We did another class with Waterlogged this weekend -- a 6-hour extravaganza -- practicing breathing, feeling more comfortable when we don't have breath, and understanding our physical and emotional limits. We began the day by sharing what we love about the ocean and what scares us. We all love the peacefulness of the ocean, how it helps us forget the outside world for a bit. Many of us have mentioned how surfing helps us in our regular lives, either by giving us space to be ourselves which allows more freedom for our families, or by the general empowerment it provides. And we all love each other and the support of the group. I love every time we get to tell our origin story, because we reaffirm how special we are to each other.
We also shared our fears -- and all of us have fears, pretty big fears, of the water, of what's in the water or what it can do to us. It's really amazing that we continue to surf given these fears. We took this course in order to develop the skills to face our fears. Many of us panic when we get held down; we don't like that feeling of being powerless. So we joined this course in order to understand how our bodies work when deprived of our natural breath, develop specific skills to help us feel calmer in the water, and practice the skills in a more controlled environment. I had three take aways from the day that parallel lessons from meditation and therapy.
One, you go through any technique or drill three times, then your body knows it's OK. Just like getting over emotional peaks, once on the other side of the intensity, your mind can handle future issues with greater ease. There is something to the idea of pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone to find greater freedom. After a couple of times, you just know you'll be OK. That's equanimity.
Two, knowing the games our minds play on us gives us a lot of power over our reactions. When under water, the urge to take a breath shows up very quickly, and the mind begins to panic. Knowing this is going to happen helps us to remain calm, to withstand the urge to bail and hang on a bit longer. We can talk to our inner critic and decide not to get involved in its chatter.
Three, awareness, noticing, and connection to our bodies is the key to making this whole process work. I have to be aware of my thoughts and feelings in order to make a different decision. Morgan, the instructor at Waterlogged, mentioned a study that showed that free divers actually cue into their feelings sooner than regular people, which allows them to navigate the deep waters of their minds with more ease.
Again, the Sisters laughed and chatted our way through the day, sharing stories and deep breaths between dives underwater for really challenging drills. Together, we worked with our fears and persevered through challenges, supporting each other and cheering each other on every time, celebrating every victory and soothing every defeat. Skills AND support. Con-spire: to breathe with. We are a conspiracy of joy, this Surfing Sisterhood, and the class is the latest in a string of so many lovely moments that have taken place in the last few weeks. I want to note them.
We had so many events with one another over the July 4th holiday week that we had to make a calendar in our What's App group to keep it all straight. What's beautiful to me is that we are a very fluid group -- no one attends everything. We all seem equally comfortable hanging out with whoever shows up and there is room for everyone to be as involved, or not involved, as they wish. The group persists on its own. It is a consistent presence in our lives, sustained by a collective momentum without any single person responsible for that momentum. Ashley and I spoke about how in our past relationships, we were the ones holding it together, and it's so nice to be responsible for just ourselves in a group of emotionally healthy people.
Both Toni and Sherri brought their kids to camp with us. Toni's older son was in the group with us adult groms, and we cheered him on all week. (Those kids continue to come out to surf with their moms after the camp, which speaks to what lovely, joyful, and fierce mamas Toni and Sherri are.) Toni shared that on the way home from camp on the last day, her 17-year old son said to her something like, "I understand now why you like to hang out with them. I feel good about myself."
I met Rick, an old surfer dude with a long white beard and skin brown and leathery from being tanned for decades, in the Blackies parking lot. He is one of the "Blackies Fairies" that Haley has mentioned; regulars at the beach who leave her gifts at her car to find when she gets out of the water. He announced that it was his birthday. He blew a conch shell at 6 am on a Saturday, damn the tourists, to announce his joy of being. I gave him one of our friendship bracelets as a birthday gift and he seemed genuinely touched.
Katy and I took a DEEP DIVE into The Tortured Poets Department and all things T. Swift, and figured out some serious life shit thanks to her close friend group on Instagram over several days. Just one particularly lovely example of how the conversations we have in the water continue over the group chat and Instagram when we get home. There is a constant conversation happening. These people are a lovely and steady presence, providing a kind of tether and buoyancy to my life. We like each other and we show it by showing up in many different ways.
One day, there was a young man, Trevor, surfing near us at Blackies. He was on a little 6-foot hard board and appeared to be struggling. We always say hi to people near us. We often cheer people on, whether they like it or not. Trevor and I caught a wave in together and he struck up a friendly conversation. I asked him how long he'd been surfing. He said this was his third time; he had inherited that board and was trying to learn to surf in honor of his brother who had recently passed. I said that he was trying to learn on the hardest board imaginable and would he like to trade boards with me. We traded. I gave him a short tutorial on how to pop up. And he did it! Got it right away. Then we all played musical surfboards while everyone tried different boards. We all continued to cheer Trevor on. It was a lovely morning.
This loveliness is contagious. It envelops others we encounter and has affected me deeply. From the Mindful Self Compassion Program, BTG shared this lovely quote, "Love reveals everything unlike itself." I am finally getting a taste of what unconditional love feels like and it very quickly has been transformative. Just a small dose of it along with all of the meditating and therapy-ing has allowed me to become aware of how harsh my previous existence has been, which has helped me contextualize my buttons, my tendencies toward perfectionism, invisibility, and self-blame, in a whole new way. I've been able to act differently in the world in response to stressors recently. I am noticing how the unconditional love and consistency of the Sisterhood has allowed me to see my rough edges and failed coping strategies, and in a very short time, has helped to sand those edges smooth. It's not just skills that help me achieve equanimity, it's the deep well of love that I am experiencing that helps me feel safe enough to know that no matter what, I'll be OK.
So, while encountering some difficulties these past couple of weeks, I did things differently. Apart from having the compassionate presence of BTG as a lighthouse, I reached out to friends instead of suffering alone. The surf girls and other trusted people surrounded me with compassion, and understanding, giving my hard feelings the "relational home" Stolorow has mentioned. "Trauma looms for all of us as an ever-present possibility. I have long contended that the mangling and the darkness can be enduringly borne, not in solitude, but in relationships of deep emotional understanding. In such relationships, we do not encourage the traumatized person to 'get over it and move on.' Instead, we dwell with him or her in his or her endlessly recurring emotional pain, so that he or she is not left unbearably alone in it," Stolorow wrote.
I also found that a new voice emerged from the critical cacophony in my head. When faced with a new set of stressors over that July 4th week (my doggo is unwell; an old love passed away; my parents are continuing their drama -- not small things), it was easy for me to slip into the mental spin cycle of worry, relitigating the past, self-blame, remnants of perfection, and "I should have known better," and "I should be doing more," and "I'm such a fool." My inner critic was alive, well, and fully charged. Big waves and lots of them. The whole spin cycle was activated: inner critic pushing me into the darkness, then pulling myself out of that abyss with some strategies and positive self-talk, then getting sucked back in -- over and over again, not able to get deeper beneath the swirling waves. I was in the middle of that process last week, just exhausted by myself, all in my head, when a calm voice rose up out of the endless chatter to say, "You know, we don't actually have to do this."
Hmmmm? What was that?
"We don't actually have to do this."
The more interesting thing was that the cacophony got real quiet after that. My mind chatter actually did stop.
Let's just take that in for a moment.
Yes, my mind chatter stopped. I actually stopped beating myself up and just went on with my day. I was actually fine -- I'll edit that to say I was appropriately sad, confused, and angry, but not flattened in my bed unable to cope. All of those lovely events I mentioned at the top of this post were happening at the same time as these stressors providing a counter narrative, and I reached out to my people for support. It has been amazing to me to experience how some healthy, boundaried love in my life has helped me feel so much better. How having this consistent and kind presence for such a short time has allowed me to see myself differently, speak to myself differently. I wonder now what it would have felt like to have had a deep well of love to rely on my whole life instead of an empty chasm. To have had the buoyancy of compassion, to float on that well of unconditional love, instead of always getting sucked into the tar pit of sorrow, grief, and despair. Is this how people who have been loved well all of their lives feel like? My god, it's amazing.
Because of my ongoing meditation practice cultivating my ability to observe my thoughts and emotions, I became aware of two completely different mental spaces within me (and perhaps the world, but I'm still working that out): the deep well and the chasm. Both are spaces of emptiness and not knowing, but have very different characters.
One is this positive, healthy, deep well of loving awareness -- a field of possibility that is bright and clean, all soft colors and peacefulness. It is emptiness and nothingness in a field of light -- light as in sunny and light as in weightless, free, like where Harry Potter met Dumbledore at King's Cross after Harry had been struck by Voldemort's killing curse. I remember being here after my divorce and I'm here now with my job search: a place in which I know what I don't want but don't yet know what I do want. Not knowing is good, open, peaceful, noticing. Twenty years ago, I divorced a man but really I divorced my former way of being in the world; I divorced to a large extent the mask I had been wearing to cope with my harsh reality. I let go of a lot of perfectionism, people pleasing, and self-flagellation. Lots of magical things happened during that Dark Night of the Soul and, though there are darker forces at play at the edges of that space, the ego death can result in massive transformation. It's fundamentally good, a set of forces in service to the higher self or Jungian True Self. I think maybe that voice that told me "We don't actually have to do this," is my Self speaking. The Conspiracy of Joy is a breathing together, an inspiration, a signpost that lets me know I'm on the right side of things by showing me that I now live in this place. The (actual) Good Place.
The dark place is heavy. Not the gentle heaviness of gravity holding me to the earth softly, but a yanking and pulling and sucking me in like a whirlpool out in the ocean, caught in a spinning vortex. It's emptiness is a chasm. A tar pit. It is dark, dank, and sticky. Despair, sorrow, anger, rage, contempt, and resentment all live here and they want company. Not knowing is desperation, chaos, grasping for certainty, imagining and trying to avoid dire outcomes. A lot of "should" lives here: things should be better; I shouldn't have to feel this way; this grief should go away eventually. Perhaps a bit overdramatically, I imagine this space filled with demons: my inner demons personified as the sharp-edged shadowy creatures who appear in the scene from the movie Ghost when the bad guy dies and is carried away. When I get near this space, I have to lie down. I sink into my bed and have a hard time getting up. I spent a lot of time here after I got divorced when I was depressed, twisted in self-blame and the spin cycle of not good enough, worry, dread, and shame. When I was younger, I lived here. I had no control, no agency or self-worth, so dealt with it the best I could, but in very flawed ways, giving rise to my rough edges, my buttons of invisibility, self-blame, and perfectionism. All to avoid the abject vulnerability of this dark place.
Because this place is so heavy and sticky, it's exhausting to live inside of and requires me to expend a great deal of energy to escape it. Still--after all of these years, it's still really hard. Last week, I was able to dance between the darkness and the light. I was actually relieved to read Stolorow's description of portkeys that take him immediately back to the dark abyss. In Harry Potter, a portkey is a magical object that immediately transports a person to another location; it's a method of travel. As I've previously quoted in another blog post, Stolorow wrote, "Loss—especially traumatic or tragic loss—creates a dark region in our world that will always be there. A wave of profound sadness descends upon us whenever we step into that region of loss. There we are left adrift in a world hollowed out, emptied of light. It is a bleak region that can never be completely eradicated or cordoned off. The injunction to 'let it go and move on' is thus an absurdity. There will always be 'portkeys' back into the darkness—the dark realm in which we need to be emotionally held so that the loss can be better borne and integrated...."
Any difficulties I experience today are complicated by this murky emptiness. I can get knocked back there by everyday life stressors. I didn't have a compassionate relational home for my feelings as a kid. In the chaos of my family of origin, I created self-blame as an island of control, in a way. Any hero on the journey, as described by Joseph Campbell, has weigh stations, places to rest, along their arduous journey. Frodo and Sam had Rivendell. Harry Potter and Dumbledore's Army had Shell Cottage. Places to rest. Without a deep well of unconditional love to turn to along the journey, we traumatized ones have to create our own resting places. Defense mechanisms are protective structures, places to rest. An island of perceived control, however illusory and maladaptive, is a break from constant, soul-sucking vulnerability. After an entire childhood of seeking refuge in self-blame, invisibility, and perfection, it's a hard habit to break.
Roshi Joan wrote in her book Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet, “I have come to see that mental states are also ecosystems. These sometimes friendly and at times hazardous terrains are natural environments embedded in the greater system of our character. I believe it is important to study our inner ecology so that we can recognize when we are on the edge, in danger of slipping from health into pathology. And when we do fall into the less habitable regions of our minds, we can learn from these dangerous territories.” I am diving into these hazardous spaces to learn the contours of my mind through therapy and it's helping. I'm learning my buttons and how to surf through the rough emotional waves they create (skills). But the skills alone are not enough. It is only with the contrast of the friendly spaces that these hazardous spaces are revealed. Without the deep well of love, I don't even know that I'm in the chasm. Now, because of this beautiful community, when I hit the hardships that life can bring, I can seek refuge in compassion instead of neuroses (support).
And waves of hardship will keep coming. We never know what's coming next. I am coming to terms with total vulnerability after a lifetime of clinging to the illusion of control. There is a great quote from Chögyam Trungpa that BTG shared with me early on that totally confused me at first: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there is no ground.”
Wut.
(BTG is way ahead of me. I might be finally catching up a little.)
Roshi Joan wrote, “We also put Not-Knowing into practice by recognizing that really, we are always in free fall. It’s not like we will find some moral high ground where we are finally stable and can catch all those falling around us. It’s more like we are all falling above the infinite groundlessness of life, and we learn to become stable in flight, and to support others to become free of the fear that arises from feeling unmoored. The final resting place is not the ground at all but rather the freedom that arises from knowing there will never be a ground, and yet here we are, together, navigating the boundless space of life, not attached, yet intimate.” Both the Sisterhood and surfing itself teach me about how to handle this ultimate groundlessness of life, to become stable in flight.
The Sisters provide a tendril of mooring. Tethered without clinging. Connection without codependency. Generosity without obligation. Unconditional love. It's easier to endure the groundlessness, the emptiness, the dark abyss, when you have a love that gently tenders you back to the light. BTG talked about the Sisterhood and it's role in my life, our lives. He said we are all participating in a spiritual practice through surfing. He said something like, "All of you are dealing with existential issues -- the ocean symbolizes death, old age, and sickness, being tumbled, not knowing what's coming next, and all of you willingly and lovingly get out there, sitting on the very thing that you are all afraid of. Not only sitting on it, but swimming through it, riding it, and doing it together. This is sangha -- all of you working with these existential issues together. This is spiritual practice. The willingness to live in the middle of your life, danger and all."
Surfing itself is helping me (and us?) learn a new way of being, a stability on groundlessness. In learning to surf, I am moving on something moving and there is no ground. Literally no ground: it's water. How on earth can I make my body navigate that space and feel secure? Through navigating the space between these "friendly and hazardous" realities, the deep well and the chasm, I'm finding that surfer strength has the tools to help me. Surfer Strength embodies the new skills I'm learning: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In Buddhism, these are called the Four Brahmaviharas or the four Divine Abodes. I have specific practices that develop those qualities: meditation, relaxation, controlled breathing, noticing and letting go of thoughts and emotions, gratitude, and acceptance of our fundamental vulnerability in this life. Surfer strength is made up of all of these things. Surfing a wave is all about keeping your balance on shifting seas, riding waves with equanimity and joy. It is a perfect metaphor for this life journey, but it also offers concrete skills to help me along the way. I am standing up on life's emotional waves with a similar gracefulness that I am attempting in the water, understanding with every ride that I am OK. There's a quote from Dune by Frank Hebert:
Only I remain. That's true, and incomplete. Spiritual journeys are generally depicted as individual journeys. Frodo had the Fellowship, but Frodo had to carry the ring. Harry had Hermione, Ron, and Dumbledore's Army; but ultimately, it was Harry who had to take down Voldy. And I do have something to do with this on an individual level: I've been developing skills for years, perhaps finally reaching some level of competence, and I have ridden waves of fear to their natural end on the shore during therapy. The fear boulder is mostly gone, the bouncer no longer necessary. A clear, compassionate voice in my head has appeared. More importantly, though, I am not alone. Facing my fears in a community that faces our fears together has created a conspiracy of love, joy, and belonging. The majority of people in my life now are self-contained, emotionally healthy individuals. I've always had islands of loving people in my life that have provided refuge for me. The Sisterhood is a continent. The people I'm breathing with have my best interests at heart. I feel so much safety that I can rest. Having a band of badass women surfing with me is the balm I needed to go further than I've ever gone before, into new territory: the deep well of love beneath the swirling waves.
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