Addendum: Working with the Mind (H)

From “The Body’s Grace: Matthew Sanford’s Story” on Speaking of Faith:

Matthew Stanford: There‘s a reason why when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed, and it won’t be limiting his whole being, that he can—he gets a hug and, mmm, he drops into his body. And when you drop into your body, paradoxically, typically pain is less. But it’s when pain gets more intense and more…

Krista Tippett: And when you’re afraid and try to keep it at bay.

Matthew Sanford: …and then pull out of it, it really denies freedom. And it’s a great short-term strategy. That’s what I did when I was 13, I pulled out of my body to get it, but it’s a short-term strategy. And a lot of the process of my life is like embodying again and letting — and surrounding what’s going on so I can be part of the world.

And from the chapter “Falling Gracefully” in his memoir, Waking:

If nothing else, my life has taught me one thing: The mind and body that I have are the only mind and body that I have. They deserve my attention. And when I give it, I receive so much more in return. Learning to fall gracefully through one’s mind-body relationship is not a submission. One learns to fall gracefully in order to roll.

There is still so much to realize. My experience tells me that the silence within us can be experienced energetically as a nourishing sap. When this happens, consciousness changes shape. For example, I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without becoming more compassionate. A mental state like tolerance can deepen into a three-dimensional state of true patience. Nonviolence can become more than a moral principle, it can become an integrated state of consciousness that includes the body. And, of course, for good or for bad, the silence within us also contains the opportunity for choice.

Changes Pt. 3: The Balance Of Averages (I)

I’ve posted about Jill Bolte Taylor before (I’ll spare you and myself the embedded video and just link you to her TED talk), so imagine my satisfaction when I heard her again on this week’s new Radiolab episode, Words.

Jill is the neuroscientist who studied strokes firsthand when a blood vessel burst in her left brain hemisphere and, among myriad other complications, completely silenced her speech centers. Her guest appearance on Radiolab expands on this silence, beyond what was touched upon in her TED talk. (I haven’t made it through her book My Stroke Of Insight, but what I read just seemed to be a wordier version of the TED talk, adding a lot of verbiage but not, seemingly, adding content.) Earlier in the episode, Jad and Robert had explored how speech, it appears, is what creates complex thought. It is language’s ability to connect disparate words that allows us to start connecting disparate thoughts. I won’t go into all the details at present (you should probably listen to the episode), but the progression of thoughts is fascinating.

Without her left brain, Jill could not talk. And she could not think in any sophisticated way. Without the left brain, there is no past or future. The left and right brains make up, for us, the temporal and the eternal, the everything and I. Without the left, there is no self, and no time but the present. The left brain creates the delineation between one’s self and one’s surroundings. This is one of the things that is often shut out by intoxicants, especially hallucinogens. This is why people on mushrooms sit on the beach and become the sand, the surf, and the sunset.

Pure silence. You know, not that little voice that, you know, you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says “oh man the sun is shining.” Well imagine you that don’t hear that voice saying “man the sun is shining,” you just experience the sun and the shining.

In the episode, Robert Krulwich describes it as “the absence of reflection of any kind.”

Jad Abumrad: Did you have… thoughts?
Jill Bolte Taylor: …I had joy.

This is that time, living purely in the moment, where the sense of wonder Carl and Michael Pollan spoke of is all-consuming. Every sunrise is the first you’ve ever seen. A state of constant amazement. Perhaps this is what people seek when they take drugs, but in a pure strain I’m not sure anyone would chase quite so far down the rabbit hole. Constant amazement.

To envy this state recalls to my mind Robert Burns’ To A Mouse, which we all ate in high school before reading Of Mice And Men, where Burns says the mouse is blessed because it only knows the present, not fearing the future and forgetting the past. Pollan quotes Nietzsche’s assessment of animals’ bliss:

“They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn til night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and it’s pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored…”

“A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ – but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”

-as quoted in The Botany Of Desire, p. 163

If this is a bliss, it is a speechless one. It is an unaware bliss, one that doesn’t know anything but bliss, does not know this is bliss. It is one that cannot be shared because it is silent, and because there would be nothing to say about it.

I’d venture that we live in a very left-brained society. Pollan makes the argument several times, though not in so many words. Both Christianity and capitalism are systems that dominate this country (and much of the world), and spend much time fixating on the future (capitalism on the better tomorrow, Christianity on the next life). We don’t, as the cliché goes, “stop and smell the roses.” Not just because we’re too busy, but because we’re too familiar. We pass that rosebush every day. It hasn’t changed. How can we look at it in any new way?

I’d put money on the idea that one of the pulls towards drugs is an attempt to balance this out. To muffle the left brain and spend some time in the present, and in the quiet. Hopping towards the right.

Do we find balance this way? If we spend, say, 75% of our waking time in the left brain, then, on occasion, 90% into the right for a few hours. Is a balance of averages balance at all? Silence from the left can bring wonder, but can it bring wisdom?

I’ve sat in these thoughts since yesterday, and I would say this of my asceticism: what I want is to use the fullness of my brain in a moment. I want, without chemical assistance, to feel a moment in the present, and feel its passing. This is what I’m always working at. If wisdom is to embrace the miracle of the fleeting moment, I would have to feel the present, and be aware of how it flits from the future to the past, in and out of existence. To be of both minds at once. (Women are apparently better at this than men.)

It will not be an all-consuming wonder, and there are times and places for that. The times when I have felt that kind of wonder, when I’ve sobbed at the beauty of just the sky above me, have been times of transition. Change makes the viewer different, makes the skin rawer. The world burned with beauty the first time I had (proper) sex with my partner, following almost two years of uninvited celibacy (and one awkward exchange we’d shared the week before). The world also lit up when I was suffering from losses before leaving California; maybe the world obligingly became beautiful because I needed it to be. They say pain and pleasure make you feel more alive. I think they make you more awake, more present. Whatever, they make you different.

Jill’s animal bliss is a bliss without change. It is a simple bliss; with the speech centers silent there are no complex thoughts, no complex emotions. As Jad and Robert ask, can you think about time if you don’t have a word for it? Can you think about thinking? About language? The sophisticated wonders, of discovery, of falling in love, are absent. I wish it wasn’t so goddamn difficult. Change is never easy, nobody wants it. It’s no shortcut to wonder; this is the long way. And it’s often a crapshoot if you’re going to find wonder via joy or pain (or at all).

But it’s a wonder we can share. So I’d like to keep evolving.

Bread On The Table (I)

Been a while!

I think a lot about success, what makes it and what breaks it. Anyone with fears of failure, I would think, has to sometime define what would constitute a non-failure. When I wrote my first series of songs, finished songs after having played guitar for over a decade without ever completing anything longer than 2 minutes, I did it because I’d had two great losses and I needed to get something out of me.

When, for the first time, I played my own songs for an audience, I felt in return for these months of work nothing save unresponsiveness, and all my sincerity only met with a few blinks from the audience. I’m a harsh critic of myself, and I very possibly projected my own insecurity on the audience; the friends I had in attendance said it was good. But no one raved, not at all. I walked home wondering if I was doing the right thing by making music at all.

With any project I take on, I worry people will be indifferent; if only someone would just hate it at least I’d get a response. What if I make something truly good and no one cares? What if the best I can do will still mean very little to anyone?

On the subject of music, when I first came to Providence and didn’t have any possessions with me but my guitar and a totebag of clothes and books, I’d wander the city and find places to sit, usually under a tree, and play my guitar. Apparently someone in Providence looks a lot like me and walks around with a guitar and a bowler hat because people kept yelling things at me as if they recognized me. A fellow in a wheelchair came and sat next to me thinking I was someone he knew.

But we chatted, he asked if he could play my guitar a minute, and he got to talking about how he used to be a professional musician. He’d made all his money from gigging; he had a band that played mostly bars and smaller venues, played at least 50% popular song covers, never signed to a label and I think never really released an album. He did this for years, just playing music in New England. I got the impression he never really went on a proper tour, but maybe I’m extrapolating things that prove my points.

He’d had several sons; I feel like he said seven. He’d raised them and put them all through college by playing music. He said his best year he personally earned over one million dollars.

This guy isn’t known, he’s never “made it,” no one knows his band who didn’t live in the general area. It sounded like a rough job keeping 5 or 6 people in a band together for over a decade. But it more than put bread on the table.

Now I think some people are born believing they’re going to be big. The people trying to “make it,” of those that do “make it” maybe 10% or so can say “I knew all along I was going to be big.” They demanded it, they expected nothing less and would settle for nothing less. And I’d guess the ones that won’t settle for less than huge success probably quit completely if they didn’t get that huge success.

But most stories people tell you about how they made it always talk about the years they worked in obscurity. Dues paid and all that. Mark Ruffalo went to 100 auditions before he got his first part, for example. I think the huge majority of people who become any kind of success had to have a certain talk with themselves.

They had to say “success, if it ever happens, may take a while.” They had to say “I’m going to do this anyway, even if I never get recognized for it.” They had to accept a life like that man who gigged for a decade and then faded back into Providence to play my guitar under a tree.

They had to say “I’m willing to do it as long as it puts bread on the table, and if that’s all it ever does for me, it’s still a good life.” They have to say “that’d be enough for me.”

And they probably had to live like that for a few years before they “made it.” All these bands that get called overnight successes, they always say in interviews that they played for years before becoming an “overnight success.”

Can you tell I’ve had to have this talk lately? The reason I work on anything anymore is slowly becoming more about the pleasure I want to have in seeing the project done. Every artist will say “you have to do it for yourself” but I didn’t really know what that meant until recently. For me, it basically means giving up would be more painful than being a failure. I’d rather do something nobody cares about but me than go another year doing nearly nothing.

I will say, though, that a little bit of encouragement can go a long-ass way.

Settling (H)

I’m a Fool to Love You

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell you, if she could,
About her life with my father,
A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.
She would tell you about the choices
A young black woman faces.
Is falling in with some man
A deal with the devil
In blue terms, the tongue we use
When we don’t want nuance
To get in the way,
When we need to talk straight.
My mother chooses my father
After choosing a man
Who was, as we sing it,
Of no account.
This man made my father look good,
That’s how bad it was.
He made my father seem like an island
In the middle of a stormy sea,
He made my father look like a rock.
And is the blues the moment you realize
You exist in a stacked deck,
You look in a mirror at your young face,
The face my sister carries,
And you know it’s the only leverage
You’ve got.
Does this create a hurt that whispers
How you going to do?
Is the blues the moment
You shrug your shoulders
And agree, a girl without money
Is nothing, dust
To be pushed around by any old breeze.
Compared to this,
My father seems, briefly,
To be a fire escape.
This is the way the blues works
Its sorry wonders,
Makes trouble look like
A feather bed,
Makes the wrong man’s kisses
A healing.

–Cornelius Eady

An Anatomy of Healing, part 1 (H)

Tara Brach says that healing comes when we go back to a pain with a new resource, be it a new understanding, a new capacity to sit with what’s difficult, or the support of someone you trust. She’s also fond of quoting a friend of hers: “My mind is like a bad neighborhood: I don’t like going there alone.”

Buddhist teachers, as well as practitioners of and adherents to various other psychological theories, talk about the need to face what is difficult. This is summed up in slogans like, “The only way out is through,” or “The way out of the pain is the pain,” and “What you resist, persists.” And there is a lot of truth to this. For more minor mental aches and pains, simply turning towards the thing with a neutral or curious awareness and having the brief, unpleasant experience of it can be enough to dissolve or digest it.

But what about the bigger losses, shames, regrets, horrors, traumas, rages? A friend of mine thinks of it this way, using loss as the example: any loss comes with a finite amount of pain to be metabolized. And each time a wave of grief, panic, guilt arises around The Loss and comes into our awareness, if we can hold it well, let it come up and pass, we metabolize that piece of it. Audre Lorde writes about this so poignantly in The Cancer Journals:

“I must let this pain flow through me and move on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against ever wall and person I touch.”

Continuing on my friend’s theory, if we turn away from it, or can’t hold it well, it just goes back to the pile and will come up again until we can give it what it needs to be digested. In other words, it’s not useful to say: I’m just going to stay present with whatever comes up, no matter what. Opening to pain is of little or no use if you don’t know how to relax mentally and let the pain flow through as Audre describes, or how to help your body stay calm. Or if you can’t do it without injuring yourself with your own cruel judgment–the bigger pains require an explicitly gentle, kind presence. Pema Chodron writes in The Places That Scare You:

“The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhicitta. These juicy emotional spots are where a warrior gains wisdom and compassion. Of course, we’ll want to get out of those spots far more often than we’ll want to stay. That’s why self-compassion and courage are vital. Staying with pain without loving-kindness is just warfare.”

—–

It comes back, again, to the wisdom of working at the edges. The example of the body is a useful metaphor: you want to do a split even though normally your hamstrings are so tight that you can’t touch your toes. If you force your body into the split, you just end up hurting yourself. Instead, you’ve got to work on the flexibility by going to the point where it starts to feel uncomfortable and hanging out there, gently reaching a little farther, listening to your internal feedback. And sometimes the best course is not try harder, but try softer.

Kink & Alchemy (H)

A dear friend wrote to me about feeling that vanilla sex was inadequate and though he’s not particularly oriented towards BDSM, he’s decided to start exploring it to expand his sexual repetoire. He writes:

I’m under the impression (perhaps misguided) that BDSM has a lot to do with power imbalances, anger, humiliation.  I appreciate that it’s probably more complicated than that, but those drives aren’t really my deal… I’m also recently aware (via facebook) that some psychologists are considing recognizing five human experiences (interest, gratitude, confusion, elevation, pride) as emotional responses on par with the regular ones. So it seems that I could start looking into some kind of “topping” practice with a focus on aesthetic / emotional responses that are different from the ones I think of as being specific to BDSM.

I replied:

From my limited experience:

Pain is different from harm. Whether the two coincide often has to do with intention or context–the pain felt during childbirth is processed and experienced differently (and usually not as psychic or emotional harm, even if the body is injured) whereas an equal amount of physical pain felt when being tortured in someone’s basement or in a POW camp I would guess is much more likely to be harmful.

In less dramatic senses, I think there is more risk of harm when we are acting out of any sort of malice, retributive anger, hatred, resentment, defensiveness, aggression–anything that Yoda would put on the dark side of the force.

This purtains to kink in that, when it is done in a “safe, sane, consensual” manner, one of the intentions may be to cause pain–physical or emotional–but not to harm. Anyone who wants to do you lasting damage isn’t someone that it would be healthy for most people to get kinky with. A good top, when you are not “playing” with power or other kink stuff but doing something more serious, is more like a spiritual guide, knowing when to push and when to slow down, open to feedback, offering support and encouragement when necessary, with steady love beneath whatever else is going on or whatever the expression of it is (you know I don’t necessarily mean romantic love). And in this context, the sub has the opportunity to experience and confront some of the things we struggle most with as humans– perhaps, physical pain, which she will learn is easiest when one surrendors to it or accepts it wholely; mentally, humiliation–which can be an joyful release from selfhood, an entry into intense trance states, a way of taking the ego and breaking it against a rock, failure or guilt–which, in going into fully in the safety of the setting she will learn to fear less in daily life, and to meet fully when it arises, her psychic and physical limitiations–which may help release her from some of the perfectionism conditioned into us by our culture, fear–which she will become intimate with and learn to and enjoy, create for herself the tool of imbuing the terrible with the erotic thus helping her to face it, to make it bearable.

It is a grounds, perhaps most of all, for giving and recieving unconditional love. There is incredible risk on both sides to exposing “shadow” sides, in asking for obedience or giving it, in giving a command or following it. The scene can exist only when both parties conspire together, are in it together. And it is amazing, to humiliate oneself completely in front of someone, to for a period of time exist in a state of utter trust and let someone cause you pain without trying to escape, and instead of leaving, the person stays, appreciates, loves you all the more. And the top, I would guess, has a reciprocal experience–to demand, inflict, command, humiliate, and still be loved. It’s breath-taking, isn’t it?

The difference between this and actual abuse has much to do with explicit consent and intention. Abuse often comes from intentions to harm, defend, protect, intimidate. Kink, in good situations, comes from intentions to expand and open emotionally and experientially, to achieve intimacy, to give and recieve love, and often includes inflicting pain in the service of these things.

Of course some people use kink to channel hatred of various sorts, or to put themselves in harm’s (rather than pain’s) way, and in those scenarios, there is great potential to damage all involved. But in the best cases, sex can become a pretext, a means, a background, or simply a component of a deeply intimate, alchemical process.

addendum: Dapravity (I)

There is a song about fistfucking that sums up our ideas about depravity pretty well. It centers around doing something extreme, needing that extremity, getting numbed to it, and now needing something even more extreme.

Stand well back, because I’m going to quote Tool. Apologies.

Something has to change. Undeniable dilemma.
Boredom’s not a burden anyone should bear.

Constant over-stimulation numbs me
but I would not want you any other way.

‘Cause
It’s not enough, I need more.
Nothing seems to satisfy.
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it.
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive.

Finger deep within the borderline.
Show me that you love me and that we belong together.
Relax, turn around and take my hand.

I can help you change tired moments into pleasure.
Say the word and we’ll be well upon our way.

Blend and balance, pain and comfort deep within you
Till you will not want me any other way.

But,
It’s not enough, I need more.
Nothing seems to satisfy.
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it.
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive.

Knuckle deep inside the borderline.
This may hurt a little but it’s something you’ll get used to.
Relax. Slip away.

Something kinda sad about the way that things have come to be.
Desensitized to everything. What became of subtlety?

How can this mean anything to me
If I really don’t feel anything at all?

I’ll
keep
digging

till
I
feel
something.

-Tool, Stinkfist

(the chorus goes from finger up to knuckle and finally to elbow and shoulder, and I think it sums up nicely the idea that if you every try anything anal, it’s only a matter of time til you’re shoulder-deep in someone’s asshole, wearing them like a sock-puppet; with Tool, you can never tell if Maynard says something he means or says something he’s criticizing)

Depravity (I)

In our puritanical America (and we were colonized by puritans, after all), we seem to be afraid that everything is a gateway to sin. Graphed on a chart, this thinking would probably increase as religious fervor increases, but it seems to be a pretty prevalent mechanism in the US. Overall, our attitudes about sex are much more ascetic than, say, France’s, our attitudes about drugs more prohibitive than The Netherlands (obviously). Our age of consent laws and our legal drinking ages are higher than most of Europe. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, and I don’t know if what I’m going to talk about is a reason or just a symptom, but Americans, I think, fear depravity.

We seem to think much of the world is sinful, or if we don’t buy the notion of sin, at least unethical or dangerous or just overly-complicated. It’s not a matter of qualitative difference sometimes: monogamy is simpler than polyamory, abstinence is simpler than promiscuity, asceticism is simpler than finding a dealer and getting high. But not even just simpler; safer.

But safe from what?

I remember from my D.A.R.E. training in elementary school this notion that smoking pot for the first time is the gateway to becoming a heroin addict (and I think my parents figured swearing of any kind would turn me into a Tarantino movie). Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; certainly many heroin users started with marijuana, so is it not safer to just avoid the whole thing? This is the thinking they teach us to keep us clean.

I suppose I can re-quote Martin Amis:

If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer – or an undertaker.

-”A Rough Trade”

I’m behind the idea of harboring a perversity, but I don’t think that’s what’s being taught, or rather, it’s more common to put the cart before the horse. People are more afraid that watching pornography will make you want sex, that taking drugs will make you want drugs, that getting kinky will make you violent, that reading Marx will make you a Communist.

With my recent first forays into kinky behavior, the only thing I’ve come away knowing is that I am not a violent person. There is a thrill I get from the permission to bite, choke, scratch, spank, and paddle a person, and that thrill comes entirely from knowing that I am not aggressive in any other part of my life. From what I know from other kinksters (and it is rather fun now to say “other kinksters” instead of just “kinksters”), kink can be very psychological, with all kinds of darkness and degradation, fear and intimidation. It can be a place where very real and possibly dangerous desires get exposed. But for a person who is dark and possibly violent, the darkness always preceeds the sex and exists beyond it. Kink will not make you violent.

And I think it holds: drugs will not make you want drugs; gagging someone and stringing them upside-down is not going to get you into bondage (odds are: you’re already into it). When it comes to harboring perversity, I come down on the side of nature over nurture. It’s true that exploring a wide variety of experiences might increase your tolerance for many things: you may smoke socially because others are, you may be willing to tie up your partner, but doing it is not going to affect your preferences. I know from a long relationship with a mostly asexual partner that all the sex we could have was not going to make her want it more.

The funny thing is this: as our culture espouses this idea that trying it will make you want it, I think we push more people towards real depravity. When someone is told all their lives “smoking weed will make you a pothead,” they feel almost obligated to become a pothead after trying it once. We don’t leave it up to our society to ask “do you want this?” We say only “if you try it, you want it, and are depraved.”

Myself, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t use drugs of any kind, and I completely avoid caffeine. For a long time I lived that way out of judgment of the lifestyle; but at some point I asked myself the question, “do any of these things interest me?” At which point I never bothered with the idea again.

addendum: Scab-Picking (I)

I said a while back that the way I dealt with painful memories was to bring them close and see how much they still hurt. Like picking a scab to see how much skin has grown back underneath. It’s an exploratory prodding of flesh, and mostly stems from curiosity about how I’m healing.

Sometimes I catch myself bringing the same thoughts into my head again and again, no matter how many times I’ve made peace with them. It feels pathological until I remember what I’m doing: I’m trying to see if these old thoughts still hurt. Anxieties I’ve had about people I love not caring about me anymore, being forgotten, being replaced, I put words like these in the mouths of people just to see how much they hurt. I vaguely remember a time when I knew I was solid, because thoughts like these didn’t carry any weight.

I’m starting, now, to see how it gets neurotic when I’m not healing. That I keep ripping the wound back open. Making sense of a situation and then jumping back into nonsense again.

Too much scab-picking causes infections. That’s when it’s time to get my ass a shrink before what used to be a scab is just a festered bile pit.

_{(ps – RICBT technically means Rhode Island Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, but it sure as hell looks like Rhode Island Cock and Ball Torture… aren’t they missing a C?)}

Addendum: Humiliation (H)

Sharon Salzberg talks about how in our culture, when we’re in pain we feel humiliation. As though we should be able to control (and stop) it at will.  As though pain means we’ve failed.  As if it is weak. And Buddhism (not to mention common sense) teaches that pain and pleasure are simply part of life, not your fault, often not in your control, and even when it is–sometimes it just means you’ve got your heart open.

Yet–there it is. To be seen really suffering can make you feel small, ashamed, seen in all your failure. There is a sense that these things are not to be shared, that suffering is a kind of weakness one should only indulge in in private. Andwhen when you are in pain and someone receives you with kindness, that kindness can feel humiliating. In The Problem of Pain, Jack talks about “the intolerable compliment” of being loved unconditionally:

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” (p.33)

“That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”(p.47)

Something about being loved generously, openly, is at times shameful. Maybe it’s that we know we don’t deserve it, and the fact of the kindness, the glare of it, only reinforces the knowledge that we aren’t big enough to be kind like that–which only makes it more difficult to be gracious enough to accept. I write that and have  a flash of my favorite (okay, and only) hymn, “The Servant Song”. I always liked the line, “Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”

As Kierkegaard notes in Fear and Trembling:

“He has not even grasped the little mystery that it is better to give than to receive, and has no inkling of what the great mystery is, namely that it is much harder to receive than to give, that is if one has had the courage to go without and did not prove a coward in the hour of need.” (p.129)

I don’t have any neat synthesis of this yet; but I think of P. telling me, “No one can blame you for taking a drink when you’re thirsty.” I remind myself that I don’t think less of people when they’re suffering, that they aren’t belittled in my mind. In fact, knowing the depth to which someone can feel can give me a sense of awe for the person, and makes the person seem like a comrade, and trust-worthy. Humiliation can only come from pride, so my guess is that the thing to do is figure out exactly what that pride is, or is about, so that it can be let go of.