Happy Spring Equinox - a new year has arrived!
Received a very strong message from a dream the other week: Our survival is contingent on acceptance and practice of radical JOY.
A few weeks ago, I was riding back to “civilization” after a 4-day BIPOC meditation retreat, when the conversation in the car started to center on myself. One of the teachers who led the retreat asked, “are you happy?” I knew almost immediately that this was a question I needed to hear, point blank. And I almost immediately knew the answer. My answer to the group was kind of a non-answer and we quickly meandered into other threads. But I have sat on that question, “am I happy"?” for weeks. My curiosity was less about the answer, but what it meant to ask the question itself. The point that the teacher was trying to put across, was that for them, having lived a good life feeling fulfilled, nearly retired and having made peace with their legacy and life's work - this was the question that was important to them.
Life is short and really at the end of it all, did I live a good life… am I happy? It’s been a two-year (intensive) journey (of course it’s really a life-long journey) to confront this question and find out what it actually means. I’ve explored so many themes around it, including (de)colonization, death, grief, joy and pleasure. Am I cultivating a life of joy and pleasure and living the life I want? Do I even know what I actually want? It doesn’t mean I’m striving to live a life of sunshine and rainbows. Happiness doesn’t mean life is perfect or controlled or aesthetically pleasing (unless that’s what really does make me happy), it doesn’t mean I’m a do-gooder or a saint. Having “success” (as measured by our capitalist society) has little to do with it, because in that success you can still feel incredibly unfulfilled and unhappy at the end of it all and I think leads to some really tremendous mental health issues.
Addressing death, I have pondered… As I enter the end of my life, what do I hope to feel? Am I looking at my life’s work with a full heart and peace in my bones? Have I even dared to give myself permission to be happy or explore what that (could) mean? Can I allow happiness even if it isn’t something I’ve been trained to cultivate (on a deep level), and others may resent me for it, call me selfish, or shame me? And in my day-to-day life, regardless of the chaos and because of the chaos, am I finding peace and joy and presence? Small “mundane” moments and actions that truly carry my values - things that decenter the colonial demands and center what is important - the building blocks to a foundationally sound happy life. Things as big or small as waking feeling rested, staring into space with a hot cup of coffee, being of service to my family instead of a money-driven handler. Doing what I can, with what I have - not letting my resources and gifts go to waste. And most importantly, just trying my best…
These days trying your best feels like all you can do. I think it’s all we can ever do. I remember straight up having a conversation with god or the universe a year ago, walking in the neighborhoods of San Jose, California and asking, “what am I supposed to do (with my life)??” The answer came instantly, “Try.” And as vague and frustrating as that was, I did. Stumbling through the last year, just trying things, listening, course correcting, trying again. And especially in the last 6 months, I’ve noticed a new level of attunement, now exploring questions like: Can I try more boldly and bravely? Can I incorporate more conviction and compassion in my trying? Can I fuck up and learn and make amends and grow and move on without letting it totally destroy my heart? Can I try to do life with an even more undefended heart (that’s a whole other post)?
Walking with the audacity to decolonize my mind, body and spirit over the last two years has been personally revolutionary and it has not been easy or pretty. As a recovering type A, people pleasing, eldest daughter, woman of color, this time has felt constantly nauseatingly uncomfortable. I’ve had to keep headbutting the world around me into submission, while also navigating my complex inner world, in order to create time and space to get off the train and slow down, connect with what is actually true to me. Layers and layers to confront, examine, and deconstruct… I’ve been conditioned to work “9 to 5” (but really, that’s the bare minimum) at one career for my whole life, get married and have kids (by a certain age), buy a house, own certain things (Buy! Buy! Buy!), look a certain way, talk a certain way, believe a certain way (otherwise I’m ugly and no one will accept and love me - rejection from community). I’ve been conditioned to give my power to white men, let them take care of me and tell me what is right and what I need. I’ve been conditioned to play nice with white women who are threatened by me - be obedient or they will remind me what it means to be the color brown in this country. I cannot have a hair out of place, there is no space for strong emotions - stuff it somewhere out of view, and I must always have a plan and check it twice. I need to buy into and comply with systems that are made to exploit me and are intentionally unfair, but I need to pretend I don’t know that if I want to survive. Oh, and I need to show evidence of all my work. I could go on…
I’ve had the privilege of really great resources, great people and opportunities in my life that have tried to guide me onto a better path and still it has not been easy to go up against what almost everyone around me is actually role modeling or preaching. But I have been trying to (imperfectly) live without a plan, do the “next best thing,” navigate being broke (relationship with money is a whole other post too), utilize the resources that are available to me in the moment, be more present and mindful, intentionally and strategically buy and consume, make mutual aid and exchange work, get off social media (a life-long dream), hibernate from November to March (another life-long dream), find alternatives to “traditional”/W-2 jobs (another dream that I could never fathom how to actually manifest and am still trying to figure out) which includes that mutual aid and contract work, get out of a scarcity mindset, boycott several corporations, gather back my energy from everything I’ve given it away to and redistribute a healthier dose to myself and then to the very few things that … bring me joy and happiness, reciprocal activities and relationships.
I have grieved so damn much in the last year (or five), so many things that I have lost or let go of - material possessions, comfortability, ideas, beliefs, distractions, relationships, hobbies, and places. So many heartbreaking events - personally and collectively - that have ripped through me or caused a subtle current that deteriorated parts of myself before I had the strength and clarity to process and let it go. I have learned how much surrender, detachment (the release of things controlling me or the controlling relationship I have with things - not to be confused with denial/bypassing/removal of desire, wants, dreams, or feeling), and sacrifice is required of all of us in order to create a real change. It’s scary. But after all the fucking terror, the panic, the destabilization… it feels so damn good. It comes with deeper feeling and fulfillment, clarity and discernment, abundance, more limitlessness, and more balance or harmony - LIBERTATION. The detachment and sacrifice feel like a loss at first and it is. But it’s a loss of an old life, an old me. It’s not loss of joy or happiness or at a certain point, even comfort. It’s a loss of the things that are holding me back from living in harmony with myself, others, and the world. It’s a loss of convenience, distraction, quickness, instant gratification, enslavement, prescriptive limited lives - dreams and ways of being that we’re told to embody within a set of rules or norms that put a cap on our full capacity. It’s a loss of numbness and our zombie-like lives. It’s a necessary creation of space… for something new and hopefully better to take shape.
I have been thinking a lot about my child-self throughout this. Of course, the confrontation of death and life well-lived would have me reflect on being a young person. As a kid, I remember being so deeply and vividly confused by the contradiction of what I felt in my intuitive heart versus what I was told to do and be in the world. I just could not believe that the world I was being initiated into was the right one for me, because it so often felt wrong to me on an intuitive, energetic, and practical level. But it’s convincing when nearly everyone around you is following along. There were words of encouragement to be better and “make my dreams come true” or “create a better world” but the real-life examples of limitless possibilities and imagination coming to life were few. So, although I continued to feel unrest in my heart, I played the game. Until the last couple years when I came to that question once again, “am I happy"?” and “what is the point of this game if I’m still not happy after following all the rules?”
I’ve been on this quest for nearly two years and from about last June until sometime this winter, I felt like I was just screaming in a sound-proof glass box, so angry that everything outside of it was so imbalanced and did not reflect what I felt inside. Screaming at everything and everyone to wake up and help a sister out. Desperately seeking company that understood and acted accordingly, others who dared to do different with me. January and February were awful - I experienced a rage so strong and “out of nowhere,” it felt like I had a dragon roaring up my spine ready to engulf the world in flame. It didn’t feel like my own individual anger at what was going on in the world, because I’m on a different journey with that… but it did feel like a collective energy, a claustrophobic, trapped, explosive rage that I just had to let work through me, maybe on my behalf or maybe for the world. So, without it taking much to trigger me, I flopped into tantrums and felt suffocated by everything, and convinced myself it was just winter cabin fever and to hold on. But I think it was the feeling of a reckoning hitting the world. The tower card. The beginning of things falling apart, release of what’s no longer working. Finally, my external environment showing signs of change. On a personal level I believe I was facing my last bits of attachment to control. I grasped for any little and last thing I could find to control (“should I get bangs?”). My hands continued to slip, and I just kept surrendering to the rage and emptiness. So much emptiness, so much space. Depression, unclear direction, a world that’s old ways are (finally) fucking collapsing more explicitly, all of it consumed me and held me down to just submit and FEEL. How rarely do we ALLOW ourselves to just feel, not react, but just pause and feel - whatever emotions arise in any given moment, they’re not “good or bad,” they are just meant to be felt. Even if it wasn’t entirely my own energy and emotion to carry, I felt it all and I let it all move through and out of me as best I could, because it also wasn’t mine to hold onto.
At the end of February when facing the question, “are you happy?”, the answer was, “no.” But it was a light, short, cute, smiling, “no.” Because I knew it was just a matter of imbalance, and that in the (not so) grand scheme of my life, that I was well on my way to painting a masterpiece and that in reflection, I was actually very much living a life that I have ALWAYS WANTED TO LIVE, and a happy life! The last few months of short-lived unhappiness have just been the necessary death and shedding process to reach greater “heart attunement,” natural flow, and manifesting even more of what I have always dreamed of. It’s revealed to me what I still need to work on, reminded me what’s important and aligned, and what I still need to try doing even though the picture of the future is still quite unclear. I knew that eventually my great rage and deep hibernation would end. With the closing out of this seasonal/astrological year and unfolding into the new one with Spring Equinox, the clouds would part, clarity would strike loud and true, and that ease and flow would find me once again. I knew that it was okay to be unhappy and that it was my job to be patient, to examine my relationship with suffering, and to just observe and be curious about it all… not get attached, because the time would come where it would move on by and give way to something else… perhaps the next steps in a certain direction. So, the last couple months I’ve just been riding the wave as best I can, letting life flow through me… or whatever cliche you want to insert. The wave brings lessons to learn, insight, and clarity… if you’re patient and open to learning, and do not get wrapped up… because in a head-on fight - you vs. the ocean… you lose. Every time. That’s just life and it’s nothing to get upset about, but to change your perspective and relationship based on that fact. If you yield and surrender, she may just let you live and return you to shore after the storm, having a deeper appreciation for the gift of living another day, in this short life.
In my meditation retreat, I really didn’t know what to expect. I tried my best to stay open. I’d summarize the experience as a ritual or ceremony… to reset, cleanse myself of the building residue, allow the rage and whatever else was clouding my confident connection to my heart and intuition and feeling in my body and let it pass. It was a check in. Something worked through me in this hyper-focused, potent period of time that was set aside for the constant act of mindfulness for 4 days. Little to no talking and no phone. No books, no tv. No writing. Just a few others and me. A deep cleansing, a deep conditioning. Stillness and quiet work. Acknowledging and allowing the feelings and trains of thought but not getting on them. To be maintained with daily practice in the “real world.” But after just a little bit of that deep attention, mindfulness, and silence, I really did keep ending up at the ending place - the end of life. Life is short, what does any of this matter, what DOES matter? It gave me that perspective over and over again. As it does from time to time in my everyday life. Perspective is powerful. I often laugh to myself thinking about being 23, in a land far far away, doing shifts around the clock in an “incident command center” doing PR for a major potential crisis for a major corporation, working with several government entities… and then going to a small nonprofit ten years later where a kid is crying about not being able to use their iPad and it’s a whole thing that requires a staff or parent meeting. Or you know, just reflecting on how we all navigated a global pandemic on varying levels based on location, job, socioeconomics, and personal journey. I feel grateful for the insight perspective provides. It has shown me the capacity that not just I have, but all of us have. Capacity to navigate this wide spectrum of life... And to navigate it with conviction and compassion, but certainly not perfection.
Watching grown men tear down mainframes of our society, reminds me of the delusion and fragility of it all. It reminds me of the power and energy and potential I hold to create, and live a more real, joyful, intuitive, embodied, and love-filled life. Life is short. Life. Is. Short. Looking at the end, imagining how you want to feel and reflect on your life, can really help inform how you live today. Cut the shit and dial in. What is REALLY important? What are MY values? Another series of questions and exploration reveal themselves. Will I look back at this time and be upset if I didn’t walk in my truth, didn’t protest, couldn’t get over my ego and attachments enough to say fuck Target or Disney or Instagram, or that I sat back and just gave all my wellness and energy (my power) to rage over an orange man with nothing left to actually give to myself and my community? Will I be upset that I let delusion win when I could’ve been focused on building something actually real for myself, others, the planet, and generations to come? Will I regret not taking this opportunity to be bold and imaginative in creating a better future, a future where humans survive and live harmoniously with the earth? Especially when this is literally all I’ve ever wanted - the freedom to create and imagine and dream to my fullest, liberated capacity.
What can I do and how can I allow myself to be today, that will create happiness now and in the end?
*I’m writing this the day I found out a former creative colleague in a land far far away has passed. Sending lots of love and peace to their family and community. I feel a crack in my undefended heart.
Wandering Star ~ Rohini, The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns
You don’t become the cloth just because you put on robes.
You don’t turn into empty space just because you carry a bowl.
The sun doesn’t bow down. Trees don’t throw flowers at your feet. Birds don’t start answering when you call.
The Path will hold even the biggest mistakes. The Path will make room for even your deepest regrets.
But you don’t become the cloth of the robe overnight.
It can begin very quietly. Something you barely even notice.
Like the touch of water on your skin, like a knife in a drawer, like the next five minutes— unless they’re your last.
The Path isn’t a line on a map. It’s a great shining world. Enter wherever you like.
You might get thrown back once or twice, but if you push through the outer layers— oh, my sisters, then you will know the true welcome that is the very essence of the Path.