Waking Up

I’ve started this morning ritual. The alarm goes off and the inky blackness of the room swallows me. Bed is never more appealing that in that conscious state of not quite wake, when you can appreciate a good snuggle in the covers and a pillow on your cheek, the feeling of being held for a moment before the day begins. I curl, then stretch, and leave this haven, padding on over to the spare room after grabbing a glass of water and maybe starting the coffee for later. In there, I’ve set up a yoga mat, a block to sit on, a small pouch of tarot cards, dim lamp casting a yellowish glow at best, and a notebook with a pen. 

I settle in on the block first and set the timer on my phone. In and out. I breathe, trying to focus on light, on the divine, on love, on healing, whatever it is I feel like pointing my mind toward. Sometimes I just count. Keep it simple, superstar.

I try to notice my thoughts and let them go. I attempt this thing called meditation. Only for about ten minutes. I will let it grow over time. Then I pray out loud to the universe, God, or whoever is listening. Maybe it’s just for me. But I hear me. I hear me better in the morning. 

I’ve thought three times now I should be recording these prayers because often I’ll realize something, something I want to hold onto, something that might be a tool in managing these thoughts and emotions that do judo with my soul. But, in the moment, recording is not what I’m thinking about it. So today, I will write it down.

But first, some context.

Yesterday evening, a tired and slightly sad feeling washed over me. I felt like I spent or spend too much time efforting towards connecting with others. The outreach for coffee or a meal or a walk, the attempt to learn more and to share me, the unbearable requirement of consistent small talk when seeing people, the trying to join conversations, to listen, to support, to share in a way that’s meaningful. Most often I end up feeling foolish, rejected, or like more of a misfit than before.  

I’m done, I told myself gently. I relieve you of this requirement to be liked, to be valued, to somehow fit into a group, large or small, or even to successfully make that individual connection. You don’t have to try anymore I told myself, you can let go. But how to interact without trying, I asked the me that was giving myself permission to rest in the relentless people quest, a quest so unnatural to my core, yet so deeply desired by it at the very same time. 

Well, I told myself, it’s not that you are refusing connection, you are releasing yourself from striving. You can love them. You can be open to them. But you don’t have to effort. You need to find a way to just be content that you are all connected, whether you try hard or not and the connection doesn’t have to come through recognition of your ego by another ego or vice versa. Live your life, self, I said, and live it with love, but let go. The efforting hurts. Of course, I could tell myself to let go of the hurt. But maybe that’s a later step.

And so I went about my evening, rather self-contained. Kind and responsive to those around (I hope), and perhaps also kind and responsive to myself – and self-contained.

When I prayed this morning I had a chat about this with God. Or the Universe. Or whoever was listening, maybe just me. 

I explained what happened last night.

“I’m tired, God,” I said next. “Throughout my life I have felt like an outsider and when I was young this cut me so deeply. I’d reach out for the love of parents who, due to their own issues, couldn’t be there (nasty divorce, mental health struggles, the stuff). I watched my family disintegrate and felt powerless to fix it. I felt like I failed. I’d beg them to to love one another, to love me, but it never worked.”

I would go to school sad and unable to connect with my classmates. School became a place I never wanted to be, it was a place of feeling alone among people, of being unworthy of friendship or love. I started to skip as often as I possibly could. Alone, at home, with frozen food and movies, safe in the soothing ease of processed nourishment and spoon-fed fantasy.  Sometimes I’d cry out for someone to be there, to give me a hug, but there was no one there. 

“God,” I said, “I have clearly never gotten over this. I recognize in my life who and how I form relationships, constantly setting myself up to relive this trauma, to relive flailing attempts to find love, to love others and have it be accepted, to convince others to love. Constantly setting myself up to try to find acceptance and connection and to fail. To retreat to processed food and fantasy.”

Side note, as I got older perhaps the escapism varied and differed. Sometimes it might have even been “healthy” – such as the marathon running phase, but the attachment to it, the need for it, the space it filled was not necessarily healthy. 

I recognize that those that trigger me tend to be those people who loudly demand attention in a group and who feel they deserve it or seem to assume they deserve it and who get it, no matter how obnoxiously they seem to be asking for it. See me, they say, love me, they say, this space is for me, me, me.

And everyone gives it to them. And my ego cries out in the pain of memory, and my pride backs up and rejects everyone, even the group accepting that person. 

“God,” I said, “I want to change this. I need to learn how to change this. I need to find peace in myself, in connecting with myself, I need to be enough, and I am of course, we all are, but God,” I continued, “I need to connect with you, with God, with the divine, with the universe and let go of this need for other egos to see me.”

“Help me, please, God,” I said. 

Samskara. This is a term in yoga. One of the YTT trainees had to give their dharma talk about it. I have wanted to write about it, but I have avoided it because she is so much more eloquent the me, so much calmer, more grounded, wiser. She is one of the few not claiming enlightenment, yet I feel she is so much closer than everyone else. And in her talk she went into neural pathways and the science of the brain and tied it up in a spiritual bow. It was beautiful.

For me, the term is raw. This is clearly my negative samskara. I’m sure it is science. I’m sure it is spiritual. But it’s also samfuckingskara, I cry. Breathe in, light, breathe out, love, I tell myself. 

In yoga, samskara are the deep mental impressions, maybe from former lives, maybe from this one, the habits we repeat, that drive us from somewhere deep inside. My words, not yoga’s. This is a destructive samskara for me.  Setting myself up time and again to feel this pain, this disconnection. 

But perhaps in the greater and greater consciousness of it, perhaps with application of awareness and of my mind, I can work through this. Perhaps. I haven’t found the answer in scripture – Christian or Yoga or Hindu. I’m sure it’s there. But perhaps I’ve found it in that old classic, The Tao of Pooh.

Wisdom, Happiness, and Courage are not waiting somewhere out beyond sight at the end of a straight line; they’re part of a continuous cycle that begins right here. They’re not only the ending but the beginning as well.”

Benjamin Hoff, Tao of Pooh