to deal with ghosts of the past!

Had a chat with a few colleagues and friends this evening.  The chat was intended towards finding an arrangement for a business proposition, but before that it was focused towards looking at the emotional tonality lying around.  What came about were the past hurts, reactivity and mistrust that were lying around, willingness to bring in some clarity about the way forward and some new resolutions.

This process evoked many things in me .... some relief, some clarity, some resolution, some understanding of where others are located in their mind, and some emotional turmoil with a certain intensity.  I chose to not engage in an emotional drama but to engage with the process of clarifying and understanding what was happening and what issue belongs to who or to what context.  I also acknowledged that while I had a greater intellectual clarity, I have to let the emotional turmoil take its time to settle down, and find a new level of balance within myself.

At the end of it all, it has left me with a sense of internal control that I may not have experienced earlier.  What threw me off balance internally were the past ghosts of perception about me by others.  These ghosts don't need too much time to jump up from their dark shadowy corners to jump at me, crowd around and fill me with their whispering bitter voices that say " see this is what others think of you ... we told you so, how dare she/he ... blah, blah, blah ...

Usually there are two unsuccessful ways I deal with these ghosts.  One is to listen to them and allow them to overpower me with bitternes, remorse, anger and reactivity; the second is to tell them to go away and then tell myself that they don't exist, but simultaneously keeping a small voice alive inside which whispers:"may be some of what these ghosts bring are true.  is it true?  can it be so?" and so on and so forth.

today I decided to do neither.  I listened to the ghosts and asked them stand aside and did not shut the door on them;  I also listened to the other voice of the critique which usually commands me to get on with life, to move on, to not make an issue out of anything; I asked it too to stand aside.  I then became my spokesperson who was compassionate to both how I was feeling emotionally and understanding and accepting what my rationality was telling me.  I also looked around - these people were my friends and colleagues - they were not my enemies - they were expressing their deep sense of anguish and hurt and disappointment and anger over something that happened to them and it involved me to an extent.  Could I understand and grace that?  Yes, I could.

Could I also grace my frazzled emotional state rather than telling it to shut up and critique it?  I did.  I felt what I was feeling, did not hide it, neither did I let it take over the entire reality and paint it only with its intense emotional tonality.

Then I spoke to my friends telling them how I understood what they had felt and went through.  At the same time, there was an intensity of feeling that I had and tht I needed time to let it take its course, take time and settle down.  That I did not intend to let the feeling dictate my action, nor did I allow my dry logical critical self override my emotional self.  I accepted and graced both and I felt good towards myself.

I am writing this post to also put this out in the open to all of you as this process helps me to reach out to others without filtering or without shame.  

I would love to hear about your experience; do you encounter old ghosts?  What do they tell you?  What is your relationship with them?

How do you deal with them?

 

 

 

Being Female!

I was quite stirred by an article called “Unwanted daughters” by Harsh Mander in the Hindu Sunday Magazine dated 29^th August, 2010  on a major recent study done on female feticide in India by Action Aid India and International Development Research Centre, Canada. 

The article among  disturbing facts like methods of killing the female child, neglect, illegal connivances of doctors and nurses, etc also talks about some interesting explanations cited up by the study that they believe perpetuate this evil norms in India.  The explanations talk about the paradox that how some of the progressive policies of the Government such as inheritance rights for women, higher age for marriage, etc make them much more of an economic burden to the families as further expenditure on the girl and any property owned by them would only benefit the husband’s family after marriage as also that the woman’s physical capabilities like child bearing, productive abilities, caring abilities become the property of the husband’s household.  Hence the article goes on to say that the female feticide is taking place  more out of economic and material reasons rather than a desire for make child over female ones. 

The articl  then goes on to suggest as to how only through long term social reforms such as society changing their view of women, parents willing to live with their daughters in the old age, stoppage of dowry and other practices and enhancing the social and economic power of women within families can bring about any changes in this most heinous  and inhuman practices in our society. It also brought the fact to the fore that some of urban areas and the educated class are also very much part of the female feticide trend. 

After I read the article, I was with two contradictory emotions, one was of understanding and some empathy for the families who were killing their female infants (understanding and empathy would not tantamount to supporting them) and the other was a slight hopelessness and shame as to whether our society will ever be able to look at itself differently and even if it does, how will it take for us to bring any changes in these customs and how aware are we, the so called educated and progressive part of the society which has at least in paper, the capacity to influence positive social reforms through activism, practice and awareness. 

While pondering over these, I also thought another incident that I was a part of in the recent past. 

I was working with a multinational organisation where large number of men and women work together.  The group that I worked with had the following demographic data: their average age is between 25 to 35, average education qualification ranges from postgraduate to MBA from prestigious institutions, most of them come from middle or upper middle class, most of them live in metros and have lived there for most of their lives, their take home salaries range between Rs. 15 to 30 lacs per annum.   The group had about forty percent women and sixty percent men. 

While working with this group, a particular narrative triggered off a question for them to explore the psychological status given to femininity in the organisation and we suggested that perhaps the status given to females and femininity in the minds of people (both men and women) were lower than the masculine traits and qualities.  This created a furore in the group and many of them, especially some women were outraged that we could even hint at a possibility like this in their organisation context, while some others agreed with the hypothesis.  

During a subsequent dialogue some of them argued that they never experienced any discrimination either during their growing up years nor do they experience any discrimination in their work places.  What was hard for them to understand that even if they did not personally experience this differentiation, that there was a strong possibility of its presence in their organisation context and that it was probable that they themselves would be blind to their own biases and prejudices.  The data that they presented in the context of the workshop, however, pointed towards a generally held psychological bias more towards masculine attributes and qualities as more desirable as compared to feminine attributes and qualities.  The argument presented to them was that since both men and women would possess both masculine and feminine attributes in themselves, whether it was worthwhile for them to explore whether such a bias existed in the group and the repercussion of it in their work context.  

This has been my experience in not only this organisation but in working with groups both within a work context or outside, that while most  people  condemn the overtly displayed patriarchal norms of unjust and  inhibiting practices, they often remain blind to their own biases and prejudices.  Most do not take into account that most of us in the world today are products of the patriarchal culture, values and norms and that our belief system, biases, assumptions and practices would be highly impacted by the super structure of the context.  Hence injustice towards  anyone who is weak in the eyes of the powers that be in any context when happening somewhere else, is easier to condemn but when it is happening within me or in my personal context by me towards others, or vice versa or towards others, we are often blind to it. 

If I were to talk about myself, I became painfully aware of my own biases towards femininity when I was looking at strong biases held by people and by me shortly after the 26/11 incident in India.  It is in my blog post called "Communalism Revisited" (http://sharbori21.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html).   

I believe that today being female is not just about having a strong voice, opinion, capabilities, competence, financial power, status and power, but also about being self reflective, being sensitive to the larger context and towards oneself, having a sense of respect towards self as well as towards others irrespective of their social class or milieu and above all, living with a sense of conviction, commitment and responsibility towards oneself and towards the context, and living with this question: How do I wish to live? What is the quality of life that I wish to build around myself and around others, what responsibility do I have towards the larger context and finally what am I owing up and what am I disowning?

And needless to say the same argument holds true for men as well but I believe women of today need to be more aware of what is happening within as much as they need to be aware of what is happening outside.  

What has been your experience?  I would be interested to know and be happy if you share.  :-)

Your Well-being Is Your Responsibility

Concern with well-being has been with man kind for as long as we remember. However, the definition of well-being and how we generate it and who is responsible, however, has changed over time.

There was a time when people left the responsibility of one’s well being to their clan, their community and believed that if all was well with the community or clan, their well-being was taken care of as also the reverse; i.e. if they had a sense of well-being with themselves, then the community as a collective also had a sense of well-being with itself. Often in such diffused state, individual’s sense of well being had to be sacrificed at the alter of the collective well being.

Then came a time when we were told that a sense of well being came with who you are in your roles that your establish with the world at large – be it in the family, at work, in the world and wherever else. If we maintained the balance in the relationship well, well-being would be guaranteed was the assurance. This created the misbalance that we did not know how to relate to ourselves and to others without the given roles and found a sense of identity only within the given roles. Any sense of well being that came outside the scope of roles were discarded and generated stress.

Today, I believe we are going through a phase in the world, where the basic message that is being passed on to us is that “Your well-being is your responsibility alone”. We are going through a phase when we are individuals first and collective later but unlike the clan or the role era, the collective tells us who we should be and how we should be without taking any responsibility for it.

We are told, nobody else can or will take responsibility of your well -being and hence the individual is to maintain and generate her or his sense of well-being irrespective of the context. So, for instance we keep getting message through ads of chocolate, cars or even bottled water, which generates instant sense of well being even when the situation surrounding the protagonist is potentially fearful, disconnected or stressful. We are also given lessons on positive thinking which would generate well-being but often times some of these messages do not take into account the contextual reality.

However, there is an associated message as well, which is while you are solely responsible for your well being, you must not disturb other people’s well being. This effectively means that not only you have to be continuously aware, competent and rational, you must also remain vigilant that you do not become a source of disturbance for others. On the surface of it, this sounds quite alright; if everyone took responsibility of their well-being, this world will be a happy and peaceful place. The problem occurs when remaining vigilant and aware at all points of time itself becomes difficult and when such things are simplified to such an extent that they become absolute, like a dogma.

Before I proceed any further, let me clarify that the kind of individuals and context that I am talking about here are largely urban, middle class, above school level and are mostly into employment or business or are professionals. I must also clarify that as a concept I am a great fan of positivity and positive thinking but I do take offence when they are passed on as an absolute reality without taking their context into account.

Let me state a couple of small stories.

Story number one in which a woman who is feeling quite direction less in her life. She is in her mid thirties, holds a responsible job and is intelligent, caring, perceptive and competent. The sense of confusion and directionlessness comes partly from her past history of stressful relationships and partly from her work context where she is new and is trying to find her feet. Despite her best efforts, she often finds herself on the verge of losing control over her emotions, falls sick quite often without any associated disease and ends up taking decisions that she regrets later on. In this situation, more often than not, she receives advice from her near and dear ones both at work as also from her personal context that she needs to sort herself out and only if she could do that, i.e. go to a therapist, practice yoga, take care of herself, has better routine, all such problems will be taken care of and things will come back to normal. This woman, despite doing all of the above, finds herself at the same crossroad and then starts doubting her sense of worth.

And what does the context do, while she stands on her head trying to “sort herself out?” Her mother who is critical, gets hyper critical about this woman’s problems out of her own anxiety, her boyfriend stays away from her because he was unable to handle her emotional upheavals, her work context demands the same amount of attention, care, concern and competence from her irrespective of her situation and they all pass on this message to her that “please stay away from us, take care of your situation and come back to us as a “functional” person as we are unable to take care of your dysfunctionality. We however, wish you well and are willing to bear the cost of your medical bills, will hire a counselor for your or even help you find a yoga teacher, offer you gymming facility, etc, etc. This in turn increases this woman’s low sense of self worth and pushes her to the brink further and further.

The context in this case, would hardly ever look at reducing some of the stress causing factors that may contribute to her lack of well being, e.g. her mother becoming less critical, her boyfriend’s hyper sensitivity to her emotional outbursts, her work context not demanding her to be always sensible, rational and fair, etc, etc.

Story number two is a multinational organisation where higher and higher responsibility, ownership and performance are demanded from the employees. The employees don’t mind, they see this as a rightful demand on the part of the organisation in return of the money, status, position, learning and value that are being provided to them by the organisation.

So far, so good- Right? Wrong. In a situation like this most of the time the employees would not know what to do with the stress and tension that they carry for a context that is ever changing, highly competitive and very demanding. One can of course argue that this is the way of the world and that people who come for this kind of work have made a choice. However my point here is not about the choice but whether just by making a choice, the responsibility of the generating well being becomes an individual responsibility or is it both? After all, if the context learns to take care of its inhabitants, the context generates its own well being as well. However, most of the time, organisations such as these would term such stresses as symptoms of lack of work life balance problem and would organize training programs to take care of such anomalies without making the slightest difference to the internal environment which is tipping off the balance continuously. Alternately the context usually not question the value frames from where such stressors are originating and whether they are an absolute must for the “development” and “progress” of the context.

Therefore it is not surprising that often who we are and who we should be are defined and dictated by the popular media and even when we hear a heart breaking story of a model taking her own life, it often comes in the garb of how her professional life created this stress and how does one stay away from the stress through individual effort while the context goes away scot free in the name of being a “high stress” industry.

The opposite is also true, i.e. there are individuals and groups who would never look at how they are contributing to the stress of the context and would demand that the context makes all the changes while they retain all their dysfunctional habits and patterns in relation to the context.

Till such time both the individuals and context look at each other as integral part of each other and that this relationship is not just contractual (work context), or societal (family, relationships), but are complimentary to each other and one will not survive without the other, but at the same time one can not subsume the other, this confusion and stress will continue to haunt us.

On a different take, why is a constant state of well being so important? What is wrong with unhappiness, struggle, sadness, confusion, anger, grief and lack of well being? Aren’t some of these great mobilisers for new path, new directions and new action choices? May be this calls for another post, later!

What do you think and feel about your well being?

Where do we go from here?

                          

Have you ever felt like not doing anything at all and just let the world pass you by?  I do, quite often, and at those times it feels like being in a haze.  I know I have these three hundred thousand chores to do, many other ambitious plans of writing, singing, going places, connecting with people, taking care of my well being, blah, blah!   And, those voices seem to come calling for me from a distant land … I can hear but can’t respond, as I am dazed; like being in a limbo with no movement.  Have you ever experienced this?

I do, quite often in fact, and I often wonder whether this is what getting old mean?  On one hand you “know” you have these dreams, wishes, desires and on the other hand, you “feel” so content with what there is … well, may be not “content” in the exact sense of the word but a sense of being “ok” and feeling no tearing sense of urgency.

I wonder whether it has anything to do with ageing at all?  My discussions with people usually bring up comments like “Oh, age is only in the mind”, “you can do whatever you wish to do; age has nothing to do with it” and yet I wonder, doesn’t it?

Ageing is such a less talked about phenomena in my known world – the few contexts in which it is talked about is either religiosity or health related.  Of course there would be counter arguments about the average age of our politicians, but in my opinion that is about our collective clannish orientation where “the elderly knows the best”. 

My question is are we really afraid to age and become old?  I know I am; I often tell my friends that my emotional age has stopped somewhere in my thirties although chronologically I am in my fifties!   

My fears of getting old is leaving a known world – a world where I could achieve anything, dream of future so bright and shiny, relationships seemed romantic and passionate and where anything was possible! 

As I am writing this post, I am also in touch with the fact that most of my dread around ageing is shaped by the way society responds to it; how we have collectively made this into a dreary, grey and slightly hopeless land where people can look back at their past glory, hand over their future to their children and/or desperately want to stay at the same place and claim that “50” is the “new 30” …. and how it has become our consensual truth, i.e. everyone says so, hence it must be so.  That old age is lonely, not very stable, dependent and diseased.  I am of course over generalizing here to make a point.

The other depiction of old age that I have seen is in movies where romance, grit and passion are also part of the ageing process.  Where people find each other and start afresh, and of course in Indian context that if often depicted with its share of shame and guilt.  As though romance is a big no no for people over a certain age.  But even this little bit of difference is scarce.   How much of this is real in our day-to-day living process in our upper middle class, middle class and other sections of the society in India today?

 Without aping the “youthfulness frenzy” and without falling into a “hopeless abyss”, are there different ways of enjoying our life space when we are stepping into the older part of our lives, be it after 40 or 50 or 60?  This is a phase of life for most people where togetherness with partners has been lived for a while, children if any, are either in their teens or in early youth, career has taken a certain shape and we are standing at the peak from where we can both sides of the slope.  We can hurtle down, we can slowly walk, we can stride, but we can neither stop nor go back.

What choices do we make?  Are there any models available?  What new models do we wish to create? Traditionally in India there is a concept of "Vanprastha" where people can make new choices after their basic commitment and duties of being a householder is over.  However, in popular parlance, this is often viewed at from a particularised point of view, i.e. people are expected to  get into spirituality, into social work and philanthropy, etc, as though after a certain age, making other choices for oneself is a matter of shame. 

While I certainly do not run down social work, spirituality, philanthropy etc, the point I am trying to make here is what other choices are possible for us to look at?  How would we look at contentment that comes from having finished a phase of our lives to the best or worst of our abilities?  


However, I believe making choices is a second step.  Perhaps the first step is to articulate how we feel about getting older.  Perhaps only then, can we envision our future and not resign to the way we are supposed to be!! 

Looking forward to hearing from you.  What do you think?

  

irrational rationality

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine, who is a young talented poet, actor and a writer.  We were talking about a post on FB  and I asked for her views.  Her response was that she felt strongly but she wanted to think before she wrote.  I asked her to write about her feelings and not her thoughts and she said she would try, but never did write.  Another friend of mine, in her early 30s talked to me about how often she struggles with knowing what her feelings are, i.e. is she feeling angry or is she feeling sad and how important is it for her to "know" her feelings before she  responds.

These discussions provoked me to write this post about how I come across people, both men and women, who are very cautious about coming across to others as sentimental or mushy.  It is as though, expressions of passion, of anger, of love, of irritation, of reactivity, of loss, of joy, of desire, of longing, of disgust, of lust, etc, must always be moderated, thought through, considered, and then expressed cautiously like squeezed out portions of toothpaste from a tube!

What is interesting about this game is that it is never ending, the more you play, the more lost you are, because feelings don't come with meanings, they gush out without any barrier, flood your inner world.  Feelings make you feel alive, make you feel at one with yourself, they are the key to your inner world.  It is the world of feelings that also holds the key to our creativity, our passion, our zest for life and our will to live.  The more we try to understand our feelings before we act, the more are we operating from our need to control our world of future action and positioning ourselves firmly only in the world of consequences,   In the world of consequence, there is no present, only past and future and both are beyond our control.   The present is the only reality we live in and that can be experienced through our feelings.

Hence I wonder why do we keep playing a losing game with ourselves?

illegitimacies and identity

there have been countless times in the past when i have written my blog, in my mind, organised my thoughts, even put the lines the way i thought they ought to be; but never really "typing" them on this page, as i am doing now. why do i do this? well, in some ways, that is what i am going to write about.

i believe i am a woman of substance. I am over 51 years of age, live in India, been married, had a child, raised her, been divorced, been in relationships, worked full time as also loved, fought, claimed, offered, received, rejected, accepted, reached out, ran away, denied, acknowledged, hated, ignored, cared for and been loved.

i have had a difficult and a very interesting life .... difficult because that is how i feel about the experience, and interesting because it still fascinates me.

the idea of illegitimacy can occur in people's lives in many ways ... through owning and disowning, by status and power, and by being rejected and by rejecting. legitimacy in the sense that i am talking about is not about social status but also of what belongs where in our emotional world.

i remember as early back as when i was 3 years old, the status that i received from my father were that of "being his wife" and "his companion". my legitimate status of being his daughter was held in strong evaluation by him and was never approved. in fact he did not know how to approve as he always looked up to others for approval of himself. His legitimate role of being a father to me could not fulfilled by him emotionally and psychologically. he would use me to fulfill his aspiration of being approved by his highly disapproving family members and as a result, no matter what i did, it was never enough; i could never be a "good, desirable daughter'. what i mean by "his wife" and "his companion" is that he expected from me (as a child) to understand his pathos, his grief, his loneliness, to approve of him, to be his friend and companion and to redeem himself to an utterly unforgiving and insensitive family system.

the primary roles that emerged for me in my mind were as follows:

- the resourceful one and
- the rebellious one

they are a trifle contradictory to one another as being resourceful is not good enough if they are not being put to proper use in a context, and being rebellious did not offer enough scope to me to be a part of any context and put my resources to any use. in the world of action, thus, i remained a whole unto myself and kept testing, flirting, toying with the idea of being a part of a larger whole.

in the world of relationship then, being a rebel would mean always looking at what am i deprived of, and being resourceful would mean negotiating a place for me by being useful in the context. so metaphorically i would offer endless possibilities in a relationship, but in reality would block every avenue of any actual union and merger and a movement forward.

this is the illegitimacy of the identity that i am writing about. the illegitimacy is about not knowing what is your rightful place in a context and even if that is spelt out, how does one experience it the way it ought to be as i have had no positive experience of it in my growing up process from my primary and only care giver.

so i stumble, i fall, i get up again and start all over -- only to realise that i repeating the same thing over and over again -

what i have figured out as of now are some of the blocks ... one of them being a cruel and utterly insensitive attitude towards myself. when i am faced with a negative situation, i turn to myself like a hired assassin, a cruel and hostile killer, a tormentor, and i tear myself into pieces with a pervert glee which screams "you deserve it, you bitch".

i know when this entity came into my life ..as early as when i was 6 or 7 years old. i used to be beaten up by my aunt and other relatives quite mercilessly and at some of those moments, i would turn to them, tears in my eyes but with utter contempt on my face and would tell them "how much more will you beat me? at most, you will kill me, right?, go ahead, do it, but i will not listen to you...". i can see the same entity today who is saying the same thing today but this time, to me, to my other voices which are seeking a fundamental shift.

as of now i don't know what to do with this one .... except to be patient and loving to it. it has blazing eyes, its mouth curled cruelly upward, fists are clenched and the heart is beating fast, really fast and it is not ready to forgive anyone.

i can only wait, with love .....

disconnecting - Loss and fear of it

Death ...



such an ominous word. most are scared of it, it is unknown, full of fantasy and visions. so much has been written, talked about, discoursed with ....



i have been with this word for a while. ever since my divorce proceedings started actually.



Divorce, as per dictionary meaning is



-to separate; cut off

-a judicial declaration dissolving a marriage in whole or in part

-total separation; disunion

-to break the marriage contract between oneself and (one's spouse)



synonyms are dissociate, divide, disconnect, split, disjoin ....



i experienced "real" death for the first time in my divorce proceedings. I have experienced many many physical death before but the experience of what death actually feels like was like a bullet that gets lodged.

It was not simply dissolving the marriage between two people. I was initiating the processing of discontinuing the history of 30 years between two people that was held in a certain way. the disjointing of relationships tween them, around them, in the immediate family, the extended familial structure, the social circle, everything.



it was to put a full stop to something that has been in process .... for many years ....

yes, separating from someone or something is like a death experience. although people remain, the places remain, the memories remain, but not the relationship. Not the way each individual held it in his/her mind.

Sometimes i think for me at least, fear of death, is really fear of separation. fear of divorce, this time from life, from aliveness, from all senses .... unto who knows where.

and strangely enough, i am not really scared of my death, but of death of dear ones.

Death, i feel will take them away for ever, never to come back and they will then just fade into memory, sepia coloured ones.

and i have experienced death many times in my life, through death of near and dear ones, starting at age 3, but never been so anxious about it before.

what does it mean to disjoint from the other? are we ever joined?

and in all these, life, the pulsating life, kicking, alive, screaming, is perhaps slipping through the moments ... tick tock tick tock .....

i am alive, and so are the others, right at this moment. celebrate this moment!

after a long time

I was working with an organisation last week who are in the process of bringing in internal changes in attitude, development of people, leadership roles and new paradigms in the organisation. They are in the areas of advocacy for change and bringing in social awareness, specific to young people.

While i was working with them i noticed their extremely high level of commitment towards the organisation and what they believed in and yet, their difficulty in working with each other as one voice. what was bogging them down was not their personal interests or need for personal gain, but i hypothesise was their clash of personal isms. this may become clear if i were to write about a triangle that i saw was at work within this group.

This is the triangle of three types of isms, (the credit for this frame goes to my colleague Ashok Malhotra who coined it), namely romanticism i.e. i wish my world was like this, idealism i.e. this is the way the world should be and pragmatism i.e. this is the way the world is. what i find intriguing that in the effort to act on one's conviction, one arm of this triangle is almost always the loser.

If pragmatism is joined with idealism, then we have strategic planning, defined boundaries, way forwards, new directions, etc. However, more often than not, the romanticism has to bid adieu from this. for in the search for pragmatism, romanticism inevitably brings in ambiguity and lack of clarity. for romantics dreams of wishes and desires, a bit like Lennon's song "imagine". They dream and wish for things and scenarios that have not happened yet and probably sounds no plausible in the current context. This often destabilises the way forward, and even dislocates the people from the path. and yet, without romanticism, most plans and visions become dry and lifeless.

when romanticism and idealism join hands, strong winds of change takes birth. urgency to change things, need to bring in changes in the current stagnant, unwholesome context becomes strong and may even breed impatience and intolerance. if this is not tempered with pragmatism, perhaps all voices can not be heard and often the ground reality sufferes.

in this group, collectively romanticism and idealism have joined hands and they are all for bringing in changes both in themselves and the context in which they work in. but simple pragmatism like living with one another's limitations was something they were finding quite difficult to deal with. every limitation had to be dealt with and sorted out, every difference must be sorted out so that amiability returns as though feelings like displeasure, dislike, impatience do not contribute to any productivity at all.

i have seen this in my personal life as well. I find it very difficult to live with displeasure, dislike, impatience, irritability towards people with whom i share intimate relationships and who i love very much. it seems as though i am betraying the other person along with myself. as though i signed some invisible contract to always remain loving towards the other.

in time i have discovered that while this orientation makes my life stressful, it makes the other's life more suffocating and artificial. in this way, there is almost no scope for growth for either of us nor is there any scope for the relationship to grow. evolution stops and what remains are empty shells of yesterday, which often leaves me with regret and longing/yearning for something that does not exist any more.

i still struggle with it, but find it much easier to look at it in the face and don't feel afraid that it makes me look ugly, uncaring and insensitive. it also makes me look 'real' to myself.

making peace with my past ....

I read a book long time ago with this title .... understood intellectually and made little sense emotionally.

i think in order for anything to make sense to you "emotionally", you have to be at that space in your life when you are ready to make that transition, or at least ready to face the "?"

if i were to look at myself today, what am i ready to face? i think "delusion" will be one big word out there. I am not talking about the western psycho-pathological connotation of the word "delusion" but more from the point of view of experiencing reality as it really is, rather what i wish it to be, mostly unknowingly.

today, i am pondering over many things ... to begin with:

- things that i expected to last for ever, ... like emotional connect and romantic love.
i expected this love to envelope me all my life exactly the way it started. but love changes because we change. but when the moment came for me to face that change? i burst out internally, and said to myself:

- this person does not wish to remain emotionally connected with me because there is something wrong in the way he/she thinks/feels.

- this person does not wish to receive what i have to offer (never looking actually what am i offering and how the nature of the offering has changed)

- i have failed in keeping this emotional connect alive ..... it is my fault or the other person's fault that it is not working the way "it was supposed to"

sounds like nursery baby thoughts? it does to me too, but only now.

only when am i able to look at the delusion that i have been holding for such a long time that
LOVE LASTS FOR A LIFE TIME (with the proviso that it can have fights, disconnects, separations, etc but ultimately it comes back to where it was)

and this is the delusion. nothing is static.

and what is behind this? aha!

behind this is my fear of "being abandoned" (just like my mother did, by dying on me when i was 3 years old, and then my next caregiver moved away when i was 5, and many others)

so by creating this fantastic delusion, i have been hoping to avoid facing the pain of "being abandoned" ....

and actually making sure that it happens again and again by being a clinging, insecure person and by relating to just those who are really really scared of being bound.

what a fantastic game!

i am actually feeling good about discovering this today about myself. i know this is not rocket science, many will know this in any case. i have known this intellectually for a long long time.

but today for the first time, it sat peacefully in my heart and i was able to talk to my heart about how "I have changed" and not about the other person.

that makes me feel good. :-)