Goldfish and Rabbits

 "This is freedom: not a freedom to judge which comes from knowing who we are,

but a liberation from our finite self-images, an opening to life."

Claire Colebrook

Among many many strange habits I had as a child, I would often egg myself on to run faster by imagining something epic depended on my speed. "Imagine we are being chased by a huge, bloody skeleton!" I would call out to my best friend when we would race across the lawn. Twisted, perhaps, but that spooky specter motivated us to go a little bit faster, a little bit harder. Laughing, but running. I was a soccer player, and incentive came in handy. There were times I imagined my mother's life depending on my running, or the plight of the mountain gorilla ("imagine that you could save all the gorillas if you can get to that fence post in 5 seconds"). I ran for the lottery, a cure for cancer, and to end a few wars. But mostly I ran--fast--when something I feared was nipping at my heels.

Fear is like that, is it not? It makes us run. Fast. 

Faster.

But, sometimes it paralyzes us and we just freeze, holding our breath in hopes the danger will pass. 

There is an enormous jackrabbit who lives in the woods nearby, and every time I see him, I am struck by two things: how he magically blasts out of an invisible hiding place once I get too close, and how damn fast he moves once he starts. In the life of this rabbit, I am, potentially, a really large coyote. Or a featherless, walking hawk. Either way, when he senses that I am too close to his burrow and he might be found out, he does what he and all of us are programmed to do--he runs like hell.

We are clear where this is headed, right? I mean, sure I still strap on my running shoes and head out 3-5 times each week and let loose...but now it's more likely Siouxsie and the Banshees that motivates me to pick up the pace than any imaginary bloody banshee. So I'm not talking about running on a trail anymore, really. 

I'm thinking about fear and what it is I most fear and why. 

And these are weighty considerations for a warm Friday in January. It would be so much easier to instead, just....well, do anything, I guess. Anything other than look, listen, or acknowledge my fears. I guess that is the point I am circling. The point, like the scared rabbit, huddles, hides, and prepares to bolt at the first distraction or relief. It doesn't want to be found out. 

There is a great Ani DiFranco lyric that I think offers a good entry into the burrow: "They say that goldfish have no memories, I guess their lives are much like mine. And the little plastic castle is a surprise every time." Ah, the mighty goldfish. Whether or not this is true, they have something profound to teach us: when we meet each moment, each situation, and each person in our lives as though for the first time, we remain open to infinite possibilities. But when we think/act like we have someone or something all wrapped up and defined, we limit ourselves as much as anything. If we have a bad experience around the plastic  castle, then we are more likely to project that feeling onto the castle every damn time we swim past it. To be awed by what IS instead of being reactive to what you think it was/will be/should be/could demands our presence. This is what the goldfish has to teach us: if you want to be present to the little plastic castles in your life, you have to let go of the fear and hurt of the plastic castles of your past.

Fear is one of the primary reasons we bolt from our present reality--that is, what IS--because our fear is always already about the past or the future. We don't want to feel or experience something unpleasant again, so we develop hypervigilant defenses around each moment, each breath, each heartbeat. "Never again," we say, wary of the plastic castle in the murky water before us. Leery of anything like a plastic castle.

So, fear is as much about memory as anything.

  

Memory. To remember. The word, like the process, is complicated. We so often think of remembering as calling back to mind, thinking about someone or something. Yet the word is to re-member, and it is here that I find myself settling into it. Member suggests part of a whole, and suggests flesh—the body.  Remembering is a sensual, fleshly, physical process though we often think of it as merely cerebral, the flickering of the past images across the synapses of the brain. But as quantum healing (think Candace Pert/Molecules of Emotion here) has demonstrated time and again, the thoughts themselves not only trigger a cascade of physiological responses—they are themselves physical. 

I often tell my students that yoga is about remembering oneself as already whole and perfect--without the need to attain, obtain, or overcome anything. This is the true Self. The oneness of being. Yoga. To re-member is to bring back to mind, yes, but more importantly we bring back into the body the essential truth, the memory, the form...to remember then is simultaneously a physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual process. In asana practice, we approximate form after form, moving through formlessness with awareness of and attention to what stories, memories, habits, and beliefs are stored there. Beliefs around which we shape our perceptions and thus our actions. We do all this to cultivate some consciousness around the knee-jerk reactions that might otherwise dictate how we participate in this world. So we can traverse, more gracefully, what IS, and not get so tripped up on what was once or what we assume/expect it to be in the future.

In those approximations, as we take the form of so many "others" and invite in the experiences of such scary-as-hell things as open hearts, exposed throats, and standing on our own without a plan B...we allow ourselves to remember. We bring back into the body and breath and awareness the experience that we may otherwise resist, deny, or avoid.  And in so doing, we allow whatever memories--old stories, old feelings, old beliefs--to arise. In other words, we bridge something more than time and space and preference and prejudice and difference; we bridge otherness altogether. We dissolve separateness, smallness, and finality. No small wonder, then, that a moment of commemoration and memory feels like transformation in one's very cells, in the very breath.

We do all this so we can actually see the little plastic castle in its presence.

Or the co-worker, or the new lover, or the old lover. 

We do all this so we can stop projecting onto others and ourselves the limitations that come from hunkering down in a hole you think keeps you safe from what you most fear.

Feeling fear is not bad--feeling fear is the message that there is something to see, or hear, or smell, or taste, or touch. But we pull away or push away that opportunity in favor of reinforcing the posture we build around the fear.

So we withhold love, affection, or sincerity. We become more rigid and dogmatic. We seek control by dictating what should be, and exile anything and anyone who disobeys our rule. We contrive all manner of behaviors to manipulate or seduce a situation so it matches our beliefs. And when all else fails, we run, hide, or fight. 

When you remember--actively remember--having your heart broken or being betrayed or being rejected, or you remember scarcity or pain or grief or abandonment, there is a physicality to your memory. It triggers your instinct to run or hide. Or fight.

For most of us, this becomes a posture-a shape/perspective we take that is at once physical, emotional, intellectual, and energetic. And over time, with lots and lots of practice, we become so adept at that posture that we mistake it for who we are. It becomes the stance from which we act and interact with the world around us. So we become runners--always busy, distracted, and otherwise engaged so as not to face the fear. Or we become hiders, afraid of being seen, obsessed with being small, terrified of being heard, and just waiting for the threat to pass so we can slip under the shadows unnoticed. Or we become fighters, convinced the every action of others is somehow undermining our own safety, integrity, value.  Fighters don't believe they are enough, so they don't believe they have enough. They fight over territory, validation, and dogma. They want to be right rather than free.

In each case, we are reactive to the true, underlying fear. And reactive is the antithesis of creative. In a reactive state, we just do what we have always done--fight, flee, or hide.

We run from something or someone--through distractions, busyness, imposed distance, control, drugs, or dogma. Whether tyrannically controlling others/situations or numbing out, we run. Or we hide. Paralyzed, trapped in the burrow of a moment, a feeling, an experience around which we build elaborate and complex identities that we insist are "Just who I am." 

"Deal with it," we say to the world, "This is the way I am," digging our claws a few centimeters deeper into the dirt. Into the hole.

That burrow, that identity, that posture, that old story--it can FEEL like a safe place to hide and wait it out. It can FEEL like you are right, or you are protected, or you are validated (since no one can really fit into that hole with you). But we mistake our prison for a home, and the invitation of that raised heartbeat and the feeling that something is tracking you is this: take a deep breath, get out of the hole, and look it in the eyes.

What are we most afraid of? And do we have the courage to ask how we keep insisting on the same damn experiences by projecting those fears onto the little plastic castles right before us? 

My mother taught me a long time ago that if something is "always" happening to me, or I am "always" experiencing something, the common denominator is, well, me. I watch myself and others in patterns of reactivity--doing the same things over and over, not realizing they are creating the very reality they fear. If you are convinced the little plastic castle is going to hurt you, and you react as though that is the only possible scenario, you will find a way to be hurt...and that will validate all your past hurts, all your self righteousness, and all your attempts to lock down and control (yourself as well as others) all future hurts. 

The balance to the "fight or flight" syndrome is the parasympathetic nervous response we refer to as "rest and digest." In other words, the way to bring equanimity back to the scared being is to find a way to actually digest what is happening. And to do that, we have to be willing to rest in it--to allow for it. To sit with it. Pain, depression, guilt, anger, whatever the reactive emotion is, it's giving us an opportunity to digest what is ACTUALLY happening. See the person before you as they actually are, listen to the words they are actually saying, and instead of projecting onto them their own past or the ghosts of those who came before, let them be free. So you can be free.

What is the worst thing that could happen by facing fear and looking it in the eye? One of my most influential mentors taught me to follow up each response with, "So what???" It's a profound way to access the real fear, which is more often than not, the fear of change. Because what happens when your safe little burrow that gave shape and form to all your beliefs will no longer hold you? You feel exposed. So what? You feel vulnerable? So what? You might get hurt? So what? If you get hurt you feel sad? So what? 

So many fears and fears of fears become layers that may at one time offer protection, but can just as easily bury you. And bury the possibilities this life is offering you, moment by moment, breath by breath.

Perhaps our task in all this is to find space out of the hole but not yet running in a panic, so we might actually look at the fear that is tracking us and making prey of this life. Maybe in our reactive state we can cultivate curiosity and compassion instead, genuinely interested in what we are feeling and how it might be a re-run of a past experience. How might we respond differently, if we knew we are safe and whole and no matter what we experience, we have a choice about the stories we choose to re-live over and over.

What are you afraid of?

So what?