The deepest reason that many of us train, underneath whatever goals and visions motivate us, is to become our best selves. Everything in life, whether we purposely throw ourselves into it or whether it shows up on our path, provides us with certain training opportunities. Every challenge we face asks us the basic question of “Who do I want to be?”
We are both products of and creators of our society. When we are not who we want to be, we can identify areas where we are deficient, unlearn old patterns, and learn new ones. As far as I can tell, this process never ends and we seem to be works in progress until the day we die. Perhaps this is the very point of life itself. One thing I’ve learned from training is that to make solid progress that will have lasting effect we must strive to work from a place of reality. Unfortunately, reality is often the most terrifying thing we can possibly examine, particularly when it comes to areas where we may feel ashamed or areas that may have disastrous civilization-ending consequences. It doesn’t help us to pretend that we have certain qualities or wisdom that we haven’t actually developed yet or hide behind superficial gestures to feel good about ourselves. I’ve been guilty of doing this plenty of times. I eventually realized that self-delusion and denial are losing strategies and that shallowness is probably the greatest inhibitor to real change. Although I have generally avoided looking inside, I am really glad that I developed some training practices in my life to build pain tolerance, build fear tolerance, and to reconnect with nature. I find that this assists when looking deeper into the things I am afraid to see.
It’s been a very difficult week as a privileged white man to examine certain realities in our country that I had been tuning out. I have clearly been benefiting from an unjust system of racial oppression. Growing up in Boulder, Colorado (which is practically as white and privileged as you can get) it’s easy to look the other way and it’s difficult to learn about race or underprivilege in a deep or personally meaningful way. The scary truth is that I have much to unlearn and learn in order to become a member of a just and compassionate society.
I realize that I don’t really have a set of healthy beliefs about equality as a general matter and despite having been educated as a lawyer I didn't learn much about justice. I learned to compete, obey the rules without deeply challenging them, and “succeed” according to a certain arbitrary set of standards. I never tried to be equal; I thought my job was to try to stand out. In law school I learned to manipulate fuzzy rules and tell stories within a winner/loser system. I don't remember deep explorations of justice. In the corporate world, I didn’t learn about equality or justice either; I remember learning mostly about job skills, compliance, hierarchy and ruthless competition for money.
The thing that gives me hope is that I hated all of it. I hated the pressure that I felt to stay on the beaten path and impress and compete in the various games of life. That way of life felt empty, lonely, pointless, and even destructive to me and I wanted to be free. I’ve made some progress in dealing with the pride and shame that trapped me in competitive behaviors and dealing with the fear of just being myself that kept me trapped playing games I didn't want to play. It might be a bit of a never ending process but it feels healthy. Now it looks like I’m also going to need to learn many new patterns of thinking about human community, race, justice, listening, and sharing in order to be part of a society that can function in a healthy way. This is pretty daunting.
It is really clear to me that I have a great deal to learn about compassion. That doesn’t come easily for me because I have difficulty feeling things to begin with. I am prone to feeling numb and avoiding feelings that I don’t want to feel. I didn’t start addressing this until a couple years ago when I discovered it was unhealthy and that there’s a better way. What I have learned is that accepting and processing difficult feelings and difficult realities about ourselves improves with practice significantly faster than things like physical stamina and muscle strength. After many decades of resisting difficult emotions, it’s been a real eye opener for me to realize how quickly we can clear them from our systems and learn from them when we just allow ourselves to sit with them. This is really liberating and has freed up a lot more space to explore beyond my own rattling obsessions.
It’s painful to confront American reality right now and I see it as a good thing. We can’t fight reality forever and pain is a necessary step in training and transformation. It looks like it’s time to really listen, learn about community and race, feel and process a LOT of pain, and open ourselves to deeper changes.
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