Something Beautiful

Doing what we can

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  -- Theodore Roosevelt:

Feminine Tao (and other)

I came accidentally upon this site offering a Feminine Tao. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but its quality seems obvious and its worth equally apparent.

The Feminine Tao is hosted at Early Women Masters. Again, I don't think I really understand the intent or organization of the site. And yet it's so appealing that I think it well worth mentioning here.

The importance of truth (cont'd)

I feel I've stumbled on a beginning to the end of my pain by focusing on truth. If something is not true, I need not fear it. If something is true, my pain will cease only when I grapple with it, confront it, deal with it. There is nothing terribly frightening in that, although I might need some time and patience in order to be able to do it.

I'm casting about on the Web looking for helpful statements about the truth. So far I haven't found much. There's this:

     ". . . and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32)

There is my post on how the law of the Lord, in its perfection, restoreth the soul.

There are these two other quotations, that I have quoted earlier in this blog:

     "Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality." (Frank Herbert)

     "Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I have a glimmer of a sense that, if I can pursue this line of thinking, I just might be able to come to grips with things that happened decades ago, with what happened yesterday, and with things that happened during all the intervening years. It is just possible that a heavy dose of sunshine might disinfect the whole lot of them.

That is another truth-related quote, I suppose:

     "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." (Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis)

A related theme is that of invalidation. I haven't looked up the etymology, but I'm pretty sure that the words "valid" and "invalid" have something to do with truth.

(Added later: The word "valid," as I have used it here, appears to mean "supported by facts or authority." Invalidation would then presumably mean something like: "denying the existence of facts or authority.")

Here's a definition of (emotional) invalidation:

"To invalidate is to reject, ignore, mock, tease, judge, or diminish someone's feelings."

In order to continue, I'm going to have to announce some truths, I suppose, or at least say what I accept as true. One proposed truth: It is wrong, morally and ethically, to invalidate another. A related proposed truth: It is both wrong and cruel, i.e., profoundly immoral, to invalidate while pretending to "love" the invalidated person.

Just now, as I investigated invalidation, I came across a set of suggested responses to invalidating statements. What interests me, apart from their possible effectiveness (at least for the speaker) is that they are all essentially truth-oriented!

Now, a bit later, I have come across an entire pamphlet that deals with the question how to think about, and respond to, criticism. I haven't studied it yet, but it looks wonderful.

The importance of truth

As I attempt once again today to understand and address and heal my pain, I come once more to the power of truth. From time to time, I find myself trying out a notion so radical (for me) that I cannot quite believe it: that perhaps there is no pain, but only the temporary acceptance of falsehood and the postponed effort to seek the truth.

Yesterday's email, which has given rise to so much pain that I have contemplated shutting down this blog, was full of falsehood. The fact that someone I trusted would insist on so many pernicious falsehoods, deliberately and with malice aforethought, has caused me so very much pain yesterday, last night and still this morning.

It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that I can cause that pain to diminish, and even cease, only by examining the statements that were made and making a full and complete effort to discover their degree of truth. My inclination is, in part, to do the opposite -- to run away from the pain they have caused, and therefore from them as well.

I'm thinking, however, as I work my way through these multiple hours of twisting and turning and attempting to find surcease, that "the only way out is through." The only way to make pain stop is by going to its source, examining it honestly, discovering the honorable way to deal with it, and then following through.

Grief

I've been grieving a loss, with little let-up or relief, for the past seven months. Yesterday I suddenly remembered a passage in a book that has sometimes comforted me in the past, as to previous losses.

The book is I Heard the Owl Call My Name, by Margaret Craven, set in an Indian village of the Pacific Northwest. The passage comes near the very end, when the villagers are mourning the death of a young priest. He had ministered to their parish for the previous year, and earned their trust and affection. Marta, an elderly woman, is particularly saddened by this loss.

On the night of the day Mark died, she prays by speaking to his spirit. She uses the words of her people's tradition:

Walk straight on, my son. Do not look back. Do not turn your head. You are going to the land of our fathers.

It puzzles me, to some extent, why I should find this passage so comforting. I think it is because the passage suggests that the person whom we have lost still has a road to travel, and that he or she is on it. There is comfort in that. And it suggests that they have not so much left us as gone on before us, that they travel a road we will ourselves one day traverse. There is comfort in that as well.

I do seem to feel somewhat better about this most recent loss since remembering Marta's prayer.

What our whole self knows (focusing)

I've been reading about, and to some extent utilizing, a psychological technique called "focusing" for quite a few years. Tomorrow I will take an online workshop in focusing and so it's very much on my mind.

Focusing has many uses. It can be used to make a decision, to answer a question, to understand how one feels about a given person or problem. It first came to prominence more than thirty years ago through the book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, the discoverer and primary proponent of this method of gaining knowledge of our inmost selves.

It's likely I'll write more about focusing during the coming week. For the moment, I'd like just to record these key observations in this space, where they will be easy for me to re-locate.

Once your body is allowed to be itself, uncramped, it has the wisdom to deal with your problems. . . . Your body always tends in the direction of feeling better. Your body is a complex, life-maintaining system.

Gendlin explains that a bad feeling is just a symptom, much as pain or a fever is --

The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.

Here is my single most favorite quotation:

Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.

He continues:

The very existence of bad feelings within you is evidence that your body knows what is wrong and what is right. It must know what it would be like to feel perfect, or it could not evoke a sense of wrong.

And finally:

Your body, with its sense of rightness, knows what would feel right. The feelings of "bad" or "wrong" inside you are, in effect, your body's measurement of the distance between "perfect" and the way it actually feels. It knows the direction.

Focusing is a way of gaining access to this knowledge - the knowledge of what the bad feeling is and where it comes from, and the knowledge of how to make it better.

Dealing with doubts and fears

This wisdom comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82):

Don’t waste your life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

Making a Deep Mental Path

I posted this passage from Henry David Thoreau almost exactly one year ago. I didn't pay sufficient attention at the time, to my detriment. Thoreau begins:

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.

And then continues:

To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. (Henry David Thoreau)

Perhaps I'll put this to use concerning the two Biblical quotations in the post below this one. 

Struggling

I'm struggling today with a lot of hurt. So I'm looking around the Web for something that might comfort me. This comes to mind and I go look for it:

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7)

Continuing to try to find something that would make the aching stop, I find this:

For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11)

"I enter the courts of the ancients"

I had never read this before until yesterday, but it has made a big impression on me.  Nicolo Machiavelli, when he was forced into exile, retired to his estate at Sant'Andrea in Percussina near Florence.  There he began writing the treatises that would ensure his place in political philosophy. In a famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, he described how he spent his evenings during this time:

When evening comes, I return home [from work and from the local tavern] and go to my study. On the threshold I strip naked, taking off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world.