It’s not easy to drop your feelings, opinions and ideas so you can really hear what another person has to say, where they may be coming from, or how they’re seeing and experiencing things. This is never more true than in the context of an argument. When we feel attacked, it’s perfectly natural to go into defense mode, but most of the time, no one is attacking us and deep listening can’t happen if you’re in “fight or flight” mode. People may see things differently, but if you’re in a close relationship with someone, it’s unlikely they want to go for your jugular (and if they do, you’re probably with someone who needs help figuring out how to manage their anger).
We all want to be known, seen and understood. It’s beautiful when you allow yourself to open to another person, but the more you do that, the more you have to be willing to be vulnerable and that requires trust. When you have the feeling that someone is really seeing you, and suddenly that same person seems to be misunderstanding you, it can feel like a betrayal. Sometimes we have embarrassment or unease because some of our flaws slipped out and now this person who had this image of us may be seeing something we don’t want them to see, or something we’d rather not see ourselves. There are all kinds of reasons a person gets defensive, or shuts down, or runs for the door. Often it feels safer to dig our heels in and defend our position, to “win” the fight. If you’re trying to get close to someone, though, and if you want to be seen, it’s not a fight and this isn’t your opponent. A person is either going to love and accept you with all your flaws and absurdity, or they aren’t. You can only be known if you allow yourself to be known. Most people are not going to be able to read your mind and if you’re only willing to show the shiny, status update, perfect picture version of yourself, that instagram glow, the 140-character gem that you thought of while walking your dog, then you’ll never really be seen because we’re all complex and we all make mistakes, and we all have choices we wish we could make over again and differently.
People dig their heels in when they’re attempting to hide or to hold on. Or the level of reactivity is high. That’s one of the main things a consistent yoga practice addresses and encourages — the ability to sit with intense sensation, calmly. A burning feeling in your quadriceps is not all that different than a burning feeling in your heart, like rage. It’s a temporary sensation, and if you can open to it and examine it, it will open you and strengthen you, and teach you something about yourself. If you fly off the handle every time you feel something intense, you deny yourself those opportunities to become more aware, more accountable, and more able to trust yourself.
Of course there are legitimate times when you’ll disagree with someone, or see things in a completely different way, but if you really want to know the people in your life, it’s so useful if you can learn to listen deeply. Open to it even if it’s something you don’t want to hear or accept. Maybe this person is attempting to show you something essential about who they are, or where they are on their path. Maybe you’re going to discover a new way of thinking about something. It’s possible you’re going to realize there’s some fundamental philosophical difference that you’re not going to be able to get past, but there’s no point in denying someone else’s reality, even if you disagree with it. You might as well open your heart and your mind to their point of view. Maybe you’ll go back to your own, and maybe something will shift for you, but real listening is not the same as waiting for your turn to speak and being right is not nearly as satisfying as being seen.
Wishing you love, and the power to pause, breathe, and listen,
Ally Hamilton
Sometimes people go through experiences that lead to questions like, “What’s the point of it all?” Most people asking this kind of question have faced desperate situations. There are people coming out of physical, emotional or sexual abuse. People who’ve endured the kind of loss that makes you weep if your heart is open and you allow yourself to stand in their shoes for just a moment. Sometimes the pain is really old; I have a friend who watched his father die of a heart attack when he was eight. That will never be okay. My cousin lost his six year old son to brain tumors, and my cousin is one of the best and kindest people I’ve ever known, and so is his wife. I know a woman who drove her daughter to the school bus and watched her get hit by a car as she crossed the street. The parents in Newtown Connecticut who are still suffering and still trying to put their lives back together in some kind of way so they can get through today and tackle it the same way tomorrow. I don’t think everything happens for a reason, or that everything happens for you and not to you. I think some things just happen, end of sentence. I think all kinds of things happen. I know how much we want things to make sense, but some things fall so outside the lines of sense, sense is just an idea. Things happen, and then there’s the way you rise up in the face of the things that happen, and you may be able to grow beauty out of your pain at some point, but it will probably be the kind of beauty and understanding you’d gladly give back to undo the thing that happened.
Sometimes I get emails from people who’ve been through the kind of loss that makes it hard to get up in the morning; the kind where you open your eyes and it all comes crashing back and you just want to disappear, go back to sleep and go back in time and not live in the current reality with its crushing pain and lack of light or hope. Without your effort, without even an inhale to power them, the tears just stream from your eyes, and even that feels like too much life. Everything becomes an effort, to breathe in and breathe out, to find a reason to get in the shower, eat, put one foot in front of the other. The kind of loss that makes you question everything and think, “No. Not this. This I can’t do.” Those are the emails that break my heart, and they’d break yours, too. Because the absolute truth is, sometimes horrendous things happen to very good people.
If you find yourself chasing after someone who isn’t making time for you, isn’t treating you well, or seems to be on the fence about diving in or taking off, listen up. When we aren’t loving ourselves, it’s hard to imagine why anyone else would love us, either. If, at your very core, you doubt whether you are truly lovable, you’re going to be susceptible to people who don’t seem overly interested in being your friend or your lover because that tiny part of you that worries you may not be enough will want to conquer the people who are reflecting that doubt back to you. If you can convince them, maybe you can convince yourself. Except it doesn’t work that way. We all want to heal, and we all want to feel worthy of love, but you can’t chase that down. You’ll never find the satisfaction you’re looking for in another person, because that need is too big, that hole is too deep. You’ll drive people away if you look to them to solve that for you. It’s like getting to know someone and asking them right away to please carry a huge elephant around for you. The weight is crushing, and the burden is too much to bear.
We do this all the time: we think we have something down, we believe we’ve explored or experienced all there is to know about a person or a place and we stop paying attention. Did you know most car accidents happen within 25 miles of a person’s house? The theory is that people go into relaxation mode. They know the streets like the back of their hands, and the brain goes on auto-pilot. Then something unforeseen happens, like the weather changes unpredictably, or another driver isn’t paying attention, and BAM. Some variation of this happens in over fifty percent of marriages, too. Or at least, over fifty percent end in divorce, and my guess is this is a big reason why. People take each other for granted in one way or another, start to believe they have their spouse’s number down, and there’s no need to really look anymore. No need to pay attention. Your partner goes out into the world every day and is seen and encountered for the first time by countless people. If you’re currently in a relationship, do you remember the first time you saw the person with whom you share your life? Do you remember the first few weeks, few months, first year? That time when you thought, “This person is so amazing. So kind and thoughtful, funny and bright. So much fun. I can’t believe how lucky I am”? I don’t know what little thoughtful things you did in the beginning, but I bet they were sweet.
I’ve had emails from half a dozen people over the last few days who are struggling to end relationships they know are not healthy. Knowing what you need to do and doing what you need to do are two different things. One requires awareness, the other demands action and we’re not always ready or able to act on our own behalf.
When my son was about two years old, I began going to the Mommy and Me parenting group at his preschool. We met once a week to talk about child-rearing issues, but in actuality they turned out to be mostly mom issues. One woman was having a very tough time with her son in the mornings. He wanted to pick out his own clothes, and when she resisted he’d throw himself on the floor and scream until he was blue. It had been going on for months, and by the time she basically sat on him and got him dressed in the clothes she’d picked out he was exhausted and angry and wouldn’t eat breakfast, he’d throw it at the walls. Then she’d have to wrestle him into his car-seat, and once they were at school, he’d beg her not to leave. So she was pretty beaten down and most of the time she’d arrive with some kind of food in her hair. Banana, or eggs.
If you’re involved in a relationship that’s crushing you, you already know it isn’t sustainable. If someone is treating you badly, you have to get out, or you’re going to die. I don’t mean literally, though there are too many cases where physical violence is a real issue, but I mean your light will go out. Without that light, that spark, that intuition, life becomes very dark indeed and it’s nearly impossible to know which way to turn.
So many times in life we search for answers, look for ways to predict the future, understand the past, or ask for signs about which way to turn now. It’s perfectly natural to want some stability, to want to know there’s a point to all this, to want to feel that your past had a purpose and that your future has one, too.
Yesterday I received an email from a guy who really likes this woman. “Likes” is an understatement. They’ve been dating for a couple of months, but he thinks he’s crazier about her than she is about him so he’s playing it cool. Not calling or texting too much, not expressing the depth of his feelings, just kind of going along, acting casually and agonizing when he’s by himself. Would she come forward more if he did? If he tells her how he feels will she run? If he doesn’t, will he lose her? Does he measure up to the picture she has in her head of the kind of guy she wants to be with?
Even after I fell in love with yoga and watched it transform my life, I thought I’d never teach. “I can’t teach, I have a huge fear of speaking in public,” I’d tell myself and anyone else who thought to suggest such a thing. I did have a huge fear about it, but I held on to this idea of myself and my limitations so tightly it strangled me. It made me unable to see the possibility of something else, and if I hadn’t been put in a situation where I felt I needed to sub a class for a teacher who didn’t show up one day, I probably never would have realized I could do it. Our ideas about ourselves are powerful, they shape our lives. They encourage us or they crush us. When you start to tap into what your gifts may be, they pull on your heart like the moon pulls on the ocean. It breaks my heart to think so many people stop themselves from just opening to that pull because a loud voice inside is saying, “You can’t.”
I get emails from grown adults with children of their own who are still blaming their parents for who they are. I get emails from people who are entrenched in a battle with a family member and from those who cannot forgive a former partner. The more you dig your heels in and cling to your opinions, your version of events, your list of ways you’ve been wronged, the less chance there is to let some love in and to shine some light on your own participation and what it is you brought to the equation that led to a painful outcome. We always bring something to any situation, even if that something is our inability to stand up for ourselves, to value ourselves or to put an end to abusive treatment (assuming you weren’t a child at the time — in which case your work is simply to heal, not that it’s easy).
Yesterday my six year old son asked me if I knew about the “walking palm trees of the rain-forest.” He told me that these trees were able to “move their roots” if they saw a spot that looked better to them. I told him that was incredibly cool, and that I did not know about these trees. Of course, I had to go Google it, because palm trees walking around the rain-forest seems like something I’d have heard about somewhere along the way. So it turns out the Socratea exorrhiza, or, “Walking Palm” is native to tropical Central and South America, and it has stilt roots that allow it to grow in swampy areas of forest. Some people think their roots exist as an adaptation to flooding, and others believe the roots allow the palm to “walk away” if another tree falls on the seedling and knocks it over. If this happens, the palm produces new vertical stilt roots and rights itself, the original roots rotting away.
A few weeks ago, someone messaged me on the fan page and said he was going to end his life. I can’t really explain the panic I felt, especially because his message was a few hours old by the time I saw it. He shared some details of his life over the last few years and why he’d come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t worth it. He’d suffered some devastating losses, enough that it was understandable he felt hopeless and defeated. I wrote back immediately and gave him the Suicide Prevention Hotline number (800-273-8255), my number, and also contact information for three therapists I know and trust. I begged him to write back and let me know he’d received my message and also told him there have been times in my life when I’ve felt like giving up, too. Not for many, many years, but I certainly entertained those thoughts at one time in my life. When things feel so dark you really can’t think of a reason to lift your head off your pillow, the thought, “What’s the point of it all?” is natural and understandable.
Sometimes life can be brutally painful. We lose someone we love beyond our ability to put it in words, way too soon. Loss like that is violent and shocking, even if it happens slowly. Or we have our hearts broken in a relationship, sometimes over and over again by the same person. If betrayal is in the mix, it’s even more painful. Or we lose a job we really loved or wanted. Or we simply can’t seem to get any traction going in any direction in life, with relationships or work, or even with how to be in this world. Maybe there’s an abusive background. A family of origin with addiction issues. A history of broken promises, emotional or physical violence. You get the picture.
Yesterday I posted about lies, deceit and betrayal and as I expected, it stirred up a lot of feeling in people. Today’s post is focused on marriage, divorce, and children because I got a flood of emails from people related to this topic. It seems many people are in relationships that aren’t growing anymore. We could talk about that quite a lot. How is it that our divorce rate is so high? It’s over half of all marriages that fail now and I believe a large part of it is cultural. We’re taught to keep looking for bigger, better, newer, shinier. So much of what we value is external. A lot of the time, we aren’t looking at the gifts right in front of us.
Last night in class I ended up with a roomful of people who had clearly been doing yoga for a long time. When we got to the first Warrior I, I said, “You all look like you’ve done this pose a million times, but you’ve never done it before in this moment. Don’t take it for granted, because that’s how people end up divorced.” Everyone laughed, but I was serious. (Not that I minded the laughter one bit). It’s so easy to think, “I know this person. I have their number down,” and stop paying attention. Stop learning and listening and being open to the evolution of the person next to you on your path. As if they’re frozen in time. As if there hasn’t been any growth or change since they said, “I do.”
I’ve had two weddings, but only one marriage. My first wedding was to a man who kept the antique mirror I (painstakingly) had restored when I was nineteen years old, the one that belonged to my grandma whom I adored and lost long before I met him, and who also kept the vintage diamond necklace that belonged to my great-aunt, which I’ll never be able to pass along to my daughter. I call him Mirror Guy. I didn’t love him and I can’t tell you what I was doing with him because it feels like another lifetime and because I was in a fog fueled by outrageously painful migraines, percocet and a stubborn desire to cling to stories that didn’t serve me, to blame my parents and my childhood for my brokenness, and a general sense that I had no clue what I was doing here. I was coming off of some of the darkest times of my life and I was very young and totally lost. I’d been in that damaging victim mentality for too many years, blaming other people for my poor choices and behavior, numbing out, denying, running. I wasn’t an awful person or anything, I’ve always been kind, I was just a bit of a mess.
Endings are hard, especially endings between people. I’ve never had an easy time with them; I must have missed the day when they taught “clean break.” Whether it’s a relationship, a job, or a way of being that needs to come to an end, loss is not easy. Soul-searching is important if you’re thinking about making big changes especially when other people will be affected, but there are certain times it’s just clear that change is coming and needed. A friendship is not what you thought it was, your boss is abusive, your landlord goes through your underwear drawer when you aren’t home — time for a change! Everything living grows, blossoms, peaks, and dies and something else is birthed. Resisting that reality is futile, you may as well head to the ocean and try to hold back the waves. This doesn’t mean all relationships die, it means we must be willing to shift and grow together and also accept that sometimes we’ll grow apart.
If a person is crazy about you, you’re going to know, it’s not going to be a mystery. I get emails from people every day who ask about various situations they’re in. This guy barely calls. This girl doesn’t make a lot of time for the relationship. This person is probably seeing other people. This one is separated or divorced, but still hanging on to their ex. This one used to like me, but I didn’t like her and now I do and she doesn’t. I like this woman but she likes other women. I have a huge crush on this guy but he’s gay. Or married to my sister. Or dating my best friend. I like this woman but she has a boyfriend, but really she’s in love with me she just can’t hurt the other guy’s feelings. We used to go out and now we’re both dating other people, but last week we fell into bed and now it’s a mess. I like this girl but my family doesn’t. I like this guy but I’m too scared to tell him. I went out with this guy and it was amazing, but I never heard from him so now I stalk him, but just a little. Mostly on Facebook. Okay, sometimes I sit across the street from his house. He may have gotten a restraining order. But I’m pretty sure he’s gonna come around.
Last week I received an email from a colleague. It was pedantic and rude, written by someone so arrogant he didn’t even realize how offensive he was being. I have a strong feeling it’s not an email he would have sent to a male colleague, but I could be wrong on that; it’s possible he talks down to everyone regardless of gender.
If you follow this blog, you may remember the much older man I dated during college. When that all fell apart it was awful, and it took me over a year to get back on my feet. Closer to two, really. It would have been great if I’d taken some time to heal, but instead I ran head-long into another disaster. Rebounds rarely go well, but I hadn’t figured that out yet.
If you’re not lit up from the inside over the way you’re spending your time, then it’s likely you haven’t found your purpose yet, you haven’t found a way to pursue it, or you’re so focused on the results you’re missing the beauty in the journey. These are not easy things to do growing up in a society where we are fed constant messages that happiness lies in external stuff, like a big house or a fast car or an amazing wardrobe, the “perfect” body, or that right person who’s going to show up and “complete” us (that would be you). We are taught that in order to live the good life, we need money, and lots of it. That sets many people off on a path that has nothing to do with their passion. I’ve met countless people over the years who went to law school or medical school because that’s what everyone does in their families. If you look around, and all your friends are in a race for the golden ring (not realizing they’re on a merry-go-round), it can seem normal.
