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constellations
March 2009 
Life is Irritating
Mushin
We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our soul a universal resonance. -- “A Blue Fire” by James Hillman
What, if we own every feeling?
Standing on my balcony this evening I was feeling this slight tinge of irritation creep up on me. As I realized that I own this feeling, that this is indeed my feeling, a deep breath happened upon me. I stood upright. "This too is me, this is mine," I thought.
Looking a few inches deeper the idea of possession became strange. What could I possibly own? Where could I store what I own? Do I own a memory? Is this memory about the day of today my memory?
We say these things but more often than not, when my mind can freewheel, they lose a lot of sense just a few inches below the surface. Nevertheless, owning that feeling of irritation I was nourished and strengthened. Making this feeling mine made me stand tall. So the idea of ownership my be strange a few inches deep into the realm of the soul, the process of owning makes very good sense.
What reveals itself in thinking about the relationship between me and what I own is static thinking. As if I was something permanent that could have a relationship to something else, that is permanent, and that relationship is a one-way street in which I own whatever-it-is. When my thinking goes a bit deeper still the flow of "I" and "it" is more apparent, and from that view "owning my irritation" is as if I would take in something of myself that was externalized.
I differentiated myself from the irritation - which is a good move for a child needing to come to express predictable and reliable behavior. I externalized my irritation and placed it with the cause. Now "it", whatever "it" is, irritates me; it is irritating me - I become the recipient of irritation, its victim.
Growing up, being 'adult', over time "I" was insulating myself from my feelings and impressions, and finally also concepts, ideas, whatever it was - I was not that. I was the "eternal witness" disengaged from life in many ways (even though often enough not really, because I behaved like many other men in situations with a strong emotional load), or I at least aimed for being/living That.
Going through periods of softening up to the other(s), discovering we-fullness and the amazing energies and being that can unfold and come into being between us, in critical times a critical ripening happened.
Coming back to re-internalizing what I have externalized over the last 50 years or so might take a while :-) But it is maybe not so much a goal as an orientation. Owning my feelings is a practice, not a goal; it is something that becomes part of the way I live.
Static think believes in things, and relationships between beings and other beings and beings and things. In this constellation of people and things there is more or less rigid limits between everybody and everything. In this scenario you can make me feel things, you are the cause of what happens to me. Or also things and situations are the causes of how I feel, and think and last but not least behave.
More fluid thinking probably out of the practice of owning what it feels and sees and hears leads to much more respect towards others and things and situations. O yes, feelings and thoughts and behavior can still be triggered, but the triggering event itself or the feelings triggered are a much more fluid affair. What happens is much more happening within processes which do have a mysterious end; this end does have a name but in itself is another process: living.
The irritation that the child externalizes is not the same irritation that I re-internalize, or own. Both the irritation and I have been passing through a great number of processes - and yet we both are still recognizable. Re-internalized irritation is - most likely - a driving energy behind this investigation that turned into a blog post.
Access: Public
Delightful, Mu! I really love it that you’re blogging all this stuff these days.
What you write here makes me think of an experience I had yesterday with my dear friends R and M. We were having lunch together and inquiring into how we could deepen the bonds of trust between us in order to hold the kind of space we need to hold in order to invite into our organisation the kind of change that needs to happen there.
As we were speaking, R and I - as we so often do - sparked off each other’s buttons - although, as always, we were pretty civilised about not acting it out! But M, being as perceptive as a bloodhound, picked it up straight away, and for the first time he named it and invited us to stop and address it. And for once, we were in a context where we had the time and space to do so.
What I learned was quite extraordinary. Obvious, but I would never have understood it if we hadn’t each shared what thad been going on inside us. R and I were each operating out of such different paradigms that our respective irritation made no sense at all! It’s all very well to own one’s irritation - that’s like owning one’s endocrine system. But do we own the processes that play out inside us, all unconsciously. I realised that R and I have different ‘meme drivers’ (for lack of a better word) installed in us. I can’t say I installed mine by choice, though I was fascinated to discover it, and realise how familiar it is to me.
I was operating from a meme driver that sorts in terms of perspectives. ‘This is your perspective, this is my perspective - neither of them are fully true, neither of them are fully false - sharing our perspectives will enrich us both’. R’s ‘offending’ response had left me feeling ‘voilated’ and ‘judged’, because I felt that my perspective had been simply dismissed.
R, meanwhile, was operating from a meme driver that sorts in terms of ‘true and false’. It’s strongly cognitive (as opposed to social and emotional - although both levels coexist in all people). ‘There is true and there is false’ - the whole filter of perspectives doesn’t come into it. What had triggered R was that my response to what he said was false in relationship to how he understood what he was talking about. Which is quite true - I had hopped (as those who know me will recognise that I often do) like a drunken bunny right off tangent. Learning that this was the way R was operating made it possible for me to take responsibility for having interrupted his flow with my tangent, without feeling violated that R then told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that my perspective was false.
The point of this rabbit drama for me is a shift of perspective, or a shift of figure and ground, from ‘we pass through processes’ to ‘processes pass through us’.
What changes in our experience if we recongise ourselves as the channels through which memes pass which have an independence from us, driven by meme drivers that are installed (god knows how) outside of our awareness, rather than believing ourselves to be independent, volitional agents the way we often do (despite all the stuff that rages through us totally outside our control)?
Thank you, dearest Helen, for sharing this amazing experience - or is it the lessons that unfold as I’m reading it?
It is, indeed, a real blessing when conflicting with someone and the art of relating in strange tongues and languages come upon you and you find a way in to where there were formerly only outsides chipping away at each other.
And I like the language of process, of figure and ground, of “passing through processes” or “processes passing through us”.
What fascinates me presently is that there is a sense of at-homeness that I have when I just sit on my balcony or somewhere alone, and I just enjoy being-with. As soon as a person that I know (and closer ones) enters my space (physically) I notice a slight - or not so slight - tingling of uncertainty stir within me.
I ‘deal with it’ in several ways, the preferred one nowadays is a deeper opening up to that person to see where they’re at; somehow tuning-in to what shows on my radar and take it from there.
I can’t, so far, befriend the channel idea. I’m running into all kinds of logical and mental but’s and why’s and “this is not correct”s.
Maybe this is much easier to a woman like you that has had children grow inside, being vessel and channel for their coming-into-being. I think I would prefer maybe instrument; but however we choose to put it, there is an amazing out-of-control reality that is hugely influencing and informing our thinking, feeling, living and acting. The feeling world is part of that even though it’s increasingly obvious that even though there is no control over feeling there is the possibility to contain them (without spilling too much and messing up others or oneself) by ‘owning’ or maybe re-integrating.