Improving Conscious Contact

No time to sit down for this 9-minute read? Let me read it to you on your next walk or commute!

Having spent the past few months of dabbling with being a “real” artist – reproducing, showing, and selling my Grief Collage as a Gateway to Soul series – I’ve noticed a community sprouting up around me and my own sense of delight in re-engaging with life by offering something of beauty and meaning. I told my sponsor I credited the nearly 100 personal messages I sent to friends inviting them to support me; or perhaps the couple-dozen like-minded friends I realized I had made locally, many of them who came to my show, brought their friends, bought my cards, and asked me to host a workshop so they could create their own. My sponsor asked if this shift might actually be related to the Promises coming true in my life as a result of working the 12 steps.

At first glance, I didn’t see the connection. Then slowly it surfaced. Just as I started sharing my fundraising campaign, I was finishing up my amends. I was reaching out to people I hadn’t spoken to in years; people I had admired who had been a significant part of my life, people I missed and blamed myself for having lost. In all but one instance, they hadn’t given a second thought to the thing I was apologizing for, and I realized in a deep way that these relationships had changed not because anyone did anything wrong, but simply because circumstances had shifted. This released me from self-blame and invited me to simply grieve the many losses that have come with my freedom of choosing to reinvent myself.

The one instance in which I had caused harm was one that perhaps only another addict would have noticed. This friend of mine was strongly committed to recovery from prescription drugs, saw my addictive relationship tendencies and my blindness about them, and distanced herself from a sense of being unable to help me and unwilling to have a friend in active addiction who wasn’t owning the truth. Hearing her share how much she grieved the loss of our friendship brought me to a visceral experience of the suffering my addiction has caused.

Powerful forces I can barely see, let alone resist, still seep into and twist many aspects of my life. I have a strong tendency to sexualize restlessness, anger, fatigue, anxiety, hunger, celebration. The first solution in my mind to anything that disturbs me is to create or fantasize about romantic intrigue. Being abstinent from relationships has just made this tendency more inverted and cunning. What remains to be done is not just ask a higher power to keep me healthy and balanced in way I struggle to do so for myself, but to completely reorient my life away from the inherently elusive romance I seek towards a more primary relationship with the ever-loving, ever-present consciousness available in every moment.

This relationship with Beloved Mystery moved through my life in the form of a job offer during the same time that I was wrapping up my amends and launching my art campaign. I had experienced another bout of discontent over my job coupled with an empowering rush of possibility that manifested an interview at a local private school. I fell in love with the founder and the simple interventions she described in her book for responding to children in distress. Because our culture is so intellectual and driven, we believe the best approach is to move straight from the conflict or disruption to seeking, teaching, and implementing the solution. The actual result of this approach, especially in children who aren’t able to regulate their own emotions, is somatic dissociation, lack of emotional maturity, rigid thinking, and cutting off a good part of both our humanity and our wisdom. What this school emphasizes is that every person in every situation is doing the best they can, and that the way to tap into fuller expressions of our best is to first establish safety, then build connection, and only then to reflect and learn.

I felt an upwelling of sadness and subtle anger over how different my life would have been if my parents and teachers had had these skills. Whenever something I did was perceived as wrong, I was punished as a way to teach me a lesson. My intense emotion around the situation was typically completely disregarded, even when I was the victim of illness, bullying, or misunderstanding. Because I wasn’t given a foundation of safety and connection when I was taught as a child, I became anxious, self-critical, and risk-averse instead of curious, compassionate, and resilient. Practicing self-compassion has helped me make some progress in countering my inner critic, but this bit of child development, brought to me magically through a dead-end job search, provided the missing piece that’s taking me deeper into rewiring my adult brain.

Now when I’m triggered at work, I’m much less likely to jump straight into career planning. When I catch myself fantasizing about a man who violated my boundaries, and wondering why he isn’t calling, I think instead about where I feel unsafe and disconnected, and I address those needs directly. I do some grounded breathing, have a snack, go for a walk in the sun, take a hot shower, or feel gratitude for the comfort of my routine. I write a letter to Mystery, text a friend some words of support, listen more deeply to the next client, or work on something I can give to others. Then I realize I have everything I really need right here and now – the rest is in the hands of Mystery. In this way, I have gradually been more able to lean into increasingly complex questions, challenges, and lessons and stay grounded and flexible enough to really learn, not just react.

As I have been willing to stay put in this place, keep coming back to my work, 12-step meetings, and dance communities, and reach out to connect more deeply with those who most inspire me, I have been becoming more relaxed, expressive, and playful and have received some beautiful invitations and reflections from those who are beginning to really see me. I have identified that the core issues I struggle with are not an inability to define and commit to a profession, but shame over not having a profession and fear about my future security.

When I confront those feelings directly, I see how the fear keeps me in state of compulsive movement that disconnects me from the serendipity of this moment. The shame keeps me isolated from the simple truth about what I love: exploring ideas and art in solitude and having adventures and deep conversations with friends. I only became ambitious as a teen as the strategy for finding belonging and friendship, and followed that thread into adulthood as a rewarded means of livelihood. What’s really core to my being is the light that ignites when I am exploring and reveling in this sensual life. I want to believe this gift from Mystery is more than enough of an offering to our increasingly beleaguered world and a force powerful enough to ensure my basic needs are met in our ever-shifting world.

This is how I experience the 11^th step working in my life – how I seek to improve my conscious contact with what I call Beloved Mystery. It is a willingness to set aside my ideas of who I am, how the world works, and how to be in relationship with others, and just face today with the intention to create safety and connection – inner and outer – to the best of my ability. Presuming to understand any of this makes life and God too small. I can share with you what I love. I can celebrate what I love about you. And I can show up in the life I’ve been gifted as fully as I can. My life began improving the moment I started looking at it less as a resume and more like a contact dance: no agenda, no mistakes, just a give and take in the delight and distress of a sensual body guided by an unfolding consciousness.

Nancy