16 posts tagged “shenpa”

I have done the hard work, for years, to come to terms with having a father who sucks. For a long time, my work centered on de-trauma-ing from the years of his rages, his cruelties, his unpredictability, the overall clusterfuckstorm of his presence in my childhood. Eventually, I started working on the sadness and loss of feeling fatherless, not having a grown-man mentor, someone to ask questions, get help solving problems from, make proud, have fun with---whatever: all the stuff dads seem to do/be for people. Finally, I began to see that I was pretty fine anyway, that I'd gotten most of his better qualities and few of his worst, that I'd made relationships with a number of really excellent men, that in those relationships, I'd developed a solid role model for the way men could be, and that I could finally use that model to choose a partner who really rocks. And so forth and so on.

I've gone long stretches of time since I was 11 out of contact with my dad. I stopped visiting him when I was 12, cut off contact from 14-17, and then again, from 18-26 or so. Later, after I'd faced him and put some relationship back together, I had enough of his crap again, and cut him out for another few years. In the past 5 or so, though, I've been doing this really good job of maintaining a connection, in which I show up with a reasonably open mind, stick around if he's being good, and politely take my leave if he's not. It works pretty well and I'm proud of the way I walk this path, generally. I feel pretty sure that it will matter to me that I did this when he's gone, and I'm glad I'll be able to have spent whatever positive time together we have gotten.

But, christ, it is just so crazy-making sometimes to have a relationship with a man who is incapable or unwilling (whichever it is) to ever act like a parent. He just doesn't have the parent gene or chromosome or whatever it is. He is motivated always first and foremost and second and last, by his own self-interest and comfort, and he still lapses into big, bizarre episodes of aggression, and he still really is just an asshole by nature pretty much most of the time. No manners, to say the least.

I relate to him largely by way of detachment. I show up with zero expectations, I try really hard not to hook for good or ill. I've really grown as a result. It's a remarkable opportunity for spiritual practice.

But sometimes it just hurts. It seems impossible to truly forget that he's technically my dad, to completely let go of any expectations for father-ness, to not be hurt and sad when he's mean and shitty. To not be his daughter, basically, but to instead be a person who continues to be connected to him. And if I really weren't his daughter, I would never, ever, ever show up to be treated like this. Ever. It has been a long time since I have willingly participated in any relationship where I'm demeaned or abused or just treated with less than basic respect.

Today's one of those days when it feels like I'm living a family koan and it just hurts and makes me feel sad and I super want to hit him with a truck or at least not fucking talk to him again for a few years.

Sorry to not make a whole ton of sense, I think. Thanks fer reading. Hope all's well with all.

Mood swings are not as fun as they used to be. Hrmph.

It's a beeeyewtiful day, I'm about to meet my mom for a little shopping, and then go work at My Bar, which I dearly love to do, but guess what? I'm extraordinarily grumpy.

Frick, frick, frick, fuck. SLP is graduating from college next weekend, which is a huge joy, for real. I'm endlessly proud of him. He took a long time to nearly finish when he was younger, but then left for a good job in industry before he finished his credits. The whole thing really rocked his confidence, especially because the good job turned out to kind of suck and not be what-he-wanted-to-be-when-he-grew-up. When I met him, he was still in that phase where his family and family friends all nudged him to go back consistently and he didn't really have any plans to do so. Just mainly felt bad about himself.

Then, a year and a half ago, I think, or maybe two, he just came home and said he'd registered for classes. :) He's been going strong and steady ever since, while working full-time, and just growing and turning onto his very, very fine brain in the most delightful ways. It has been an honor to be around while he's done this. And now, I've invited around 60 people to our house to celebrate on Sunday next, including his parents and sister, who are arriving on Wednesday.

And herein lies the crux of my grumpiness. I've just been so low-level depressed and lazy this year, working hard and teaching well, but apart from that, I've been doing a lot of watching TV on the internet and not much else. So I have to clean the house top to bottom this weekend, go buy a bunch of food and drinks we can't afford (somehow we owe the tax man $1200), and not be a shitty wife who hasn't gotten anything together to celebrate her man apart from making a really sweet Evite.

From this sense of failure, of course, my attention turns with great force to all my other worries and inadequacies. We're broke, broke, broker than a joke, and all I have for work this spring/summer right now is one class at The Community College and two door shifts a week at My Bar. I still haven't gotten my ass down to the social security office to finally make my name-change official (we'll be celebrating our 3rd anniversary in August, and until SLP got his hyphenation official a couple months ago, we'd both only changed our names on our drivers' licenses), nor have I called the damned financial aid folks about the one student loan that doesn't seem to have been properly consolidated, so I'm probably damaging our credit every single day. And so on...

Grrrrrr.... I hate being depressed. It's just so irritating. I'm tired all the time, and eating like a waitress (one crappy meal a day) and all that. And of course, I'm giving myself such a ton of shit for being subpar. Grrrr....

So I guess I'm just gonna have to greet my sad, tired, self-beating self with kindness and tenderness and grapple with the definite truth that nothing is as bad as I think it is, and take myself off the hook. That's very likely to get me in a better space, and even if it doesn't get me in a great space, it'll definitely suck less than being all evil-minded like I am right now.

Grrrr....

I meditated, cleaned the house, watched a little hulu tv here and there (Angel--super loving that show right now). I went back to the breath over and over; I felt fondness and compassion for myself; I liked people and things. I had pretty good perspective going on the exam--that it's just an experience like any other experience, just four hours like any other four hours, all passing memory.

Then I woke up all night last night worrying, with a sick stomach. When I wasn't waking up, I was dreaming not only of reading for the exam, but of reading the wrong texts. Annotating them, all the while knowing they weren't on the goddamned reading list.

Today's been rough. My stomach hurt so much when I got up that after I showered and got ready to leave the house, I had to go back and lie down for a while. I watched Monk on Netflix and breathed. I got back up. I went to the store. I just walked slowly, came back to the breath a lot. I feel some better at the moment, but not as better as I'd like. It's really hard not to do something, not to solve this experience. I want to rush and re-read a bunch of theory, or seven novels, and surely a bunch of poetry. Or to suck face with the tv all day. The urge to fix/solve/escape--hoo-boy, that's a bitch.

I'm not, not much, at least. I'm just coming back to every breath, or every third breath. I'm just greeting myself all scared up into knots with kindness and the kind of love we feel for over-tired or out-of-gourd-scared children.

I am going to read some more sparknotes of my literary texts, and my Rukeyser poems, as a ritual gesture of calming. I'm going to read some more teachings, mainly Cheri Huber and Pema. I'm going to finish airing out the bedroom Heartswater will stay in tonight, finish dinner prep, breakfast prep for tomorrow. I'll call PTM every half hour. Read my brother's blog posts from his two-weeks' service with the International Solidarity Movement in Israel/Palestine. Make my iPod mix for tomorrow. Come back to the breath.

Breathing in, kindness
Breathing out, patience

I want to do scads of the most fun drugs and have riotously soul-redeeming sex

to go on vacation

to wait tables at top speed

to go through the halls of My Institution, exposing and condemning every single flaw at the top of my lungs

to go back to sleep

to spend huge amounts of money

to run a marathon

to watch tv, endless, numbing, wonderful tv

to skip school

to cut class

to abandon my master's program

to write three essays about the barbaric, sadistic, meaninglessness of the exam, rather than three answers

I have a huge contingent of in-laws. Individually, most of them are very nice people who I like very much. When they get together, I actually often have a very nice time with them. But sometimes, the whole whirlwind of manic enthusiasm and superficiality and insular conservatism and snide anti-Otherism and weird family dynamics (weird obviously means "someone else's family dynamics"--I could hardly argue that my family isn't fully insane in our own special ways) just makes me simultaneously exhausted and full of a burning desire to aggressively be every not-normal part of myself at once.

Sorry to whine/bitch so much. (I may not have done a whole lot of whining/bitching yet, but I'm definitely ramping up for more.) It's just been an entire weekfull of in-law-o-rama, culminating in 48 hours of constant immersion in their world, and it's not over yet, and I'm so tired and irritated and resentful.

I'm sick of laughing along at their inane, often offensive, jokes, of indulging them in their fucked up behavior out of good manners and compassion and my responsibility to be a supportive partner. I'm sick of getting looked at like that space alien that SLP married who everyone has to just put up with whenever I say anything I actually really believe. I'm super fucking sick of being treated like being smart and taking anything seriously is a behavior disorder. I'm sick of not counting, really, when it comes down to it.

That's the chewy center of being an in-law, isn't it? As an in-law, you just don't particularly count. You're a visitor in someone else's country, and while the natives may try to be courteous, and pay lip service to 'getting to know you,' you are only there because one of them oddly chose to marry you. When in the country of The-Partner's-Family-of-Origin, one must do as the Family-of-Origin does. Or at least be a polite visitor and try to think other thoughts when things get really seriously irritating, or duck out back and smoke a cigarette, or feign a headache and go the fuck home.

Errgg. I don't know if I'm making any sense, but I guess I don't technically have to, right? After all, it's my blog and I can blather if I want to, and I figure/hope that anyone stopping by will just wisely click on past any post that is both cranky and unintelligible.

Fuckin fuck fuck.

Whatever. I have today off of the in-law-o-rama. SLP is over there with the whole gang, including, sighhhhh, his insufferable little sister who's flown in for the week of parents-retiring-and-moving-up-north festivities, but I called dibs on getting to stay home and work today. I have to get a draft of the rationale done for my self-generated MA exam question/essay-answer. I'm coffeeing up and drinking water and trying to get my brain together. I just need to shed this super crabby in-law hangover and I'll be fine.

Thanks for reading/listening.

One of my fave professors told me that the other day, and I'm holding onto it like a buoy in choppy waters right now. She said to think of it as a short, concise, pretty arrangement of ideas, with a twist at the end. The twist is the "implications for future work" bit, the bit that makes it ok not to have everything worked out in my head and on the page. That whole unfinished feeling of the conference paper is hard for me. I never know what I think in 12 pages, ever. This feels vulnerable and vaguely nauseous. 

Pema says that, on the CD set I listen to all the time. It's a series of teachings called Learning to Stay. In brief, her focus is on illuminating the phenomenon of shenpa--the ephemeral quality of hookedness that tends to send us running away from presence. For example:

I've been working on this research project for my 18th-Century Brit Fiction course for a few months now. Research projects are hard work, and I tend to bitch and whine about all my horrible suffering when I'm working on one, especially in this space. But the real truth is that research projects are really fun--I get to dig into all sorts of interesting texts and theory, mix 'em up with the lived-world scenarios that matter to me, and arrive at new insights and apprehensions. Along the way, I get to use writing to think it all through, and then I get to share that writing/thinking with at least one other person. This is not the kind of sweet opportunity that regular life offers, usually. As a full-time waitress, I rarely got the chance to think deeply, with great focus, about something that really interested me, with other people who also really cared about it, who brought their talents and seriousness to their work and my own.

This term, I happen to have gotten a professor who has not been a particularly sensitive or supportive team player in my process. In fact, I have been describing her teaching practice as 'cuntiferous' quite a bit, at pretty high volumes. The volume and intensity with which I have responded to her arises from this shenpa business. Her gestures of response have pushed on buttons that I am ego-invested in. In essence, she has hurt my feelings, and I have a really hard time not rising into a lot of avoidance behavior (read: rage, nasty comments, etc.) when I get my feelings hurt, especially when my feelings are getting hurt about something I'm sensitive about. So the shenpa is the ego-investment, the quality that somehow hooks me into a reactive experience of unpleasantness or discomfort.

Pema teaches that shenpa is value-neutral. It is unpleasant, but it isn't bad, per se. In fact, she teaches that shenpa can be read as an opportunity to develop mindfulness, insight, and warm regard for both oneself and whoever it is that's offered the opportunity in the first place. This is how I understand her interpretation of the concept of prajna--the experience of compassion-based wisdom that can arise simultaneously with shenpa. She points out that when a person's behavior elicits shenpa in me, it is often the case that that person is hooked into his/her own shenpa in the first place. She suggests that it is possible, when shenpa arises, to experience prajna about it at the same time--to feel warm and kind toward my own shenpa and the other person's. Hence, she cites her teacher who tells her, "when shenpa arises, sheer delight."

I listen to these CDs in the car, and they help. They help me get some quiet and mindfulness before I teach, they help me gentle down on myself when I'm ramping up stress, and they help me work on what Jimmy Carter famously referred to as sinning in my heart. Calling my professor a cuntiferous whore, and really going into that utterance with whole heart, is shenpa unrecognized, is sinning against someone else in my heart.

I know this. I knew it Monday, when I got my proposal back from my professor, covered with nasty, unhelpful feedback. I knew it when I flew immediately from feeling really hurt to blathering about her being a cuntiferous whore for 8 hours. Indulging in 8 hours of hate is exhausting on a number of levels, so I started trying to get some prajna going on by the time I got home that night. Wasn't overhwelmingly successful--I did manage to unhook from the intensity of both the hurt feelings and the flight-rage, but didn't really make it to compassion. So I skipped her class Wednesday night, in order to at least avoid doing any more damage, or getting re-hooked.

This whole time, intellectually, I have had the framework of compassion--the intellectual apprehension of my professor's likely suffering that makes sense to have given rise to the unkindness she does as a teacher. I even got so far as to be able to see that it is a suffering I have spent a lot of time in myself--perfectionism, which in my experience arises from basic self-loathing, and the enrollment in the kind of snotty, quasi-abusive hierarchy thinking that forms the basis for so much academic culture. But I have just been having a really hard time getting the rest of compassion--the open, tender heart, the softness and warmth of experiencing the basic goodness of another sentient being, and honestly giving a shit about that sentient being's pain.

And so. This morning, I am taking it nice and easy before I get back into my work. I'm drinking my coffee, smelling the spring coming in through my window, digging the sheer niceness of SLP. I'm reading Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my every-summer books. It's a pretty shenpa-free situation, and it's pretty nice.

So then I turn to page 274, and discover the only annotation I made in this whole book through all the re-readings since I bought it in 2000 or 2001:

It made for a long, lonely life, this business of getting things right.

I love this book--it's a long, luxurious read through lush mountains and country fields, with plenty of 'slow-hand' sensuality, and just enough loss to give everything a keen edge. It's chock full of terribly smart sentences, but this is the only one I underlined. In fact, I underlined this one in ink.

Because that sentence has been so true for me, because "this business of getting things right" has hurt, hurt, hurt for me. That loneliness, that despair, that sorrow at just being such a suck-ass person who'll never be able to get things right enough to make up for all her flaws, never get things right enough to be ok, to be loved, to just get some fucking rest and have an easy laugh and whatnot. And that, I'm sure enough, is what my professor is suffering through, and that I can feel for her through, and genuinely desire not to add to that suffering by hating her in order to avoid letting my feelings hurt a little bit.

Yep.

I am tired, menstrual, and hugely not-writing the last two papers of my MA. I'm not completely wallowing in the great mudpuddle of cyclical depression, worry, despair, and self-recrimination yet, but I can feel myself slipping.

Here's a little Rukeyser poem I'm clinging to like a mudpuddle life-raft:

THE OVERTHROW OF ONE O'CLOCK AT NIGHT

is my concern. That's this moment,
when I lean on my elbows out the windowsill
and feel the city among its time-zones, among its seas,
among its late night news, the pouring in
of everything meeting, wars, dreams, winter night.
Light in snowdrifts causing the young girls
lying awake to fall in love tonight
alone in bed; or the little children
half world over tonight rained on by fire--that's us--
calling on somebody--that's us--to come
and help them.

Now I see at the boundary of darkness
extreme of moonlight.
Alone. All my hopes
scattered in people       quarter world away
half world away, out of all hearing.
Tell myself:
Trust in experience. And in the rhythms.
The deep rhythms of experience.

Indeed. If I can rely on anything, it is the rhythms of my cycle. I know them by heart--I should; I've been riding this roller coaster for 22 years now. What happens this week, what always happens this week, is that my mood goes deep and wide, with occasional wild ups and slightly less occasional serious dips. I certainly cry at nearly anything. I also get progressively tired, although I just realized, with help from a friend, that I get some interesting bursts of productive energy, earmarked exclusively for cleaning the house.

My cycle used to just make me insane and insane to be around, but, all praise to therapy and an over-thirty-changing-body, I ride it pretty well anymore, and even enjoy a lot of it--the slowing, the internal turn, the opportunity to be keenly present to experience. The unpleasant parts--being a huge bitch, etc.--I've gotten pretty good at just letting be, not feeding them, and also not fearing them. In essence, I've done this enough times to know the rhythms of my experience, and trust them to come and go.

Oh, but fuck it's a bitch this week. I'm feeling so much pressure to finish these papers, because they're the last two. And the professor who I was pretty sure was being a huge control-freak bitch about the one has indeed turned out to be a ragingly huge control-freak bitch, and that's making me even more loathe to do anything. And being loathe to do anything and having a wet-cotton, cycle-end brain is making it really hard to relax and believe I will actually come out of this and get them done in time.

But of course I will. I always do, and I'm not about to start not-doing now. So, I'll take me a deep breath and trust my damned rhythms.

Plan:

1. Recognize that no amount of worrying or needing to work is going to help right now
2. Give in to my body's demand that I just be fucking nice to it
   
3. Let it fucking go
   
4. Pack up my work and go home
5. Eat something
6. Help SLP with his paper
7. Watch TV
8. Fall asleep
9. Sleep well
10. Go to work tomorrow and do as little as possible, while maintaining as even a mood as possible
11. Read/write tomorrow night, hopefully, because by then I should be experiencing the upsurge of serotonin or whatever that usually follows the first day of my cycle
12. If not, do it anyway
13. Chant "B's get degrees" over and over until April 28th
    

Writing. That's what I'm thinking about tonight. I'm working on a project for my 18th-Century British Fiction class, and it's making me nuts.

The assignment is so highly structured, and its structure is very different than the process I've been using for a while. Plus, there are flaws in the prompt she's constructed. The whole thing's disruptive and making me whiny. I am aware that the opportunity to try a new set of moves is a good one, one that I should totally take advantage of. But, god, it's sooooo fucking uncomfortable. And I'm already tired. Really fucking tired. And the professor's been being a bit of a bitch.

Arggghhh, though. All my fucking whining and moaning about how unfair everything is lately has been really getting on my own last nerve. I need to invigorate, look for the good, get excited about what is, and make the good old-fashioned best of it. Damnit.

So the assignment goes like this. First, we do a proposal. In this proposal, first we overlook the teacher's snotty attitude. Then, we write an introductory paragraph--4 sentences--followed by a 1 sentence statement of our thesis. (Yes, this is graduate school. Yes, this is also a discipline I could maybe use a bit of.) Then, we write a provisional outline of our 3-4 main subarguments. Finally, we write a concise paragraph for each of five texts: two chapter-length critical articles on our literary text, two connected, chapter-length articles by a theorist we read in class (one of which we actually read in class), summarizing the key theoretical construct we're using in our own essays, "showing how well [we] understand it" by "putting it in [our] own words," and showing how it relates to our literary texts. This whole list of prompts has sentence numbers inserted between almost every clause. She's actually telling us how many sentences to use for each part of each paragraph. The more I write about this, the more I'm boggling at the control-freak-micro-management style this woman operates within. And the more my bean is getting steamed.

Wasn't I trying to have a good attitude about this? Right. Sorry.

Ok, so what's got potential here? First, I can completely see that this is an excellent organization of a research process. It enforces close attention to both theory and the literary text. This is good, because, as a result of the sheer volume of work in graduate school, I have definitely allowed myself to forgo some of the 'theory grapple' this year. And this is an opportunity for me to get to know Judith Butler a little better, which I've been wanting to do.

It'll also give me a core for all the other research I've already done. I've been working on this paper, which will be a standard 20-pager, for weeks now, but I've been doing it more or less my way. My way means global--I think wide and far-flung, I find all the parts of the thing, and then I pull them in together. Doing this close engagement with Butler will calm things down, definitely. It will foreclose some of the five zillion sub-sub-arguments and evidence I still have in the game.

Holy fuck! It's 4 in the freakin' morning!

Ok, real quick final summary of good available to me in this situation:

And the literary text is fun, and the research I've done has been very rewarding and also fun, and my thinking is really satisfying to me. And if I do it, I can pass the class, which will mean I can graduate, which is nice. ;)

G'fuckinight, sheesh! :)

I've malaised myself into a bit of a tight work corner this weekend, and I'm full of anxiety and frustration and plain old fear. Fuck.

Having slid into my old night-work schedule, I fucking got up at 11 today. 11. Arrrgggghhhhh.

Ok, gotta fucking reframe. Accomplished this week:

1. Lectured on Rukeyser and the complexities of Jewish American assimilation in the pre-war (II) period in front of 80-ish students. Got a real conversation going with the class, only used the word "motherfucker" once, and got applause at the end of class. Not bad for having less than 24 hours to prep.
2. Did not cry or throw up when lecturing.
   
3. Got a serious plug from the professor I TA for this term for a lecturer position in Lit at My Institution next fall. He dropped the "hire-bodhibound" word with the department head and program director.
4. Drafted a cover letter for said position and updated my really not so bad CV.
5. Facilitated two quite productive sessions of my composition class.
6. Wrote, re-wrote, and re-wrote the Unit 3 assignment for said class. It'll do.
7. Got a solid start on their final unit.
8. Found an ethical way to not fail L from said class.
9. Read for one class.
10. Did not forget to call my mother for her birthday.
    
11. Read, wrote, deleted, read, wrote, re-wrote, revised, deleted, read, wrote toward the fucking paper that's due Monday, and is making me nauseous just thinking about.
12. Did the dishes a couple of times.
13. Changed the cat litter, finally. Thank god.
14. Sorted the wash.
15. Straightened the living room.
    
16. Bought tickets for the Harlem Globetrotters.
17. Helped a friend in need.
18. Oh, helped two friends in need.
19. Got laid twice.
20. Ran some errands.
21. Won a couple games of Scrabulous on Facebook.
22. Watched some Firefly and The Wire and Southpark.
23. I think I did some other stuff...

Ok, that list makes it a little harder to dig a hole, crawl down into it, and beat myself with the self-loathing stick while I'm down there. That's good.

I'm going to clean the bathroom now, sooooooooooooo quick, jump in the shower, get dressed, and start the wash. Then I'm going to gather up all my resources and shit for this paper, go to my coffee shop, and write this goddamned, fucking conference paper. I will write it; it will be good, bad, or ugly, but it will get fucking done, and I will turn it in and never look back. It will be fine. It will be ok. Or at the very least, it will be over, and that will be wonderful.

This is the breath today.