Happy First Anniversary to the Surfing Sisterhood! And to Haley, who celebrated her third Surferversary this weekend! Woot! We've had two lessons -- one with Endless Sun and one with Haley's original surf school, Learn To Surf in Huntington Beach. We partied at Sherri's to celebrate ourselves and generally felt the love and good vibes all weekend! As Sherri wrote in our group chat on Sunday afternoon, "My heart is full, you guys. Because of you guys." We are starting our second year strong and I couldn't be more grateful for this loving community.
For the Learn To Surf lesson, we went to a new place -- Haley's normal place -- to celebrate her, called River Jetties. (The Surfline cam caught us on the way to the water; I love this photo.) River Jetties can be really intimidating and it wasn't exactly small today! RJ is where more experienced surfers usually surf. I am so proud of us: we are trying new places and being brave, still supporting one another and still learning every time. It's not easy to try something different! We have built up our illusion of safety at Blackies and it's easy to somehow think that everywhere else is more dangerous. But I am always braver when I am among these women and we did have the adult supervision of the instructors. So hop in we did!
I caught one wave on my own, no push -- surfed in on my feet again, so it's a feature not a bug, three weeks in a row! Then got clobbered on my way outside over and over again. I caught a couple of more waves, but never got up again. Current pushed us north across the river to Huntington Beach! So, we have officially surfed Surf City, USA! We learned many new lessons from our instructors, including:
Charge it and trust the process. (Grab a wave and allow yourself to learn. No big deal if you didn't catch it or didn't stand up. Over time, you'll get better. Trust the process.)
You control your circle. (Instructor drew a really nice diagram of the shore, the wave break, and how your paddle out/surf in forms a circle. You control how big that circle is; that is, how far you want to go out, how much you want to be challenged.)
Surfing is 20% knowledge and 80% conditioning. The body just has to learn how to do it. We can't think our way there. (Can confirm. MUCH paddling against the current today. My brain was exhilarated, and my arms were spaghetti noodles when we left.)
Keep your center of gravity low: no stink bugs. Chett from Endless would have said something like "Poop position," meaning to keep your butt down. Helps with balance.
It was such a good day! Gray skies, rolling, roiling waves, strong current pushing us north, and a seal sighting for good measure! And I'm not sure about the others, but I'm feeling pretty badass for taking on River Jetties and not freaking out. (Had I seen the seal, that sentence might be different.) As I keep saying, "Our badassery is infinite." It's so easy to get used to wherever you are and think it's safe. I'm glad to be going to different places this summer to stretch our capabilities and our joy. It's been a great Memorial Day Weekend!
(Trigger Warning: Me Too)
I am so much braver among these women -- in surfing and in life. This weekend, I felt very much at home with my girls. In her book Homecoming, Dr. Thema Bryant says, "Homecoming is a return to authentic living that is based on truth, self-acceptance, and an aligning of action with values and purpose. Home is more than a physical location; it is an emotional and spiritual space of belonging, appreciation, and love." She discusses several ways to reparent ourselves into healing, and one way to do it is to pay attention to our joy. "One way to reparent yourself is by creating opportunities and cultivating spaces for your joy to be unleashed, for your joy to come alive." I feel certain that this joy I am experiencing now, from surfing itself but more due to the Sisterhood, is the support I need to keep going deeper into healing. Meditation is peace; surfing is joy. I am taking much better care of myself these days, and the therapy keeps breaking open new depths of discovery. I am trusting the process thanks in part to the real feeling of safety and acceptance I get from the Sisterhood; that's no illusion.
However, in other spaces, the illusion of safety keeps me lonely. I have twisted myself into unnatural shapes to escape and survive the traumas of my past. Dr. Thema writes, "You may have started acting different because of how you were treated, or what other people told you about yourself, or how you saw others acting. You have not felt comfortable or safe enough to truly be yourself or to feel at home in your identity. The recognized and unrecognized traumas of your past may have taught you to hide your gifts and voice in order to survive."
I know I have hidden my true self with perfectionism, thinking mistakes were dangerous, for many reasons. If my original buttons are perfectionism, mistakes, and a cloak of invisibility so as not to inconvenience anyone, then another great big button to emerge this week can simply be labeled "men." As I gain a clear understanding of one set of issues, another set emerges. The layers of the onion continue to peel, and have thus revealed a substrate of rage that can best be described in two words: me too.
And just like leaving Blackies to surf different breaks, it's hard to step out of the familiar ways of thinking and feeling that I've built over the years to protect myself. I'm trying to think and move differently in the world. I want to be brave in facing that rage, because big rage often covers big hurt. As we were headed into the water today, Stacey was next to me. I said something like, "I'm so proud of us for being so brave!" She replied with something like, "That's not what I'm feeling right now." And I answered, "This is exactly the definition of courage. We feel the fear and do it anyway. Courage is directly proportional to how much we fear. And I don't see us turning back." In the words of Taylor Swift, "... with you I'd dance in a storm in my best dress, fearless."
To defend myself against men, both their constant emotional, spiritual, professional invalidation as well as their physical exploitation and abuse, I built what I thought was a very safe fortress full of misguided ideas and limiting beliefs. I blamed myself. I blamed individual others. I blamed sexism writ large. Trying a different, more open, way of being is terrifying, because it challenges every defense I ever built. Problem is, those defenses no longer keep me safe. They keep me lonely and my world small. And just like standing up on surfboard at River Jetties, there's more out there that I can do that brings me joy and shows me that I can trust myself in new surroundings.
It was interesting that we went to River Jetties. The jetties are made of these big, black boulders. Newport built the jetties to save beaches and create harbors for its wealthy citizens back in the 1920s. Jetties disrupt the natural processes of the beach, but create a lovely space for tourism. "Jetties are large manmade piles of boulders or concrete barriers built at river mouths and harbors. A jetty is designed to divert the current or tide, to keep a channel to the ocean open, and to protect a harbor or beach from wave action." Another example of man altering nature for his own ends. "Inconvenienced humans create methods to keep their harbors open and preserve sand on their beaches by creating jetties and groins, which negatively affect natural beach processes."
Piles of boulders. Natural processes disrupted by men. Sounds familiar. BTG did a guided meditation with me the other day at my request. We have been working on my mind through the body, and as we do that, more stuff arises. Stuff stuck in my body. Emotional and physical traumas are felt equally in the body, and I have both kinds of trauma in my history. And just like our new surf instructor said, "Surfing is 20% knowledge and 80% conditioning." I can't think my way to where I want to go but for 20%. I have lots of intellectual, brainy strategies that are necessary and fruitful and will continue. AND. That other 80% needs some work.
I asked BTG if there were ways to work with the effects of physical trauma using the meditation methods we've been practicing, so he did one with me, a meditation for relaxation. The meditation guided me to notice any areas of tension in my body, any areas that may hold stress or shame or anger, relax them on the out breath, and send them loving kindness and compassion. Notice, relax, send love to the parts of me that need it. Tara Brach has a similar practice she calls RAIN. You'd think that would be simple, but it turns out that sending love to myself is quite hard, especially when the darkest parts of me still blame me for some of what happened. Too often, being kind to yourself is the hardest thing a person can do.
I actually had to make myself inhale during the practice -- I didn't have enough air to exhale with my natural breath in order to help my body relax. I couldn't breathe naturally. When I asked what that was about after the practice, BTG said, "Fear." I was surprised -- I remain surprised -- that after all of these years, my body is still holding old fear. And that fear was triggered by a man's voice coming through a zoom screen. We weren't even in the same room. And this is a man who has treated me with nothing other than kindness, respect, and compassion. Safest man I've ever met, and I couldn't breathe I was so scared.
I felt a massive weight on my chest. When I went back after our session to try the process again on my own, I really tried to feel what that weight was. I imagined it was a big, black rock. Neither shiny like obsidian, nor rough and grainy like sandstone. I decided it was granite. Heavy, hard granite laying across my chest like a breastplate. My fear has solidified into granite. A previously constructed defense system that now makes it hard to breathe.
So I have been working on how to move that rock this week. First, sending it love through guided meditations and relaxing my body in the tense places. The 80%. So much trauma is caught in my cells. I can't think my way out of it without my body coming along and letting go, too. And with me, a hyperachieving perfectionist, perhaps allowing the body to lead the way is a better idea than going through my brain. My mind is the bouncer at this night club; it keeps me safe by keeping some stuff out of my awareness. To heal, I need to let everything in.
Second, really seeing and validating my emotions -- journalling and writing this blog to show up for myself -- to understand the fear. Acknowledge it. Get curious about it. It's been hiding out within this granite, so what's it about? Granite is not one thing; it's made up of lots of minerals. The fear boulder protecting my heart area is made up of a lot of things, too. Like Dr. Thema mentioned, "the recognized and unrecognized traumas" of my past are numerous. I keep reading that book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account by Matthew Ichihashi Potts, hoping it will prompt reflection and reframing, as this rage, this fear boulder, is getting in the way and I want to move differently in the world. That I am drawn to the idea of forgiveness at this point at all is a good sign of where I'm headed.
The book wonders what a "forgiveness rooted in grief would look like." Potts asks, "What if forgiveness allowed for anger and rage and grief? What if it preserved mistrust and could keep a safe distance for its victims? What if forgiveness acknowledged the hurt rather than promising healing; what if it uniquely reckoned with the permanence of a wound, rather than hastily dressing that wound with a thin reconciliation?" I'm kind of loving this forgiveness with an edge -- a more gritty forgiveness that absolutely acknowledges how fucked up things were, how a wrong or wrongdoing cannot be redressed, and how we must move forward with a full acceptance "that what has been lost cannot be regained." That's a granity forgiveness. Hard and true.
Like granite is comprised mainly of quartz and feldspar, forgiveness can be made up of mainly rage and grief. He frames it as a "habit of grief and a practice of mourning," but the key feature of this forgiveness is that it refuses to deal out punishment, vengeance, retaliation, or retribution. Our cultural ideas of forgiveness are tied up with justice and remedying wrongs. Potts' forgiveness refuses to continue the harm of the wrong by harming the wrongdoer, "trading suffering for suffering and paying for pain in pain." Potts writes, "Forgiveness only makes any sense if we are willing to abandon not just the right of retaliation but also the logic that underlies this right." No one else's pain or suffering, or my futile attempts to seek recompense, will ever balance the wrong done to me. I'm stuck with it.
That seems truer to me than a forgiveness framed as the gift that we give freely, that heals in the second it is offered, something peaceful. As Potts describes, "... how tempted we are to romanticize forgiveness, to regard it as an enchanted salve or unearned resolution." I need something harder to match what I feel right now. This kind of forgiveness at least stops us from continuing to harm both ourselves and others, like when the Buddha compared holding on to anger and resentment to holding onto a hot coal, preparing to throw it at someone else: we are the ones who get burned. By forgiving, we cease to harbor the resentment and we decide not to retaliate, not to inflict any more harm. And while I hope this book takes me much further on the path to a more peaceful forgiveness, this feels like a good first step I can take.
Buddhists counsel letting go of anger and resentment, just drop it. I'm happy to continue working on letting this go, but I'm not there yet. Facing my traumas pisses me off, because most of them are not actually my fault. I made myself as perfect, as need-free, as invisible as possible due to my individual issues in my family of origin. And society has only reinforced my invisibility by telling me in a thousand different ways that women don't matter as much as men. My needs are subservient to a man's needs. I am only good for looking pretty or having babies. Total invalidation on a semi-daily basis is not going to get repaired. The granite is thick and hard in this area. I have been raging, bitter, sad at the unfairness of it all, what I cannot reclaim. Like the jetties altering the natural beach process along the coastline, my life has been rerouted. So much is lost. In Becoming, Michelle Obama writes, "Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities - in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us, sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they're barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere...." A forgiveness that acknowledges these emotions seems strong enough to hold me and carry me safely into shore.
In discussing accountability the book asks, "How should we respond to wrongdoing?" Exactly the question. In suggesting a forgiveness that foregoes the typical justice system we have that makes wrongdoers suffer to balance out our own suffering, he argues that making someone else suffer cannot erase the past and it only adds more suffering to the world. So traditional justice just doesn't work -- on any level. This logic allows me to take a first step out of that system -- a justice system that has institutionalized anger, retribution, and vengeance into law. I think part of me has been not only waiting for my grief to subside, but also waiting for some justice, something that makes up for all of this trauma. I want a season of Law and Order to prosecute my past. I can try to do things differently, but I can't skip over the acknowledging and validating part. My rage is justified yet cannot be quelled by vengeance, and by lashing out, I cause more harm. Like Voldemort losing a piece of his soul with every new horcrux he creates, nothing is getting reclaimed here. There is only loss.
I have been so angry to have been invalidated, both by own original wound, perfecting myself into invisibility, as well as by growing up in a world run by patriarchy, which invalidated me as an autonomous, valuable human being every day. I have harmed myself and I have been harmed by men in many ways. I lash out when I hear myself say things like, "Mercifully, I have finally reached the age of invisibility to men. The only thing men ever needed me for was sex and I'm finally unattractive enough to not warrant that attention. What a relief." Or simply, "Most men are fuckheads. Why would I want to invite that into my life again?" And much worse. Believe me when I say that I have said much worse. Words are a type of violence. With every one of these bitter missives I'm sending out a retributive verbal violence into the world as a result of my hurt. Vengeance is mine every time I insult a man, erase their worth to me. And there has been enough harm. I can knock that off -- it's not serving my healing.
When I hear myself say these things, I am speaking from underneath that fear boulder. These beliefs from the past continue to harm me in the present. I am committing, in a way, the same violence done to me: invalidation. Potts quotes another author, a woman, Jean Hampton, who characterizes retribution as a "reversal of the helplessness victims suffer when they become victimized." (It is interesting to me that when the male authors in Potts' book discuss justice, they describe delighting in the power and pleasure of vengeance; but when the woman discusses it, she describes helplessness and dignity.) When I speak this way, or want some justice for my traumas, I'm attempting to reclaim my power. But I can't reclaim my power by taking away the power of another. My dignity does not depend on diminishing someone else's dignity. Invalidation does not cure invalidation. Those men who harmed me were harmed, too. Hurt people hurt other people, so let me be the one to step out of the vicious circle of harm and into a kind of forgiveness, eventually putting down the hot coal, but always living with the scar from the very justified burn.
These words assume a world devoid of men who love and care for and deeply respect women. I genuinely want to believe that such men exist. So I can step out of this cycle of violence. I can reframe my desire for justice into a desire to not cause more harm. I control my circle. It's a step in the right direction.
The fear boulder formed to defend me. Deformed and defended, I can try to step out from under it now, but thinking in this new way will take time. Another way the Sisterhood supports this effort is that these women have good men in their lives. They are loved, which in part gives them their great capacity to love others. Examples of good men are starting to appear on the horizon: our generous, kind, and supportive surf instructors are lovely examples. As my defenses lower, my field of awareness opens up to include more possibilities. My community is different now, so I can see different places. I can trust the process. No stink bugs; I'm finding balance and controlling my circle. I can learn little by little to trust myself.
Both BTG and the meditation group are all about softness -- not fighting what we feel, but noticing. Not resisting, but breathing. Accepting, not denying. Loving, not punishing. My first instinct for what to do with this flat, granite boulder sitting on my chest was to shove it out of the way or break it up with a hammer -- both very violent processes that set up resistance, that vanquish, that destroy. I want instead a nonviolent, gentle integration of my past traumas. So instead of imagining violently breaking up this rock, I looked up how I might soften it, melt it, dissolve it. I literally googled "how to dissolve granite."
After sifting through too many links on how to clean a granite countertop, guess what's one way to dissolve granite? "Chemical weathering takes place by a process called hydrolysis" -- a reaction between a mineral and water that breaks down the mineral. Just add water. There are other things that have to be present for water to break down granite, but I thought it was wonderful that the granite that is protecting my heart can be slowly broken down through surfing. Whether by my tears or saltwater, just add water. And guess what that granite becomes, in part, when it breaks down? Sand. So, in the company of these healthy and loving women in this beautiful coastal community, water and sand all around me, I have enlarged my circle. I am dissolving the ancient protection that covers my heart. I am finding balance and trusting myself.
When I bodysurfed the last wave in today at the end of the lesson at River Jetties, I sat on the boulders that make up the jetty, waiting for the others to come in and to catch my breath. Yep, I said to myself, this is the type of rock I saw sitting on my chest. Instead of the boulder sitting on me, I sat on it and breathed deeply. I looked back out to see everyone else making their way in to the beach. I saw the new instructors we met catching their waves and waving at me to make sure I was OK. I saw my girls out there coming in, some surfing, some bodysurfing, some turning around for just one more. I saw a beautiful dog pick up a giant piece of driftwood while he was running joyfully on the beach with his owners. I saw Catalina in the distance, the long stretch of Huntington Beach to my right, and our beloved Newport Pier in the distance to my left, big gray waves as far as my eyes could see. I felt to myself, "My heart is full, you guys. Because of you guys." I'm in the right place.
Comments