self worth and relationships

Have been feeling low, down and out for several days. When I look at how I feel, there are several so called reasons for it, feeling unloved, undesired, low on confidence, lack of hope, lack of direction, lack of purpose and the whole host of it.

After moping for several days i am feeling more enraged and irritated towards myself. One thought that keeps coming to me is that if I were to face a person who was like who I am at the present moment, what would I have felt towards him or her? one single answer that comes is : "CONTEMPT" in capital letters.

I would have felt contemptuous, helpless, angry, tired and irritable. This constant whining would have got at me faster than it is hitting others. I think A has been quite patient and sweet with me, he is coping with whatever i am dishing out to him with grit and hidden resignation and may be even a little bit of despair.

Who would want to love a woman like me, this way? If i am whining about feeling low on self worth, etc, what is the other person supposed to do? At best the other person can try and help, be a problem solver. but basically apart from just listening, what else can any one do?

I hardly ever smile, I am sulking most of the time as though the whole world owes me big time and they have not paid their dues. what the fuck!

I am more and more getting convinced that this deeply entrenched sense of "low self worth" (behind that a very firm belief that I AM COMPLETELY UNLOVABLE) can not go, until I start gazing inward, but not in an analytical way. I have done that way too many times. By now I know every cause, every 'why's of every 'how's. that does not help. in fact what that does, in a way, is to strengthen this whining that 'oh such a bad thing happen to me, therefore, what else will i be, but this, that and the other".

my internal gaze would have to be more spiritual, more meditative. I am not sure I alone can do it. when i try to do it, there is tremendous resistance to it. I feel very restless, my mind races off and i feel like running away. It can be quite distressing at times.

but I also know that meditative practice is a discipline and not something that happens in a day. I am hoping that one of these days, very soon, I will be able to settle with that discipline within myself.

meanwhile can I experiment with smiling? not just a physical mouth open teeth showing smile; i mean, can i smile at myself and smile inwards?

As i am writing this, one of those restless, disbelieving and laughing voices in my head is saying "what the fuck are you writing, you stupid idiot, do you even know what the f*** does that mean"?

and it is right. I have no clue about what i am saying, but I am hoping, that instead of knowing, I can experience it somehow, soon.

Aparajito by Ray

just finished watching Aparajito by Satyajit Ray. It is the 2nd part of a trilogy by him, from a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Felt very moved while watching. It is a simple story of a small family of a husband, wife and a son.

The story is told in a non judgemental way from the point of view of the little boy under the age of ten. He grows up amidst fondness and love of his parents who are surrounded by deprivation, illness, uncertainty, death and hardship. Surprisingly the boy's curiosity and innocence remain refreshingly intact. As he grows up and moves away from home, his apparent lack of any close emotional ties with his surviving and slowly ailing mother or with anyone does feel like a very natural flow emanating from a character like that.

while i was watching the movie, i was also thinking that although the storyline is based almost eighty or ninety years ago, it still seems very contemporary. The theme of moving away from home is very alive today, in fact even more so today.

the movie has a background of deprivation and poverty and yet the boy finds his wherewithal to go out to a bigger city and study. In today's time, most city dwelling middle class parents would want their children to go out and study so that they do well in life and they do provide for all such necessity. However, the tie that gets loosened between the child and home as it has been shown in the movie, has not probably changed.

Moving away from mother's close watchful eyes to a larger world full of freedom, opportunity and new wonders. Home seems like a distant past where nothing moves and time stands still. Very aptly, the hero of this film says, "I don't feel like going back to my village, i only feel sleepy there". I thought that comment was a signifier of what home perhaps mean today to most. It is probably a place that provides continuity and safety but does not provide any stimulation. May be that is the nature of home.


I wonder, however, is the essentially in the nature of home or is this what we have made it out to be? Has home become only a refuge of those who stay back, waiting only for those who may or may not return?

reading Ken Wilber

Have been reading "Grace & Grit" by Ken Wilber. The book is about his life spent with Treya, his wife, who is no more. She suffered from breast cancer almost from the beginning of their marriage and passed away after five years.

what i find compelling about this book is the bear bone honesty with which it has been written, This has entries from Treya's journal and Ken's writing about their life, their journey together, their love, their dark sides, their neuroses, their struggle and fight with the disease and their acceptance(or lack of it) of self, of each other, life, love, hatred, and all the junk that lie around in our persona. and of course, their meditation.

i felt hopeful reading this book. It is giving me back hope and faith. i feel drawn towards meditation and forgiveness practice.

what i also got in touch is that life and living is a discipline - it is not a hard cruel "if you don't abide by, then you will die" kind of discipline, but is more like having a gentle, loving and yet firm mother around kind of a discipline. life needs some order to be lived, to ground itself; so that it can give us the space to do other things after feeling alive.

Right now going through a lab with twenty five managers. A is also with me. we are feeling so loving towards one another, so gently and yet so deeply.

The lab is going on alright ... at times i have to fight hard with myself to stop judging the participants .... judging is so easy, compassion and sincere joining in is so hard.

As the personal life stories of some of them are unfolding in the lab space, I am awe struck, amazed, saddened, touched, resonated .....

I am also in touch with the "me ness" and it is like a light shadow at this point of time. i can most times feel it but can not distinguish. Only at times, i can see it clearly. Those times are special, i have a feeling of floating. when i am separate from my "me ness" i feel lighter, happier, broader, expansive. and at times, when the "me ness" envelopes me like a fog, i sometimes forget to breath, i feel agitated, reactive, snappy.

but i am finding it easier to talk to me now a day. :-)

the "JUNO" in all of us perhaps!

I have often described insights coming to me as snowflakes falling softly on my head. I don't know why i use this analogy as i have never experienced snow in my life. it is possible that the way i receive these insights are not like 'wham', 'crash', 'zing', but more like a soft whisper in my head.

i was thinking about my mood swings and irritation and impulses and wondering whether one gets a hang of handling these things or does biological changes overtake who you are. Just at that precise moment "the whisper in my head" told me that actually i have always been like that, moody, unpredictable, impatient, with little sense of boundary management, volatile, enthusiastic, impulsive, hyper, enthusiastic, ..... sounds a bit like a teenager with raging hormones!!

Except, I am no teenager, i am nearly 50 years old and this is by and large how i have been most parts of my life.

i guess, in a way, i never really grew up.

oh, i am not crying about it, nor do i regret it but it does seem like a long time to be in this state. what accompanies this state is a continuous sense of dissatisfaction of what life offered me and mostly what it did not; every point of receiving a gift from life is laced with a doubt of whether i was worthy of receiving it!

i cant remember for how long i have been in this state. seems like forever. my mood changes more often than the clouds changing their position in the sky! and it often changes towards being grumpy or feeling heavy or being restless ....

I also see the rage that has been my constant companion over the years. in fact it has a form, looks like a figure with a orange flame like thing around and it is moving, shouting, screaming in
rage. i can't hear what it is saying but i can see the colour and i can see the movement. it is very real. when i see it as separate from me, i can see my rage and then it is easier to manage but most times, it is smart enough to disguise itself as irritation or impatience or restlessness and then i give in. 'Wham'! it comes with its full blown attack and i realise only post facto!

in fact, people feel i am quite loving but at the same time they are quite afraid of me. their fear is more about my being not predictable. the worse part is i don't realise when i am not being that.

and i can see what they were scared of post facto and i don't blame them.

most times my lovingness come to me in gushes like a flow of a stream which is sometimes dry and sometimes overflowing with passion. people at the receiving end can not handle this. they are not prepared to be smothered by it or being bludgeoned to death with my irritation or indifference!

i think being a teenager also means not having received any valid parenting at all. which is true in my case. so how does one parent oneself? i guess the fact that i am in touch with this is a step.

sometimes i look at my daughter and see how similar and how different she is vis-a-vis me. there are times when she is parenting me like a mother i never had. i guess for her, having a mother like me has been tough. but she has grown up to be quite alright.

i miss not having a mother .... very very much .... and i have always stopped myself from grieving, saying what is the use? i guess real grieving has never happened.

I think time has come for me to start 'mothering' myself and being a person and not a perennial teenager!

Even 'Juno' grew up! :-)

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.