Clearing My Throat: a Postmortem

Aaahemmhmrrmmmaaaa.

Beeeeebleeebleebrerrippbbbb!

There. I think that’s about as weird as it’s gonna get.

The other week I had the experience of sitting in a circle with some 20 other people. It was at the end of a several hour ecstatic dance and sound bath event, and those of us who lingered decided to spend a little time circled up, checking in, closing the container.

We went around giving introductions, and naturally my mind was running, while listening to the others, pulling together what I would say about myself. My life lately has been brimming with changes and challenges, lots going on and the dance had stirred some of it up, and it was still swirling in me. When it got to be my turn to speak, I said my piece. I heard myself speak in a steady, clear, yet timid voice – scared, and you could hear it. I was scared to speak, scared of how I’d be seen, scared I wouldn’t make my truth intelligible and I’d be judged. I thought they were cool, this group, and the pressure gave me anxiety.

But I realized that, after I said my introduction and we were all finished, my anxiety was gone. I felt empowered and permitted to speak, no longer timid. I felt known by the group, and accepted. Even though I had been fearful and self-denigrating and had not said my introduction ‘perfectly,’ that no longer mattered. What mattered most was that my presence had become comfortable, my communication channel felt free. “Sometimes you have to get all the crap out the way before you hit the good stuff and you’re like ‘Ok I’m getting good stuff now.’”

It’s been nearly a year since you heard from me last! What happened to Energy Outward, where is the next installment of this grand essay series I told you would be coming?

It has had to wait while I go through a big growth spurt, with no shortage of growing pains (and growing pleasures!). On the surface, this has looked like: moving out from my beloved communal house of five plus years; moving five hours north to my family land; fixing up the old tiny cabin in which I will live; traveling the American Southwest by train; turning 30 and hosting a celebration; launching a monthly music event series; beginning to train in conflict resolution; and settling into my new life, the chaos of a year-long transition finally abating.

Along the way, I tried to get the next essay out in anything resembling the promised timeline. I tried, dear reader, I tried! First the deadline was September, then New Year’s, then February… and here we are. I did write an essay, it’s nearly finished and maybe I’ll release it.

But what feels more alive to say to you now is that, increasingly over the seven years I’ve been trying to write some version of Energy Outward, I’ve struggled with excruciating insecurity and doubt over whether I should be doing this at all. Where’s the line between being dedicated to your dream and clinging to something that’s not working? It’s taking so long, will it be any good? Will anybody really care to read it? Is this worth my time? Aren’t there more direct, effective ways to offer my service to the world? Is this doubt a sign I’m on the wrong path – or is self-doubt a natural feature of creative process?

And then in February, my car got stolen. After moving through the initial shock and grief, I opened myself to the lesson that might be contained within the experience. The guidance I received was to get comfortable with loss, because things will be taken from you. As a thief had taken my car, life is moving on and I no longer have the time to tinker with this passion project. I could treat this as tragic, or I could treat it as a gift. Coming to terms with the loss of my car, I realized I could drop Energy Outward. Let that dream die so that something else may be born. In so doing, I have rediscovered the spirit of Energy Outward, begun living again in the freedom and exuberance that once that phrase gave me. A fresh new life opens up before me, carrying loss and grief, yes, but unburdened by obligations whose time had passed.

I am a perfectionist, I’ve discovered, and I’ve got it pretty bad. One interpretation of perfectionism is that it’s a strategy to cover up, or compensate for, an inner sense of unworthiness, a basic insecurity about my right to take up space. I generally don’t feel I can speak freely, and certainly not without careful planning of what I’m going to say. Many of my ideas may be considered radical and strange by your average American. I am deeply fearful of social rejection, worried specifically that I may alienate people who don’t understand but could. If only I could explain myself fully, if only I could show them the totality of the context, if only I could calibrate my words so they stand a chance of being heard. Like Luke at the end of the first Star Wars making his approach to the Death Star, I’ve felt that there’s just one tiny entry and if I don’t fly this ship just right, I will burn out and be forgotten. (This is, not incidentally, identical to what I’ve taken to be the rational prognosis for humanity generally.)

So I would write. I would hold back my speech, playing it safe so as to not risk my relationships, and spend time in private crafting my masterpiece, the artifact that, upon reading, would make it all clear. Speaking off the cuff, I’m prone to sloppiness and imprecision, the meaning and force of the message diluted and distorted in the transition from mind to mouth. I’m better at writing than talking, I’ve often said. Given enough time and contemplation, I could write in a way that anyone could understand. So I thought.

This has been an important theme for me: communicating in a way that will land for the listener, rather than merely a way that will satisfy my own need to express. This is one meaning of ‘energy outward.’ So many good ideas get lost because they’re expressed in language the listener won’t understand: insider-baseball jargon, language that shames or triggers or inflames. So much of our world’s conflict is not a true conflict of interests but merely a failure to communicate precisely and with charity. When we communicate without care, we often do more damage than good.

So I endeavored to be meticulous in my speech, writing in a way that rises to the many demands of this historical moment. We have different educational backgrounds: I would not use jargon. We have different political backgrounds: I would patiently build up explanations from first principles, using simple and universal concepts. I would address the multifaceted concerns a broad readership might have, so that all conceivable defenses and criticisms would be soothed. I would edit impeccably, with a professional standard of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure that would be maximally clear and unassailable. And I would write it with a poetic economy of speech so it would go down smooth, writing words so attractive and compelling they would be read for pleasure. My writing aspired to literary achievement, to be an important milestone in the landscape of thought, a strong and fresh expression of perennial wisdom, a foundation from which to shape our world’s future.

A tall order. It feels a bit ridiculous typing it out now, a bit obvious why I’ve had so much trouble actually writing something like this. How many weeks must one spend editing each paragraph in order to intentionally create perfection? Yet there is a part of me that really believes in myself this much, really thinks I have the capacity to do something monumental like this. I love that part. And it torments me.

If I could write essays like this, I would. But I can’t, not right now. Let me say a bit more about what I have wanted to do with my writing, so you know what I am giving up.

There is a bias in our modern culture against context, against tradition, against what has come before and what already exists. A form of freedom has been found by disregarding lineage. Yet it has also given rise to a tendency to spout off without doing due diligence, without checking in with one’s surroundings, without honoring the ancestors who have come before. As the Internet has expanded, so has our ability to publish writing. Thus we’ve seen an immense proliferation of blogs, most of them hastily written and not worth your time. Functional writing, writing that doesn't reflect the immense privilege of sharing your words, that doesn't honor its audience as holy. I don’t want to be just another Substacker, sharing my thoughts because I can. I want my writing to stand apart, to be well-crafted and thought out, my prose balanced and playful and tight as a spring. I want my writing to be nutritious, not fast food.

Thus I have not wanted to write on a subject without a thorough accounting for its intellectual history, or at least a survey of others who have spoken on it, linking in some of what’s already been said about the idea. I want to communicate legacy, I want to show that these ideas are not new. They have been around, and we largely fail to integrate them, to know our history, to learn from the past. I want to be humble before the ancestors, to be clear that I am not an innovator of ideas but, as Terrence McKenna once said, a ‘meme replicator.’ I am sharing old ideas, weaving them together in the ways they feel relevant to this living moment.

This humility… I mean it, and also – it’s a gateway for self-aggrandizement. I want to show you how knowledgeable I am, how erudite, that I’m aware of the important voices in the landscape of culture and thought. Can you feel how badly I want your respect? The so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’ is competitive, and I am not someone with notable credentials, nor am I willing to snag your attention with clickbait. Referencing the ideas of others has not only been a way to pay my respects and offer the reader a fuller understanding, but has also felt like a way to validate my own views, to show you that I’m not crazy but am actually drawing on well-established, well-founded ideas. Maybe then you’ll find me worth listening to.

This attitude has led me to collect an enormous library of resources: articles on this, book passages on that, names and dates and stories with which to create something like an exhaustive, authoritative rendition of these subjects. If I’m going to write about, oh, say, the expressions of dualism in religions, by God I’m going to do it well: I’m going to include every example I can to prove my point, and I’m going to provide voluminous citations so there can be no doubt as to the solidity of my view. My memory isn’t good enough to allow me access to all these references in daily life, so I can’t share them in conversation – but I can in an essay!

This approach has colored every aspect of my writing. I don’t typically free-write, as I’m doing now, stringing one thought into the next without a rigid framework for it to serve. This is how I write for social media, or an email. Casual. Not endlessly worked over, not comprehensive, and not examining every intricate detail. There are so many details! When we slow down, attend deeply to any little thing, we find so many fascinating aspects, so many connections to draw, emotions to feel, possibilities to play with. To do so is sacred. This is one definition of the sacred: to feel deeply into that which is before you now, to immerse yourself in it, attend fully to it, feel the truth of the notion that this, like every point in the universe, is the center. But this is no way to go to work. How can we get things done from this wide-eyed, sensitive place? And there are, indeed, things to be done.

Writing like this, it’s taking longer to express myself than if I edited it strictly, spoke efficiently, excised needless words. I am taking up more of your time, testing your patience. I am taking up more server space on the Internet, more electricity and mineral mining. I have not calibrated these words for maximum impact per square inch. I am not sticking to a rational framework, grouping thoughts and sentences into thematic paragraphs. I am writing as my mind flows, jumping from one thought to another, a coherent whole forming non-linearly.

And it feels so good. I am in flow. These words, though they could be critiqued a thousand ways, they feel alive. A major theme in my spiritual growth this last half year has been noticing. Just noticing. Noticing is enough; we feel we should follow our noticing with a judgement, with some effort, what in Buddhism has been called ‘the second arrow.’ Jumping into judgement and action, we quickly jump out of the noticing, and thus detach ourself from it. We snap into a script, some moral code we feel we should follow, some subconscious structure of ‘how it is done.’ And it’s not appropriate to the noticing. Noticing what is, we can see appropriate action emerging spontaneously. Instead of calculating what action will likeliest get us to our goal, we can sense into the feeling of aliveness: that tingly excitement, that thing that’s the most salient to this present moment, where my truth and yours intersect. The action that comes from this place is what will best serve the whole; I trust, even if I don’t rationally understand how. It’s so hard for us to accept, but no plan will get us where we want to be so well as following this sense of what feels alive, what is true right now, beneath the urgency and guilt and desperation.

And there are nuances to these ideas, yes. Perhaps another day we will explore them. Discernment is a muscle that must be pushed to failure in order to grow. There have certainly been times that I followed what felt true and wound up hurt, or disappointed, or culpable. Was I hearing a false voice, failing to discern well? Was my failure itself a part of the process, the wider unfolding of the universe that I do not understand but that I nonetheless serve when I follow my aliveness, wherever it leads?

God, these words. So flabby! So unclear. I am using my own jargon, and trusting you to get it. Or accepting that you won’t. I am not doing the work to explain it for you. I don’t have the time. I have had to let go of this entire way of thinking, this project of shouldering an immense explanatory burden, sacrificing gobs of my time and my aliveness in order to make these ideas intelligible to the most common denominator. I am speaking from the heart now; that is all.

Just noticing. Noticing my desire, born of fear, to defend these ideas, to justify them, to show that I am not oblivious to their pitfalls, their multidimensionality. If there is some further idea, some additional take that I have not included, I let go of the need to include it, to express myself exhaustively. I let go of my claim upon wisdom, and leave room for others to pipe in. If you notice some novel application of an idea, some fresh interpretation or useful connection, I release the need to prove I’ve already seen it. I release the need to be recognized as the first to have an idea. I open to the wisdom of the collective, to your place to join the conversation with your own authentically valuable contributions, to not need to see myself as the sole owner of innovation and understanding.

So I won’t be writing and releasing essays the way I once planned: ordered in a straightforward, linear way, as if I were writing a textbook. I’m not going to force myself to start from first principles in the suspicion that you’ll reject me if I presume too much. I’m going to write in the order of what feels the most alive at the time of the writing. I’m going to include references that I think to include at the time of writing, not indulging in a long process of combing my library for every possibly relevant bit. If this means I deploy ideas that I haven’t optimally set you up to understand, so be it. I cannot manage your impressions; that is ‘your business,’ as Byron Katie would say. I put myself in your hands and trust whatever comes.

I have tried to write, tried to live my life, under the notion that I, as I am, am not acceptable. That I must contort myself in order to be well-received. That if I share myself as I am, it will not be intelligible to people, and I will be rejected. Well, now that is shifting. I’m going to share myself just as I am, not tweaked for your pleasure (or for my neurosis). I’m going to use the words that present themselves to me, be they excessively basic or excessively literary. I’m not going to let myself get overly concerned about ‘the right way’ to do this. What matters are not my fears of your potential judgements, but the field of love in which I ground these words.

In letting go of the Energy Outward project and coming to terms with this loss, I have discovered a freshness. I discovered what it is I really do wanna say. What is left after everything is lost? What pokes its head up through the ashes, still seeking expression?

I had been working on a grand framework, a ‘theory of everything,’ that I would unfurl slowly and patiently, like a textbook, from first principles. First I would explain the history of the Mind-Body Divide: Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes situated modernity in the rational Mind, from where it seems impossible to contact the Body – for how could an immaterial consciousness interface with the physical world? Yet looking within the Body, what piece of anatomy could we possibly call a Mind? The mind contains such wild imaginings that could never fit inside a brain. This duality, known in philosophy as the mind-body problem, has manifested in human cultures stretching back millennia, and has reared its head with terrible grandeur over the past few centuries. All of the prime crises of our world today can be seen as reflections of Mind-Body Dualism. Take the ecological crisis: the world’s body is being degraded near the brink of death by technologies that serve navel-gazing human ideas of progress and comfort. In our obsession with entertainment, we spend most all our time inside, detached from nature. Dualism is in the nature of thought itself: we focus on an idea, a construction of the mind, and become numb to our situational awareness, our embodied context, the fullness of reality that goes far beyond our limited ideas. The more we look, the more we find echoes of dualism. Here it is in racism and sexism: a detached, arrogant center (white men) dominating and degrading the bulk of humanity in the name of an idea (racial and gender superiority). There it is in the global economy: a centralized ‘First World’ dominates the larger ‘Third World,’ using economic manipulation and military might to keep poor nations in line so they’ll keep giving up natural resources and labor at bargain basement prices in order to serve the comforts and entertainments of us First World folks. Here it is again in our governance structures: so-called democracies where the great mass of people are politically disempowered, where decisions are made by a small, centralized, detached group of people, our democratic power abstracted into ‘representatives.’ Our units of governance – the boundaries of cities, states, countries – are themselves abstractions, tracing human ideas rather than the planet’s real boundaries, bioregions. Dualism (are you sick of this yet?), here it is again, in information, media, and propaganda: the separation of societal consciousness into competing echo chambers, each side holding its truths as superior and violently discouraging consideration of inconvenient evidence. The gleaming, officially sanctioned narratives pushed by central institutions and the heretics underground who dare consider dissident ideas, feeling in the darkness for the murky structures therein. Dualism, again (I could do this all day), in how we might respond to this horrid situation: our grassroots social movements, the body of the demos seeking to self-govern, fractured into conceptual boxes called ‘the Left' and ‘the Right,’ our brittle ideas of justice diverting our passions to in-fighting. Conversations across difference, those conversations that would be necessarily to build the type of broad grassroots coalitions that could truly shift the balance of power, those conversations are impossible because we approach them from the Mind, clinging to our ideas of right and wrong, numb to the sensations in the Body, unable to notice when we feel triggered, unable to feel back into our heart, to take a deep breath, to hold loving presence so deep and strong that we build bonds that can hold our true complexity and solidarity.

There. That’s what I have to say.

Whooooooo. Deep breath.

Do you see why I wanted to take my time? Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s so concentrated here, written in my mental shorthand, drawing on frameworks and assumptions I haven’t explained. I might sound crazy, misguided, or simply put, not worth listening to.

I do not have time to write my masterpiece. We do not have time. I am growing up, life is taking me over, considerations of vocation and income and homestead and partnership and fatherhood – and liveliness! I do not want to spend my precious life holed up on my computer, agonizing over synonyms. I do not think this is what will serve the whole. When I embarked on writing Energy Outward in 2017, I arrived at the idea from a contemplation of ‘What is my gift to give? What has my life set me up to offer?’ A worthy question to ask. Writing a book: not an unreasonable conclusion for a fearful bookworm. But since then I have grown. I am older now, and wiser, yes, and more capable. As I deal with my fears, untying knots in my psyche, I become more able to speak with fluidity and clarity. I find myself developing a body that can hold greater loads, and the possessor of a skillset with which I could do real good. Writing is not the only gift I have to offer.

So I have a choice. I could abandon writing entirely, regarding it as the activity of a past version of me, one more trapped in his mind, one with youthfully endless stretches of time. This would be the dualistic version: from one extreme to the other, taking that which I was so immersed in and flinging it away in disgust. There is another option: to stay attuned to what is, to simply notice, to sense what feels true for me. It feels true that I have less and less time, and other projects that draw my fancy, and some kind of block to actually releasing writing the way I’d been doing it. And it feels true that I have novel and worthy insights, understandings that could be helpful, and a way of expressing things that could help these ideas land with people who would otherwise reject them.

I want to write. But I cannot do it the way I have been. I cannot be perfect. I am sorry. If you only have time to read writing of the most exquisite caliber, that has been tuned to perfection, then you’d better look elsewhere. That is not the type of writing I now feel called to produce. That is the only type of writing my shadow thinks you’ll be interested in, the only type of writing my fear and my trauma has been willing to let me release. Thankfully, I am releasing my fear, and healing my trauma. I am stepping into a new version of myself, one looser, and braver, and more in his body. One for whom tears come more easily. One who cares less what you think of him, who trusts that his true expression will attract the right people.

So, yes. Energy Outward is dead. Long live Energy Outward. Will I release that other essay I have written as a practice in revealing my imperfection? Perhaps. Will I take many months again before I release something else? Perhaps. Only time will tell. All I can say for sure right now is that I do feel I have something to say, and that I feel more able than ever to maybe actually say it.

P.S. I got my car back. It’s a long story. Let’s just say City of Berkeley agencies don’t know how to talk to one another.

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