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A recent conversation about activism and self-righteous anger has got me thinking about how we really make change in the world. Many of us are “working on ourselves,” and at the same time, trying to make a difference in the world around us. As activists we are attempting to change the societal structures which promote inequity and injustice, to raise our children to be conscious and compassionate, to encourage our politicians & legislators to incorporate fairness and equity into our governmental systems. This can be frustrating work, bringing us face-to-face with opposition, rejection, skepticism and even abuse from people who would rather things stay the way they are. Sometimes in the midst of all this struggle, we can become judgmental and angry at the world and the people in it who seem reluctant to “see the light.” I have begun to wonder, if we do all the work we can toward making the world a better place, but do it from a place of anger, judgment and self-righteousness, what kind of change are we really affecting? Do we in effect cancel out any good we’ve done? Do we end up with a net effect of zero?

I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s books as required reading for a meditation teacher training with the Elesa Commerse, and his work has me thinking about how much activism in the world must be combined with a deep self-inquiry and mindfulness. If our ultimate goal is peace and harmony for humanity, then the very notion of “fighting” for something is incongruent. Fighting implies aggression, and aggression may result in surrender and domination, but these are not the same as peace. Anger met with anger breeds more anger. Aggression met with aggression results in more aggression. Judgment of another feeds a sense of separation. Besides the obvious effect on others, anger, aggression and judgment also constrict the individual who is expressing them.

In his book “Anger” Thich Nhat Hahn describes the chain of effects that occurs when one person acts out their anger. I yell at you, you carry your anger to the next person who upsets you and yell at them, then they act angrily toward someone else, and pretty soon your anger has multiplied itself – grown wings and launched itself into the world. Am I saying you should hold it in and allow it to burn you up? Not at all. There is a middle way – mindfully and compassionately acknowledging your anger, making friends with it if you will, and allowing it the space to exist as a valid emotion so that you can learn from it without needing to direct it at others. Then you can release it, just let it go. Emotions can be very deceiving, and anger is often a way of resisting that within you which needs to be welcomed, acknowledged and released. Our anger toward others is most often the projection of anger toward ourselves. Taken as a mirror, the object of our anger can be a valuable teacher.

I’ve heard people say that anger is a good thing. For myself I know it isn’t. When I’m angry my perspective constricts, I stop being reasonable and I become caught in what the yogis call “asmita” – a pre-occupation with “I,” “me,” and “mine.” In essence, when I’m angry it’s all about me. I have no desire to see the other person’s point of view or even to think of them as deserving a point of view. In fact, I have no patience for anyone at all. Moreover, this anger blinds me to the fact that what has made me angry is probably the reflection of some issue or trigger within me that needs to be compassionately addressed. When I’m angry there is very little room for reason or compassion. Beyond this, I can feel that it is a state that is not good for my body – I feel a crawling sensation on the skin of my neck, my breathing becomes shallow and I feel my blood pressure rising. Therefore, in this state, not only am I at risk of hurting others through my words and deeds, but I am also limiting and hurting myself and creating unnecessary suffering.

The Universal Law of Resistance states that you attract that which you resist. This is also consistent with the premise that “energy flows where attention goes.” If we are constantly focused on that which we oppose then we are actually allowing it to have a hold on us and feeding it energy. How often are we in opposition to something without creating an equally strong vision of what it is we are for? As a simple example, I think of working personally on being less judgmental. I tried to be less judgmental, but every I’d find myself being judgmental my mental noise would be something like this: “Oh, I’m being judgmental again, that’s terrible, I have to stop that!” So I judging myself for being judgmental! Rather than being opposed to my judgmental-ness, I see my judgment as an opportunity to see myself in that person, to practice being compassionate and understanding. In the end, this is really what I want – not to be less judgmental, but to be more understanding.

So back to this notion of net effect. A Course In Miracles teaches that whatever affects us most in the world outside is a reflection of our deeper inner self that is in need of healing. As we work with our causes can we use that which we oppose as mirrors of our own processes? If we are opposed to political aggression against the opposition, can this be a mirror to the ways in which we are aggressive or opinionated in our own ways of dealing with others? In our willingness to heal the world, can we be also conscious of the need to care for our own inner wounds? Sometimes this is the hardest work – to see ourselves honestly and with compassion. It is easier to deny that which is in us and fight against it in the world. If you believe, however, that we are all somehow connected, then that fight is actually still against ourselves. All the work in the world outside will bring only superficial change if the inner self still has not been changed. Perhaps if we were all willing to face our inner selves with courage and compassion there would be no need to “fight” for anything at all.

I’m pretty sure I own about 300 books, not counting my kids’ books.  Most of my books at this point are non-fiction.  I have books about yoga, spirituality, feng shui, cooking, energy healing, women’s health, parenting, psychology, counseling, metaphysics, mythology, butterflies, gardening, butterfly gardening, spirituality and gardening, physiology & psychology, spirituality and psychology, yoga and psychology, yoga and physiology… you get my drift.  How many of these books have I read?  A lot of them, but there are lots with the binding pretty much intact, waiting until I have the time to actually take them off the shelf and get acquainted.  Why do I have all these books?  Because I’ve been addicted to knowledge.

I remember reading once that humans are the only species that collects information just for the sake of having it.  Until that point, I didn’t view my accumulation of knowledge as frivolous, but as essential.  After all, the more I knew the more informed choices I’d be able to make, right?  Well… maybe.  As it turns out, I’ve found that the main impact of my thirst for knowledge was that there never seemed to be enough.  Not enough time to gather more knowledge, and the more knowledge I accumulated, the more I realized I didn’t have and therefore the less I thought I knew.

One of the abstentions prescribed by yoga is non-greed (aparigraha).  I came to recognize my “thirst for knowledge” as just another form of consumerism. As the unread books and yet-to-be-heard audiobooks began to accumulate I began to question my motives.  Collecting more information was supposed to make me feel more competent, wiser, and therefore more in control.  But I found myself feeling oppressed and overwhelmed by all these other people’s words, pronouncements, condemnations and conflicting points of view.  I felt as if I had gone out to a buffet and eaten too much but was still putting more and more food on my plate because it all looked soooo good!  Someone out there had to have the answer to this mystery of life!

As someone who has a hard time making decisions in the first place, more knowledge just added to the number of permutations I had to keep afloat in my brain.  This had the effect of keeping me “in my head” and leading me to distrust or disregard my intuitive center, my inner knowing.

After a while I began to crave silence.  I got tired of words.  My husband always said that he didn’t think I would find out anything in all those books that I didn’t already know. But I enjoyed reading all those books, and I think I learned a lot from many magnificent authors.  And after all that reading, though I think I’ve realized that what I really want is not going to be found in any of those books.  It is not a fault of the books themselves, but of my use of them.  I read to accumulate knowledge to fill a void that I perceive exists in my own inner knowing.  I am searching outside for something that can’t be found outside – myself.

Working with the releasing techniques of The Sedona Method after the recent death of my friend has helped me to realize just how much I feel the need to understand and explain the twists and turns of life.  I also realize that this craving, this need to know, to understand, to have it all make sense, will never be satisfied.  What I really want is freedom, which is beyond knowledge.

So, I am formally releasing my need to know, (and the need to know what will happen when I fully release my need to know!).  It may take a while, or it might be quick.  We’ll see.  I’m also allowing for the possibility that there is a knowing beyond knowledge that is enough.

Do we choose our life experiences?  Does it matter if we do or don’t?  If we do choose, where’s the fairness in some people getting a user’s guide and others not – it sure seems that way.  Or is it karma that determines our challenges and our outcomes?  And if so, could some of us really have screwed up that badly in the past?  And what’s the logic behind paying for something in one body that you did in another (and don’t even remember doing)?  Maybe we can blame human suffering on God?  Or maybe there’s some Universal Senate making up new rules that even God has to follow?

A dear friend recently died and her passing has thrown off my already precarious balance.  I’ve read the books, I know what I’m supposed to be doing and supposed to be thinking, but I’m still questioning and wondering and doubting.  I mean, I get that we have an opportunity in every minute to choose happiness.  And I get that a lot of what we see as reality is really illusion, but shouldn’t that be something we learn in preschool so we don’t have to spend the rest of our years feeling put upon by the world?  It’s too easy to explain the vagrancies of life as “Universal Laws” or “karmic debt.”  the truth is that it seems plenty unfair that some gentle and loving people carry heavy burdens all through life while egomaniacal miscreants seem to get an easy break.  There are lots of explanations out there, but I think our assignment of cause and effect is really just a mental exercise to relieve our own need for an explanation.  Really, just because some old guy in a cave 1000 years ago said something that sounds profound, does that make it true?

And where does that leave us?  If we don’t rely on explanations like “karma” or “Universal Laws” how do we make sense of all this craziness that we call Life?  Truthfully, I don’t think we can.  The trying to make sense is in itself crazy-making.  But can we live with all this craziness without it taking a toll?  At some point you have to put a stake in the ground and just decide on a perspective that makes you able to move on with energy and enthusiasm.  Isn’t that what we do as humans?  Isn’t that what religion, science and politics are?  Just ways of trying to make sense of the craziness in the world.  In the end they’re all just perspectives – different ways of trying to make logic out of a weave of events that could as easily be attributed to cause and effect, as seen to be chaos.

And so I choose my perspective and hope that it will not only help me, but also those with whom I come into contact.  Today, I choose, instead of grieving the loss of my friend to honor the gift of our friendship and the blessing of knowing her.  She was a gentle, kind soul who even in the midst of her own suffering was always looking out for others.  Instead of regretting not spending more time with my friend, I choose to cherish the time we did spend together, including phone calls and a visit with my parents a month before her death.  Instead of viewing it as tragic that her baby boy will not know his mother, I recognize the blessing that he has an entire lifetime to experience because she gave him that gift.

Even so, in the midst of all this I think of her family and the loss they must somehow make space for in their lives and sometimes it still doesn’t make any sense.  I find myself having to release the need for it to make sense, or else sink into despair.

After a month of releasing using The Sedona Method, I’m still not Enlightened.  I do, however, feel lighter.  At first it seemed really easy.  I was recognizing emotion and resistance. I was finding it in my body sensations and mental images.  I was letting it go. I had begun to feel a sense of ease in my body and in my day-to-day interactions that was refreshing.  I felt as if my internal space was expanding in a way I hadn’t felt before.  “This is a cakewalk!”  I thought,  “I’ll be rid of all this stuff in no time!”

There are sections of the method where you practice just allowing your emotions to be, without trying to change them.  I did those too, but those releases felt a little like the moving bridge on the playground where my kids play.  As you’re walking on the bridge, it is swaying underneath and you know you’re not on solid ground.  I wondered, “Am I doing this right?”  Even so, Hale (the instructor on the CDs) insisted that any amount of releasing you could do was enough.  And so I continued

About 3 weeks into the process things changed.  I suddenly couldn’t feel where the emotions were living in my body anymore.  It seemed like everything that came up was insisting on existing only in my head.  Now, for someone who teaches that emotions live in the body, that was very disconcerting.  This was supposed to be moving me into more awareness, but instead I felt as if I had suddenly dialed down my whole internal process.  What to do?  Maybe I should just welcome this stuck-ness?  As I did, I began to notice that whenever emotions would begin to arise, I’d instantly react to shut them down.  It was like in cartoons where the little cartoon animal is coming out of the sewer hole in the street and a big truck comes rolling by and it quickly drops the manhole cover as it ducks back down.  Well that was a fascinating recognition.  But, if this thing was supposed to be teaching me to be more open to my emotions, how come I was insisting on shutting them down?

I kept listening to the tapes and going through the processes (in my head).  At one point in the tape series a woman mentioned that when she welcomed in her emotions, they seemed to start to release right away.  Aha!  That was what I needed to hear!  Thirteen years of Catholic School and a top liberal arts education have left me with the determination to do things “right.”  I was insisting on doing this Sedona Method the “right way.”  At the beginning I had noticed that when I welcomed my emotions they seemed to lose their charge.  I decided I must not be doing it right because there was nothing really left to release when I got to that part of the process.  Instead I decided to really feeeel those emotions.  I decided that the phrase “welcome them in”, didn’t apply to me, but instead latched on to “allow them to be there.”  And boy oh boy was I going to be good at allowing.  I “allowed” those emotions to get as intense as I could and searched the deepest corners of my insides for corresponding sensations.  And then I let them go.  I also noticed the even while I was “allowing” I was also rejecting and judging – and then dropping the manhole cover on the rejection and judgment.  Was it surprising that with all this manipulation and coersion that the emotions would eventually go into hiding?  “Oh, no, here comes the big bad truck!” 

Realizing my resistance, because after all that is what it was, I began to actually welcome the emotions, starting with the rejecting and judgment.  Lo and behold, the flow started again, and this time it was actually a flow… well, mostly – after all this is a process and I’ve had 40 years practice in trying to do things “right” (at least in this lifetime).  This time the emotions and sensations often lasted for only a short time, since they sometimes released right away upon welcoming them.  I also began to allow the pictures and thoughts, all of which I gleefully let go… until something came up recently that wouldn’t let go.  But more about that later.

The most fun part of all this has been the noticing of how much my reactions are choices, how small an action it is to make the choice to let go, even if it is just a little bit, and what amazing tricks my mind can come up with when it feels “controlled.”  Also fun is how the answers I need come just when I’m stuck.