If we ever get mad at each other,
I’ll give you my eye and you give me yours.
Just till we see where we’re coming from.
-JLK
If you ever get scared, or mean, and you wonder if maybe you’re not such a good or brave kid after all . . . I’ll tell you what you do:
Take those feelings and feed ’em to the worms.
“Did you say worms?”
Yes, I did.
Did you know, no matter where you are,
underneath you, there’s a world of worms?
Even if you’re on the top of a skyscraper or on an airplane-
way down under the ground, the worms are there. And they’re hungry.
And you know what they like to eat best? All your bad feelings.
Tastes just like pizza to them. Yup. Even the ones that make you want to bite your mom, or make you wanna throw your toys,
or make you wake up crying in the middle of the night.
Just gather them all up and toss ’em all down.
The wormies’ll thank you.
They thank me all the time!
-JLK
From Feed It to the Worms, a collection of very short stories for small children.
After my mother passed, I sometimes felt baffled and even more alone by the words people would say to express their condolences. But at some point, I realized that when someone dies, the language of condolences just needs to be translated. It’s a very simple translation. Basically, every offering of condolence can be translated into, “Death is painful and strange. And I don’t really have the right words to say. But I wanted to say something. Because I care.”
-JLK
An illustration of me, when I’m on the verge of pushing through my pain and discomfort to have an insight, but have had enough and reach over and pick up my phone instead, lol.
No shame though.
Insights come when insights come.
If I’m available to have an insight, it can come from pushing through pain, from meditating, being stuck in traffic, making the same and just about the only dinner my son will eat, talking with a customer service rep, being there to read or comment on a friend’s post… anything.
In my opinion, whatever you’re connecting with is precious, as long as you’re present to what you’re connecting with, so you can recognize its preciousness.
-JLK
Not everyone starts the day with the same number of spoons.
Some of us are still depleted from the day before, or the year before, or generations before.
Some people are doing the work of three people all by themselves, which means they’ve likely got a spoon deficit and are running on fumes.
It's difficult to find the spoons to deal with all the stuff we have going on.
But we can help each other conserve what spoons we have left by asking ourselves before we speak or act, “Am I about to deplete this person’s spoons or ease their burden?”
So many times we judge our words and actions based on what WE find useful or amusing, and have little or no awareness of how it might land for another—as toxic, or nourishing.
I realize more and more that world peace truly does begin with immediate vicinity peace.
So just as I have a keenly calibrated radar for whether or not I’m being treated fairly, I try to remember to check in with myself to make sure I'm not covertly or unknowingly generating toxicity that another person is going to have to work hard to heal from.
And if I do happen to have any extra spoons, I can give them away through my support. Chances are, I know someone who could use them.
-JLK
"Spoon theory is a metaphor that is used to describe the amount of mental or physical energy a person has available for daily activities and tasks. It was developed by Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus. She used spoons to provide a visual representation of units of energy that a person might have and how chronic illness forces her to plan out her days and actions in advance, so as not to run out of energy, or spoons, before the end of the day. It has since been applied to other phenomena, such as other disabilities, mental health issues, marginalization, and other factors that might place an extra – often unseen – burden on some individuals."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
I think one reason people don’t tell the truth about what’s so for them, is because of the things they’ve heard people say behind the backs of other people going through similar stuff:
They should get help.
She used to have it so together.
I feel so sad for him.
It’s such a shame.
She’s had such a hard life.
But the only people who judge another for a trip to the abyss are those who haven’t visited there themselves.
So if you’re having a hard time, please don’t feel stigmatized. And please don’t hesitate to ask for help. But—please make sure to ask the right people for help.
Find someone who’s returned from their own abyss, someone who knows how easy it is to wind up there.
Sometimes the journey to the abyss is just a few thoughts or circumstances away.
Those people know how to navigate down there. They can lend you a light so you can look around down there and find friends. Not shame.
-JLK
Who says there has to be a right way to meditate?
Who says you have to just watch your thoughts pass by as if in some brook?
Why not welcome our thoughts?
What if they’re the first sentence in a story we haven’t heard yet?
Who says we can’t stroll our bodies like libraries, browsing for the information that might give us clues for how we arrived at being the person we call ourselves?
We’re not alone in our bodies after all.
There’s younger selves in here and ancestors and livers and spleens…
And they’ve all got stuff to say.
Important stuff.
We all go sit in a chair to watch someone else’s adventure to find the holy grail, while our own is sitting inside us waiting to be discovered.
Why not explore our depths? Discover where the gold is?
Have you ever tried to communicate with someone and they say, “Wow, I’m not at all absorbing what you’re saying! I’m watching your words and thoughts pass by in the river of my mind!”
You might want to slug them.
In fact, that might very well be your last conversation with them.
Why not listen carefully and respond to the voices inside ourselves?
We don’t need to let them take us where we don’t want to go, but why not ask them the reason for wanting to take us there?
Some of those voices might be the confused voices of upset younger versions of ourselves who internalized a lot of negative stuff.
Why not take the time to listen to their concerns, and show them a new direction?
Or if we’re feeling damaged, instead of watching our damaged parts float down the river, why not appoint ourselves our own doctor or triage nurse and tend to our own damaged parts?
We store our pain in our bodies. So if we pay attention and scan our bodies for which parts of us are having an emergency, we can hurry to their proverbial bedside and soothe their wounds.
‘Oh boy. Someone rang the nurse’s bell from the lower left leg of the hospital! Stat!’
‘Uh oh. There’s someone who needs immediate assistance in the heart of the hospital! I’m on my way!”
The point is, meditation can be a time to heal ourselves, and healing can actually be really interesting and even fun.
And as long as you’re not attached to any particular way to meditate, it can be made up, like any recipe, to suit your particular appetite, your particular set of ingredients, and your nutritional needs.
Sure, I still carve out the time to focus on my breath. And I’m grateful that my breath is always here, as the most reliable anchor to ground me.
But when there’s a feisty negative thought, I don’t let it go… I go toward it, and I ask where it came from and why the big upset. And each time I really listen, the same thing happens. I wind up understanding where that upset came from, and that upset thought turns into an insight, and all I'm left with is empathy and love.
To me, the purpose of meditation is to discover what I'm made of, and to give each part of myself my attention, understanding and love. And as far as I know, there’s no right way to do this.
But because this relationship with myself is the longest term relationship of my life—I figure I better make the process of getting to know myself as fulfilling as possible.
-JLK
When I have pain or discomfort, it seems so natural to want to flee or avoid it.
But from what I've noticed, that never works.
What works is to go toward my pain and discomfort and give it support, as if it were a crying person I stumbled upon in the street.
Every upset is calling out for love and understanding.
Even when that upset is yours.
When you are the one with the upset, then you are the person who needs the support of your own love and understanding.
-JLK
I made up a word—Lessergized: When you get a momentary boost from connecting with someone by pretending you’re less than you are.
I thought of the word because this used to happen to me a lot. And sometimes, when I’m tired or feeling vulnerable, it still happens, though mostly when I'm talking with someone from my family of origin.
It happens when they kind of criticize something about my life without really meaning to criticize it.
Maybe they just can't understand the context of my life, but they feel like they want to make a difference in it, because not understanding to them, means there must be something wrong, which to them means an opportunity to offer some guidance.
But instead of explaining my truth in response to this unasked for out-of-context guidance, I get a boost of connection, because—how nice that they even have a moment to talk with me!
And I just kind of thank them for their wisdom because I do feel a connection with them, even though their 'wisdom' has next to nothing to do with my existence.
And though I could have used my voice to share my truth with them, so they'd get to know more about what’s real for me, I chose instead to lessergize myself.
I think it comes from the longing to connect deeply with people, but fearing at the same time that who I really am will be criticized or dismissed, instead of received.
It’s the result of that old shaky foundation that so many of us were built on—those of us who weren’t fortified with validation in our developmental years.
Those of us who missed the milestone of internalizing that gift of validation, and so we continued looking for it, without realizing that the job to validate ourselves was going to be ours alone.
There’s a mourning that comes with this truth, before it’s worn like a privilege.
It took me until I had a child, and saw those little eyes looking for me to create who he was, before I truly got that I had the strength to do this for us both.
These days, when I have a moment of pretending and people pleasing, it feels like a crack in my self-built foundation.
I can literally feel my sense of myself trickling out.
Because pretending and people-pleasing is fear-based instead of values-based. And my foundation was self-created through values I chose myself.
Still, I try not to punish myself when it happens, but to repair by lifting myself up and reminding myself that central to my values is compassion—for myself and others. My body is a punishment-free zone.
My self-built foundation is pretty strong these days.
Strong enough to carry all my weight pretty comfortably—my mistakes and my victories—without it all feeling like an overwhelming burden.
These days, instead of worrying so much how I’ll be received, and laboring to figure out the most digestible way to express myself, I try to remember to spend that energy figuring out what’s real for me, so that when I do share myself, I know I’m being the most authentic version of myself.
And that way, if someone doesn’t receive me, or appreciate what I’ve communicated, I know it’s out of my hands, because there’s really no one else I can be, but me.
And if someone should receive me, and tell me I’m having a blind spot, instead of feeling shamed, I can thank them for giving me the opportunity to see something new I hadn’t noticed before.
The goal is not to be perfect. Just to be the best version of who I am, as often as I’m able to, no matter who it is I’m speaking to, including myself.
-JLK
I think the opposite of ‘being’ is the drive to be recognized.
Maybe it’s a primal thing. A territorial thing. ‘I am here! See me here!’ that’s been domesticated into this thing we call ‘success.’
‘I am here! See my credentials that validate this!’
Yet I’ve noticed, when I feel compelled to upgrade myself to something ‘better than’ or ‘more than‘ the being I naturally inhabit, it feels like a battle, like there’s something I need to conquer or overcome before I’m able to get where I think I need to go.
Even the innocent languaging of it reeks of conquest:
‘She certainly never set the world on fire.’
Or, ‘He’s killing it!’
But the efforts to catapult myself from regular-being to the gold-standard-of-being-recognized causes so much anxiety.
Because what does ‘becoming recognized’ really mean to my own experience of being? Not much. Being recognized is really something I need others to do for me. Which puts me in a constant state of needing to abandon being with myself to find this validation elsewhere.
From what I’ve noticed, the drive to be recognized seems like the ignition of all conflict.
Because someone ‘better than’ creates someone ‘less than.’
And someone ‘less than’ is inevitably going to feel like they’d better make more of an effort to look better, to avoid being devalued or dismissed.
And this gives birth to shame, resentment, revenge, and their coping mechanisms: avoidance and distraction— all of which gets in the way of a person’s relationship to their own intrinsic experience of being, which then gets in the way of being present to build meaningful relationships with the people in our lives.
I think my drive to be recognized came from my childhood. Because while I was little and perfectly content to just be, the adults in my life were too busy trying to get somewhere better to notice, or if they were home, they were too busy distracting themselves from the exhaustion of the day’s endeavors.
I often felt neglected, and took their lack of being with me to mean I wasn’t worth their attention.
And at some point, I figured if I wanted their attention, I’d better become someone bigger and better than who I was.
So I began to work extra hard to become someone more recognizable, someone more worthy of connecting with, hoping that if I succeeded, I’d be catapulted into the kind of environment I longed for—where people were present, happy where they were, and ready to connect.
But the work of getting recognized is grueling. And every time I failed in my endeavors, I felt I still wasn’t worth what I longed for, so I settled into one toxic environment after the next, where people continued to be unavailable, reactive; trying themselves to get someplace better or to distract themselves from where they were.
It’s so hard not to get trapped in this race to become something ‘more than’ who we are.
It’s so hard to find environments where people are present to the gift of just being who we are, where we are.
And it doesn’t help that we’re constantly being bombarded by messages from screen to shining screen that invite and even urge us to work harder to be not just somebody, but ‘a somebody’—to be worth the space we take up on this planet.
I find it interesting that I’m rarely bombarded by the reminder that I am already blessed with being who I am.
This blessing is saved for greeting cards or memes, or from people hoping to enroll me in such and such course or workshop.
Maybe this is why so many people are devoted to Jesus. He’s just about the only guy in town who loves a person for who they actually already are. Of course, people even fight about who deserves his love.
So I wonder, how do we learn the skills to be able to retain our ‘being’ in this world, that is so obsessed with ‘being recognized’?
How can we cultivate our being’s purpose and share our gifts and connect with each other as we are, instead of tripping over each other or inadvertently disregarding each other on our way to becoming recognized for what we believe we should be more of?
I personally have to catch myself with every thought I think, to remind myself the distinction between sharing and connecting, verses that old drive to be recognized, in order to get me out of my hell hole and into a better place.
I have to constantly remind myself that this land I’m often in, that feels so barren and isolated, like a ghost land, is the way it is because it’s missing the only vital nutrient that can’t be bought or earned or acquired—it’s our being, and the nurturing of our being with each other’s awareness of it.
Maybe it’s as simple as a shifting of our languaging:
Instead of, ‘She never set the world on fire,’ how about: ‘Her presence always lights up the space she’s in and warms the hearts of those near to her.’
Or, instead of ‘He’s killing it.’ How about: ‘He put his efforts into pushing his best qualities out into the world, past all his conditioning, to connect meaningfully with the people in his vicinity.’
I certainly don’t have any answers. But before I share anything or speak anything, I try to remember to check in with my motivation first, to make sure my intention is aligned with my values—to connect and to be a contribution—instead of aligned with those old beliefs that tell me who I am right now is not yet good enough to share.
To shift from that desperate longing for what I don’t have, to work on healing my life from the space of being, this being that’s always been here, under my circumstances, waiting to nourish where I already am, so that my environment can grow into a place where I actually want to be, where I can be myself, and invite others to do the same.
-JLK
Only you get to say when your creative self will be born
Sometimes, I feel a kicking inside myself. It's this wilder truer version of myself that I keep under wraps, wanting to get out. This part of myself that doesn’t second and third and fourth guess herself, but takes more chances to be who she is, instead of who she isn’t.
I think the world needs more from these truest versions of ourselves. Time to do what it takes to push them out of ourselves and into the world.
-JLK
