Elizabeth LaVier
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Morning Fruit
Late spring’s small peach
now it’s ripe, but you’re gone.
I hold it to my heart,
hesitant to pierce its soft skin.
It doesn’t matter who I am,
just that I love you.
This prompted me to try and have a conversation with self-loathing. It’s so easy to look away or get distracted or accept half-answers. But I stuck with it long enough to get this, which feels like it might be a piece of the puzzle:
the grey spiky monster (kind of an oversized chinchilla/porcupine hybrid) of my self-loathing is there to keep me safe by front-running any perceived threats to my intrinsic value/right to exist. It has been on this beat a long-a** time. According to it, I’ll be safer if I anticipate the worst possible judgments of others, thus allowing me to internalize and then change myself to accommodate them pre-emptively. This monster will not stand down unless it is assured that I will not cede my perception of my intrinsic worth to external parties or circumstances.
For those following along in the book, Susan’s words on page 29 (I think, I have the Kindle edition) really hit home for me: “When the teaching ‘your ego is the problem’ meets the Western psyche’s existing conviction that ‘you are the problem, you have to figure it out alone, good luck,’ we don’t get enlightenment. We get spiritually ill–a toxic cycle of self-improvement and self-hatred dressed up in dharma vocabulary.” Let’s stop doing that, together.
Thanks so much to all for your practice and your heartfelt comments (here and during the live class), and to Susan, Crystal, and OHP for this journey.
