Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 64

Monday morning. My partner gets me up earlier than usual because we’ve made a pact to meditate together before they need to be on Zoom at 9am.

I’m grumpy. Mornings and I don’t get along. Also, I didn’t sleep great. More strange dreams.

This time I dream I’ve done something really unskillful. But later on, still in the dream, as I reflect back on what I’ve done, I can’t remember whether it was real, or a dream.

I drop my awareness into the body, looking closely for sensations I associate with shame. But there’s nothing there. I breathe a sigh of relief; it must have been simply a dream.

I wake up and immediately feel guilty for what I did in the dream, even though in the dream I had already decided it was just a dream, and therefore not worth feeling guilty about.

I believe young people would call that meta. And probably extra, too.

There must be something calling for my attention. Over coffee I feel into the sensations I associate with guilt. These are different from shame. Heavier, more stuck, lower in the body, around the pelvic floor and gut.

It’s got the helplessness of a small child, fearing withdrawal of love and an irreversible fall from grace. It’s got no perspective, stuck in a story of inherent wrongness, and is completely irrational.

As I feel into the guilt, meeting that younger part of myself with a softening grace, she begins to reveal the shame she’s been holding close to her chest.

Shame, although also but not equally uncomfortable, has a movement and energy to it and tends to hang out a bit higher than guilt, around the central diaphragm and heart. It’s how I feel when I know I’ve acted unskillfully and can hold that knowing in a wider perspective.

It’s got a wholesomeness to it, arising from the part of me that is more aligned with reality and trying to break through the weighty curtains of egoic rationalization, defensiveness and heel-digging.

I’ve worked on both guilt and shame for a long time and have learned that it all comes down to my deep, innate sensitivity to dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of experience when related to from a deluded point of view.

This sensitivity is actually a deeply valuable asset, when I have enough stability of mind, energy and conviction to feel into it, familiarizing myself with it more and more. There’s a bitter-sweet poignancy to it, an openhearted tender ache.

It is what I rest on when “dancing at the birthplace of emergence” with my own experience, and that of others. And it supports a deep holding of whatever is here, as painful as it might be, and a curiosity in discovering its true nature.

What’s here this morning, when related to in this way, is a sense of how much the whole world and everyone in it is hurting and how much it’s going to take to move through this moment together, towards a radically different world.

Many of my activist friends, and the writers, artists, politicians, healers, teachers, prophets, shamans, and other truth-tellers who inspire them, have been calling for us all to bravely imagine the world we want to live in. They keep reminding me that it is only through imagining that world that we can begin to manifest it.

That is where my reflection this morning has led me. And that is where I stop, dead in my tracks. The scent has gone cold. I am terrified to imagine that world out of fear that it will never be realized.

That is what I end up sitting with in my morning meditation. The deep fear that we are doomed. And the more I hold that fear, the more it occurs to me that holding the tension between the beautiful dream and the fear is what a life dedicated to transformative practice asks of me.

This practice is not for the faint of heart.

After meditation I catch up on email and do a bit of writing. I’ve been reflecting on the blog. A couple of times over the past 64 days I’ve lost my motivation to write and it’s taken quite a bit of energy to keep it going.

This is the most I’ve written in my adult life, even though I love to do it and have been saying to myself for years that I must make more time for it. Discipline is not my strong suit, yet it’s a critical practice for any dedicated writer who wants to be taken seriously.

So I keep going. It’s a strange thing, committing to something for an unknown length of time. But I suppose that’s true of most things in life, like marriage, or ordination, or children, or life itself.

After lunch it’s time for my regular Monday afternoon meeting with a circle of friends who are also ordained. We usually take about ten minutes each to share a bit about our lives over the past week and respond to one another.

It’s another commitment I sometimes wonder about. Another one with no known end point. Every time I seriously reflect on it, I always end up back at the same place.

That I highly value these women in my life. That it’s good for me to simply keep showing up and trusting in our individual and collective practice. That to try and be in touch with our depths on a weekly basis and share what we find there as authentically as possible is a practice in and of itself, almost regardless of what actually happens in the meeting.

We are there for each other. Witnessing each other. And sometimes it’s moving and real, and sometimes it’s boring and superficial. The only problem I can see, when I look closely, is my own expectations getting in the way of simply showing up for what is emerging in that space.

After my meeting we head out for a late afternoon walk and sunbathe. We go back to our favourite spot in Hackney Downs between the primrose bushes and pine trees.

There are two men in Muslim dress asleep and snuggling on a flattened cardboard box in the corner of the spot, up against the hedgerow. We wonder if they are homeless or just looking for somewhere to cuddle, far away from the discriminating eye of family and friends.

My partner is convinced they are doing more than cuddling so we end up moving not long after settling into our spot. It’s warm and the sun is still hot in the sky. Now we’re in the middle of an open, grassy field.

People are playing football and tennis very close to us. At one point, we almost get hit with the tennis ball. The young man apologises but doesn’t move any further away from us. Soon after we head home.

We have leftovers for dinner and decide to watch the next episode of Killing Eve. Villanelle wants out of working for ‘the twelve’ and Eve has figured out that she’s not the one who tried to kill Niko.

In one scene Eve is defending Villanelle to Dasha, her mentor. It becomes clear that Eve both knows and cares more about Villanelle than Dasha does. I have a hunch where things are headed. I’m pretty sure Eve is going to help Villanelle get out.

It’s interesting, the complexity of their relationship. They’re both drawn to the good and the bad in each other in equal measure. And in that attraction, there is space for growth and change.

When there is space for all the different parts of us, the wanted, the unwanted, and the unknown, then there is also space to grow.