an age of entitlement. “The symptoms of the disease range from the extreme (hiring fake paparazzi to follow you around for a weekend) to the more ubiquitous, garden-variety solipsism (Twittering what you ate for lunch or hiring a professional photographer to take your Facebook photo). Translated into the realm of romantic relationships, the message comes across as: I’m great, and you’d better be, too.”
Esther Perel elaborates, “the culture of narcissism is about your personal happiness coming first and your partner coming second,” says Esther Perel. She adds, though, “Narcissism is actually a clinical personality disorder affecting 1 to 3 percent of the population, not an occasional attitude.”

We pay lip service to self-esteem with Botoxed lips and smooth shiny foreheads. We still look outside ourselves for validation and approval. And if we don’t get it, well then, damn you! To find ourselves has become the Holy Grail. We meditate, go to therapy, do yoga, with the same zealous application our great grandmothers used to bleach stained linen. We invest time, money and energy into ourselves. Why would we want to share our Obsession with someone else? We follow our bliss with the same single minded blinkered zeal that our forefathers used to hack down the great forests, alter the courses of rivers, decimate, or convert the indigenous inhabitants. Yet in the frenetic rush to get somewhere, be someone, there is no time, no silence to be still and go within.

For me, myths and fairy tales are repositories of wisdom. These age-old stories carry the unperturbed truths that ripple through our lives today. They teach us that nothing has changed, nothing is “trending”. And that all our neurosis is just a minute piece in the large tapestry of evolution and transformation. The story of the beautiful youth, Narcissus, is a tale of self-absorption, spurned lovers, arid intellectualism without conversation with the moist wetness of our soul. So the story begins, as so many good stories do, with a concerned mother of an extremely beautiful young boy. She asks the blind prophet Tiresias “will he live to an old age?” to which wise Tiresias replied, “as long as he does not know himself.” So she hides all the mirrors in their home and her precious boy Narcissus grows up to be extraordinarily handsome, adored by all who meet him. Because he has never seen his own face, he depends on the reactions of others to tell him how beautiful and desirable he is.

Positive self-delusion has resulted in evolutionary leaps in technology, science, medicine and commerce. The bleached bones of many narcissists lie loosely in graveyards decorated with flags marked with marble tombstones. Today narcissism is a me-first Ivy-league requirement for Alpha males and females who deftly play the corporate chess game. It’s a must for those who hanker after their fifteen minutes (or more) of fame or infamy.

“A reality shaped around your own desires — there is something sociopathic in that ambition,” writes Zadie Smith in her superbly crafted essay Find Your Beach. Our self-absorbed ambition pushes impatiently through the crowds. Our desires Tweet and Like. Don’t question.

In doorways and under bridges of our metropolises the homeless are unseen and unheard. I was struck by the poignancy of a plaque placed on an unremarkable cement bench along the river in Nashville today. I wondered about the woman who chose this name for her baby and the little girl who grew to be Tara Denise Cole, homeless on the streets of this American city. I wondered, did she live and die unseen, unheard, un-reflected in the shimmering green waters of the Cumberland River.

Lana Del Rey – Damn You

October 8, 2014 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Fragile

Every family has one. A secret that pervades the air at family gatherings like the smell of moth balls. A death, a betrayal, an imprisonment. A relative that falls from the family tree and vanishes without a trace. Secrets roll through the dust of generations like fragile tumble weeds. Sometimes they are collected and fashioned into tales that are embellished with bright beads of drama, or muted strands of omission. Sometimes they are made more colourful, more heroic, to lighten the terrifying darkness, conceal the senseless waste.

Film, literature and poetry depict the flawed hero, the Black Sheep, the Sacrificial One who becomes the Redeemer. We vicariously watch the Rebel, the circuit breaker deliver the seismic shock that topples atrophy in the family system. We rejoice in the regeneration, the potency of new growth. The BBC’s adaptation of Irish writer John Banville’s novels portrays the pervasive power of family secrets and our complex relationship with what can be told and that which must be unspoken. Gabriel Byrne in the title role of Quirke, (like Morse, we never find out his Christian name ) enters the portal of his past and attempts to untangle the dark knots of his family complexes: Affairs, addictions, misuse of power, and the redemption of Love. Sarah Polley, in her documentary Stories We Tell explores the twisted thread of secrets in her own family. She discovers that her mother and Montreal producer Harry Gulkin sequestered their love. That she was born of their hidden passion.

In Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, author Margaret Heffernan explores the subtle and pervasive ways we choose, sometimes consciously but mostly not, to remain unseeing in situations where “we could know, and should know, but don’t know because it makes us feel better not to know.”

And yet, we do know. Many of us spend much of our lives moving forwards, never daring to look back. At first we may run like the Gingerbread Man, as fast as we can, to escape the dark shadows of our inheritance. Or like Bluebeard, we keep the gruesome corpses of our memories locked away with the key that bleeds. Perhaps we stuff the dark terror of our past into a glass bottle where it floats across the sea but eventually washes up on the shores of future generations. Family secrets are intuited even by young children, unpicked, uncovered, with the best intentions by loving parents who wish to protect them from what they perceive as a dangerous truth.

Author of Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel, examines the western belief that there should be total transparency.“ In America, lying can never be an act of caring. We find it hard to accept that lying would be protective, this is an unexamined idea. In some countries, not telling, or a certain opaqueness, is an act of respect. Also, maybe the opposite of transparency isn’t intimacy, it’s aggression. People sometimes tell for their own good, as an act of aggression.”

Nations have secrets too. We turn a blind eye. Stay under the radar, in fear of reprisal, in terror of putting our lives or those of our families at risk. Like the frog in the beaker of slowly boiling water, we remain in physically or spiritually destructive environments as the temperature increases insidiously, lethal degree by degree. Often we must confront our past, choose differently, knowing that nothing will ever be the same again.

So often it is in our families we inherit secrets and lies and encounter conflicts and complexes that have ossified over many generations. Sometimes it is helpful to revisit the past. Sometimes it is not.

Joseph Marshall Lakota teacher, writer and story teller tells how he would go out walking with his grandfather, sometimes for miles. “He had this curious little habit of stopping and then he would turn me around, grab me by my shoulders and he would say, Grandson, look back at the way we came. So I would. I finally asked him, Grandpa, why are you making me look back? He said, Because, Grandson, one of these times I’m going to send you down this trail by yourself and if you don’t remember the way you came, you will be lost. To me, that is the greatest lesson I ever learned about history and about the past. Our past makes us who we are, makes us what we are.”

Like racehorses, some of us are destined to be weighted more heavily from the start. Perhaps in looking back, we learn how to walk bravely in the dark. We may glimpse in the stories, the artifacts, the letters and perhaps the old photographs, the strength, the creativity, the courage of those who have walked before us. In their pain we discover the portal to our fragility. In the opaqueness of their secrets, the bright spark of Divinity is concealed in the soft folds of their humanity.

Sting and Paul Simon, Fragile

September 22, 2014 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Rainbow Connection

Our relationships shape shift in a seamless, boundary-less space where we spend more time stroking our screens than caressing the skin of our lover. And yet, in our arrogance or ignorance, we seek our “soul mate”. We believe that quite by chance, we will meet The One who will see us, really “get us”, love and cherish us for as long as we both shall live. Kermit the frog knew of that heart-desire when he sang, “someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me…” And so we dream, we yearn for that chance meeting of souls, that fateful glance across the room, the Providence that will deliver to our door, the Rainbow Connection.

Is Fate is dependent on the will of man, on our Sliding Door choices as some inner or outer power directs us to the appointed place at the appointed time? Dr Gerhard Adler, a disciple of C.G. Jung, asked, “is there some destiny within us that preforms the pattern of our life, or is it the actual experiences which shape it? Are the experiences we encounter predestined, or do we feel them so intensely, remember them so well because of an inner need? ”

Fate, Destiny, is described in myth and fairy tale. This interconnectedness of the microcosm with the macrocosm, our unconscious soul longing that merges seamlessly with outer events. Fate was honoured by our ancestors. Today Fate, in the Western world view implies a terrifying loss of control, and a “what’s it all about then?” kind of impotence. Even death is no longer Fated in our prosaic lives, and we believe our Fate can really be staved off with chemicals and transplants. And yet when it comes to Love, we trust that Something else is at work. Fate, Destiny, Synchronicity…

Love’s Fated initiation is sensitively portrayed by actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, one in a series of films made in 1995 and superbly directed by Richard Linklater. In this thought-provoking depiction of Fated Love, a young couple meet by “meaningful co-incidence” on a train and spend the day together in Vienna. As she tumbles into Love, Celine asks poignantly, “I always feel this pressure of being a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and without making it look my whole life is revolving around some guy. But loving someone, and being loved means so much to me. We always make fun of it and stuff. But isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?”

So after the sunrise of a fated encounter, a brief opportunity to make a choice, embark on a journey, say yes to Love, then what? We recognise ourselves, we find our belonging. We disrobe, invite our Beloved into the fragile innocence of our inner sanctum, offer them the food and wine of our spirit, invite them to gaze upon our soul. We may discover with the clarity of hindsight that our inner receptivity to external events, our willingness to wait at the crossroads to meet our Fate has been precisely the catalyst that has allowed us to move along a particular path and experience certain encounters. And in hindsight, we can choose how we perceive these experiences.

Fairy tale marriages are doomed to crumble outside the realm of fairy tales. Divorce rates rise, families torn asunder. We speak and say we “can’t communicate”, that it’s impossible to live happily ever after. No one can break open our heart like our lover, no one can mirror back to us our beauty and our ugliness, our vulnerability and our strength. There is no easy Jamie Oliver recipe for permanent bliss. In real life, lasting love requires a heaped spoonful of human effort, a liberal sprinkling of daily intention, mixed well.

Intimacy often conflicts with our hard wired self-protective defences. Love’s oceanic depths require patience to plumb, strength and muscled endurance to explore. For many of us, lasting Love is a realm we have never explored before. Here the currents are strong and the rocks are jagged and dangerous. Many of us are terrified when we find that our partner has different desires and passions, that he or she is not a mirror image of our self.

Authors of Tell Me No Lies and In Quest of the Mythical Mate, Drs Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, say we want to re-create the feelings of falling in love without any heavy lifting.

We begin with the rainbow promise of what Love may be and then turn away from that deeper brighter coloured many splendored Thing. We atrophy; or we drift directionless on the current of our lives, drowning, not waving, as we move further and further away from the one we love. We believe that relationships, like good sex, happen naturally. That relational skills don’t require muscle and focus and consistent practice. If we choose to keep on swimming strongly towards our beloved, even though the current is strong and there will be times that we scrape ourselves on the rocks, we will discover an inner strength that astounds us.

Love ebbs and flows. It’s like the Zen riddle: If you never change directions, how can you tell there is a current? As we turn towards our partner, we hone our swimming muscles perhaps by being willing to choose to live in tension and deadlock long enough to accept and embrace our differences. We learn to dive deeply by dismantling our defences, and at last we see our Lover as he truly is by allowing ourselves to be seen.

To Love, in all its constantly fluctuating permutations requires softness, so the energy can flow, and a strength which comes from a congruent place within. As Celine says in Before Sunrise, “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt. ”

Rainbow Connection Sung by Kermit

August 19, 2014 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Breathe In Breathe Out

“I am not afraid of death I just don’t want to be around when it comes,” Woody Allen once famously quipped.

Each one of us has been or will be touched by Death. The death of someone close to us. The death of someone we may identify with, someone we admire from afar. Eventually, the finality of our own dying.

When someone famous dies, death enters our lives in a way that seems to resonate through the Collective consciousness. I received the news of the death of Robin Williams and felt a wave of sadness. This gifted actor who wore the mask of the magician in the roles he played in his movies, inviting us all to collude in the mystery and magic of play. I didn’t “love” him. I certainly didn’t “know him”. I am aware that the characters he embodied were cartes blanches for my projections.

Amidst the plethora of eulogies and anecdotes for this man I never knew, I wonder if it is the dying of someone we relate to that is unsettling, or is it our own death that we fear when a star that shines so brightly is extinguished. When a god becomes a mere mortal.

There has not been the same public outpouring over the death of 89 year old Lauren Bacall. Men, women and children die every day, pawns on the chest board of war, the thread of their lives cut by accident, disease, or brutal murder.

Donald Clarke writing for the Irish Times, says “millions of strangers found themselves “devastated” and “bereft” at the news. A random sampling of Twitter drags up a surprising number of users who “can’t stop crying” the advent of social media only increased the metaphorical rending of garments. Everybody wants to be seen to care. Expressing implausible grief is a way of communicating your great sensitivity…What on earth is going on? The manufactured sorrow at the death of figures such as Princess Diana or Robin Williams is, to some extent, connected with a need to celebrate one’s own life. Your dad may have taken you to see Aladdin. You may remember sitting exams when the princess’s wedding was taking place (as I did). A little part of your life has just moved away…”

Vladimir Nabokov wrote that “Life is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness …” and perhaps when an icon or a “star” dies we are reminded of the brevity of our own existence and that Death walks with us from the moment of our birth.

Do you recall these words spoken by Robin Williams in What Dreams May Come… the story of a man who dies and seeks his wife’s soul in the afterlife to rescue her from hell as she has committed suicide … It’s about not giving up. And yet in our death-denying society there will come a time when the light dims and the glare from the sunshine becomes too harsh, perhaps it is time to surrender and give up. To acknowledge that death is part of the cycle of life.

The Romans kept Death in mind at all times, especially at Life’s peak when we may lose our remembrance of the necessary part of the cycle. So when a military hero triumphantly entered Rome, hailed as a god, standing tall in his chariot, a man wearing the costume and mask of Death stood at his shoulder, saying, “Man, remember you shall die.”

In our hubris, our fear of ageing, our terror of death, we perhaps must remember that our lives are cyclical, like the seasons, the orbits of the planets… and with each in-breathe, each out-breathe, we are moving irrevocably closer to our dying. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC) taught his disciples that in all our human suffering and misery was the omnipresent fear of death. Epicurus advocated a belief that our human death anxiety is not conscious but with us all the time, and it may come thinly disguised by restlessness, accumulation of wealth and power, or excessive religiosity. He embraced the mortality of the soul. With death comes the end of body and soul and mind. In death we dissolve into the blissful tranquility of oblivion, merge into an eternal and boundary-less universe. Socrates who lived a decade before him, believed that after death we pass on to a better life, freed from the shackles of the body. A belief which has become entrenched in the Christian view of something better that awaits us (if we are good) beyond the Pearly Gates. In living we must prepare for death. Perhaps this is the gift in the grieving of the death of a public figure like Robin Williams.

In safety and aliveness dwell loss and isolation, confusion and unspeakable sorrow. Nothing is static or linear. So whether we believe in an impersonal universe and the sweet oblivion of death, or an afterlife amidst loved ones or hierarchies of angels, death is our life-long companion. Death is our Dark Angel bearing gifts under His wings. Death “itches all the time” says existential psychologist Dr Irvin Yalom. And Lillian Hellman wrote that “it’s a sad day when you find out that it’s not accident or time or fortune but just yourself that kept things from you.”

When we cross the narrow isthmus of fear that links the life we live now with the life we would love to live, the acceptance of our own death “can save us”. When we acknowledge death as our companion, perhaps we can live more authentically, discover how to be alive, how to be fully present, deeply grateful for what we have right here, right now.

Matt Kearney’s Breathe In Breathe Out