Tending the Gaps

Greetings friends,

I want to further clarify the understandings that have unfolded regarding a newfound capacity / enjoyment for being in relationship with both my human and non-human neighbours. In the hope that something amorphous will become clearer by the process of distillation.

What is interesting is that a persistent concern for much of my life has been a tendency to the avoidance of relationships, in particular with other humans. And I have sought in many ways over many years to ‘fix’ this perceived problem. Whether it was CBT, mindfulness, ACT, yoga, psychology or meditation/spiritual practice, the reason for partaking has always been with the aim of solving the problem. The problem being that when I was in states of discomfort/pain I was paralysed and anxious and avoidant in nearly all situations of relating with other people.

Over time, I began to notice that the motivation for this avoidance of relationship is the fear of other people witnessing my painful and deficient self, the hole of lack in the middle of my body. There is clear line from having this deficiency witnessed by another, to that other looking and seeing my personal brokenness/disease and therefore deeming me to be unworthy of relationship. The idea of others seeing this felt unbearable, hence the drive to avoidance of interaction. What has seemed to really hold this pattern in place has been a strong belief in a dis-eased self. That is, I am this person and this person has a problem. Within this framing, the only question became: what is the right technology to fix the problem that I have? (psychology, meditation, inner work, breathwork and so on…………)

What I have noticed is that when I try like hell to avoid this pain being witnessed by others, my relationality with all the other beings around me, human and also non-human shuts down. The logic is, if I just shut everything down then no-one will see what is going on. Of course this exacerbates the pattern and intensifies the pain as I shut down my sensing into the relationships within and around me, attempting to isolate the experience into the most final walled up cavity of privacy I can find, out of all sight of every other being. I would like to call this, the tendency towards the medicalisation of pain and suffering. Medicalisation because it is aligned with the Western medical standpoint of individuals carrying a disease, the treatment of a given disease being isolated to the boundaries of the individual patient ‘the one who suffers’. And this way of perceiving oneself as a individual who suffers is a completely normal habit of perception.

I can’t precisely isolate a formula as to how a certain shift in perception began, however I can point to significant features of the shift. Firstly, I started to see that the way I was perceiving my dis-ease was in fact a feature of the dis-ease. And ‘the disease itself’ is a normalised pathological understanding who and what we are. If I perceive myself as a porous entangled series of relationships that have no start or end point, it doesn’t add up to pathologise the set of relationships happening within an arbitrarily defined boundary which I call ‘me’. How does the disease know that it should stop at the defined edge of my body/mind? And once this perception loosened, it began to dawn on me, that the disease I have always seen as belonging to ‘me’ is a widespread and normalised habit of perception that characterises the operating system of industrial modernity itself. Having grown up inside an operating system that has normalised the seeing of oneself as a separate thing from life, it is of course a difficult thing to see. This operating system is numbing, it is the cause of deep suffering and it is extremely painful.

It is not difficult to appreciate that psychic structures which facilitate the perception of separateness are deeply painful. As in, we cut ourselves to pieces and wonder why it hurts. This is why the war on drugs fails, because it requires heavy anaesthetic to proceed as though cutting ourselves and the living land that we are of into pieces does not hurt. It has hurt and continues to hurt every living being immeasurably. If any if what I am saying carries a measure of truth, then the work of this moment must be some combination of the following:

1. The uncovering of the psychic embedded structures and patterns of thought and belief that enable this habit of perception

2. The cultivation of an awareness of the entangled web of relationships that we are, the ecology that I am and you are.

Maybe these two points above are just flipsides of the one coin.

It’s very curious to me that in my case, mediation and spiritual work were not the vehicle to bring forth the awareness I have been talking about. I am finding it much more fruitful to develop practices of gratitude and love for the living beings in my neighbourhood. In other words, the movement towards tending of the relationships with the beings in my neighbourhood. This involves a movement towards others, which is made much more possible after discarding the perception of self as diseased and unworthy. I won’t say it is comfortable to begin moving into the gaps, because it isn’t. I have been habituated to an operating system is geared away from analog relationships outside of the logic of the market. I have to be prepared to be weird and knock on people’s front doors in my neighbourhood to have a conversation, to extend an invitation to people to be together and tend to the relationships that we can tend to. To remember that we are made of the living land and we all have it within us re-learn the habit of ‘reckless generosity’ practiced daily by the non-human beings surrounding and sustaining us in every moment. And it can begin with turning the conventional perspective on pain and suffering upside down, knowing this to be a logical consequence of the operating system we presently live under and locate the pathology where it resides in the barren and untended gaps between me and all my neighbours. With the practice of tending, the gaps could become rich seams of compostibility leading to ways of living and being that are presently unimaginable.