Meetingwithpeace

I do not anticipate uniformity or perfection, curiosity is another word for warts and all.

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The shift from identifying with your Parts and their burdens to identifying as your Self and its broad care, compassion, curiosity and love.

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I hear you that you are tired and worn out. Is there a burden that you would like to put down? Is there something you would like me to know? Is there something I can do to assist you. If you would like I can be here with you where you are tired. What are you afraid will happen if you put your burden down?

These are conversations my Self has with my parts.

The responses of the parts are varied, and often lead to a pressure release and softening.

Language is strained and broken because we allow it to make money for anything at any time. These people made risks and sacrifices to make a true expression and within moments they were mocked and satirized. We have to value true expression when we see it. Even if we do not agree with it.

The first time we did this there was a sudden shifting perceptable to them what were breathing. What is going to happen when bunches and bunches of us breath? Peace. Heart Space Massage

Post-Efficiency and Politics
“And if you listen now
You might hear a new sound coming in
As an old one disappears
See the world in just one grain of sand”
-World Party

There are some mornings when I woke with the sun and in that tender half-light, even before I open my eyes I find myself thinking, "I already blew it, missed it, avoided it, I screwed this thing up, I am guilty." And then if no siren has come to carry me away, and it hasn't yet, I will have worked and been present all morning, chores and chores ahoy!, and sometimes think, "what did I do today?"
We live in a time of hyper-efficiency where politics, self, news, statistics and the algorithm land wave upon wave upon wave upon us so that our guards are as sweaty and strained as a palace soldier in a London heatwave. We wake feeling we let people down, must produce, and cannot keep failing and though we rise through the doubt, attach our battle armor and corrective lenses, although we even forget the pit we woke out of, understand it was mistake, that s**t is heavy and the effort taxing. It hangs out with us in the meat of our shoulders, squint of our eyes, chokeberry in our shoes, until we unlace the strings and bare the feet. Still, is that red spot a freckle, bruise, or sweet staining juice.
Daily dread isn't new but the pressure to be always performing at maximum efficiency has been intensifying since the industrial revolution, Henry fords assembly line, and digital commodification, its running somewhere like an exhaust fan or blinking like waiting cursor. If we are graphing data and we think about it like a football field, delineated by feet and yards, hyper-efficiency tries to dictate value in portions of an inch: yes/no in metric. Post-efficiency is both/and millimeters to miles. Hyper-efficiency drastically narrows what we view, value, and feel safe with, that which is not perceived as most efficient and productive must be cut out, cast aside, defunded, defended, shamed. It makes sense, parts of us are so strapped, so pushed, so tired that they feel un-capable of giving anymore space. Those parts deserve care and compassion. All parts do. Truth without compassion equals cruelty. Ours, today, is a politics of cruelty.
I hesitate to talk about politics in a newsletter because it throws our defenses up and our boundaries solidify, reflexively we access our senses of overwhelm and frustration– assumptions run free, often negatively, and there is not much room for maneuvering.
The constant prater of political outrage is central to our current media and our repulsion with this strain of politics is part of the design of hyper-efficiency. To take an Asian medicine point of view, a system that is overwhelmed can not as effectively fight off illness and strain. So politics sit like a soreness or the flu in our bodies. We feel we cannot negotiate the whole of the illness and so we cast it aside, while the next headline, shiver and chill roles over us.
And so I offer the word politics with a suggestion of being slow and soft with ourselves. Maybe we can’t deal with all this right now, but we can try. We can sit.
In situations of stress or pain when lenses become entrenched and repetitive they fatigue and begin to complain, it is true of muscles, emotions, stress, and energy. But our internal and external responses are not set in stone, we have so many parts or lenses through which we view our lives, the parent, co-work, teacher, boss, mentor, adversary, child, administrator, athlete, slouch, student, noting what part is leading or what lens we are looking through helps find perspective and helps to sit with difficulty. What if we invite another lens to slide in place of overwhelm, another part to drive the bus, curiosity, sympathy, compassion, confidence– we cannot choose the outcome but what if we understand we can choose the parts we engage with, admit the parts (we perhaps unintentionally) lead with, and allow those parts which served us well to rest knowing we have other competent lenses that also work.
When you see the word “politics” what lens pop forth, how does your attitude shift, do we meet our tension with an administrator, whisking it away, an adversary to be held at arms length, what if we tried to engage the negatives of politics with a nurse, mentor, parent or friend. A type of safety is thinking, “Oh my f**k I can’t do this.” and pausing and thinking, “I can sit with this.”
We may not be able to fix this entrenched global political crisis today, “but we can try” Iris says. And we can sit with, listen, give care, to our own bruised political muscles.
I asked a woman the other day, “maybe you can ask what is your muscle mad about?”
“I know what it is mad about.” she said, and I could see list of fatigue and soreness and not enough exercise floating out of her head.
“There is a difference between knowing why something is angry and listening as they tell you.”
Love dictates that we might have to listen over and over and over as difficult and impossible as that may seem, as much like our breath it might repeat.
Violence is hyper-efficiency in action. In conflict the shortest line between my anger and your heart is violence. Violence by the state is intentional hyper-efficiency that says peace takes too long and pain should be the end result of you. The state that goes to war with its enemies is already at war with its population. The Hyper-Efficient state calculates the cost of enemies and peoples the same way, as expense.
Post-efficiency says, “No.”
“No.” is a complete sentence. As complete a sentence as your breath.
Your breath begins at the edge of the distant universe converges into the smallest capillaries of your little toe and expands all the way back out past Mars. My hat hangs at 6500 University ave, suite 203, Windsor Heights, Iowa, The USA, North America, The America’s, Earth, Milky Ways, The Universe. I live at my breath.
If we are in a hyper-efficient time, the next one can be post-efficient. These are not new thoughts, like the paper lining a parrots cage or sparked to start a fire, peace and pacifism, Post-efficiency is a constant thread in our lives.
“Pacifism can never work.” I’ve heard tell.
“It is playing out very loudly at this very moment.” Is my reply. “We are not talking here and now without it.”
When we shift our lens and bring attention to a moment we can better gage the valuation we are using.
Hyper-efficiency says, “My God you have work to be doing! Productivity to be producing.”
The Post-efficient response is, “So I have, and so I have time, so I have chore, so I have play, so I have art, so I have craft, so I have work, so may I run, and so in the center I may sit.”
Hyper-efficiency demands, “Prove your right to be here!”
Post-efficiency says, “So here I am.”
In the parking lot it is the cracks and crevices, the potholes and micro-habitats where possibility and beauty and understanding lie. Post-efficiency begins when we allow for other moments of safety. It matters not if a dandelion is grouped as a flower, plant or w**d. It matters that kids love them, pop their heads off and they bring me joy. It is groovy if they do not bring you joy, if you want to get rid of dandelions and that creep Charlie. The hyper-efficient way with chemicals and round-up is painful to us all. The post-efficient way, on our soggy knees popping out their roots has properties to recommend it. It is not my role, my job, nor my inclination to critique you. I do think it is my duty to offer a 2nd excuse, a parallax point of view. So I offer a Manly Hopkins: “What would the world be once bereft/ Of wet and of wildness/ Let them be left/ Oh let them be left, wildness and wet/ Long live the w**ds and the wilderness yet.”

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Distress Tolerance helps meeting with peace.