A year ago tonight, by this time (10:00 P.M. PST as I write this), I was gorked out of my mind on pre-surgery medications, and being tended to by Kim (#FKAgirlfriend) in her relatively new Queen Anne apartment. I hadn't actually had my orchiectomy, though I'd been scheduled to. This is the last photo of me beforehand:
A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on
An orchiectomy is the removal of a testicle. My variation of the procedure was a simple bilateral orchiectomy; simple meaning relative to radical, in which more tissue is removed (this is usually reserved for treatment of testicular cancer); bilateral meaning both testicles. Some trans women do not feel a sense of embodied gender dysphoria, and are content to keep their penises and sometimes testicles. For me, having any of this kind of apparatus feels physically wrong in a way that I could not make sense of or articulate until I understood that I was actually a girl. All of it has always felt wrong, and contributed greatly to my depression; depression which mostly came on with puberty.
You may wonder why I would bother with this surgery, when my ultimate goal is GRS. The reason is that I got the orchi done about a year ago, while I am just now finally in line for my GRS, which is scheduled to take place on February 4, 2020. This is a stopgap solution, but it is better than not addressing the problem at all until the Trump administration, if it lasts so long, has already entered its fourth year.
One of the things that trans women's HRT does is suppress testosterone. Ultimately, at my peak dose, I was taking 5mg medroxyprogresterone and 200mg spironolactone daily to suppress it. This suppression created half of my sense of hormonally-related physiological relief. My experience of the world softened. The other half was the introduction of estrogen via 1-4mg estradiol daily (the dose changed every so often; this was not a choose-your-own-adventure of estrogen each day kind of thing). But the point is that I wanted to not have testosterone in my bloodstream. At all. Ever again. Ever. Removing my testosterone factories seemed like a good way to do that.
Women's underwear is typically not designed to accommodate much in the way of external genitalia. Many trans women "tuck," or draw the penis back through the legs, and set things into place in such a way that can be contained by some panties comfortably. Some also use tape to keep things in place, although I never went there, myself. But the point is that removing some of the bulk between my legs would naturally mean better-fitting women's bottoms in general. Removing my testicles seemed like a good way to do that. I was thinking in terms of volume, of space occupied. I had no way to understand how to think about the weight until it was gone.
It turns out I was right on both counts, although I did, in the year since, ultimately argue for (and win) the reintroduction of both of testosterone-suppressing meds I had been taken off of following the surgery. I wanted to add medroxyprogresterone back in order to mitigate or eliminate the occasional erection that had begun, ahem, popping up. Having an erection is generally a very unpleasant experience for me. While in theory, medroxyprogesterone should not have had any impact (since there should not be any testosterone to suppress), it did actually all but halt erectile function, making a marked impact on the volume and frequency. I returned, in that regard, to my pre-op, post-start-of-HRT state, and that was very nice.
I asked for spironolactone to be reintroduced in order to try to hormonally induce more breast development. I'd heard anecdotally that cis women who had been prescribed it for some other purpose experienced breast development, regardless of their age, and induced breast development regardless of age is a thing I'd like just a touch more of. My breast development appeared to have ceased following the removal of the drug from my schedule. It has noticeably continued since adding it back, to my pre-op amount, same as the medroxyprogesterone.
A last-second emergency surgery came in and bumped me from my slot just before they were going to put me under. I remember being very upset, sad for myself because I had been waiting for so long to have this done. But when the surgeon came to console me about being bumped, I told him I was only upset for myself, and that I was happy to give up my spot for an emergency surgery. That I hoped the other patient, the other veteran, would be helped. He assured me I would be scheduled for the first available slot, which turned out to be January 22, 2016; the very next day.
People ask about whether girls like me regret this kind of surgery. Some just assume we will regret it, though the data generally do not support that. For myself, I can say that I did regret when I did it, though I do not regret actually having done it. I posted vlogs aboutmyrecoveryweekly for awhile, and in some of them, talked about that. I regretted it because my post-surgical state strained my already damaged relationship with Kim, and so the timing of it certainly was a large factor in the end of our relationship. I wished I had done it at some other time, some other time that would let me have the orchiectomy that has brought me so much relief, without losing the love of my life.
Overall, my health in regard to gender dysphoria and embodied gender dysphoria has improved greatly as a result of my successful orchiectomy. I have less actual weight between my legs. Tangentially, as a result of continued conscientious HRT adjustment, I also have slightly more weight on my chest, and the sensations that these simultaneous states produce are becoming closer and closer to what my brain experiences as "right," when it comes to how it feels to live in my body.
I had no grand ambition of founding or leading a church. I still don't. In fact, I am actively doing what I can to explain that I am, objectively, only the founder. I am not the leader. There cannot be any such thing that is not declared, invented; inherently not objectively real. If I lead, it is a part of objective reality to the extent that I do it. But whether I am called a leader means only that I am called a leader by whomever decides to refer to me as such.
In many ways, the Church of Objective Reality is an anti-church. It is as descriptive as possible, avoiding prescription as much as possible. It is about practicing being as close as possible to pure perception — our best capacity to know what is — and practicing recognition of what is not that for what it necessarily must be: subjective reality, a subset of what is; thoughts, emotions. It is about acknowledging that every living thing's scope is necessarily limited.
I have a few labels for the COR that reflect not the entire thing, but major aspects of it; labels like "first framework," or "disorganized religion." But really, every church is about abstract thought, a subjective interpretation of what is, turned prescription of what is supposed to be; in human terms, how to live. But every living thing, by definition, clearly knows how to live; it is alive. Whatever it's doing, in terms of "are you alive or not," it's working.
Humans can understand that, conceptually, there are different ways one could possibly live. For any number of reasons, many are not content only to live, but want also to divine how to live better; that is, how to make their own reality better than it is, in any given moment. Humans have developed complex systems of communication, and each human innately has some capacity to invent and understand language. So, around the world, people began not just living, like the animals many forget we are, but talking about how they lived.
Around the world, in different contexts — different climates, for example, or different history — people described how they were living, to each other, whether by showing, or telling. Thoughts about ways to be were no longer limited to genetic passage. Now they could travel memetically, as culture; through language. But thoughts about how to be were (and are) still only thoughts. A thought is inherently only a subset of objective reality; limited to the one who holds it. A thought is not reality itself, but a response to perception of it. Mechanically, it is the end product of the process of noticing, experiencing, concluding.
Prescriptive religions — those that command people to live in a particular way — mechanically interfere with the believer's experience of objective reality by disrupting the first step: they condition ignorance in noticing; this necessarily mutes experiencing, supporting the practice of conclusion before fact. The end result — the thought — is necessarily distorted. That is, for example, if one is taught (and comes to believe) that there is a God who creates all things, and that God made Man and Woman, with strict definition, and no variance from those core definitions, it is natural to conclude that people like me, transgender women, are an affront of some sort to God. And so, ironically, in pursuit of instruction in how to live optimally, many have forgotten how they actually live, just live, in the first place at all. To live optimally requires context; measures of better or worse. To live, just to live, requires only being alive.
Years ago, in the Before, Jenn introduced me to Buddhist schools of thought; Buddhist frameworks for processing and understanding reality. I did not understand this at the time, but Buddhism, like every other religion I'd ever heard of to that point, is fractured and factional, with many common core elements, but divergence beyond them. So, when I say "Buddhist," I really mean "interpretations of Buddhism through the lenses of a limited subset of authors who are Buddhists, writing as Buddhists." I started with Thich Nhat Hanh, and a book called No Death, No Fear. I had what, at the time, I would have grudgingly described as a "mystical experience" — a sense of being able to see the connections between all things in objective reality. Seeing through the wall of the apartment, out to the balcony, where Jenn's bike was hanging from a hook. From parts of the bike (and the apartment wall, and the cars outside, and and and) to manufacturers all over the country or world, to the workers in those factories, to their lunches, to whomever had made those lunches, to the bakers and butchers and grocers who had provided access to all the ingredients, to the farmers, and so on, and so on, forever; all expressed as light in void. For like two minutes. I cried. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. For more than ten years, nothing like it happened again.
I understand that experience, now, not as mystical, but as a sort of proto-visualization, an early form of what I went on to first consciously create and direct in guided lovingkindness meditation practice, but which I now frequently create consciously during informal visualizations, as well. I was experiencing a suddenly much deeper awareness of reality, so much deeper that it overwhelmed my senses for a few minutes, as I struggled to comprehend the truth of our inherent connectedness, of our interbeing. The next closest sensation to this was when I realized I was trans; that, in the context of binary gender, I had been as wrongly categorized as I possibly could be. That was followed by sensory overload, as well, while my entire body woke up for the first time, to process uninterrupted hours of lived past experience. Everything made sense deeply in this way, too. I had only two great truths: that we are all connected; that I was and always had been a girl. I understand these both as true, still, but also as incomplete expressions of what is. But, writing this, I was struck, again, that I was always already living in accordance with my church; I just did not understand what I was doing, and so made many temporally subjectively good choices that were objectively poor.
My capacity to make objectively better choices in any given moment, I realized, was founded upon my capacity to notice what is; to distinguish it from what is not. Where I failed, where I suffered, it was invariably to the degree I was not in accordance with reality. Before I understood I was a girl, I tried very hard to be a boy, while also knowing (though not understanding) that it was inherently not who I was. Naturally, my best attempts included as much avoidance of the role as possible in the first place; it wasn't who I was. So, when I found ways to check out of objective reality that were still in many ways permitted and even encouraged by what was available to me, cast as male, in the subset of objective reality I could experience, I took them. They were, more than anything else, video games.
At first, any sort of other reality was preferable. At least those other realities, if nothing else, made complete sense almost immediately, and were implicitly self-contained. In contrast, my subjective reality — that is, my lived experience of objective reality — never had made sense, prior to my realizing I was a girl, and also had no limit I could understand. But with video games, if I did not like them, I could discard them; it was easy to recognize them as not objectively real. If I loved them, I could play them again — relive those alternate realities — as often as I liked. As video games evolved, went online, became better approximations of objective reality, I invested myself more completely. I had spaces in which I could live a life, or something close to it, as someone much closer to who I really was. Not a wizard, or warrior, not a paladin or a priest. But a girl. Just a girl.
My suffering all along was not born of what I was, or even what was, at all, entirely, objectively. My suffering arose entirely because I had become attached to ideas of what was supposed to be, without ever really considering them.
Today, to give tiny example, I was planning to head down to SoDo Deli. I think of them, in many ways, as my family. Not just the owners, but everyone who works there. The shop will close early, tonight, but from then on, we will relax and enjoy food and conversation and singing and... actually, probably television, to be honest. Feelin' like 99% sure there will be television basically the whole time. Also today, as the last day of the month, I was running out of time to do a thing I generally prefer to do, and have so far only rarely failed to do: publish at least one new post on this blog a month.
I have much more to write about this, about my church. Prior to today, I had approached these blog posts as complete, distinct entities. I would sometimes interlink them, but the idea of writing an explicitly serial piece with explicitly connected pieces was always terrifying to me. I am not sure why. But when I ask myself, as I sit with apprehension over the idea of trying such an enterprise, why I am afraid, my best answers fill me with love for myself, and a gentle smile. I want to not say anything wrong. I want to not make a mistake. If I write and publish a single blog entry that is self-contained, as hermetic as I can make it, I will not have committed myself to an entire structure of things that could later be wrong, or not what I would say then. When I examine those answers gently, repeatedly, like a gentle washing, with "why?" they are reduced to only this: I do not want to mislead; I do not want to harm by misleading.
When I ask myself whether I really have any control at all over any of it — any response to what I ever do or say — I know implicitly that the answer is "no." I am only me, after all. What I can control is very limited.
Today, my tiny example, had me beginning to feel distressed, because all else I wish to pack into this blog entry, my backstory to my church, will take too long to articulate, in the context of my wanting to spend the evening with family. There is no objective benefit in my staying here and pushing myself to do what seems impossible; even if I succeed, I am still only creating a subjective benefit. I am creating relief from my own expectations. But as I understand expectations, fundamentally, as a form of "I would like it if," I have a new way to relieve myself of them. It is far simpler. I will tell you about it later.
I recently read a NY Times op-ed titled, "Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment" by Ruth Whippman. In it, Whippman describes her frustrations with mindfulness, which, she says, "is supposed to be a defense against the pressures of modern life" before going on to say that mindfulness is "a special circle of self-improvement hell, striving not just for a Pinterest-worthy home, but a Pinterest-worthy mind."
When I got to the word "striving," I noticed that I expected I would see several more paragraphs of what mindfulness is supposed to do for us, rather than what it actually is. There is no striving in mindfulness practice. It is, frankly, mechanically too simple for that. It is only being present; paying attention; noticing. This includes noticing that my focus has drifted from what is, to something subjunctive, and then returning to what is. Or, noticing that I've drifted from a guided meditation, and coming back to it. I acknowledged the expectation that the rest of Whippman's op-ed would be reaction to something wildly different from what I understand mindfulness to be. Then, I released that expectation, acknowledging that it was based not on the piece, but my expectations of it, and kept reading.
Whippman seems to believe that mindfulness practice has a goal beyond
being present. This is not an unreasonable conclusion for her to draw, given that she seems to have been sold mindfulness as a solution to her stress. "Practice this to achieve
that." I tried to approach mindfulness that way Before, and got very little out of it. I understand now that all of the discomfort I felt, and the lack of progress I experienced early on, was normal. After all, I was finally examining my own emotions after dousing them for decades. My mistake was going in wanting to see immediate and profound results, rather than simply taking up a practice for its inherent benefits. Being aware of what is happening in each moment is a generically useful skill, like walking.
Mindfulness practice is asking myself, "what's happening, right now?" Mindfulness practice is answering that question continuously; being aware of what is. The outcome of the practice is not important. The practice is its own reward.
The benefits people seek, when they arrive, do so without being
dragged into being. They are not goals. They are the natural result of being present to what is.
Whippman argues that "[mindfulness] is a philosophy likely to be more rewarding for those whose lives
contain more privileged moments than grinding, humiliating or exhausting
ones." And yet I could not fully embrace the practice until my class privilege was decimated, until my life became mostly a string of grinding and humiliating and exhausting moments, until I was so utterly cut off from distractions that I had no choice but to notice how deeply I felt that I wished I was a girl, and to sit with that feeling and try to make sense of it. This predated my formal instruction in mindfulness practice, through classes at the VA. And yet, even without that guidance, I was able to examine that feeling, and explore why I was feeling it. Why it had always been there. What that meant. My depression and apathy, secondary to unrealized gender dysphoria, had finally won out. I'd cornered myself, after nearly 40 years. I literally could no longer afford to distract myself from myself, my actual self, where I actually was. It is no wonder that sitting with the sentiment of wishing that I was a girl was deeply uncomfortable; I'd spent my entire life being told I was a boy. For a boy to wish he is a girl does not make sense, and wishing that hurt too much for me to ever examine it closely, when I could just ignore it, and dull that pain instead. But it was only in sitting with it, and asking myself why I wished that, exploring it, that I came to understand I had had the grammar all wrong. At some point, "I wish I was a girl" gave rise to the right response, at last: Am I not? Whippman wants to "offset the tedium of washing dishes" without examining why she considers washing dishes to be tedious. She says, "happiness does not come so much from our experiences themselves, but
from the stories we tell ourselves that make them matter." Here, she acknowledges that happiness can come from experiences themselves, but goes on to give greater weight to our stories about our experiences. Telling ourselves stories about our experiences, stories about the other people in them, is a very big part of how we ended up with President Trump. We can synthesize joy with our stories, but I have found objective reality to be more joyful, overall, in no small part because it is inherently less harmful; things that are simply are.
I find it more difficult to believe that a rock I have stumbled on is somehow out to get me when I consciously acknowledge that it is a rock. I find it more difficult to believe that Kim went to Trans Pride expressly to meet a new trans woman to replace me with when I consciously acknowledge that she, like me, like every living thing, wants for the same things: safety, health, happiness, ease. When I sift out what I feel and conclude based on my feelings of being discarded and replaced, and instead guide myself into responding only to what is, the reality is plain. She was unhappy with me as her girlfriend. Of course she left. It was inevitable.
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Recognizing this does not make me feel instantly wonderful. In fact, even consciously stating it now, in writing, I necessarily go through most of that hell again. My chest implodes, I struggle to breathe. I cry. But I cannot process those feelings without processing them. I cannot wish them away and ignore them without suffering. So, I acknowledge it. Reality. Each time, the pain seems a little bit smaller. It dissipates a little bit sooner. Being present with my emotions, loving myself enough to care to do that work, like anything else, is practice.
To avoid telling myself stories about my experiences, to avoid necessarily defining others and their motivations or intentions, is to avoid disappointment in the future when my stories inevitably fail to line up perfectly with reality. Mindfulness practice is recognizing what is real, and what is a story. Lovingkindness practice leads me to conclude that responding to what is real is more likely to be kind than responding to what is a story. Mindfulness is fundamental to lovingkindness, and leads naturally to it, but, alone, mindfulness is only the skill of noticing.
I found it distressing that Whippman describes her experience with mindfulness advice as containing "moralizing smugness" and "'moment-shaming' for the distractible [sic]," as these ideas and attitudes are directly opposed to what I was taught. I was taught a thing I found true when I considered it: that it is the natural tendency of the human mind to wander. There is no shame in being what we are. The practice as taught to me explicitly excludes judgment.
I have been recommending to people that they seek out mindfulness classes in their area, because of how impactful my own practice has been for me. But Whippman describes a westernized, commodified version of mindfulness that is outcome-oriented in that it sets expectations. Ironically, she's very close to understanding the practice more as I do. She argues that in mindfulness, "happiness is
seen not as a response to our circumstances but as a result of our own
individual mental effort, a reward for the deserving." Mindfulness practice has made it possible for me to be much more deeply aware of my circumstances. Aware to the extent that my happiness is largely in response to my circumstances. Mindfulness practice is not difficult. The things I can see with it frequently are.
Whippman laments that "we give inner-city schoolchildren mindfulness classes rather than engage
with education inequality, and instruct exhausted office workers in
mindful breathing rather than giving them paid vacation or better health
care benefits." But mindfulness practice, the practice of noticing what is, is the only way to address problems of education inequality, inadequate healthcare, and so forth. After all, to the degree that a problem is not understood, it cannot be solved.
Far-right conservative Christians, for example, tend to believe that I am a man who wishes he were a woman, and is now engaged in a years-long process of mutilating his body so that it looks like some sort of facsimile of a "real woman." But while they ask themselves "what kind of man would do that?" and then answer that question with whatever seems reasonable to them, they remain blind to the fact that their question can never lead to an answer that makes sense, because it is the wrong question. It begins with the presumption that I must be a man. With that presumption, as when I was designated male at birth, comes a whole host of cultural footnotes. For example, the idea that men are inherently sexually predatory, and can have no relationship with any girl or woman that is not either sexual, or paternal. Cast as such, of course they fear my presence in the women's room. Why would a man be there? But that isn't the problem. The problem is that they do not understand the problem well enough to realize that there is no problem.
Were they to ask themselves the right question, as I finally did, the answer becomes so obvious that the question is rendered rhetorical. When the question is, "what kind of woman would do that?" it collapses on itself:
What kind of woman would want to use the women's room?
What kind of woman would want to have a vagina instead of a penis?
What kind of woman would be upset that she grows facial hair?
What kind of woman would want to join a women's group?
What kind of woman would wear women's clothes?
What kind of woman would feel erased and unseen when called a man?
Whippman closes by arguing that the results of a "an enormous meta-analysis of over 18,000 separate studies on meditation and mindfulness techniques" were underwhelming. This makes sense, given that what she has been taught about mindfulness is so very far from what I was taught that they are more different than alike. She seems to be talking about westernized, mass-marketed mindfulness instruction, and if that is what was analyzed (by the United States Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) it does not surprise me in the least that the results were underwhelming. Internal results within the VA have led to persistent expansion of mindfulness-based programs; where the kind of mindfulness I was taught is employed, it produces enough benefit that the VA invests in more.
Mindfulness is not a hammer one can use to beat stress into submission. It is only noticing what is, and what is not. Like everything else, it is a practice. Whippman closes by saying, "perhaps, rather than expending our energy struggling to stay in the
Moment [sic], we should simply be grateful that our brains allow us to be
elsewhere." Mindfulness permits me to consciously recognize that desire to check out, to be elsewhere, so that the reason why I want to disconnect from reality reveals itself. It is only then, when I understand the problem, that I can solve it.
Mindfulness is not "a defense against the pressures of modern life." It's no defense at all. It is being, where we are, when we are, unadorned, ourselves. It lays the foundation for lovingkindness practice, for cultivating a soft and gentle response to the reality that is, rather than a harsh and commanding attempt to craft or sustain a reality that is not.
Whippman says, "Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment."
In one of the lovingkindness meditation classes at the VA, one of the participants asked the guide what the point was of all the well-wishing, sitting around saying "may you be happy" and stuff while imagining people or whatever before us. He said it didn't do anything for anyone in real life, and he didn't know why we were doing it. I caught up with him after class and told him how I think of it.
I don't think of the exercises as the goal. I view them as just what they are called: practice. We practice so that when the object upon which we wish these kind sentiments is actually before us in some way, we are skilled at knowing how to be kind towards it, whatever it is. A noun; a person, a place, a thing. In informal practice, I often offer kindness to the creek, as a distinctive collection of things I understand as a place. If some kind of land use action were to come up for consideration locally, I would want to act to preserve it, instinctively, because I have practiced caring about it.
In the same way that I practice yoga to tone my body so that I am more skillful in my navigation of the real world — able to do more, better, more safely, and more gracefully than without this practice — I practice mindfulness and lovingkindness. I practice so that when an opportunity to practice with actual nouns arises, I am aware enough to notice the opportunity has arisen, and practiced in doing what is kindest as a consciously chosen response.
Most of what I achieve, much of what I understand as my capacity to make
such rapid advances with these practices as I have, is in how I
visualize things. I don't mean to suggest that others should necessarily
employ my visualizations. I only intend to share some of what I
tend to visualize, and what my embodied experience of practicing with those
visualizations is usually like. Physical sensations are felt in reality, not
just in the visualizations. With regular practice, the visualizations themselves bleed into reality.
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At one point in the very beginning of my formal practice today (actually 10/27/2016, the day I started writing this, pictured above), the guide said "pay attention to the sensations of breathing," and that reminded me of a couple shirt ideas I had had the other day, so I leapt up and paused it and typed them into my to-do list under "shirts." Then I resumed playback and returned to the guidance. As far as I understand, this is either bad form, or perfect form, depending upon whom you ask. I consider it to be sound form; I responded to what arose, and then quickly returned to the practice.
After mindfulness of the breath was established as a base, I was guided to receive kindness from benefactors. I was directed to envision them across from me, if I had only one; in a semi-circle in front of me, if I had more; in a circle around me, if I had more still. I usually envision myself in a void, with my benefactors around me forming a sort of atomic sphere. They don't go zipping all over like electrons, or anything; they just suggest a sphere around me by their positions relative to mine.
In voidspace (my name for the space where I practice the sphere visualization), there is no setting, and there are no props. Everyone is naked, but representations of human bodies as they exist in reality are rarely visible, and when so, not for long — they are all too radiant, ultimately. My own body is visible to me the longest, in the sense of looking the way it appears in reality within the visualization. Most of the time, though, I, too, am only light.
I had some trouble using people as benefactors today, at least at the start. Instead, I enlarged my I/O cats. Linta's paws grew to a little bit larger than my head. Wobbles and Pippin were similarly resized. They formed a protective sort of circle around me, but in a natural cat way. Linta sat by me and let me rest my hand on one of her fingers when I rolled onto my side. I don't usually think of cat paws as having distinct fingers, but one of my hands barely covered her knuckle. I could feel her fur, rougher than usual, also rescaled. She wasn't looking at me, but rather off into the distance, thrumming gently with a soft purr. Wobblefoot was lying down behind me, also looking off into the distance, but some other direction. Pippin was pacing around and stepping over me. I realize this is in a void at the center of a sphere of other benefactors, but that's how it works for me. Sometimes people walk on ground that is not there.
The guidance calls for practitioners to envision tangible beams of light projecting these caring sentiments into them, from their benefactors. With the cats, I usually envision it projecting from their hearts towards mine. My general visualization for tangible kindness projection has its origins in Champions Online, and their Celestial power set. One of the powers — Celestial Conduit — is a beam of light that heals allies, harms enemies, and can chain between targets near and like the main target. It doesn't look this way in my mind, at least not anymore. But this is a pretty good representation of it. Recently, I've also used plasma balls as a sort of conceptual visualization guide, with myself being the center. Sometimes I use fire, but Champions Online-style video-game fire — just the appearance of it, spirit fire, not something that actually burns my body. I don't generally have a sense of choosing, but rather a sense that one or the other just arises as the best fit with whatever benefactors I'm working with.
When receiving kindness, I feel as though my heart is being unpacked and unraveled. Expanded, it resembles a sort of steel flower about 30cm across at the widest point of bloom, but built only from the veins of petals. A delicate four-dimensional filigree. It is a mildly painful sensation of openness and expansion, like a really good, effective stretch. I think of this as kindling for my own sense of kindness, although there's no sense of it catching fire. It's more that the tangible beams of light begin to catch on the framework like sticky dew, and before long it is completely covered and alight.
Not long after that, it becomes so bright that I can feel it on my skin. I cry the entire time. I cry a little bit for the pain — it feels like the breath is being squeezed out of me — but mostly in mourning. On some level, I know I was always supposed to receive kindness from others. I have a sense that I was designed to, and understand why people believe in a personified god. There's a sense of relief that usually follows the mourning, and that's when I really begin receiving the kindness more completely. I usually have a sense of the beams disintegrating my body as representative of resistance to my true form. The flower, my heart, goes with it.
Sometimes my visualization shifts erratically to a new scene representing the same ideas. Today, I still retained the heart flower, but was briefly seated, bound to a ceremonial chair, on the dais in a chapel. Everyone was dressed normally. So, the cats were still naked. I, and everyone else, was in simple Puritanical garb reminiscent of what little I remember of wood block prints depicting the Salem Witch Trials. The meditation guide stood to my right, reading the guidance, and my benefactors, sitting out in the pews, chanted along with him, to me:
May you be safe; protected from inner and outer harm. May you be healthy; as strong as you can be. May you be happy; peaceful and content. May your life unfold with gentle ease.
I sobbed and strained against the bonds. I whimpered "no" over and over. Not because I wanted them to stop, but because it was so overwhelming that I was instinctively afraid of it. Afraid it would obliterate me. And it does, but just my body. The scene ends and I am still engulfed in tangible beams of kindness in voidspace. I have visualized a visualization within my visualization.
(The cats don't chant, but they still send the same distinct sentiments. I often see them blinking slowly and head-butting me as a kind of punctuation. When they are huge, it's wonderful.)
I notice that a strong sense of not deserving this kindness arises every time I practice. I don't feel I am intentionally resisting it, but more that I'd been conditioned from birth to believe I should not have it. This practice heals the damage from that kind of conditioning. It feels like therapeutic massage; painful, but in a way that is clearly, tangibly healing. It feels kind of like being slow to catch fire. It's not that I cannot be an effective channel for kindness as I am now, without practice. It's that I need to practice opening that channel both ways to really be maximally effective at practicing kindness. Understanding how it feels to really receive kindness is key to being really empathic about where and how to offer some.
Eventually, I rolled to my back again as I felt relentlessly pressed upon by this tangible sense of kindness. It rushed over me like a suddenly flooding riverbed rushes over a boulder it cannot move. My position shifted a bit, but I stayed where I was, and I felt this visceral flow rushing past me, pushing me down. But it was light. It felt heavy and weightless at once. Trapped beneath it, I could not rise up, but I could breathe perfectly freely.
When the guidance called to return focus to the breath, and reflect upon the experience of receiving kindness from benefactors, the light faded quickly, along with them. My steel flower heart structure was gone, transformed into a ball of light. This is typical of my practice lately; I can't remember the last time the ball wasn't part of it.
After manifesting, ball initially stays over me or in front of me, near the center of where the flower had been — about six inches out from my skin, in a line straight out from my heart. When she is very dim, she is still too bright to look at at her center for long, but not especially radiant. She only naturally throws light (that is, kindness) a short distance. When I engage her in later guidance, she intensifies such that she appears vastly larger than she actually is. The tangible core of her being is about three quarters of an inch across, and perfectly spherical. She is bright enough at minimum that she usually appears no smaller than a tennis ball. I don't have a name for her, really. I don't always even know where she is.
She often stays with me in reality for days after formal practice. I can move her where I like, or let her go where she wants (I really don't always know where she is). I visualize working with her in reality as an overlay, like Pokémon Go's overlay. I understand she's not real in the sense that nobody in our shared reality can see her. But I understand that she is real in the sense that reality, to each of us, is whatever we experience, and as I can picture her there (wherever "there" is) so vividly that I have a tangible, felt sense of her, she is real enough.
After she is formed, I lie there and have mostly a sense of feeling spent. Usually my body, such as it is, is shedding vapor. Sometimes I am still engulfed in remnants of spirit fire, or little patches sputter on and around me and eventually fade. I feel warm. I am always, now, by this point, mostly or entirely light. If not entirely, actively becoming, and in the last moments before being so.
I was called next to give kindness to a benefactor. Early in my practice, this part was difficult, because we are instructed to choose only one. I would become anxious about choosing. Now, I have more of a sense of letting them choose themselves. When the call comes, it's as if they know the drill. All vanished but one as soon as the guide started this portion of the meditation. Today, Savannah remained. I have not seen her in a while, but I projected kindness to my representation of her in the same general manner as my benefactors did to me — with tangible beams of light.
My benefactors always all project from their hearts, for whatever reason, but I tend to project from my heart, both hands, and my head. Sometimes, I just move the ball into other people, instead, and coax her into glowing more brightly, like blowing gently on the embers of a fire. Sometimes I use the ball as an amplifier, and direct a beam or beams into her, and then aim the resulting single, much larger beam at my target. When I do this, the ball explodes with radiance, again becoming so bright that I can feel it on my skin, and cannot avoid seeing her; even with my eyes closed; even when the beam is not directed at myself.
I did not do this for Savannah today. Most of my visualizations with her were partial scenes, and my kindness projection was more aimless than usual. I think, considering it now, that that was probably a reflection of my not knowing where she is, exactly, in reality. My kindness projection towards her was more like a sort of radiant collection of coalesced but slow-moving vaporous tendrils, drifting her way, and eventually enveloping her completely. Sometimes a bit of plasma-ball-like projection followed that connection, once it had been made; lightning crawling along a cloud.
When called to reflect upon the process, I noticed that I felt a sense of wistful sadness — I do miss her — but also a greater sense of happiness. No matter where she is, she got there because of her own choices, and all she ever wanted from me was the freedom to make them. She was a stray when we found her, and always seemed to feel a bit suffocated being kept completely indoors. No matter where she is, I always have her with me. While I was able to see her around me, in reality, she was clearly so much happier being able to roam around outside than being trapped inside. She spent a lot of time out in the woods behind the house, down towards the creek. When I begin to worry about her, and speculate on what could be keeping her from coming home, my mindfulness practice prompts me to ask myself what I can observe, what I know for certain is really happening, right now. In regards to Savannah, that is only that I do not know where she is, and that I know she is the most capable wilderness survivor of all my cats.
Through this kind of constant practice, I've come to think of myself as more of a guide for my cats, than their owner. A guide to help them safely navigate the human inventions of reality. I give them better, more constant care. I have all but ceased lashing out at them in any way, even verbally. My bonds with each of them are stronger than ever. I understand that being kind to them means doing what I can to help them become their best and truest selves. For most of them, that means being completely indoor cats, with no interest in even stepping outside. But three of them regularly follow me down to the creek behind the house, because they choose to. They have that choice because I was present enough to realize that they wanted to make it, and aware enough to realize that I had no actual objective justification for denying it; other cats have lived completely outdoors here for years without incident. I realized it was kindest to support them in making their own choices; in being what they were.
Sounds silly, doesn't it? But I have no better way to explain these things, right now, and all of these cats are getting so much better all around as my practice deepens and expands. The ones that come outside with me are becoming much less fearful. They relax more fully. They are in better health. They have more trust in me as a roaming safe point. They bring their sense of being relaxed back into the home with them, and it helps keep all the other cats even calmer. They are all benefiting from my work by being around me as I practice. My goal is to practice as constantly as I can.
The two hardest practices for me both involve receiving kindness. The first is from benefactors — basically very vividly imagining myself receiving kindness from other people. The other is from myself.
The guide suggests visualizing ourselves earlier in life, when we were perhaps happier. The first time I was given that guidance, I flew straight back in time until I felt like I'd hit that moment, and I found myself looking at my newborn self; I burst into tears. I took my own tiny hand and let it wrap a bit around my index finger, rubbing the top gently with my thumb. I sobbed and quietly said, "I'm so sorry, baby girl," over and over. It happens this way most often, still. When it does, my heart softens a little bit more towards my past self and all she did and all she endured, all she permitted to be done to her, before I realized who and what I was.
Today, it was a little easier than most days. I recently looked at a picture of myself from mid-December or so, 2006. That's probably why this version of myself came to mind. I know how hardened I was by then. But I entered the picture at that moment in my practice, as I am today. I walked behind the Jason Construct and my children, knelt behind it, draped my arms gently around its shoulders, and hugged my tiny, deeply buried self, hidden somewhere within that shell. I cried.
Eventually I floated up and back away from her, as if I was being hoisted gently by my shoulder blades, curling into a ball, and noticed the ball swelling with light before me, moving slowly away from me, and over the Construct and my children. I was probably about 30 feet up in the air and maybe 5 or 6 feet behind it, in a space I've never been to, with a line of sight that is not possible. I unfurled, my legs dangling as before, my arms near my sides, but with my hands farther apart than before, and projected my kindness towards the ball. After growing for a few moments, the ball fired an amplified beam straight down onto the Construct, eating away at it away like a sandstorm.
When I work with self, especially given the guide's suggestions on making use of the past self, I often see a sort of pillar of spirit fire kindness connecting a massive column of iterations of myself through time. It originates from the point I am specifically working with, but nearly always, nowadays, ends with some more expansive overflow of kindness as forgiveness for my past self, and everyone around her. I usually fly past a large segment of it very quickly as the guide calls for us to return to our breath, but I take it in fully, impossibly.
In examining my responses to that part of my practice, I noticed mostly that I felt pleased and skillful. Today was by far the most pleasant practice I've ever had with giving and receiving kindness to and from myself to date. Usually it is more purely sad, mournful of decades of suffering for simple ignorance, with a sense of forgiveness, rather than kindness more broadly.
I was next called upon to offer kindness to a Dear Friend. Usually, #myfavoritemistake appears for this. Today, Anna appeared instead. I think probably because she was the first person I invited who marked herself as Going to a party in my home that I was not hosting, and which was primarily attended by people who had never met me, who had only met me Before, and who knew me Before, but no longer like me. I felt very anxious about likely being here all night without any friendly and familiar faces, aside from the boys (my landlord and my roommate, the other hosts). Anna said she was going to bring mac 'n' cheese. It turned out she didn't have enough gas in the tank (literally) to be able to get here after all, but I still appreciated her genuine intent. I imagine her appearing was a reflection of my natural desire to show kindness to her, after receiving some from her in that way.
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Though the guidance often suggests we wrap our arms around our beneficiaries, I usually opt for energy projection. It somehow feels more powerful. Perhaps I feel it is irresistible in a way that hugs are not. Not in the sense of violating someone by forcing beams of kindness upon them that they do not want, but more in the sense of obliterating all barriers to kindness that are between us, as well as then also delivering that kindness. Hugging feels more intimate, and the representation of the Dear Friend usually gets held for the duration, unless I know they are really hurting.
So, I held her in a simple sisterly embrace, sort of sitting beside her with one arm around her shoulders, and the other on her hands, which rested together in her lap. I said to her the same kinds of phrases that had been chanted at me in the church scene. I took care with each word, giving them time to be absorbed completely. I have the sense that Anna is simple in the admirable sense of being uncomplicated. She has a wonderful balance about her. I imagine that translates to relative ease receiving kindness, compared to most people I've met, which probably explains why I felt a sense of joy growing in the representation I held, revealed with light, and a slowly growing smile on her face.
However, when working with these representations, I remain aware that they are just that — representations, and not the actual people themselves. Being aware of that has helped me to understand other things in more healing ways. For example, I realized that the ex, my #FKAgirlfriend, that I'm still in love with essentially no longer exists. When I work with her — when I think of her at all — I understand that I'm actually thinking of a representation of her, a version of her that is fixed in time around the moments we last interacted. Consciously recognizing that the version of her I remain attached to no longer exists makes it easier for me to let her go. I literally cannot go back to her. I could meet Kim again, as she is now, as I am now, and form some kind of attachment to her. But the Kim I was with becomes more imaginary every day. During my formal practice, as long as I remain mindful of the fact that I'm working with my versions of these people, and not these actual people, the details never get too complicated, and never matter too much. The goal of practicing being kind to any idea of that person has been achieved, and can very easily be called upon later, in reality.
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With regular formal practice, this kind of work causes me more naturally to think of ways to be kind to others. I have limited resources, now, so usually this means reaching out to them to ask how they are doing, and just giving them some of my time as an attentive listener. I manifest the ball inside of their hearts, and pay attention. This kind of work has also led me to naturally be more considerate of others. I've simply spent more time literally thinking about wanting for the safety, health, happiness, and ease of others.
When called to reflect upon the experience, today, I felt more my embodied self, and less the transcendent being of pure kindness. More the human than the god in the human. Anna feels like a sister to me. I felt warm again, after this, but in a deeper and closer way, a more completely intimate way. Radiating more from the rest of my body than from the ball. (I understand the ball as part of my body.)
After Dear Friend, I was called to give kindness to a Neutral Person. I sometimes struggle to find a Neutral Person, and today was one of those times. I spent probably about half of the guidance flitting from one candidate to the next, like Eric Draven digging through a pile of possible clues until he finds the right one, purely by his sudden awareness that it is the right one. I ended up with the lady who processed my passport application. I noticed a flash of annoyance arise in myself, because she was part of a process that ultimately frustrated me. But because our relationship is so clear and simple, giving kindness was easy. I barely noticed the sense of annoyance as it passed through me and I experienced it; it was quickly outshone by what I was focused on doing. I directed my kindness towards her through the ball, but more playfully, without anything like the intensity I had directed towards myself earlier. I gesture a lot in reality while I'm doing this, probably more than I'm aware of, because I'm not usually too aware of much that isn't directly a part of the visualization in each moment. I was stretching with a vaguely cat-like aesthetic on my bed in reality, while in the visualization flying around above her as she worked at her desk, batting the ball near her, amplifying kindness through it towards her. I felt no particular emotional response to her, after the annoyance.
We are often instructed to visualize our awareness of our emotional landscape as a vast clear blue sky, with emotions and thoughts as simple clouds, drifting through it. Incorporeal, inconstant. My version has evolved to be more liquid, as if I'm in some kind of infinite lava lamp tesseract space. Thoughts and emotions pass around and sometimes through me, there. I can transform them into the neutral liquid that is the equivalent of the blue sky — the unchanging background — but not without passing through them. Or, more correctly, letting them pass through me.
They have different temperatures and textures and viscosities. Some are nearly the same as the background, detectable only by a change in temperature, like swimming past a slightly warm jet of water in a swimming pool. The sense of annoyance with the passport processor lady was like that.
Others are thick and oily and suffocating. The first time I ran into one of those I had an enormous panic attack because it seemed endless, and I cried so hard I felt like I couldn't breathe. I notice even now that I can become easily stuck in this kind; I can be dragged along, caught in the pain of that moment and that feeling, moving with it, instead of letting it pass through me and be transformed. I've become better at weathering those without having a panic attack. They're still very painful, but I've come to that pain with gentle curiosity, and with that have come to understand that I need to sit through it (whatever "it" is) to recover from it. I need to let it pass to let it go, and if it doesn't pass through me, it cannot pass.
Some emotions are larger and take longer to transform than others. I'm still breaking up with Kim, for example. I have cried over something about her basically at least once a day since we broke up. But I cry less frequently, now, for shorter durations, with less ripple effect. These scattered bits and blobs of liquid emotions are smaller in size, thinner in viscosity, and I am better at permitting them to go through me. I am better at it because I have been practicing with them, instead of trying to ignore them.
In the same way that phantom limb pain can be eased by convincing the mind that the missing limb no longer needs to be told to clench as hard as possible, mindfully processing my emotions as they arise is using visualization to tell that pained and spasmed part of my mind, the one that feels like it's my heart, that it no longer needs to cling so fiercely to whatever it is I am at that moment most aware of it clinging to. I can offer kindness to myself in the wake of finally experiencing the emotions of whatever difficult past experience. I can offer kindness, and forgiveness, to anyone involved in that experience. I can let go of old grudges by seeing the essential humanity of everyone I ever felt had wronged me. I can prevent new grudges from forming by proactively doing the same thing; by practicing kindness.
I can mourn my losses — feel the weight of them, and cry for the sadness of it all — and then move on. I can do it every time any aspect of any of those experiences arises. It's not like it's one-and-done: "I thought of a sad thing about Kim today, but I thought it mindfully, and now I'm 100% over her!" It's a process of mindfully experiencing those emotions when they arise, as they arise. Instead of just crying and being inarticulately sad suddenly about something about her, I recognize why: "this is the café she used to take me to for breakfast. I didn't know the stop I needed on this bus route would let me off right in front of it. This is a shock to me. I miss her and that hurts."
It's not that this doesn't hurt. It's that it hurts like therapy.
When called upon to examine today's Neutral Person practice, I noticed a sense of pleasure with myself for making the most of the guidance, and not giving up or letting my attention drift away when I did not find a Neutral Person immediately. Early in my practice, this was a difficulty for me.
Next, I was called to give kindness to a Difficult Person. Today, that was Kim, #FKAgirlfriend. Like the other categories, now that I've been doing this for awhile, the selection process is often so quick that it feels more like recipients have volunteered themselves in some way. So, the guide said to bring a difficult person to mind, and there she was. I began sobbing and shaking with pain, wracked by long, slow convulsions that made my whole body look like the arm that's about to lose an arm-wrestling match. A massive oily blob had engulfed me. "Baby, please," I whimpered over and over as I sobbed. At the time, I didn't even consciously know what I was asking her for. I suppose when I do that I am asking her not to leave me. Even now. Please, stop leaving me. Yeah. I'm crying as I type this. So I guess that's it.
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Before long, I noticed that I was failing more spectacularly at the Difficult Person part of lovingkindess meditation practice than I ever had. I observed myself crying, making this exercise in giving kindness to her all about me, and my pain. I smiled sadly at myself in my mind, as I cried. The flow of my tears began to stop as I heard my own call. I gently reminded myself that this practice was for Kim, not me. The thick oil vanished, partially transformed; the rest could wait.
What happened next felt reminiscent of how possession is always shown in movies. My body language shifted suddenly and dramatically. I went from completely and painfully clenched and flexed to completely relaxed. I uncoiled from my fetal position on my side, coming to rest on my back instead. My arms were at my sides, relaxed but straight, each hand about six inches from my side, palms up. My legs were similarly straight, but relaxed, my toes pointed more down than forward, about hip-distance apart. My face relaxed and went from contorted and tortured and sobbing to half-lidded and serene.
Then I felt my chest lift on its own, suspending me in my visualization (I have no idea what it looked like in my body at that moment, but I felt as if I was rising there, too, bodily). The ball rose above me, faster, until she was about six feet from my chest, while I was about 12 feet above the ground, and my representation of Kim. I felt a sense of intense pressure of expansion in my chest, like when I receive kindness. I tend to think of this as my most potent and pure kindness; when I have the same bodily sensations while I am giving it as I feel when I am receiving it.
The ball swung me upwards, above her, so that she was between Kim and me. I felt myself glowing with lovingkindness, most brightly in the palms of my hands, in my heart, and in my brain. When the beams erupted from them and struck the ball, she amplified and projected them towards Kim. I was instantly blinded in my visualization by the beam, and instead saw dream-like visions of Kim enjoying the things I now wished for her: safety, health, happiness, ease, sometimes in the company of a vague other whose presence warmed her as mine never had. I smiled with the faintest hint of intangible sadness behind it, like a martini glass that's had vermouth swirled in it, and then poured out.
The guide called for a return to breath awareness, and the beams all stopped, the ball fading back down to her earlier brightness, and apparent size. I drifted lazily upwards, looking down at Kim being perfectly ordinary and content, bringing in her mail or something, walking into her door, before I turned away and left the space. When called upon to reflect, I noticed that this was the first time during which I practiced with Kim as my Difficult Person where, by the end, or even more like halfway through, I felt deeply and utterly at peace. I wanted for her without wanting for myself, without regard to myself at all except for where I was relative to her and the ball. I smiled. I felt very tired, but also very relaxed.
We moved from there to Groups. In the guidance I have, the guide uses Men and Women as the Groups, calling us to direct kindness to each in aggregate. He also suggests we use any Groups that work for us. As I followed the guidance today, I noticed again that the Groups did not work as well for me as some of those used in the class, and that I experienced discomfort at the thought of leaving out all the people those two boxes necessarily exclude. In the class, many Groups were presented as This and Not-This. For example, we were called to offer kindness to All Veterans, and All Non-Veterans. I modified the guidance in line to call for kindness to be directed towards All Women, and All Non-Women, instead.
My visualization for this saw me leave the planet by flying straight out from the surface, and scaling myself up until it was roughly the size of a basketball, relative to my proportions. I manifested the ball inside it, and lit up each Group as the guide called for one and then the other to receive each sentiment.
Once, earlier in my practice with All Beings (the last target for kindness projection), I tried bringing the planet into my chest, into my heart. I did this after scaling myself up such that it was roughly the size of a cherry, but when I drew it into me, it was instantly painful in a dark and cold way, and I ejected it spontaneously and immediately. That kind of visualization was interesting to me. I don't think I'll ever forget it. I felt visceral pain in my chest as I imagined it, and my reaction was without conscious thought. In reality, I physically scrambled backwards, to get away from it. I had to get it out of me. I still don't know what that means.
The point of Groups practice, moreso than the other practices, is to notice our own reactions to various groups. For example, I can answer truly for myself that while I fear and am wary around men, I do not hate them. It is as easy for me to offer kindness to Men as a Group as it is for me to offer kindness to Women as a Group. Because of that, Groups practice has come to feel like a lite version of All Beings, the last category, to me. Now that I've come up with the trick of putting the ball into the planet, rather than the planet into me, Groups is usually the simplest and most relaxing of all of categories. It's like turning on a Christmas tree, and then just watching it alternate lights. Half this color. Then half that. Be safe; half this. Be safe; half that.
When I was called to examine myself and my experience after Groups today, I noticed I felt happy and eager to move on to All Beings. I felt like I'd warmed up and was ready to do my most important work to the best of my ability. I felt the way I imagine Luke Skywalker might have felt if he'd understood how to raise his ship out of the swamp. In a context where power is based on will and imagination, real size, real weight, has no meaning.
Early in my practice, my visualizations were much more bound by the rules of reality. Scaling the cats up in my mind, making them giants, was not something I planned. I'd never even done it before today. Most of my scaling, my manipulations of size and distance in these visualizations, now, happens without much conscious thought at all, if any. In Champions Online terms, I feel like I'm leveling up and unlocking new powers. My practice advances and deepens, and the ways in which I can deliver kindness to people, including myself, grow in number. The first time I tried arranging my overflowing group of benefactors around me in a sphere, I was always oriented to them exactly as I was in reality. I could rotate the sphere and put people onto my plane, and then move them towards or away from me, but all motion towards or away from me happened on the same plane I was sitting or lying on. If I was lying flat on my back in practice in reality, they walked up to me lying on my back in the visualization. In voidspace, the bed was gone, and I was simply suspended at the same height. But I was, otherwise, exactly as I was in reality, only unclothed.
Now, my practice finds me much more often experiencing the sensations of my visualizations to the relative exclusion of most other sensations. I have lost my balance and gotten dizzy. I have floated and fluttered through the air like a dancing leaf. I have flitted between realms, moving in and out of them as the guide prompts me to direct my attention elsewhere. Part of what helped me stop punishing myself for really deeply enjoying the media I have always enjoyed, and now enjoy more fully, is that I realized I have been giving my voracious imagination more tools to play with. I spent most of my life hiding in imaginary worlds, often inventing my own because I would become bored of the ones others had made. Now I am making use of my explorations of those realities to bring real kindness into this one.
In the final segment of practice, the guide directs practitioners to focus on All Beings as targets for projection of tangible beams of kindness as light. From there, he steps through gradually-expanding contexts: first, where I live. Then, my whole city or town. Then my whole state, country, hemisphere planet. His guidance suggests we see ourselves as radiating kindness, becoming brighter and brighter with it, until we are shining over the entire planet. The first few times, I tried to follow along, but felt like a champion sled dog tied to the back of a pack of elderly pugs. I'd already started scaling things up and down, and just flying off the planet and making myself so large that it was comparatively small just made more sense to me as visualization. Before long, I started to consistently ignore most of the guidance, and just fly through the universe, radiating and directing kindness to All Beings.
In formal practice, especially, I understand myself as existing simultaneously in both places: here, and the visualization. They overlap a bit. I see myself where I am practicing, in reality, kindness pouring out of me as light, as if I am a leak into this reality from the other. I see myself in the visualization, holding planets suspended over my palm, making the ball bigger and bigger until it has engulfed them all. I expand and move back until the ball is about the size of a volleyball relative to me, and the Milky Way fits inside it. Sometimes I fly into the ball, and scale up and down all over, visiting everything, sending kindness to all. Curiously, this sort of visualization feels empty and ersatz if I try to just jump into it cold. When I build to it through the course of the rest of the guidance, it's incredibly vivid and powerful.
In informal practice, I often manifest the ball and send her into other people and beings, and then call upon her to brighten with kindness as I offer them the same sentiments as before. Sometimes in bits and pieces. Sometimes all of them. Sometimes others I make up on the spot. Sometimes without words at all. And then I move her to another location. I do this constantly while I am walking around in public, and to a lesser extent when I am driving. It is what causes me to appear, to most outside views (I imagine), as if I instinctively do kind things, when I am skillfully practicing. When I find a wallet or phone on the bus, I set about doing what I can to return it to its owner. When I see someone drop something, I abandon my own pursuits and rush to draw their attention to it. When I see an animal in danger or injured, I do what I can to help them, and keep them safe. When I kill one with my car, I feel like I've been stabbed in the heart. When I see a roadkill body on or along the road, I feel sadness wash over me. I practice experiencing these emotions mindfully. I listen to them as they pass, and let them go when they have gone.
As the practice came to a close, I was called upon to return to myself, and my breath. The guide encourages practitioners to take a moment to acknowledge the powerful work we have done to open and heal our hearts. He encourages practitioners to dedicate the the powerful merit of this practice to someone or some entity, to offer wishes of care and kindness and goodwill to whomever we choose. Sometimes I return to Difficult Person. Today, I continued with All Beings.
My avatar of myself in Champions Online can set a circle at her feet, a magical blessing of the space immediately around her. In the game, it makes it so she effectively cannot die while inside the circle. If she does, she is resurrected immediately, and cannot summon the circle again for a limited time. When the circle has been summoned, she can also instantly resummon it (instead of channeling the casting) to her location if she does so before too long, healing herself and all allies when it resummons.
In trying to think of how to relate that game metaphor to me in my actual life, as part of the concept of the character within the game as basically just me, I came to understand it as consciously coming into the moment, and being present and mindful of reality. In the game, I cast a literal glowing circle at my feet. In reality, I ask myself what breathing feels like right now. What is happening right now. I engage my core, check in with my posture. But now, after having worked for so long with such vivid and intense visualizations, I sometimes also bring the circle into my view of reality.
It's not that I actually believe this literal glowing circle is there. It's just another imaginary overlay, a little visual indicator of something only I'm fully aware of. But the metaphors of how it operates are the same. When I am truly mindful and completely present, I have no fear of death. I understand that I cannot be destroyed, because I have lived, and I have existed in the world. I have changed the world everywhere I have been, and my actions will live on forever. That is why it is important that they be as kind as possible. That is immortality. That is eternal joy and eternal suffering. We make some of both in every moment. It's up to each of us to determine the ratio.
In the game, when I resummon the circle, even if it's right where I already am, every ally around me is healed; everyone benefits. In reality, it is only when I am fully present and aware, as much as I can be, with as much as I have practiced, that I can truly do what is kindest. Without being fully present to what is, without being fully aware, I cannot be sure that what I am doing is truly kindest. I may only think I am healing people, instead of actually bringing them relief. I can be tricked into believing I have been or will be hurt by things that cannot actually hurt me.
My understanding of harmful ignorance is a corollary to this. Religious zealots who preach anti-LGBT hate are not fully present to what we actually are. Instead, they incite violence against their idea of us. They do this because their idea of us, which they've invented, is that we are violent and deceitful and promiscuous, all of us, purely because of who we are. Then, actual people like me suffer for that. They believe they are doing what is kindest, that they are saving people. They could not do those things if they were fully present with me as I am.
The more regularly I practice, the more connected I feel to everyone and everything. I walk as the center of a living web of plasma lightning, white bolts and tendrils of kindness, connecting me to literally everything. I can scale in and out of all sorts of granularity — I can see the connection I have to every molecule of the air around me, every individual sub-atomic component of each atom. That view isn't terribly useful, it's just solid white space. Usually it's more a sense that those connections are still there, just not visible, and I have visible large connections, like arteries, to discrete nouns around me. In my room, it may be my desk, my cats, my bed, the heater.
The more regularly I practice, the more constantly the ball is with me; the more constantly she wakes me up. I
am able to send her into others as I interact with them, if I am aware
enough to realize we are interacting in the first place. I did this
earlier with #lumberjackson. He peered in to ask me a few questions, but
I was in the middle of typing a comment on a friend's Facebook post. I
interacted with him mindlessly, carelessly, not really listening, mostly thinking about my interrupted task. After a
moment or two, my mindfulness practice kicked in, and I observed and
made note of what was happening right then. My friend was talking to me, right there in front of me; I was trying to type something that was not even a little bit time-sensitive. I noticed the ball, and sent her
into his chest, turned to face him, and gave him my complete attention
until he walked away.
A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on
The metaphors for these visualizations are many and easy to find or invent. The ball is clearly my heart in some sense. When I send her into others, I am expressing a felt sense of my being part of them, and them being part of me. Of it being important that I hear them, that I help them if I can, only because they are there with me, in that moment. Yet my heart also remains where it is. I exist in two places at once.
When I am skillful and active in my practice, doing the dishes for everyone else in the house, cooking for others, keeping the fire going, scooping the cat box, none of these things feel like chores. They are gifts. They are countless opportunities for me to express gratitude to my friends, my family, who have seen me through so much. Letting other people merge in front of me is not being cut off. It's looking out for someone else who is right where I am, right at that moment. I can make their lives unfold with a little more ease. The decision is easy. I have practiced making it.
I talked to my friend Anna the other night about theories of attraction, but in explaining mine to her, I realized that I was actually talking about just one facet of a much larger problem.
My theory of attraction is that people experience a sort of bodily sense of increased gravity around someone they're attracted to. It's a feeling of being pulled towards them. We may be able to see some patterns emerge in the general types of people we are attracted to, but I don't know that we actually have a lot of choice in the matter. Given things like anti-LGBT priests being caught with male escorts, or government officials who vote against LGBT equality and end up getting caught exposing themselves to other men in public restrooms, I confidently believe that whomever we are truly drawn to, we are drawn to, and that is that.
Knowing that, it's easy to extrapolate that this is the case for not just me, but everyone else. But I must remain especially mindful of including people to whom I am drawn; because they may not be drawn to me. Or perhaps not in the same manner.
I should clarify that this kind of pull does not have to be sexual or romantic.
Returning to Anna as an excellent case in point, I am about 3000% sure that neither of us has a particularly sexual or romantic sort of attraction towards the other. But we do seem to mutually feel a strong platonic attraction, which has created, in me, a sense of being in a sort of sisterly relationship. We enjoy each other's company, and the easy conversation that flows between us. We hardly know each other, really, at this point. But we feel a mutual attraction in this familial and easy way that is often referred to as a "kindred spirit."
A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on
I went on to explain that when I experienced a more complete sort of attraction in the past (up to and including the very recent past), I noticed that I would feel a sort of compounding secondary attraction to the idea of being attracted. I was enjoying that feeling, and wanted to hold onto it. In order to do that, I began to paint over the person I was attracted to. They became, from my point of view, a canvas onto which I told my own story about them to myself. In the very beginning of this kind of painting, it is not hard to adjust to things I notice about the way they are that are different from the way I was going to draw them. But before long, they are invisible, hidden by what I want to see in them. The weight of expectation.
I noticed this happening in my mind most recently as I was drawn in a way I have never been drawn before to anyone. I don't mean that in the simple sense of Xtreme Powar Pull or anything. I just mean it is unique in its character, this sense of attraction. I feel powerfully magnetically pulled to her to the extent that I can tell when she enters a space I'm in before I have any way to really know that. I sense that she's arrived, because I feel pulled. I look in that general direction, and see her. I also feel equally powerfully magnetically repulsed, at a fixed distance. It's as if I am a comet who gets pulled into orbit. Exactly this close; hang around; but no closer. It is the most remarkable thing. I treasure it for its uniqueness. But I noticed myself beginning to covet her as its source.
So it was that one day when she did a thing that I found injurious, I found it especially so. Because on some level, I'd permitted myself to believe that she was not capable of injuring me in that way. I had painted over that part of her. I'd made it the realization of a beautiful dream, for me; a woman I'm drawn to in this powerful and mesmerizing way, who is also incapable of hurting me in the most painful ways. But it had nothing at all to do with her. The weight of expectation.
The pain of being hurt was doubled by a tiny sense of betrayal, just large enough to echo the pain back on itself, and double again, and again. But in experiencing that pain mindfully, I saw how empty it was. It was the realization that the movie I was watching wasn't real after all. This angelic creature — for what else would I be drawn to? — was just an actress in a role I'd cast her for, a role I'd been trying to fill without realizing it. She wasn't an angel at all. No flying warrior princess with gleaming armor and a sword that never missed, even when she threw it. No invincible Valkyrie, who would unfailingly be on my side in any fight. But a woman. Not just a woman, or only a woman. A woman. A completely independent person. I would say I am fond of her, but that is a thing I cannot say honestly while setting expectations upon her, for that is not kind. Expectations always weigh something.
I realized that many times in my past, when I'd allowed myself to believe that the women who joined me in failing at being together romantically had really been the ones at fault, I was engaging in this same practice, but not mindfully. I let it play out and run for months, or years. The ones who left me were betrayers. The problem wasn't that I'd misread them, because the attraction was so real. The painting I'd made was so lifelike. The problem had to be them.
But it never was. It never even could have been, because the biggest problem was that I was more interested in being with some idea loosely based on their life than with them. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that they were also doing the same thing with me. But what they were doing doesn't really matter, because what I was doing made every one of those relationships doomed from the start. (Yes, even with #FKAgirlfriend.)
The pain of experiencing all of those kinds of feelings was delightfully brief, this time around. And I am confident it will be one of the last, because most of the pain was the sense of mourning all the time I spent invested in these tools for painting the people I was drawn to out of existence, under a picture of what I decided they had to be.
This most recent and unique attraction still exists, of course. I still feel drawn to her, in exactly the same way I did before. I suppose this is why break-ups hurt so badly. Anyway, she messaged me the other day, telling me about a date she had coming up that night. I felt instinctively a sense of joy. This beautiful creature I was drawn to and intent on observing and protecting in some way, being kind to in some way, was telling me about something that she was excited about. I noticed a sense of joy in myself, a sense of satisfaction that my instinctive response to her telling me this had nothing at all to do with me. I worried that perhaps a few hours or days later, I might feel something else. But so far, I haven't.
By accepting who she is as she is in every moment, and not investing myself into an idea of her that nobody could ever live up to — if nothing else, paintings don't move; people do — I can be as kind as possible to everyone. To her, by seeing her truly, as she is. By demonstrating kindness to that actual person, and not my idea of her. To myself, by not carrying around this painting, and trying desperately to keep it between us, so I can only see something I want, and not someone I can be kind to.
I understand that this is the kindest way to relate to people, now. For myself, anyway. Your mileage may vary. But in understanding that whatever sort of attraction I feel towards anyone is entirely a product of myself, even if I qualify it as a response to them or something about them, I can understand that by extension, everyone else has the same set of conditions to work with, more or less. That is, whether I'm attracted to someone is not up to me; whether someone is attracted to me is not up to them.
What is up to each of us is what we do with that sense of attraction. For myself, I figure if I am going to be inexplicably drawn to someone, I may as well make the kindest possible thing out of that feeling. If nothing else, that keeps things simple; I try to find the kindest action in each moment as it is, already. I have mixed success. But the goal doesn't change, the intention doesn't change, and as long as I don't lose sight of that — as long as being present and being kind are the two foremost practices in my life — I think I shall do much less damage going forward. In fact I think I'll foster some real joy.
In coming to understand these mechanisms through the lens of romance, I realized that the same fundamental principles for attraction can be used to understand the bond between parents and children, because the same kinds of things go wrong for the same kinds of reasons. When children come into our lives, we feel some kind of pull towards them, generally. If we have two or more, we probably feel more pulled towards one, and call them "favorite," to ourselves, and hope nobody else notices. But in any case, it's a pull. It's the pull that we build a bond on, the one that has us doing our best to come home from grocery shopping with the same kids we took there.
I got my birth certificate in the mail the other day. In order to prep for a working retreat over the winter in Mexico, I need to get my passport, and in order to do that, I needed to get a certified copy of my birth certificate. I was born in 1975. I'm not sure what sort of technology they had back then for guessing at my gender. What I am sure of is that until a guess at my gender was made based on what my body looked like, I was freer than I would ever be after that.
The weight of expectation around gender is one of the biggest any of us has. It's even built into the phrasing we have used in birth announcements for at least as long as I've been alive: It's a _____! Without the reveal, we are not even people, really. Not "they," but "it." A thing waiting to have gender conferred upon it. But that is a false construction.
So, I was born, and the doctor said, "It's a boy!" and I screamed for the next 39 years. Mostly internally. Mostly at myself. What I was screaming for was my mother. I wanted her to see me. But she didn't. Because the moment someone told her, "it's a boy!" she started painting.
Being trans is not the only way to get a ticket to this show. In my case, it just put me in a seat with just the right view to see how the magic happened on stage; to see the painters painting. Had my mother been correctly told, "it's a girl!" when I was born, she would still have started painting. Perhaps she would have seen me longer; perhaps the things she felt she ought to paint, the things that said "girl" to her, would have naturally aligned better with what I was actually doing; with who I actually was. But she still would have been painting, and eventually, I would have disappeared.
I understand that teenage rebellion is not rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It is a child saying, I am tired of not being seen. I am tired of being unknown to you. You're so busy staring at your painting of me from when I was born that you haven't had time for me since. Well, you will make time for me. I will make you make time for me. You will see who I am. You will know.
It is rage and hurt at realizing on some level that the people who were supposed to best love us for who we are — the people who we know, deep down inside, were always supposed to teach us how to love ourselves, to teach us that receiving kindness is our birthright, that giving kindness is our duty — taught us that we were only worth covering up. That we were not even worth seeing, never mind acknowledging. Never mind loving.
To disappoint your parents is not a cruelty. It is a kindness. It is freeing them from the weight of the painting they've been holding up between you, the painting that parents start before their children are even born. It is offering them the opportunity to see you. It is giving them the only chance in the world that they will ever have of really putting that painting down. It is giving them the chance to learn how to love someone they have finally just met.
