Celia Landman

Mapping the Past in Memoir

November 3, 2024

Families, Forgiveness, Healing, Healing Ourselves, Memoir, Trauma, wholeness, Writing

Image generated by AI

Us humans keep wanting to know where we are going and where we came from. We puzzle over the why and how and why not, trying to figure out how come I am the way I am and what happened to my parents to make them so…like themselves. Well, some of us keep trying to figure it out. Especially if there’s been something hidden that was too shameful or different to mention. I’ve seen that writing my own memoir has given me a way to remedy this aloness and secrecy. And it’s helped me see what has changed for the better. Here’s the second chapter of my map of the past.

Unaccompanied Minor

Chapter Two

This morning around 6 something, I woke up with this sadness and pain and remembered that my mother died. There was just a feeling like a heavy curtain draped over my head and pulling me down with it, all my bones gone soft. Did I love her? Yes, I guess this aim to care for her, despite her relentless badgering me to do it and criticizing me that I couldn’t do it the way she wanted it, there was love. It’s not a pure clean love, the way I feel about my kids when they are sweet and I think they are just so kind and good and there’s simplicity in the way I recommend them to the world and am happy they are here, or the love of this cat with super soft fur like the sealskin coat my mother had inherited and wore before we were horrified at wearing a seal.

When I was little and not so little, even in fifth grade, I’d tuck myself into the coat closet and stand behind the coat. It had a nap that if you ran your hand one way, it was so soft and turned a darker minky brown, then I could draw a grid with my index finger and play tic tac toe in the soft fur. I could write letters on this fuzzy background and secret messages, wiping them out with an upward sweep. Sometimes, I just go stand in the closet to feel the unworldly softness of this coat, a secret place of hidden delight and refuge in the hard plastic world.

∞👁👁👁∞

Competition means less of everything for everyone. Plants are smaller and leggy, fighting for sunlight. I have a distrust of big families. When I say “there were six kids in my family,” I usually hear back, “That’s so nice. You were all friends,” or “good company for each other.” I know big families who are friendly and loved being part of a group. In my family, though, it is hard to describe how being in this group was an acutely lonely experience. Lonelier because we were together. Alone because we did not have each other’s back. We fought for the scraps of attention, the dashes of approval. We competed for everything, whether known or unknown. It wasn’t conscious, it was wariness. Home wasn’t a place where we could be ourselves, because the message was, don’t be yourself. At your core, you aren’t what we want.

“Kids are like pancakes, the first ones you don’t get right,”my mother would say. Now my sisters call Will the first pancake. Being the second, I am less burnt or underdone, but still probably one that would end up in the bin.

Shame separated us. Which is why, although my siblings have friends, I would not describe any of us as extroverted. A sense of melancholic aloneness runs through our veins. The search for belonging, and home, rather than believing we are home. We are visitors, waiting for the gates to open. But as my dharma teacher would say, that horse has left the barn. No one left to open those gates, but us.

Hiding means I always keep a bit of myself from view. From early days, I knew I needed improving to be approved. And this hiding, this shame circled round and round. The kids passing it back and forth, shoving each other into the spotlight of blame because as long as it isn’t me. It’s better.

I don’t think it was always like it was. I believe my mother was delighted with me. My older brother was a cautious and introverted child, while I was eager to explore the world. “You were such a happy baby. It was so nice to have you because you were so delighted with everything.”

I had almost no hair and in my baby pictures. I have large round eyes looking out of this small head with wisps of hair rising around me like a balding ghost. I look like a mouse crouching at our play table with an impish smile while my brother, who is thirteen months older, sits like a massive stone in a turtleneck and corduroys, smiling with decorum. I caught up in size in a few years, and we were playmates and companions because that’s who was with me.

The earliest memories I have are from Medfield, Massachusetts where we lived in a Victorian house in a 3rd-floor apartment. I was in a crib and Will in a crib on his side of the room. We’d watch the nighttime car lights from the street in our turret room in the dark, following each car headlight making a rectangle that traveled its course against the curved wall and was gone. This was silent and slow and even thinking about it is soothing. We sat on a freezer in the kitchen, my father tired from working nights at Jordan Marsh, his head low over the Maxwell House coffee in his mug, the sky pink with dawn, and us gnawing on the frozen hot dogs that were cold and dripping in our hands. We nibbled at the frozen, salty edges until they melted and sat watching the day be born.

∞👁👁👁∞

I am aware I am swearing less. My swearing has worn off somewhat. Which is interesting because when I worked with the teens, I was swearing regularly. I have nothing against swearing—except when it’s swearing AT someone. Swearing in general can be creative and bonding and give some good insights, such as a super fucked, or a cluster fuck bomb. Can Buddhists swear? Is that right speech. I am not concerned with the answer and getting it right.

Two things I am thinking about: the first is how I have outsourced moming from even when I was small. I’ve consistently found nurturing women I could attach to who guided me. I feel some tears coming in my eyes and a pull like strings around my jaw thinking about the generous hearts I’ve encountered. How the world has always been giving to me. When one tree doesn’t give the fruit we want, there’s an abundant one next to it. There were people with more capacity in my life. The first outsourced mom was Mrs. McCarthy, who Will and I called Mrs. Goggy, because we couldn’t say McCarthy.

Mrs. Goggy gave us Goggy crackers, which were Ritz crackers, and we would hang out with her and her family when we were small. Really small, like four and five. Different times, the whole neighborhood was ours to explore and neighbors got involved with parenting the whole neighborhood, not just their own. I think that’s what is lost—the sense of confidence that it’s ok to offer guidance or a cracker to someone else’s kid. Of course we want safety, but now any adult hanging out with a kid is suspect. And something is lost when we trade community for separation. We lose places of refuge for kids and adults who aren’t as burdened, those who can pick up the slack for overworked stressed parents.

This was typically the role of the grands in past times when we had intergenerational living and I imagine I would have needed so much anti anxiety medicine if my mom had lived with me. It’s a beautiful ideal for other people, which is always the easiest ideal of things and places I don’t have to actually endure and can lament like the old person that I am turning into.

Mrs. Goggy fed us Ritz crackers because “It was one of the only things you could eat. You and Will had dysentery so badly. You were sick for a year. You had brewer’s yeast in apple juice and I was trying everything. You couldn’t eat anything,” mom told me over coffee. Wasn’t dysentery what the soldiers had in the trenches in WWI? That severe diarrhea from unsanitary water supply and bad hygiene is the number one killer of children in India. Why in Medfield, Massachusetts did my brother and I have this. What the fuck? Didn’t people wash their hands? This will never be clear to me, but it does explain why we got Ritz crackers instead of cookies and this set up a lifelong quest for salt and fat, maybe that is the culprit.

Mrs. Goggy lived with her husband and an old child, who was probably all of 20 something, in a big square house, like ours but hers wasn’t sliced into apartments with one family on each floor. She and her family sat outside in folding aluminum chairs with striped webbing. She wore soft dresses and had whitish hair and a soft voice. I would tumble in the thick, green grass and display my prowess at the somersault while she and her husband and ancient boy would clap. This type of group attention was something my little heart longed for and I loved to be seen as competent and skillful and entertained the Goggys as often as I could with my feats of daring.

To pay the Goggy’s back for their kindness, Will and I decided they needed help because they were so old. They were painting trim on their large Victorian house and had left the paint and brushes out, covered with a drop cloth ready to go for the next day. We decided that our height precluded us from getting much done on the official house, but we were a good size for addressing the smaller structure of the garage. We picked up the brushes and began, but not just painting, but decorating. We made circles and swirls, large dots so that it would be a polka dot garage, the white paint so bright against the grey of the shingles. We spent the morning helping, doing our best to make this garage something spectacular. We returned the brushes into the little tray and ran home for lunch. Later, after the phone rang, mom looked at us, “Did you paint the Googy’s garage?”

“Yes,” we answered, full of expected congratulations.

“You can’t do that. That is someone else’s house. Now they have to paint over it. You have to stay in our yard for a couple days.”

I was confused that my beautiful contribution was not received the way I wanted. It also was a teaching of shame. “You can’t just go and paint someone’s garage. That’s naughty.” This was one of the first lessons of boundaries. That other people’s things are theirs. Something that mom didn’t always stress or observe herself. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to impose my ideas of what’s good and beautiful on the innocent. The ones who wanted a boring unpolka dotted garage, but who had the most delicious snacks.

I was the kid who was “into everything,” which meant I was busy, moving and active. I was also happy. I am smiling in most photos except where I am sick. I have fuzzy down on my head, a toddler in a smocked front dress with a Peter Pan collar and white tights with ruffles on the tush, my bottom lumpy with diapers. I have dark circles under my eyes which my mom says were there from the dysentery. But we look happy enough, and my parents look in love. There are pictures of us in meadows with dandelions, me, with my old man patchy hair and Will with all the thick brown hair and a big head, both of us on a blanket in zipped up knit sweaters of green and red. This was before the too-much times that made things so hard. Before dad’s rages and mom’s turning away.

We lived across from the IGA which was a small one-story building with an asphalt shingle roof. My brother and I used to play on it when we were old enough to climb the ladder that leaned against the building. We would cross the street and wander the isles, putting an index finger on the yellow plastic price tags and sliding them down the length of the metal rail. It was satisfying the way they moved, gliding them down to find their meeting place with the other tags. Mr. Berenson, a little man who wore a white butcher’s coat and surprised me with his whiny, complaining tone and holding up his sticker gun, rushed at my mother when we were shopping, “Your children are changing the prices! No one knows what these cost!” He hissed holding up a can of green beans. “They are on the roof; they could fall, and we’d be responsible. I cannot allow them here unsupervised. You need to get a hold of them.”

I guess because it was the sixties, there was this laissez faire parenting. Children were left to themselves, to be children while the adults did the big work of cleaning the house, going to a job and earning the money to buy the food from the IGA.

There’s the story mom tells with the low intonation of a storyteller, “I was pregnant with Gabiel and tired. So, Will was three and you were two. I put you both down for a nap. And when I woke up, there was this glass of sherry in the refrigerator, and I didn’t know how it got there. And then I saw him, lying on the floor of the bedroom. He had gotten up and found the sherry beneath the sink. He said he drank one glass,” her voice breaks into adoring laughter, “then he put the rest in the refrigerator to save for later. Then he said, ‘I got sleepy and needed to take a nap.’” In a more serious voice she says, “he was only three, what dexterity to pour from that big bottle.”

In those young family days, my father was getting his degree from Boston University. He went to school during the day and had a job at night in the accounting department at Jordan Marsh, a now defunct department store. He would bring home the ribbons and fabric flowers for us from the wrapping department’s waste, and we pasted these on paper and boxes and they are responsible for me getting voted the most beautiful doll carriage in the fourth of July parade in Bedford, much to the shock of my mother. The competition had matching Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes, red, white, and blue crepe paper streamers woven into the spokes of their carriages, and me with a flurry of bows and floppy flowers, ribbons saved from the dumpster, scotch taped to a dented doll carriage.

“When they called your name, I thought, oh no they’re making a mistake. Don’t go up.” She told me. “The other children’s doll carriages were so careful, and you had done yours all yourself.” I didn’t know my mother doubted me or how she saw me as I walked to the podium wearing my secondhand tutu with sequins dangling off the bodice and my neighbor’s old tap shoes I had painted silver. I was confident in my five-year-old certainty that the judges saw me as someone who creates beauty. But I am getting ahead of myself.

∞👁👁👁∞

I am creating a patchwork and getting to choose what to include. I can make a picture that I want to show you. I am saying this not because I want to manipulate the past, but because I will. I can’t help it. My past is not the past of my siblings even though they lived in the same house with the same people and they will have a different view. I don’t want you to think my mother was one thing, or another. I want you to see her as I saw her, which is to join me in uncertainty. For her whole life she maintained that child-like openness, both frustratingly curious and enviable.

Was she a good witch or a bad witch? What was our relationship? I was her child, then I was something else, a helper, a little mommy always in her shadow of disapproval. I want to know the terrain, so I know where it’s safe to step and showing you, I believe will make the path backwards clearer, so I can see where I came from, where I am going, and it will make sense. I need the story to make sense because I don’t know what to think or to feel. And more than anything, I want to understand.

∞👁👁👁∞

Both my parents were Buddhist by choice, not by birth. This may be weird for two white people from New York. Buddhism like any religion, has a range of intensity from the more traditional and orthodox to the ones that resembles the town meeting vibe of the Unitarians. You can be Buddhist and something else; it’s not an all or nothing, more like a base of salad or rice you add flavor to.

My father found his brand of Buddhism through his mentor and lifelong teacher Harold Isaacson who introduced him to all things Japanese, including Haiku and Buddhism. Later Dad became a Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist, following the path of Rigpa, which focuses on the preparation for and friendliness with death. Mom’s Buddhism was influenced by her husband, but she practiced in the Insight, Theravada tradition, the teachings of the Elders, like the people who actually read the Bible in the Christian world. She found the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center around the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a few years younger than I am now. “I don’t know what I would have done without CIMC. It gave me a place to go and get centered and helped me when there was so much going on at home. I had cancer and your dad was being so difficult.”

Although she was Buddhist, mom never stopped being a practicing Catholic, or rather Christian. She told me a story of walking into church in the city when she was in her twenties and sitting in meditation and finding that two hours had elapsed, and she was in “a deeply concentrated state.” She used to say when she came back from retreats, “I get very concentrated.” Her words were beyond slow after a week of not talking and it was excruciating waiting for her to pull the next one from her word bag and make a sentence. When she wasn’t in deep concentration or on retreat, the other switch flipped, and she was constantly talking.

Mom said her Dharma teacher told her, “Children who are lonely often end up talking to themselves.” Which explained her non-stop narration of life. “Oh, there’s the water pitcher…and what was I going to do now? I was going to walk to the door and pick it up, but there’s something else. Oh, right, I need to call Cheryl about sharing a ride to the prayer meeting. I will call her right after I fill this up. See, it’s not hard. I am filling a water pitcher, and now. I’ve done it. I will call Cheryl. Where did I put her number?” And it would go on and on and on, so that I felt like I was trapped in her mind and there was no escape, except to get out of earshot.

Her Dharma teacher’s assessment made sense to her, “I was a very lonely child. My parents didn’t understand me. I felt alone. I made up my mind not to talk when I was eight. That was the year my brother left for the Navy.” Her brother, Uncle Bill had lied about his age in the time before computer records when there was a vestigial presumption of honesty and had joined the Navy and she became the only child living in a house with an emotionally distant mother and a grandmother trapped in dementia. Mom did what other children do and went quiet in wordless protest when they can’t talk about what’s wrong, but in her suppressed German household no one expected a child to talk. No one missed her voice.

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Unaccompanied Minor: Reflections on Loss and Growth

October 13, 2024

Memoir, Mourning and loss, Uncategorized, Vulnerability, Writing

Scary vulnerability

Image generated by AI, can you believe it!

I am doing something scary for me. I’ve written a memoir. That’s not the scary bit. What’s scary is that it is not finished…and it is not perfect. Sharing something publicly that involves my creativity and my actual real life, is hellishly scary. Posting this seems a great way to cap off my year of accompanying shame. Going out in a blaze.

My request is for some feedback about this book. I want to know if this is relatable and something you’d read? This book is my real life year of figuring out what the hell was that relationship with my mom? It’s about mourning, forgiveness/ not forgiveness, being a parentified child, dogs-why I love them and resent them controlling my life, living in New England in the winter, trauma, rage and some actually funny bits. My other request is for feedback that says your message with kind words. I know kind is subjective, but let’s just go with that for now. Here’s the new baby:

Unaccompanied Minor

by Celia Landman

Chapter One

Winter. It’s back. I don’t mind the grey, the ice, and coldness when I am distracted and have stuff to do. My dream of creativity is different than actually creativity, which means I sit my bum down and do stuff. Stuff I don’t want to do, like write. My tapping keys in my kitchen while Sexy-kitty sit on the counter top eating, against house rules, her tushy on the countertops.

It’s been almost a month since my mother died and I am struggling to make meaning of what we were. Making sense of the world is important, it calms the anxiety. We are homo sapiens sapiens, this knowing knower, the one who thinks about thinking. It does not matter if it is accurate and evidence-based. It only matters that it turns the chaos and unpredictability into a string of events that explain things, to step back from the action to get the shot, because up close, it’s too muddied. The purpose of this living is to put the puzzle of our lives together.

Now I am the returning guide who points out the markers I was too young to see. I can step on the stones in the river and cross over without the same floundering, or panic without washing away into confusion and blame.

Maybe.

∞👁👁👁∞

The last time I saw my mother, I left her in the hospital when she was curled up in a C shape, not speaking. The morphine drip letting her rest—finally. I said I forgave her for everything. I also said I hoped she forgave me and that in the next lifetime maybe I’d be her mother and she would be my daughter.

I only did it because Oneida the hospital cleaning woman told me to. I figured she had been through a lot of deaths and knew best practices to get my mom out of the prison of her body sooner. I can’t wrap my head around forgiveness, since I have no idea what I would forgive. One of the reasons is because I don’t understand my mother, and I don’t take her behavior personally.

She couldn’t answer, and just looked so worn, doing the hard work of stepping through this doorway into the next. I pulled my sadness and tears inside. She had told me the week before in the hospital, “don’t cry.” She didn’t want tears by her bedside. If she could have spoken that day, I am sure she would have said, “Oh Celia,” in that exasperated tone, “I’ve forgiven you a long time ago. There’s nothing to forgive. The past is the past. Why do you keep bringing things up? Stay in the present moment. What’s happening now?” chiding me with this mindful awareness that denies responsibility for what went before.

My mom liked Buddhism because it gave her permission to ignore things. If it’s not happening now, it’s not happening. Wait long enough and it’s over and we never have to speak of it again. “People say and do things when things when they’re heated, and then they get over it, and you understand. You don’t need to bring everything up and talk about the details. It’s not kind or nice.” And being nice had high value, especially for her daughters. And she was an expert at not talking about the past. I don’t want to be like my mother.

There are some things you don’t get over. They live inside and grow and start eroding the foundation like road salt sprayed on the highways that in before times would take out the chrome bumpers and eat away the mufflers and the gas tank and rot your whole undercarriage if you didn’t get your truck washed in the winter. The quiet erosion of the system in the cold, grey New England winters.

∞👁👁👁∞

I heard a line of a song this morning, Could I ever have been that young, or was I always old. It got me thinking about the things I’ve done in my life that I squint at. I want a past with less pain, and I am engineering it, where I can be the hero or the victim, anything but weak, anything but a liar, coward, and a sneak. I don’t want that past where I lied all the time, I hid, I was afraid constantly. I was that kid, like mercury slipping away, sliding into danger because I didn’t know how to protect myself. I did not know my life was precious. It wasn’t what I was taught. I learned it after.

Scientists have studied that memory is like a copy of a copy, and that what I think about the experience, the sadness, the fear, the excitement, gets imprinted in the memory and becomes part of the picture and when I bring it up again, this new picture with these feelings gets printed again and again. That’s why time does not soothe anything. A memory is not accurate, it is inherently subjective and the older it is, the longer it’s been overlaid with emotional printing from the one who feels something, each time they pull up the image. The shame gets more roiling and burns hotter, the guilt, more nauseating, and the unlovable harder to look at.

Mostly, our life was a blur of doing. I am in fifth grade and mom comes home putting down her music. She’s hanging her coat in the stuffed closet already checking in, “Audrey did you get the note? Celia, did you defrost the hamburger?” Tying on the apron, her fingers are in the cold, red meat, kneading it and questioning us, “I asked you to empty the dryer? Did you? Dinner will be ready in 45 minutes as soon as the meatloaf cooks.” Her hands glisten with meat. The hands that played Chopin and Debussy, covered in raw hamburger. She adds oatmeal and torn bread to make the meat go further and soy sauce because she adds soy sauce to everything. The white rice goes in the squat yellow earthenware pot and bakes in the oven with the meatloaf. “Celia, please make a salad.” As I look in the hydrator for some non-wilted lettuce. I peel carrots and cut them into coin-shaped rounds add celery and put out the Ken’s Steak House Cesar dressing. “Willy set the table.” He does with minimal flourish using mismatched silverware.

My brother’s whole name is William Shakespeare Landman, and he is called Willy mostly, or Will and William when he’s being horrible which is often.

“We’re out of napkins.”

“Use toilet paper,” Mom says and he makes a face.

“It’s toilet paper.”

“Then use the cloth napkins,” which means we need to find them wadded up in the secretary, the seldom used, lumpy woven cloth napkins with stains that I will be washing later during the week.

Dad sits at the head of the table and Mom at the other head, “Here a little child I stand holding up my wither hands, cold as fishes though they be, here I lift them up to thee,” as the kids on the bench seats raise our arms, “for a benecent to fall, on our meat and on us all,” as we lower our hands, “Amen.” We’ve been saying this blessing since I was little complete with arm movements. It’s Robert Herrick, Dad’s poetry crush. He loves Herrick and we’ve been performing this, all six of us—which must have been pretty adorable to watch, but we just did it without thinking about the meaning of these words, except we all have asked, “What’s a benecent?”

Last month I asked my next younger sister, Ele, short for Elenor.

“It’s a blessing.”

“I know, but is it a real word, or did Herrick make it up?”

“No,” she spells it, “B-E-N-E-C-E-N-T. It’s a real word,” she says authoritatively even though I can’t find it in the online dictionary. What I find is benison, a word which means blessing. So we’ve been saying it wrong for my whole lifetime. My apologies to Mr. Herrick.

Then there’s the after-dinner clean up, “Ele, you clear.” We all bring our plates to the kitchen and whoever is on clearing gets to bring in the meatloaf and the soy sauce which besides ketchup is one of the four condiments we have in the house.

After dinner, it’s girls against boys, which is grossly unfair because as it skews out, the boys have age and weight on us, so it’s never fair. The gladiator ring has a reproduction Oriental carpet, and the stadium is the pull-out sofa. We strategize, me, Ele, and Audrey, but it’s usually me who ends up getting hurt. Sometimes Ele, sometimes Gabe my younger brother, but I don’t go after the younger ones. My target is my older brother who seems like he lives to humiliate and terrorize us all. He holds kids down, sitting on their stomachs. twisting his forehead into theirs and sometimes, lets a long trail of spit descend from his mouth while the kid beneath him struggles to avoid the dangling thread of saliva. Heads get banged. I am an expert at a half-nelson. Bodies are flung over the couch. You dodn’t yell for mom unless you are totally out of moves. “Mom, Willy hurt me!”

“William, leave them alone!” Mom yells from the dining room where she and my dad sit with their Lapsang Souchong after dinner. “They’re younger than you are.” We never yell for Dad. We never want to subject our bro-nemy to that. Yelling doesn’t stop anything and we kept fighting—no action—no intervention. My parents are tired.

We learn to get revenge where we can because the parents don’t do it for us; no running intervention. Only once did I win a fight with my brother. He sat on my chest, pinning my arms and I lift my legs and swooped them around his shoulders rocking my weight forward. I caught him off-guard with dropped my legs to the floor hard slamming the back of his head into the rug. He gets up with tears and rubbing his head. I watch with a slightly sad and sorry feeling. I am used to getting hurt, I didn’t think I could hurt him. It’s a shock and it doesn’t feel good.

In our job roster, Clearing the table also means wiping down the vinyl tablecloth while Dad does the wash-up and the kitchen counters. Someone is supposed to sweep the floor in the evening. When the crumbs stick to your bare feet, you know they did not do their job. I think Dad likes to clean up, to work through the chaos in his striped blue and green apron. After he’s done, the stove is clean, the counters are visible, and the dishes dry in the rack. The scattered bowls, smears, and sticky drips of mom’s frantic cooking have been neutralized and it’s a kitchen. Then there’s the homework, the signing forms.

“Celia, have you practiced your piece?” We all have instruments that our parents pay money for our musical education, and we are obligated to practice. And then pajamas, baths, and bed. If you want a snack, make it a secret, “I just cleaned the kitchen. It’s closed.”

There is little joy or happiness. No choice in any of this. No rest, just doing, getting through. And in the winter, this sunless routine was every day. “Your mom was depressed,” my therapist says. No, not my mom, the doer, the relentlessly cheerful one. “Dad was depressed.”

“They were both depressed.”

Both depressed. “They both felt trapped.” I know they did. We sensed it, the unescapable drudgery and doing. The long months without sun.

“How much of this feeling is yours and how much is your parents?” Is this my depression? My sense of being stuck or is this my inheritance. “I know they were lonely.”

“You learned this, but it doesn’t have to be your reality. You can choose something else.”

Can I really? Even with all my training, my Buddhism, my meditations and my people who love me, I feel empty, and alone. I don’t know how to climb out. I don’t have the energy.

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Can I Order Some Accompaniment Here?

May 9, 2024

Relationship, Uncategorized
Photo by Mart LMJ on Pexels.com

My dog is dying from terminal cancer and a dear friend responded to my pre-mourning and focusing on her demise with “That’s depressing, why not remember what a good dog she was.” I noticed I felt worse because now, my dog is dying, and my person is not getting me the way I’d like.

Photo by Marcelo Chagas on Pexels.com

In my perfect world, there would be a response menu and I’d order the “Acknowledgment this is hard for you, delivered with gentle words, braised with understanding for your situation, all served with a side of compassionate silence.”

Left to our own conditioned responses of silver lining and that toxic positivity, we can do more damage to a relationship and increase the pain of someone who is grieving, without being aware.

When it’s this tricky to do with a friend, how much more is it with our children, our spouse, our kin? Speaking for myself, it is hard to separate myself from someone in pain. If I don’t understand where I begin and end it is impossible because I become overloaded feeling your feelings.

One of the first steps is to become aware of how I respond. This is a cognitive process, do I immediately go to denying, “No, you don’t feel that.” Do I use the relentless positivity that erodes a sense of self-trust? “Focus on what is good. Be grateful for the time you have.”

Or there’s the super depressing route of universalizing, and dismissing, “Yeah, death is unavoidable and all life ends. You should be used to it by now—impermanence.” Or, the not so subtly holy and educational, “You are a Buddhist. You know nothing begins and ends, it’s just continuation. Death is an illusion.” For me, this distances me from the other person because they don’t get that while I may have awareness of impermanence, someone I love is suffering and dying and I feel that deeply. I am suffering too. I want to honor this experience as a living energy that is asking for care, from me, and my people.

It is hard to see someone suffer, hard to acknowledge that they can be ok with painful feelings….and this is where we are asked to stretch. Is it intolerable for us to be with someone who is having a hard time? Does it bring up that pain in ourselves? When we accompany someone, as my Dharma teacher used to say, we give them enough space to change when they are ready. We don’t force or push or express our disappointment that they aren’t dealing with this situation the way we believe is best. The phrase, “Let it go,” can cause more pain, because now someone thinks I am doing it wrong.

The only time I was trained to ask people what they wanted and how they wanted it, was when I waited tables. I don’t think I am exceptional. As a culture, we believe, “You should know what I want.” Or “How could you say that? Don’t you know how it makes me feel?” Well, no. We don’t know how something lands with someone else unless we ask.

And we don’t ask for lots of reasons. In my family, it was because not knowing the answer and needing to ask brought up shame. Veteran NonViolent Communication trainer, Liv Larsson says, if you want to get to know shame, ask for something you want. When I ask for acknowledgement, or understanding that my feelings make sense, it is a very vulnerable place. And I may not get what I asked for.

And when I invite someone else to tell me what they want, there is a level of humility I did not know was possible in a relationship. With my kids, I may ask, “Does it help for me to understand how hard it is right now?” and I listen if I hear a “No,” I think of it like they ordered oatmeal, and I just brought a seaweed salad. It’s not about me.

Accompanyment is about listening and responding to what someone else wants, respecting what feels like care for them, even if it’s different than what is true for me.

Some steps for learning how to notice and move from adding more pain to accompanying,
1. Notice your habitual responses. Are you silver lining, trying to move someone out of their experience, denying, minimizing, catastrophizing? Giving advice? What’s your signature move?
2. What comes up for you hearing someone else’s expression of physical or mental pain? Is it panic to take it away? Is there anxiety in you seeing something painful? Give yourself the care you need for the pain that comes up in you witnessing this suffering.
3. Ask what is helpful. Do you want some reassurance, or for someone to just listen. Learn to ask others, “I am not sure what you’d like right now. Can you tell me?” Learn to ask for what you want. “Could you just listen right now?”
4. Understand that it isn’t about you. When you try to shift someone out of their feelings, it can send the message that you are not someone who can be there for them with them changing.
5. Know that accompaniment, acknowledging, and offering empathy, is already lessening pain. You are making a difference when you make room for their experience exactly as it is.
We are deeply conditioned to respond to suffering in ways that are multi-generational patterns, that are either supportive of connection, or disrupt connection. When we become aware of how we are responding, we have more choice. We also enlarge our capacity to be with the suffering of someone we care about and our own pain. We become a refuge for our beloved and for ourselves. We can deliver what we need.
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I am my own Cheerleader

March 8, 2024

Self-Kindness

Hummingbird in a nest. Photo by me.

It is grey and cloudy but the bulbs are pushing out of the earth with green fingers of leaves. This temperature holds excitement, not fear. I love this shift, after the winter that feels unending and the grey flatness, there’s a renewed confidence that things will change.

I choose a word each new year and this year, the word is confidence. It also means trust…and it is the first of the Five Spiritual Power’s in Buddhism. It is trust in yourself, confidence that you have the potential to be awakened…and for me, it is an ability to let go of perfection and worry because no matter what, I am my own cheerleader.

I didn’t have someone to encourage me when I was young. Instead, there were people who trained me to doubt myself so that I would care about what others thought of me. This made me feel anxious and unsure because there was always someone judging me, keeping track of everything I did, or didn’t do.

In middle school, I was amazed at my adaptability and chameleon-quality. I would morph to be acceptable for whoever I was speaking to. So when I was with the smart kids, I could be smart, and when I was with the nerdy-drama club kids, that’s who I was, and a stoner with the stoner kids. I lost touch with what was important to me, with what was ok for me. I needed to belong to be safe. I lived on the shaky surface of other people’s approval.

Teens put their attachment into peer relationships. It’s natural and understandable. But what happens if I stay caught in that bind? And to make it all more complicated, all those around me need to be ok for me to be solid and well. I have earned a PhD in vigilance in my life, and can track the barely there look of blame or the inflection of judgment in a voice. This affected my experience with religion, education, work, and relationships. Besides, it’s exhausting and impossible to control someone else’s opinion.

As I trained to keep coming home to myself, I imagined my younger self, sensitive and easily hurt by criticism. Did that child really need more doubt and shame?

This isn’t what I was taught. I was taught to be aware of other’s needs and feelings and to do my best to not upset them. To be what they wanted me to be. So how to shift into taking back our own power to be ok in this changeable world?

Belief in Good Enough: For me, I recognized the link between doubt and anxiety. I learned about a study that demonstrated an increase of stress hormones and anxiety in the body during uncertainty, and a decrease when there’s the ability to make sense of experience. And here’s the kicker, it doesn’t matter if it was true or right. Yup. The brain doesn’t know the difference between delusional certainty and fact based reality.

Making a Commitment: I had been schooled to get it just right, to find the right way to meditate. The truest mode of practice, did I log enough meditation time and was it the right type. How sincere was I? When I saw the evidence that making sense of the world actively lowers stress hormones and just feels better-I didn’t have to become a conspiracy theoriest-I needed to commit and trust what was enough for me.

The result was that I let myself trust that this good enough accompaniment of myself was good and enough. If I had faith in my own ability to accompany myself as splotchy and unsteady as it felt, then it was working. It absolutely made a difference! And it didn’t matter if someone else didn’t judge it as stellar and worthy of enlightenment. I did. My stress levels fell and I expereinced this beautiful thing called confidence.

Snowdrops in March

Earning my Trust: Over the years, I’ve made a vow to love and care for myself, no matter what. When I embrace my own kindness and purity, I see that no matter what others think of me, I know who I am. I can offer this sense of strength to myself. And that’s confidence. I can’t control how others see me or how much they value me, but I have power in myself. I stand here, knowing my worth and supporting myself.

That is my strength. I still get rattled, do things and find myself thinking, oh no. Someone’s going to have feelings about this! And then I can come back to myself again and again to comfort, reassure, and to let myself know that I see my own worth. I make my vow and and again. You are loveable just as you are. I love you. It’s ok to make mistakes. Everytime I do this. I step into power. I am not alone. I have my cheerleader with me always.

Taking the Plunge: What do you want to commit to? What are you ready to promise to yourself? To show up? To care? What needs to change for you to trust in yourself? What if it’s nothing…but willingness.

(more…)

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New Podcast with 18 Summers

January 17, 2024

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-your-emotional-state-of-being-matters-in/id1517106300?i=1000641980344

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What to do about shame?

December 10, 2023

Transforming emotions, Uncategorized

I hate this feeling. Shame. I do not feel open and accepting or like meeting shame. I mean who welcomes shame? It is painful. Like today, when I had an unpleasant interaction and someone is not liking me. More than not liking me, they are avoiding me and thinking I am unwoke slime.

It doesn’t help much to think that any time we react, it’s more about what’s in me than the other person, so transitively, their reaction reflects their needs. My reaction comes from a healthy dose of verbal abuse in my childhood. There’s that old fear of my father being enraged and saying cutting words I thought my brothers and sisters, and even the whole big wide world, would believe. My shame said he was right, and I was all those things. If I knew more or was better, he wouldn’t be angry.

Shame only happens in a relationship when there is a sense I’ve damaged our connection. I’ve done something to make someone stop loving or including me. I’ve hurt my reputation, and I am disconnected. In short, I am unlovable, at least by that person or group.

“It’s not the truth, just because someone else thinks it.” I remind that young, scared part of me that is relieved to hear that. And there is also that contingent self-esteem that relies on the good opinion of others and is so easily bruised when we fall out with someone. It is hard to esteem myself and think well of myself when someone judges and blames me–even if they don’t understand me or my motives. It still smarts.

As I learn again and again, it’s about the ability to see what is happening in me, not to put the responsibility to care for this pain out into the world but to care for it myself. So what does caring for myself mean? Or look like?

My Shame Accompaniment:

For me, it means that I first stop and locate the emotion of shame. Today, it’s in the center of my chest like a pulling inward, collapsing on itself.

Then I breathe with this feeling, letting it know I care about this shame. I care about this sensitive, tender heart. I can help teach this feeling to breathe and let it know it is accompanied.

When there’s more calm, I ask this shame, “What are you afraid of?” Today, the shame is afraid that others won’t like me either, and I will lose my community. Everyone will cancel me. “Of course you’re scared. You want to be seen and valued just as you are.”

I wonder if I can see and value myself, just as I am when someone is angry with me. “Even though one person is upset, I still love you, honey. I’ve got you.” And I stay with that intention to be that warm presence of care for myself.

There’s a shifting, and I notice shame has faded and sadness is here. I listen, then ask, “What do you need from me, my sadness?” I hear the longing for gentleness, for safety. I can hold those emotions with gentleness in a safe place. I have an imaginary island I visit with my shame and sadness where we can just be beneath the White Pines in this cool, soft moss garden, a whole island covered in moss.

I ask if there’s more I need to know and hear, “Remember, you are grown. You have trained to mediate disputes. You can drive a car. You have people who think you are lovable and sometimes even wise.” Hmm. This seems like new information to that shamed and sad part. I am not seven? What? I am not helpless and won’t kick myself out of my heart because someone has their own feelings?

When I take the time to actively connect with this emotion of shame and let it know that no matter what happens, I am there for myself. Coming back to painful emotions helps me heal. It also helps me be an adult–someone who has learned how to heal from the past, drop by drop in the present moment.

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Book Launch!

December 6, 2023

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Thank you to my friends and contributors, the folx at Parallax, and all who joined me this evening at Wisdom House. I am excited for this book to be a reality- to offer the teaching of equanimity for all of us♥️

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When Paradise Wears Off

November 11, 2023

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Anxiety, hello again.

So, I got back earlier this week from a life changing experience in Bali. I know, what a cliche that it was in Bali, the place where people go to find themselves. I was at a Nonviolent Communication International Intensive Training, (IIT) that brought together a diverse group of humans from all over the world, about 125 of us together for nine days of learning, getting real, feeling feelings, learning how to tell our truth and living in the ideal that all of our needs matter. We lived and practiced creating a community where all of us mattered and we cared about each other–we made a safe world. For me, this was the first time I felt absolutely seen, respected, cared for and SAFE. I have never experienced this profound sense of being ok, being loved as I was and seeing myself as loveable. A belonging so deep, that I could relax into this safety in a way I have never before. Ever.

This is the paradise we got to learn in. Ubud, Bali Indonesia

All this helped me come home feeling more grounded and at home in my life having the felt sense of what its like to be me and not have to hide or defend. I had more confidence and love, happiness, and peace. And then…I needed to reply to a PR company’s questionnaire and list my social media accounts and how many followers I had and there it was, embarrassment at my 33 Instagram followers who are family members and people who are obliged to follow me. So there’s the shame, the anxiety, the doubt.

Is this really a holy toilet? Made of gold? Do I need to be a man? I never found out.

I started losing myself in my thoughts, “Celia, you don’t know what you are doing! You suck at social media and don’t know the difference between a post and a story and everything keeps disappearing and you can’t learn this because you resist spending time on it and you’re too old and now you won’t get publicity for your book and they are going to judge you because your social media is so lame and why can’t you just share like millions of people in the world? Or say, social media is not for me and be strong? Why are you choosing to torment yourself and feel inadequate when it’s a choice! You are supposed to know this! That is a small sample.

Social media is scary for me. I get terrified that it’s too personal, too much, or I will get those trolls who say really mean things and because I am sensitive, I’ll obsess and then won’t be able to sleep thinking I offend people and that someone hates me even though they don’t know me well enough to hate me for real reasons. I am unlikeable or they will ignore me or, or….then I remember Bali. Where I learned that it’s ok to need other people. It doesn’t mean I am a burden and needy to ask others to contribute to me. It’s ok if I don’t organize things well. I love to create things, but I need support in the details. I am not the tidy one who makes the spreadsheets and compiles the data. I need a roadie! I need help, people! Ahh. it feels so good to say that. Bringing my truth and risking being seen is what helps me heal the anxiety that is so ancient and afraid of disappointing someone else, or not living up to the idea of being an author who gets shit done.

We are wounded in relationship and we heal in relationship. I know my experience of safety helped heal the part of me that has been searching to find where I belonged, where I could be safe in the world. It happened while the world was on fire. Violence was exploding in the Middle East, in Ukraine and the thirty other countries at war around the world.

I found that safety involves a risk, of being honest and saying what’s on my heart. It involves a world wide shift, dismantling the idea that only those who are deemed worthy deserve consideration. It takes apart notions of power and risks to believe that we are all capable of compassionate connection. When we are all safe, we feel it. My small acts of honesty make me safer, make me capable of the confidence to talk about how we can make all of us safe, all of us at home here in a world where we all matter.

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Searching and Finding

October 23, 2023

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If you spend all your life seeking, how will you know you’ve arrived?

Rice field, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
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I am in Bali meeting people from China, Morocco, France, Indonesia, Belgium, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. It's a magnet for the spiritual seekers, the young and the not so young, looking to find themselves, a new way of living with more choice and healing. There's yoga retreats, Kirtan, colonic therapy, Ecstatic Dance, 7 Day Spiritual Awakening Course, you name it, you can do it. And that desire to be transformed to be deferent, freer, more authentic, and more at home in your life and in the world. If a seven day session would give me that, then sign me up! 
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And, I am newly old. I’ve never been the older person and now, that is me with white hair and glasses, still able to ride on the back of a motorcycle taxi and hold a plank for a minute, but–not a youngster. And it is a relief. As I listen to young folxs from all over longing to get free from the “have tos,” and the “shoulds,” and wanting something transcendent, something bigger than the world they’ve experienced. I feel incredibly lucky to have listened to what is true for me and to have the benefit of experience. I know what it’s like to wander about in the mall of spirituality, sampling from this tradition and that, a pinch of Vedic and a dash of Kabbalah, topped with some Pranayama and you have an international spiritual smorgasbord to satisfy all tastes.

I can’t remember where I read the Buddhist description of a seeker, someone looking for water who digs shallow holes, over and over. Compare this to the one who digs deeper, using time and focus and the determination to keep on going and the reward is…there is water after the effort. I know for myself, I’ve had huge resistance to practicing. I don’t want to meditate today! I don’t feel like doing it, or thinking that the teaching is just too unreal for real life. Who can love everyone, really? And then, there’s that thing called renunciation, giving up of something. And checking in with my willingness. Am I willing to give up my dislike for the next 30 minutes? Today yes, maybe tomorrow no.

Simplicity and spiritual growth requires streamlining, doing less of what takes me away from my intention. For me, this is a hard lesson, because I want to grow and learn and do things in the world and own some really comfortable and styling shoes…and I know what I want even more than those awesome loafers, is the rest and sureness that comes with renunciation and simplicity. This path is hard won. It takes a lot of “nos” to get to this place of surety. Practice and time. But if there is a seven day spiritual awakening that is money back guarantee, sign me up! I could use the free time for more ecstatic dancing in my new Birkenstocks.

May we all trust our light,

Celia
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Taking Refuge means Not Running Away

February 8, 2021

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I take refuge in the Buddha,

the one who shows me the way in this life.

I take refuge in the Dharma,

the way of understanding and of love.

I take refuge in the Sangha,

the community that lives in harmony and awareness.

~ Three Refuges Chant, Plum Village Chanting Book

Dear Friends,

It’s a new month, and we are changing again. In many Buddhist centers when someone joins the community, they take refuge. This is taking refuge in three things, the Buddha, and the promise of waking up, the Dharma, the teaching of truth and the path, and the Sangha, the community that helps us live following our values. These are called the three jewels or the triple gems.

Today there is snow, lots of snow and I watched a Dharma talk from a retreat I attended back in 2015. Sister The Nghiem, Abbess of White Crane Hamlet invited the community to note the difference between taking refuge and escaping. I answered that question six years ago and it seems truer today. When I take refuge, I stop, I come to a place of rest and stability. When I escape, there is the energy of running, of distancing myself from danger and there is a sense of dis-ease and dis-connection. When I take refuge, I am home, safe, and protected, and able to rest.

One of the realizations of living in this pandemic is that there is nowhere to run. There is no safe place to escape from the virus. While we can distract ourselves, we come back to the same truth there is no place immune from this. When we recognize that putting out trust in the transitory world does not provide stability or refuge, we can find that pace to stop, to come home, and to know we are living in alignment with our values.

This protection in taking refuge comes from recognizing that the teachings of the Buddha, offer us protection from pain and harm in our lifetime. When we follow this path of practice and live in accordance with non-violence, with compassionate speech, earning a living without harming living beings or our planet, with diligence and an eye towards the impermanent coming and going of all things, we protect ourselves from a life that gets complicated with delusion, distractions, and the pastime of acquiring more stuff than we can use in a lifetime.

The Buddha is recorded as saying:

Threatened with danger,

Many go for refuge to gardens, sacred trees, mountains and forests.

But such is not safe refuge.

Such is not the supreme refuge.

By means of such a refuge

No one is able to free himself from all these sufferings.

However, if one turns to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and Sangha for refuge,

Realizes the four Noble Truths: Dukkha [unsatisfactoriness], Dukkha’s causes, the

cessation of Dukkha,

And the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to the

cessation of Dukkha

This indeed is the safe refuge,

This indeed is the supreme refuge,

Turning to this refuge, one frees himself

From all suffering. (Maitreya, trans., 1995, Dhammapada, 188-192).

These three jewels are so precious because they give us clear directions of how to live a happy life. The Noble Eightfold Path, the medicine the Buddha gave to stop suffering, spells out the steps for conduct that will create a peaceful and meaningful life for us and the world. There are the steps of thinking about our interconnection and the understanding of the wisdom teachings, Dharma, that leads to happiness in Right Understanding.
We understand how to produce a pleasant thought and how to cultivate wholesome mindstates while letting go of the unwholesome thoughts in Right Effort. There is loving speech, truth, and deep listening, in Right Speech, and the responsibility of how our actions belong to us and affect others and ourselves in Right Action. There is accountability for our lives and for protecting the lives and wellbeing of others and the planet in Right Livelihood, not selling weapons, or substances that lead to intoxication and addiction.

In Right Effort, we deepen our practice with joy instead of harshness and criticism. Right Mindfulness calls us to be aware of our feelings, our bodies, and our minds, and in Right Concentration, we develop the diligence to stay with our meditative training. This ability to sit, calm the mind and look deeply leads us to insight which unties the knots that prevent us from freedom.

When we live in accordance with this happiness plan and seek the support and company of those who also want to create this world, we increase our happiness. This is the fruit of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in Sangha. As we live with this awareness, we also see that the three gems are inside of us as well.

We are encouraged to take refuge in the Buddha in ourselves, our own ability to become awake, and to celebrate the moments we are already a Buddha! We may see this when we give a place in line to someone who is struggling, or when we refrain from joining with criticism in a group. We see that taking refuge in the Dharma in myself means that I recognize how this path benefits my life and that my practice directly affects the happiness or unhappiness of those around me. Taking refuge in the sangha in myself means I see the interconnected web I am part of and the support already here for me. I can see sangha in the trees in my back yard and in the ways that I am able to listen when someone calls with a concern they want help to understand. I see sangha as how my life stretches out and back, how I enact belonging for myself and others.

Refuge means we have confidence. In Buddhism, we are asked to try things out and see if they are of benefit to ourselves and approved of by those whom we consider wise. When we experience what refuge means to us, we naturally develop confidence and trust. This gives us the desire and the conviction to continue to practice. Our practice is meant to be joyful and to create joy for us. If we are suffering and making those suffer around us by our practice, we’ve grasped the teachings in the wrong way and are using them as a justification for more violence and separation from ourselves and others. Taken with care, these refuges offer us the solidity and ease, that enables a life of integrity, joy, and peace. The three jewels offer protection from avoidable suffering, a way out of confusion, and joy that rests on what is unshakable.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

References

Maitreya, B. A. (1995) The Dhammapada: The path of truth, Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press
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Unaccompanied Minor

My Shame Accompaniment: