Archive: Mindfulness in Three Steps

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 16 January 2018.]

Start Cultivating Mindfulness in Three Steps

Mindfulness is not itself an activity. Rather, it is a byproduct that emerges from a practice. One follows the practice with slow gentle patience, continually returning after inevitably straying, and mindfulness emerges in you. Here is one such practice.

Phase 1 is intended to be practiced often, and it only takes an instant. Phase 2 requires a moment to a few minutes, so is still very frequent but less so. And Phase 3 can take from minutes to unlimited time, so you do it as you can.

1. The game: remembering the present moment.

(A reversal of The Game.) From now on, every day, you are playing the following game: you win again each time you remember that you are playing the game, and then notice that right now you are in the present moment. Pause the running train of thought, your rumination on past or future, and just see your self right there right now exactly as you are. You are entitled to bonus win if you can hold on to the awareness of the present moment for any length of time.

2. Incorporate your body.

Many of the times you win the game, you will be on the go, in conversation, or, say, operating heavy machinery. But if you are in a position to interrupt your activity, you can add the following aspects to it.

Here you are in the present moment. Closing your eyes helps now, but is optional. Start breathing deliberately: calm, medium-slow, and deep into yourself. As you bring air in and out, perform a checklist on your body. Working from the top of your head down to your toes or vice versa, one point at a time, let your attention fall onto each successive part of your body. Ask that part of your body how it is doing, and wait with a non-judging curiosity for an answer in the form of a sensation. If you find tension that can be relaxed, do so. If at any point you have stopped breathing, simply continue. Take your time. By performing the checklist while breathing and remaining in the present moment, you get Level-2 win, with bonus win for carrying your breathing and bodily awareness for any further length of time.

3. Meditate.

Begin with Phases 1 and 2, and use the feedback from your body to adjust your posture and find a comfortable, relaxed, and stable situation.

Now let go of all but one thing: your breathing as an anchor for your attention in the present moment. Simply observe your breath. Most people choose the most noticeable aspect of their breathing experience, commonly the feeling between the tip of their nostrils, or the feeling along their windpipe, or the rise-and-fall of their body. Hold your attention's gaze at that one point, letting every other aspect of your thinking just fall to the side. Inevitably you will have thoughts, impulses, ideas, and all manner of sensations trying to jump in and steal your attention, and they will succeed. Each time your mind strays from your breath, notice it, see it compassionately and curiously for what it is and without judgment... and gently let it fall to the side and return your attention to your breath. Over and over. You get Level-3 win for each time you notice the straying and returning.

For how long? Well, how much time do you have? Even several minutes is a good start. The longer you do it, the more the character of the experience unfolds. On retreats, people practice for hours or more.

Archive: Return to SF

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 22 December 2018.]

A few days ago I returned to the Bay, optimistic after some good healing on the road, and since then I've experienced a roller coaster. The distance and resilience gained during my travel have allowed me to see more clearly than ever: my root problem is fear response on a biological level. It affects my body in many ways, from my posture, to my ability to handle sound and light, to the pain and dysfunction in my gut. And, my brain makes existentially frightful meanings and shitty dreams out of it.

Most of the fear is externally driven: interpreting world events as spinning out of control. Seeing how educating myself has empowered me to understand the train wrecks of the environment and American society in exquisite slow-motion detail, but left me powerless to change it. I have a powerful drive to make meaning in things and find empathy with them, with other people and with entire systems. It is too easy for me to form attachments to ways that things are. In addition to fearing a world where I am not safe, I fear the mourning to come.

I used to hold myself responsible, but I see that now as unnecessary self-flagellation. In general, I now understand on an intellectual level setting boundaries with the universe, and I can even accept it emotionally when the fear isn't active in my body, but it's hard otherwise.

Most other sub-issues and manifestations have been worked on successfully, to the degree that they are in the margins and manageable. If I can get the fear reaction to heal and return to normal levels, then I fully believe can manage the rest and live a reasonable life.

What has been helpful? Being outside the Bay, definitely, because so much of this helplessness about the world was learned here, and my body recognizes it. Avoiding media, when I've succeed in doing it, just letting myself be an ostrich, because I can't help what I see there. SSRIs, which we don't understand but we think it has something to do with serotonin levels in the amygdala. Mindfulness, especially vipassana, keeping some distance between me and the perceived realness of the thoughts my body extrapolates from the biological feeling, and putting brakes on the automatic associations. Yoga and physical activity, for giving me other bodily sensations to focus on. I have tried several other tactics and integrated many other lessons, but these are the ones I will continue using effectively. The main clinically proven technique I have not tried yet is EMDR, and I hope to try that soon.

I'm trying one more time to exist in the Bay. The first few days have not been encouraging, bedridden for hours at a time with fearsickness, but it is easy to speak too soon and maybe I'll overcome it here. Otherwise, the last couple months have given me hope that I can thrive elsewhere.

Archive: Postcard from Walkabout

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 19 November 2018.]

Postcard from Walkabout

For the past few months my state has had a high day-to-day variance, but usually I could detect slight improvements, baby steps, in the averages when I've looked back over about a two week period. There are always so many variables that I can't separate them. Which things are really helping? Are any of them really helping? Did one thing get fixed a while ago, and I'm simply healing regardless of continued effort? Am I just climbing a staircase of placebos?

Lately I've been hiding far away from California. My instinct was telling me that I wasn't going to complete healing there. Viewing that environment from over here, I can more clearly make out a baseline level of alarm: the problems of our world are all so real there. My empathy for the moral urgency around me keeps me constantly in a state of stress and fear, which, over time, inflames my trauma and excites my demons. (I wrote this paragraph before the fires started.)

A large piece of my life is in California, so I'll surely have to learn how to function within such an environment, and doing so is one of the aspects of my future that I'm most nervous about. If I believe that the work I've been doing has indeed been responsible for my improvement, then I should suspect that the continuation of this work should provide some defense of my sense of proportion against this Californian onslaught. But is such success attainable? Is it sustainable? Surely sometimes I slip, or lose steam; what would the consequences be?

In other news, in the last few days have I felt like my triggers are manageable enough that it's safe to catch up on Internets. Predictably, I've binged on news, FB, and Wikipedia, just like old times. It is as if my mind were a great mansion that had been locked down due to roving monsters, and I, having stayed in one or two rooms for safety, were finally wandering about and opening doors and turning on lights. The monsters seem smaller now when I encounter them. But they're still a drag, so I'm trying to put the brakes on my media consumption again.

Daydreaming about my career, what really speaks to me is a high-end emotional labor consultancy. Somewhere between a therapist and a chaplain and a management consultant. I come in and get to know your situation intimately, and I advise you on how to think about it and how to find healthy ways forward. This could involve getting to know a team and creating good communication and empathy patterns. Or it could be individual coaching, or bringing someone on an emotionally educational journey. Or it could be helping disconnected groups coordinate on a solution plan to a complex problem. To be clarified by trial and error, and I'm also seeking guidance, but the hardest part is getting my foot in the door. What I like about this idea is that in it I'm being paid to promote my values.

That's what's ready for sharing this time. Yall keep your masks on, ya hear?

Archive: Electroconvulsive Therapy

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 23 September 2018.]

More information for those of you who are curious about electroconvulsive therapy.

First, the electricity is a bit of a red herring. Its only purpose is in inducing a seizure in the patient. I haven't found backing for this yet, but the doctor told me that way back before electricity, herbally induced convulsions were common folk treatments. Since it's easy to cause them with an electric shock, that's how we do it nowadays.

Most patients receive six to twelve administrations. Where I was treated, they did them three times a week, MWF. The actual procedure has been... misrepresented. They hook you up with an IV and an EKG+EEG, and they put you under general anesthesia via the IV. While you're out, they give you a muscle relaxant. This is so your body doesn't convulse, except for, I'm told, your fingers and feet. They then deliver a certain brief shock between two points on the skull; there are variants that stimulate only one or both lobes. This triggers the seizure, which lasts approximately a minute. When the sensors show that your seizure is over, they simply wheel you to recovery to come out of sleep. Easy peasy.

It is regarded as very safe. It doesn't interact with medications and it is given to pregnant women in all trimesters. Its only real side effect is amnesia and, in my case, a kind of vacant fogginess. I had a little bit of retrograde and a lot of anterograde amnesia. Yes, the amnesia was weird—it grew unnerving enough that I stopped taking the treatments after two weeks, six of them.

ECT is effective: helps for about three quarters of patients. I think it helped me somewhat for some time, especially before my SSRI had had enough time to kick in, and it probably would have helped more had I stuck with it longer.

In the first comment to this post, I've linked to a TED talk with more info.

Archive: The Fight of My Life

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 20 September 2018.]

Update. To borrow from Wayne Coyne, the fight for my sanity has been the fight of my life. This is the first of a few posts about my recent experiences with mental illness. A lot has happened and I'll just tackle a piece of it at a time, starting here with a broad-brushstrokes timeline of the events.

Things got a lot worse after my last update. I was debilitated by daily traumatic flashbacks and painful physiological manifestations, especially in my digestive system. I didn't understand what was happening to me and I lost hope that this wasn't the new normal. It was around this point that a number of people saw me at Priceless. When Priceless ended I couldn't bear to go home, so I fled to the desert and wound up hospitalized with dehydration, where I realized complete defeat, rock bottom. So the next day I returned to SF and checked myself in to a hospital for depression.

Things started to stabilize in the refuge and simplicity of the hospital. My flashbacks reduced, though I was still constantly terrified of unknown triggers. I started working through my psychology reading list, and I have been learning a lot. I opted into electroconvulsive ("electroshock") therapy; AMA. The main side effect of ECT is amnesia, and I think it hit me harder than most people—there's a month or more that I only remember fragments of, and I still today don't feel like my memory is super reliable. I also resumed my SSRI.

The next few weeks were spent in my room with very little stimulation, trying to avoid triggers. Things varied a lot from day to day, with only a slight positive trend. The bad times kept my digestive system damaged enough that I went about a month without solid food. I think the SSRI must have kicked in, and in one special week I quickly made a leap of improvement. It felt like a bit of a crazy risk, but at the end of that week I drove myself out to the Burn alone in my RV. I parked in the burbs, and mostly avoided overexerting myself out there, even left early. One night, though, I leaned in, and I think I miraculously found some closure and cured my flashbacks. When I returned to SF, I made a "get back to life to-do list", and started ticking off items. I started handling some solid food again.

Which brings us to the present. I've never worked so hard for so long, never gotten so away far from myself while so depleted of resilience. I've learned so much and have so much learning left. After such an experience, I'm finding that I'm no longer who I was, and I'm only just getting to know this new person. For example, I'm now a bit more introverted, and my body feels like it lurched older. Holding on to all the lessons, finding the new path, laying down the new foundations, staying alert to the new lessons: all these tasks are large and daunting. I still feel like I'm standing on shaky legs. But I am standing. I now often (not always) feel less like a depressed person and more like a person with some known demons and plans to deal with them.

I'll wrap up by saying that I'm keeping media (social, news, or otherwise) to a bare minimum, and probably won't respond/react much to anything, but there will be more posts, and I am getting to a point where reaching me directly/privately should sorta work again. Especially, I'd like to flesh out the following topics soon: My gratitude for people who helped. A summary of ECT because people are probably curious. Several ideas in psychology that were important to me, especially some concerning trauma and abuse. My changing awareness of myself, and what things in my life I think I need to change in response, including my residence and my career.

Archive: The Call of Authenticity

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 14 May 2018.]

An update.

Since my post on my situation, I've been on the road more than not. It's been good for me. If it weren't for my desire to connect with people, and the availability of work, I'd almost certainly live most of my life out there.

The sure change has been from a position of fighting the feelings, trying to keep things marching on, to allowing myself to be a broken mess on the floor, and to seeing my suffering. I'm still just as broken, and I still grieve all day long, though letting that be the truth has reduced the desperation.

I've learned a lot of things in these travels, though there's a lot of filtering and disentangling to be done, and I'm still ignorant on some of the bigger points.

One thing I've learned is that a lack of self-care arose from something deeper, some failings of self-love. That was made possible by some failings of honesty, especially but not limited to with myself. I have suppressed my own Truth in so many ways. In response I'm trying to look inward, see myself as capable of beauty and deserving love, show compassion, believe I am worthy of taking up space, and recover trust and friendship with self.

Another is that I don't understand how not to accumulate pain. Living in a transactional world, treating people with differing levels of decency, takes a toll on me. In offering compassion for those I love, I take on some of their suffering. I have no hygienic practice, no form of digestion, to keep my life sustainable.

And another is that I've lost my way in terms of finding meaning in things. Occupations, at least technical problems, are only interesting for so long. Goals deter me (something I should think about). Experiences feel great, but like a drug you are always chasing the next. Human connection is deeply satisfying, until juxtaposed with my insecure tendency to doubt it's real. Learning and forming an understanding of the world endures, but without a way to project that understanding back out, it will mostly just go to the grave with me. For periods of time, I can sustain meaning in my past experiences and sufferings. It all doesn't add up to a system that sustains me.

One more comment, on the topic of human connection. When it works, it really works. Being seen is powerful. Your pictures in blue have meant the world to me. Seeing each other through hard times has brought Liz and me closer and surer than we have ever been. Thank you, all of you.

Archive: Fuck Depression

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 14 April 2018.]

TL;DR Fuck depression.

I'm taking a leave from my job, starting Thursday, for 2–4 months, not sure exactly. Afterwards, I will return to Plethora because I like it there.

I have found that my demons' power is magnified when they are allowed to fight in the dark, so I try to fight them out here in the light. My perfectionist leanings are mortified on so many levels right now. But I need to normalize talking about this shit.

I refer to my experience as depression. But it is a stubborn and intelligent adversary that contains multitudes, finding creative ways to evade the progress I make and mount new challenges. So sometimes it is outright depression, sometimes it is anxious or obsessive-compulsive, sometimes it feels like a cloak of Asperger's, and sometimes I just can't fucking deal. My mind feels like my own private Flanders Fields; I have watched the lines move from side to side so many times, the ruins of old trenches compounding like meander scars.

A term that echoes in me when I hear it is "high-functioning depression". Somehow I managed to make grades, pay bills, and achieve a few things here and there. My need to connect and be genuine has been strong enough to push through the anxiety. I have good days, good years even. Often I do well and badly in parallel. So asking me "How are you doing?" doesn't really make sense, and I'd probably just refuse to answer it if it didn't make me more difficult.

I have memory of being this way about as far back as I have memory at all. But somewhere around my postdoc years things eased up quite a lot. Divesting of my family gave me the upper hand. I managed fine through the divorce. I met Liz and we shared an unreasonably long honeymoon.

I had an episode in late 2014, while spending a semester in SF within my road trip. Was it a foreshock? Was it just being off SSRIs for several months? In early 2015 I scored some SSRIs by walking into Mexico, en route to moving to Tucson for a while, and the situation solved itself.

Half a year later I moved to SF for real and got a job. I've posted already about the difficulty in the time since: there have definitely been external reasons that anyone could point to. But most of those reasons have passed, and after much work I can't seem to find my restoration. I am still deep in emotional debt. Under these sustained conditions, the demons have had success reforming and consolidating a lot of power. They have established themselves. No matter what I do, I feel stuck with them. Of course I've grown steadily more wary of this outcome. I've dug ever deeper in search of the roots I'm trying to pull out, and time and again they have surprised me with their depth and stubbornness. At each new setback I felt another layer of failure was added, that I had let myself believe I was surmounting it, and, worse, misled others to believe it too.

Over the past few weeks, maybe months, I'm not sure, I've heard myself saying more and more frequently that I'm growing desperate, that I need to GTFO, that I need a hard reset. I need to get away from stimuli, from the city and my connections, so that in the quiet I might hear myself. So that's what I'm going to try. That is what this sabbatical is for.

If you and I have prior commitments over the next few months, I still intend to meet them, but I will avoid making new ones. I hope to go on walkabout—maybe in the Coast Ranges, maybe in the Great Basin. Not extremely far from the Bay because of said commitments, wanting to see Liz, etc. (I wouldn't mind some low-key company, a sidekick, sometimes. Let me know if you have time free.) When in town I'll mostly hide in plain sight, at my place and LL. I'll do my best to write. Some of that writing will be shared. I promise nothing more. I'll have to figure it out as I go.

If you're wanting to help, please know this. Translating my state into a description for you, or my needs into actionable instructions for you, is a tax on me. By all means, offer something, but please don't ask for an elaboration of how I am doing or why I think all this is, or for what I need. The offer, the You, is more important than it being the right offer. If it's not helpful I'm free to counteroffer or decline.

Archive: 2nd SFiversary

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 2 August 2017. It provides a good backdrop for the posts that follow, as I moved from bad to worse and then better.]

Today is my 2nd SFiversary. This is my retrospective.

Although I don't broadcast a lot about myself on FB these days, I've been thinking about writing this post for a while. Each draft has degenerated the same way: into a thicket of reasons and stories of my difficulties. Because these have been two very, very hard years for me. Don't get me wrong, I live a life of extreme privilege, and I've felt overwhelmed with gratitude at times. But wow, it's been a doozy. And if that's representative of my experience, then maybe I should write about it as such. So here goes.

An invisible reason for the difficulty has been adjusting to a new city. I had not done this before, not counting college. And I'm still quite ambivalent about SF itself, although the people I know here and the surrounding state are wonderful. My living situation has taken a while to figure out. At first I was at Langton Labs, which still feels like my home socially, but is too public a space for me and my possessions to live in. Then I moved to the hill above Noe, and although my house was nice, I felt isolated and I hated the neighborhood. More recently I've gotten my name on a rent-controlled lease in the Mission, and I'm finally happy with the situation.

(On this topic, I underestimated how much adjustment was needed moving from my motorhome back into a fixed dwelling—living in a house is surprisingly not just like riding a bike.)

A more obvious reason for difficulty has been adjusting to a new kind of career. I'm lucky that Plethora has been a great job. I still have much learning to do, and I don't feel as nimble as I used to be. Only now am I understanding the need to move among projects to keep my mind engaged. (To their credit, they've been trying to explain this to me for some time.) The constant rhythm, as opposed to the seasonal push of academia, has been hard. I never feel like I have enough rest. Working less, or more flexibly, will eventually be necessary.

An open question is my relationship to my old career. I feel more detached from number theory than ever. This includes my former colleagues, who were also friends. Surely I wasn't very strong at solving hard research problems, but I had other skills and I felt like my presence in the research community was valued. How to keep this from going to waste?

And there's my personal life. Because the details here affect other people, I'm of course going to be a bit cagey. The short story is that I've felt continuously in a state of triage, utterly incapable of being intentional about distributing my time and attention beyond immediate needs. If anything, I have erred on the side of trying new things and exploring the fringes of my social network, rather than faithfully maintaining my pre-existing bonds. This is clearly unsustainable, and I owe my friends better.

That's not to say that I have been completely uninvolved with the friends and community I already have. They have also had a very difficult time lately, the general opinion being that 2016 was the Worst Year, and I invested a lot in support where it was needed most. I've seen friends dealing with death, abuse, addiction, rape, public smearing, tormenting housemates, major heartbreak, and more. One of the reasons I've survived in this role is knowing where my boundaries are, being able to mix empathy with compartmentalization, but it's still been a tremendous drain.

There are also the inner aspects of my personal life. At some point during my road trip I realized that it was time for my identity to perform a molt, and I anticipated the opportunity for growth while my life was undergoing such changes. Around the end of my time in Boston I had gotten a handle on my family issues. It was clear to me that I had other issues from my upbringing, involving how I socially bond with people, how I share my love, what my persona is, what adulthood or manhood means to me, and so on. Discovering the next iteration of what is "right" for me as a person.

So I knew, as a rather explicit goal, that upon my arrival in SF I would be taking on greater social risks and processing the results. My conviction is unbroken in the belief that I must love those around me more bravely, more honestly, and more vulnerably. But I have utterly failed at estimating how hard this would be: issues are stubborn, and risks are frightening and sometimes painful. I honor people's boundaries as they are communicated to me, but often I feel frustrated that I have so much more to share. Sometimes that communication is lacking, and I fear crossing lines. In the most poignant case, I swear the lines were shifting on me, and eventually I had to be the person to walk away, feeling very deeply heartbroken. It would be easy to call these feelings a failure to keep clear lines between "romantic" and "not" in my life, but deep down that's never been the clearest distinction to me: I'm friends with people whom I admire, and it's hard not to be in love with someone you admire. The question, then, is how much to continue providing only what others want from me, or how much it can be acceptable to discuss if I want something more or different. I'm afraid of asking for what I want, less for fear of not getting it, and more because in my mind it is tied up with patriarchical behavior. I still avoid many behaviors or traits because they coincide with a notion of "maleness", even when this is an unhealthy overcorrection. I even still have difficulty emotionally bonding with most men and challenging this within myself has been very slow.

I feel like a motorcycle improvement project where the bike's been half disassembled, without a plan emerging for how to put it back together, but it's still the only mode of transit. My time management is crap, I have no cooking routine, I can only feel agency fleetingly, I've cast a uselessly wide social net, and I don't know what to commit my remaining life's work to. I remember wanting to write a "1st SFiversary" post, and feeling much the same way and postponing it because maybe I just had to wait and see a little longer. Another year in, here I still am.

Here is the brief part of the post that isn't complaint. What has kept me going is that I do feel loved by many wonderful people. The obvious hero is Elizabeth Raible, whose capacity for love and affection is limitless. One of my favorite things since moving to SF has been watching her thrive, and watching so many of my friends discover the joy of knowing her. More generally I'm grateful to the folks of LL for treating me as one of their own each day. Beyond that, I'm a hesitant to give specific shout-outs, for many insecure reasons that you can guess. If you have shared moments with me, I try to stay mindful and view each one as a gift, and I am grateful to you. I am inspired by how smart, caring, and creative yall are, and I want to pay forward all yall have done to make my life brighter.

I wish this could be a celebratory post, but life has been what would be, and I prefer to be honest. With no idea of where to go now (or who I am), I guess I'll just keep going. See you en route.

Claiming My Identity

A while back, I began reflecting on honesty as a core value of mine, and I began to express it by living more openly and vulnerably, both in my writings and in my life choices. Not long after, I was at rock bottom and was reconstructing my functioning from a very low level. I focused for hours a day, weeks turning into months, on the bare sensations and reactions within me. I didn't know at the time that these activities were preparing me to have a new ability: by attending to and honoring what is truly there inside me, I loosened the straightjacket of repression, and nutured my authentic self.

That is, when I wrote of honesty as a core value, I was not yet aware that it is more specifically authenticity that drives me. There is a deep, sturdy, powerful, and definite self inside me that is screaming to be represented through my actions. This self is something that the world has told me all my life that I cannot be, and that its choices are ones that I cannot make.

I have felt this way since the demands of masculinity first began to be imposed on me. The incongruity became disgust as the notion of masculinity grew more toxic and associated with domination. I always felt kinship with those whose survival, or access to basic love and connection, was predicated on the repudiation or persecution of their genuine selves. Even though I mostly see myself as cis-het, my heart has always been queer.

This self cannot sustain these repressions anymore and, like the moth finishing its incubation, it is emerging for better or worse and I cannot stop it. There are many nouns for this moment. It is an awakening, to the plain truth of myself. It is a return, home to the person I knew I was as a child. It is a coming out. It is a calling. Here goes.

If you ask me what I am, I will say: I am a skeptical hippie.

If you ask me what I do, I will say: I practice secular spiritual service.

I have spent most of my life constructing a reality in which these facts are not true. Saying publicly that I work in spirituality might be the most vulnerable thing I will ever do. I expect that it won't hit everyone with the power that it does me, because of course they don't know my story. In fact, I fully expect that plenty of readers will hold the prejudice that traumatized me and I will have to fight for acceptance. But it is who I am and I cannot repress it any longer, so I will start getting used to it.

Going further and saying this variant makes me even more uncomfortable: I am looking to make a living in secular spiritual service, and I ask your help in connecting me with sources of income.

On this blog, I go into detail about how I consider my work, for the sakes of clarification, normalization, and selling it.

What My Service is About

My basic roles

There are two.

Collaborative intentional meaning-making

My more visible task is helping my client learn, by doing, to make their meaning-making process more intentional.

Our unintentional meaning-making is pervasive and subversive, and we cannot stop doing it. Rather, one cultivates improved awareness and better-serving practices. I think of it as spiritual fitness, like physical fitness. These practices include:

  • Focusing on our basic sensations, be they physical, emotional, or more abstract.
  • Appreciating these sensations as themselves, and to describing them more genuinely using metaphor.
  • Producing and comparing ranges of meanings and interpretations for these sensations.
  • Making choices among the options.

Evoking authenticity

This task is more subtle, and harder. I invite the client to open up to me for an authentic, though professional, bond. Through the experience of this authentic connection, they may better find that authenticity in their selves and in their lives.

The underlying mechanism of forming this bond is my sincere belief in your best self. I wish to find that best self and make it belong: truly see it, get to know it, celebrate it, amplify it, support it, and set it free.

Connecting the authentic in you is the magic sauce. It gives your meaning-making an undercurrent feeling of being relevant and true. You start feeling like you're working with yourself rather than fighting an unknown adversary. The choices you make become elevated to commitments you keep.

Some attributes I bring

I'm good at making safe spaces. I radically believe in your right to your agency, and your knowing what is right for yourself. I am adverse to either side of domination/submission axes. I am a pacifist. I am compassionate. I celebrate the weird and I deeply identify with the oppressed.

I'm a good listener, good at "holding space". For those in less Californian circles, this means offering your full, steady, nonjudgemental attention. It means sitting with someone and everything they are experiencing, allowing yourself to feel it alongside them, and making all of it welcome.

I'm perceptive. I'm empathetic. I catch a lot of details. Just as the natural world reveals ever more beautiful subtlety as we observe it more closely, the human experience is rich and nuanced and layered. I'm not a one trick pony of communication. I hear words for their literal logical meaning, for their air of context, their tone of intent, and I see your body move under them with import.

I'm smart. As I listen I make sense of things, put them together. I see myself as a map-maker, fitting the patches of information into a quilt. I seek the story, the structure, or the kernel. I profess simple truths when they are powerful, and when they are not good enough I concede their shortcomings and reach for something more sophisticated. I dance between levels of abstraction: I appreciate both the big picture and the mire of details, and play them off each other. I use both the rigor of logic and the mystery of intuition.

I'm somewhat self-aware. Examples: I have lived under immense privilege. I am not done fighting my biases. My attention is as powerful as the Death Star's ray, and I must be careful where and how I point it. I am wrong constantly.

What's in it for me

I am a fiend for experiences of all kinds, but two things stand out as the most exquisite to behold: the beauty of the natural world and the complexity of the human mind. The moments when someone allows themself to be vulnerable with me and shares their genuine experience, when I have the opportunity to meet that gift with belonging, are some of my most precious.

For much of my life I pursued mathematics. It was a socially sanctioned outlet for my intellect, and I do genuinely love it. Over time, I became aware that I was not serving my purpose. My true self knows great sadness and suffering as well as triumph. I kept finding myself in a role of sharing that understanding and helping those around me. Eventually the truth became clear: the trench I belong in is with people's suffering, their uncertainty, and their disconnection. And I want to be valued and supported for doing that work.

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Traditions That Inform Me

I think of each spiritual tradition with its explanations and metaphors as providing a model rather than a truth. All models are wrong, but some are useful, and some are more useful than others. They have found better fit with the sample of human experience I have been exposed to. They have helped me and people I know more intentionally choose the meaning they make and live better lives. Here are some:

  • Therapy (various styles)
  • Relativism
  • Buddhism
  • Existentialism
  • Phenomenology
  • Coaching

I'd like to give shout-outs also to Empiricism and Humanism, with the proviso that I guard against their invalidation of inner experience.

In my view, by focusing only on frameworks one can miss the trees for the forest. The entirety of modes of contact with human experience is fair game for our minds to make meaning. They serve as entry points. I aim to be creative about which aspects of experience I might use to relate to people. That said, here are some I have used with myself and others, with varying degrees of dexterity:

  • meditation
  • narrative, storytelling
  • Focusing, IFS/Parts work, somatic awareness
  • embodied experience, yoga
  • artistic expression
  • practicing agency
  • sharing space

The Roots of True Self

I can't define true self, but I know it when I see it. It emerges from a tangle of connected concepts:

Belonging is a prerequisite need for safety. Belonging not only means to a group, or in a place, but also in the path of your life, or to the identity you find yourself inhabiting. It lies somewhere between connection and resonance. That resonant note when you belong, the feeling that where you see yourself aligns with you, is the ringing out of authenticity. Authenticity is something you feel in your bones, a mystical experience. It is something in you recognizing itself out there in your expression. Allowing authenticity to manifest requires vulnerability, because it exposes you to be seen and reacted to. Most of the time we reserve vulnerability for situations with high safety levels, but sometimes we summon courage and show it anyway.

Belonging, authenticity, vulnerability, safety: these live in feedback with our social and physical environments.

The world we are in tells us we are one thing; how does it align with what feels authentic to us? It offers us belonging conditionally, or not at all, and more likely shame or persecution. Being vulnerable gets us hurt more deeply, and our emotional scars can distance us from our own abilities to feel ouresleves authentically.

Or, sometimes we find that bubble within which we feel belonging. Where we are seen, even cherished, for what we are. Where our ability to be vulnerable is coaxed out safely. We experience the possibility of liberating secure attachment. The hallmarks of such a space are curiosity, play, and discovery.

By default, there are no promises that we are in conditions that align with our true selves, and we are considered lucky if we can find them. We can improve our living in this situation if we learn to make contact with these core experiences for ourselves. We clear a space within us where we will treat ourselves safely. We open up to vulnerability in this most protected place. We call forth what is authentic within us. And we offer it belonging. While I won't say that this will change the fact of your being trapped in a world that is truly hostile to you, what you can control is the space you reserve for yourself within your own mind.

My Life Purpose

In my coaching courses, as an exercise we wrote out life purpose statements. Here is mine:

To gather, synthesize, and share human experience.

Like I do, I packed the words with meaning and they need some elaboration. The gathering includes all the exposure and learning, through listening to people, traveling outside my bubble, consuming art, and giving due to my own experience. The synthesizing is making my own meaning, models, stories, trying to understand the richness and variety, to capture both the simplicity and the complexity. I'm still working on how the sharing plays out, but it partly means to express the prior two components in all the ways, compensating for the imperfectness of expression through doggedness and trial-and-error. Finally, I'm repetitive, but human experience aims to be as broadly construed as possible.

My performing spiritual service as a profession feeds all parts of this purpose. When my coaching courses asked me what the impact of my life purpose would (hopefully) be, I answered:

To help people belong to their being human and to see fully that they hold it in common.

Any instant our minds are receiving numerous signals and our attention is sifting them. Some signals are filtered due to the sheer complexity, and others are rejected because they are undesirable. We do not perceive visual artifacts, and we can go long periods tuning out our tinnitus. We live in denial of plain-sight truths, disassociate from sensations that are too intense, and work hard to keep parts of ourselves hidden even from ourselves. In short, our experiences are never fully integrated, and this is especially so when we live unintentionally.

When I lost my grip entirely, one of the things that helped me most was to become as open as possible of the entire range of what I was experiencing, to let it all in. As I learned to hold a compassion for my unique overwhelming combination of senses, I became able to accept that this was first and foremost what it was like to be human, that my uniqueness made me no different. My focus naturally softened and broadened, and what mattered less was my own suffering in detail, but that this was a process that had happened before and would happen again. It would give me a means of relating to other people, rather than further distinguishing or separating me.

I believe the most powerful, best form of social cohesion follows from our cultivating the ability to see and honor our commonality. I aim in my coaching to help people discover not only their own authentic selves, but how their authentic selves are relatable to everyone around them.

Claiming the S-Word

The S-word is spirituality.

What is spirituality?

Everyone uses the S-word differently, so I'll clarify.

To me, spirituality has two facets. One is the act of making meaning of things. We do this continuously—telling stories, devising models, naming truths. We do it unconsciously in our sensory perception, and often just as unconsciously in our egos spinning the tales of our identities and life stories and the fate of the universe, as well as consciously in our analytical activities. Everything we can experience is fair game. The most literal, rational among us who are not comfortable using the S-word, their science gives them a place in the universe and fills the role. The other aspect is mysticism, the feeling of nexus and connection and awe, the sublimation of boundary between self and other, the feeling of resonance of a truth deep in our bones, that special sympathetic sense that turns hypothetical meanings into living ones.

I do not believe in mind-over-matter. Our spiritual configuration does not change the world outside of our minds. Spirituality is purely an aspect of our cognitive function. I find there is enough present in secular spirituality to meet my needs without adding beliefs.

Why is spirituality important?

The fact that spirituality is merely a cognitive function is usually held in opposition to taking it seriously, especially in modernity. However, and I rarely say things of such sweeping generality, all of psychology affirms that it is just as real to our experience as our bare, measurable, physical sensations are. It even has the upper hand, as our physical sensations are all interpreted through it. The classic Buddhist example is that pain is a physical sensation, but suffering is a state of existence; it is our meaning of the pain, namely our rejection of it, that makes it suffering.

One cannot escape the role spirituality plays in our cognition and in our experience of life. I agree with Viktor Frankl that we go on living in our circumstances because we find meaning somewhere in them. I believe that our thriving is predicated not only on our circumstances but also on having a spirituality that functions well for them. In the context of human wellbeing, mocking spirituality, or even pretending it is unimportant, is like disrespecting biology. Like our biology, we can study the human experience, how we make meaning in it, and how we feel connection with that meaning. Unlike our biology, we cannot externally measure it. But that hasn't stopped millennia of humans from paying close attention and learning about it.

Why does a basic human function need claiming?

In short, because of its symbiosis with religion, but more specifically:

Because of woo

Meaning has a slippery way of becoming belief, and it filters and shapes our reality. Mysticism allows us to feel connection with the imaginary. Spirituality, in the sense of a cognitive activity divorced from belief, isn't allotted much space in our history.

Because of exploitation

The ability to shape meaning entails the ability to shape received reality. Stimulating mystical feelings transforms people. Because of these facts, spirituality is often bent towards purposes. There is the egotistic urge to see others play out according to one's own ideas, leading leads to gaslighting, cults, megalomania, demagoguery, political movements, etc. The self-enrichment motive also stands out.

What are you claiming it for?

I'd like to claim it as normal, healthy process. I want us do it, to attend to it, reason about it, discuss it, without shame.

Once it is normal, we can make an art of it. We can study it and try to get good at it, whatever that means. We can try on and compare models. We can broaden ourselves; namely, broaden the experiences we include in our lives. We can root out what isn't working for us and amplify what is. We can be intentional about it.

Don't people already do this?

They do all the time and in many ways. Intentional spiritual practices occur in many religions, in therapy and self-help, in self-love and self-care, in singing in the shower, in making priority lists, in feeling connection with others or with aspects of oneself.

Many instances are exempted from the skepticism and criticism because they have avoided connection with the S-word, even if they fit (my, say) definition. I'd like to bring them into the fold and discuss them as spirituality per se.

I don't see what the fuss is, why we need a word here, or I don't want to use that word.

Totally your call. Peace.

The Personal and the Universal

When I was learning basic political science in my youth I was taught that when political beliefs are sorted along an axis from conservative to liberal, the ends of the axis joined to form a circle. The most conservative systems are in effect indistinguishable from the most liberal ones, being plain old authoritarianism. (I'm not saying how to agree or not with this.)

Our experiences may be sorted along an axis from most personal to most universal, and my observarion is that this axis finds its extremes joined in a very similar way.

Theories of Mind

Some sketchy thoughts.

We observe causes and effects around us and infer models to understand them. Some things are simple, like gravity. Some things are still relatively simple, requiring small notions of state or process, such as a door being locked or not. Stateful objects vary upwards in complexity and eventually are not fully understood. (Examples: animals, especially people.) But it becomes clear, nonetheless, that these agents themselves maintain models of their environments that inform their behavior.

All of this is to say, we each possess a space of models for how other agents themselves model and respond to our environment. This space is our personal model of cognition, itself a model, which I call our theory of mind. This use might not be exactly the academic one; in my useage, I have a theory of mind that might overlap with but not be equal to your theory of mind.

One's theory of mind includes:

  • archetypes
  • parables
  • cultural expectations

One's theory of mind is a great unspoken substrate in how they conceive of human behavior and the potential for humanity. It determines our paradigm when:

  • observing individuals
  • functioning in relationships
  • making assumptions about social organization, econonimcs, government
  • deciding which elements of philosophy appeal to you

Something we do not address often is that theories of mind vary widely among people. The maximal theory of mind, the hypothetical map that covers all possible behaviors and explanations, is huge and each individual's theory covers some region inside this map.

The natural variations in theories of mind are an aspect of neurodiversity. This is partly because what we learn is connected to what we are able to sense clearly.

Which theory one employs can be better- or worse-suited to certain outcomes.

  • accuracy, with another specific individual or with a population
  • social cohesion, survival
  • the answers are in a feedback loop with others' theories and behaviors

And this theory can be changed; people can have their minds opened. Generally, exposing oneself to more motifs and paradigms can help. This is a role of literature and travel. It is also a role of some parts of psychology, including therapy, broadly construed. In fact, exposing ourselves to any human experience exposes to us a component of theory of mind that encapsulates that experience.

Experience

I've mentioned previously I am opening myself up to working with beliefs that are less rooted in emperical experience, and of a more intuitive origin. A representative example I have in mind is "qi" or "chakrasauce", notions of "energy within the body". I'd like to clarify what I mean by "working with" here.

On the one hand, I'm uncomfortable with people treating all beliefs or truths the same way, as if they are all the same kind of "real". Even our most genuine experience of some concepts does not cause them to be manifest outside of our own experience. And if they are not extrinsic, we must speak about them with conscious relativity. In fact when I say "uncomfortable" I actually mean "annoyed", because I consider the maintaining these distinctions, an awareness of your level of justified certainty, to be a key good habit of mental hygeine.

On the other hand, if we are clear about these things, we needn't let the subjective aspect of experience keep us from studying and discussing it. What arises when one tries to understand subjective experience is the philosophy of mind. In fact, the relativity itself is the source of perhaps a key issue of this inquiry: we are all so exquisitely unique, yet so much of the human experiene can be related and shared, so what are the common building blocks versus how do our particular lives fit these blocks together?

The philosophy of mind is the study of theories of mind, by which I mean models of minds. Consider: the notion of qi is a little bit of theory of mind that models some aspect of our experience that may be common to many of us, rather than an actual physical energy, and therefore is studyable as such.

Upfront, all models are wrong but some are useful. Namely, certain thought habits can be used to update the latent theory of mind that your brain is running as a biocomputer. Human nature seems to me to be that our brains all have potential for tremendous plasticity, yet we stubbornly resist change. This resistence punishes us, hence suffering, but we do it anyway because acceptance of our ignorance is terrifying. (This is obviously a variant of a core premise of Buddhism.) The ways we position ourselves along this axis explain a great deal of our social behaviors. Having a good philosophy of mind and working feedback mechanisms helps you as a social creature, improving your relationships with others and especially with yourself.

So it behooves me to be a student of experience, and doing that requires especially studying my own experience. The purpose of this blog is to help me document and share what I learn.

Something personal: my upbringing implanted in me accusations that any time I thought I had a good understanding of people and felt that's something people might value and cherish in me, it was only ever my indulging in a fit of pride, narcissism, or megalomania, and certainly insubbordination. Talking about what I do here and letting you judge me as you will is an extreme act of vulnerability for me. I hope you see in my actions that I respect everyone's responsibility to make their own meaning in their lives, I am only offering my experience to share and that my being honest and vulnerable is meant as an expression of my values.

Intended with that context, here's a bit of immodest honesty. A religion, with its stories, archetypes, opinions on human nature, and mores, is a packet of theory of mind. The intentional commitment to a theory of mind that is honest and useful is my proposal for empirical secular spiritual process. We gather our theories of mind from literally any source of stories: literature, therapy / self help, and improv leap to mind. I consider coaching to be one specific practice for putting such an understanding to a concrete use. And yes, this blog does have an aspect of advertising what I intend to be bringing to my clients no matter how my career evolves, and I think that is okay as long as I'm upfront about it.

Belief

All models are wrong, but some are useful. — George Box

Our minds develop models of the world around us.  Starting from our senses, they learn truths like matter, form, object permanence, cause and effect. They develop archetypes, stereotypes, and tropes. Models are the matter of meaning.

As part of being honest, I want to know how far the validity of these concepts extends.  This is why I have studied the physical sciences.  These practices are external to our minds and our senses, as they use measurement devices outside of our bodies.  The reason we do this is for objectivity, replicability, accuracy, etc.  And indeed, scientific measurement, by letting us peer deeper into the external truth than our senses, gives us some surprises.  We learn that most matter is empty space between subatomic particles, and that the emergent solid structure is only maintained by electromagnetic forces as electrons glue nuclei together.  Or that temperature is an emergent phenomenon of the statistics of individual kinetic energies.

The story often ends here: distrust our minds, and believe only what is externally verifiable.  This attitude is partially a response to the fact that when external observations contradict our senses, a great many people have difficulty viscerally admitting the science.  This is science digging in against our subjective impulses.

Also, we all have the capacity for an intuitive sense of personal harmony with a model, an explanation, or a claim, a part of ourselves that honestly holds a belief, without any requirement of logic nor facts on the ground. I believe that all belief arises this way, and the scientific belief is that which we filter for compatibility with empiricism. The unfiltered whole still occurs in all of us, and I have to admit this strange implication: we very honestly believe more than the empirically rooted, external truth. Science digging in against it often involves internal ignorance, invalidation, or shame for these other parts of ourselves.

Because we value science so strongly, it is hard to admit or even notice when we are hurting ourselves, so I understand if my going here feels icky. But learning this uncomfortable truth the hard way has changed my values significantly: every aspect of our human experience can affect whether life is worth living, and giving these parts of ourselves their due can make a real difference. When I don’t, I feel bad and eventually I get depressed.

I’ve responded to this by making a separation for myself: On the one hand, I have my choices, decision making, and actions. These I can still freely choose to accord or not with empiricism. I will try to keep my stubbornness about things tied pretty closely to the amount of evidence fit. On the other hand, I have my beliefs, meaning-making, and concerns. I get to allow a richer notion of “belief”, including degrees of belief (say, correlated with evidence fit) or maybe even distinct categories or annexes of belief that don’t get to contradict each other. I may honor all of them as representing authentic truth in my heart.

They might all be useful, too, when used with discretion. It’s not only that they allow you to treat yourself and life as more than a depressing numbers game. Understanding them allows you to debug your life, especially your emotional experience. And, more subtly, they are an aspect of your intuitive knowledge, and so learning to sense and attend to them improves your access to this powerful asset.

I hope this approach doesn’t lead me in directions that challenge my credibility in discerning fact from fiction. Maybe sometimes I’ll succeed at saving the baby from the bathwater of my intuitive life. This tension is the reason for this blog's title: The Skeptical Hippie.

Honesty

(This post was written a year and a half ago.)

A value that has been on my mind a lot lately is honesty.

Honesty means speaking and acting the truth.

One thing that I come to mean by "the truth" is: rooted in and compatible with all the available information.  You must know why you know things in order for them to be the truth.  Of course there is no ultimate, root truth, and if you successively ask "But why?" to your answers of why, you will hit dead ends.  But true things fit into a web of other provisionally true things, amounting to a coherent model of the world.  If the evidence does not hang together, then our truth is incomplete: something is positively wrong, or our model is insufficiently rich to accommodate it all.

As an essential piece of this, the truth requires updating.  All truth is provisional.  Be honest about all the available information.  I've found time and again that the simplest giveaway of the smarter people I know is not that they know everything, but that they understand the limits of their knowledge.  Without this good habit of mind, it is hard in practice update your truth.  With this practice, you become more correct and ... smarter.

Until recently I thought that that was the end of the story, but I have come to believe more.

Namely, I'm starting to believe that being honest requires authenticity, speaking from your heart.  Your own web of meanings and truths, that microcosm in which your belief can possibly take shape, is a big part of what makes it meaningful.  Your experience and identity are an essential component of your truth, and you invest that piece of yourself into it.  It's a very fuzzy statement to make.  I don't know how to be more precise.

I feel it each time I hesitate before speaking.  It is not just the exposure to having been wrong; it is the vulnerability of having my heart judged.  And I feel it each time I am rewarded for my earnestness: by whatever means, people perceive your honesty and they make themselves open to your truth when they do.

Ask yourself: Have you ever appreciated good acting?  Don't you tell yourself that the actor's performance tapped into some genuine emotion?

Honesty goes deeper.  Know your motivations, and their relationships to your beliefs.  Do you have a stake in believing something?  Would not believing it expose you to some risk, or would believing it gain you some advantage?  Honesty requires interrogating yourself deeply.

To sum up: I will try to live honestly—by the truth.  That truth must draw from and be consistent with all available information, the external reality, and be updated as a practice.  That truth must also come from my heart authentically and be meaningful to me.  To maintain this, I will continue to interrogate the world and interrogate myself with curiosity and scruples.