Marie Buda

Discovering the River Towards Inner Freedom

Archives for February 2017

“I Do Not Need You” — A Love Letter

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My dearest beloved

I wanted to tell you

On this day of love

That I do not need you

 

I do not need you

To make me happy

So you will never have the pressure

Of my contentment on your shoulders

 

I do not need you

To provide for my financial needs

So pursue any dream you want

Without worrying about supporting me

 

I do not need you

To boost my self-esteem

So if my butt really does look big in these jeans

You can say and we can laugh

 

I do not need you

To always act cheerful

So if you feel like being grouchy

Express it in all its glory

 

I do not need you

To always be a ‘man’

So when you need to be vulnerable

Do so without feeling ashamed

 

I do not need you

To always keep me company

So when you need time by yourself

Go without feeling guilty

 

I do not need you

To always wipe away my tears

So if you too are finding the world too much

You can relax, knowing I am still supported by friends

 

I do not need you

To always be by my side

So if you want to hang out with the lads

Go and have that beer

 

I do not need you

To be someone who you are not

Be whoever you want to be

And I will support you all the way

 

I do not need you

To make me feel complete

Because we are not two who have become one

But two who have become three

 

I do not need you

So I can set you free

Because I love you

And you are always dear to me

 

Happy Valentine’s Day

Disliking People Who Are Like Us: On a Japanese Four-Character Idiom That Teaches You A Lot About People

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In Japan we have a great thing called yo-ji-jyuku-go (四字熟語). These are idiomatic phrases made out of four kanji characters. For those who aren’t familiar with the Japanese language, kanji characters are logographic characters. Instead of each character having just a sound, it also has a specific meaning. Throughout the ages Japanese scholars have put together four different kanji characters to express profound life truths. A great one I came across recently was dou-zoku-ken-o（同族嫌悪). Literally translated this idiom consists of the characters, “same”, “family”, “hate”, and “bad”. It means that we dislike people who are like us.

This may sound strange, because your first instinct may be to think that conversely we are drawn to people who are like us. This is still true. When we encounter people who are like us we feel strong love and affection. On the other hand, if these people do not resemble us at all, we feel indifference. But what if these people are just like us, but resemble aspects of ourselves that we don’t like? That’s when hate rumbles from within. We really don’t like it when other people mirror aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to accept.

A frequently portrayed example of this is the school bully who beats up homosexuals, only to discover later that he is gay himself. Him beating up other poor boys is an outer manifestation of what he does internally to himself daily. We resent people for bringing up feelings that we try so hard to suppress and push down. We hate them because we are just like them. This is what this idiom succinctly teaches.

We only accept in others what we accept within ourselves. The school bully who finally embraces his sexuality will stop hurting his colleagues. This is why people who piss us off are actually our greatest teachers. The anger that wells us from inside tells us that there are parts of ourselves we haven’t accepted and integrated into our being.

Now, you may be thinking that perhaps we suppress things for good reasons. You don’t like Trump for example, because you don’t like how misogynistic he is. And sure, according to what I’ve been saying this would mean that you don’t accept misogynistic thoughts within yourself, but isn’t this a good thing? If you accepted misogyny you would think it’s ok to be horrible to women.

Well no. If you thought this then you have fallen into one of the big misunderstandings about acceptance. Acceptance of thoughts does not equate directly to any form of action (or non-action for that matter). Put it this way, if everyone who accepted their misogynistic thoughts were a misogynist, by the same logic all crime writers would be serial killers. They spend their days unapologetically exploring some of the darkest of ideas, but they are very much normal citizens of society.

To accept is to simply confront and observe various thoughts and emotions as they arise, without judgment. If a misogynistic thought arises, for example, you can simply look at it. You don’t have to act on it. All you have to do is let it bubble up inside yourself and let it go. In fact, the only way such thoughts are released is through acceptance. However, most of us are afraid to peek at the darker ideas that come out of ourselves. We push the thoughts down, build strong walls around them hoping they will never crop up again. That is, until we bump into someone who embodies the very thoughts and emotions we’ve been suppressing. Then suddenly the barriers we tried so hard to build come crashing down, and we hate it. The irony is, you never would have had your walls fall down if you hadn’t built them in the first place.

When you don’t like someone, it’s an invitation to look within to see what exactly it is that you don’t like about them, and then in turn understand what it is you don’t like about yourself. It’s a golden opportunity to shine the light of acceptance on this trait that exists within you. You hate it when people are childish? That’s because you don’t accept the child within you. But ask yourself — what is really “wrong” with being childish?

This even applies to so-called negative traits. If you don’t like someone because they are rude, that’s because you don’t accept the rude person within you. But if you can learn to accept this aspect of yourself, you can then approach this person with calm and love, rather than hate. This isn’t to say you let them get away with their rudeness. You can still say softly to this person that being rude does not help solve the situation. If anything, your calm and composed energy is likely to deflate any tension there was in the first place.

Hate yourself, hate others. Love yourself, love others.

Don’t Let ‘Self-Improvement’ Drag You Away From Self-Acceptance

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If, like me, you’re the type of person who reads a lot of self-help literature, inevitably you will come across a lot of articles that tell you how to be your ‘better’ self. Now, if you have used some of the techniques bouncing around and find yourself a happier person — great! I sincerely mean that. However, there are a few thoughts I’ve had about the self-improvement movement that I would like to share:

1) Self-improvement can move away from self-acceptance

The term ‘improvement’ suggests that how we are in this moment is not good enough. I know that for some people, myself included, this kind of thinking can be the fire that motivates them to take action. The only issue is I highly doubt that this beat-yourself-up approach has a long-term positive effect on your emotional wellbeing. After all, you are being driven because you cannot accept yourself. I feel like that is moving away from self-love and peace. Yes, you may have a string of achievements to show at the end of it, but at what cost to your heart?

2) A linear kind of life may not be for all

Be consistent. Be obsessive. Be hungry. These are the overall themes I started to see reading autobiographies of so-called successful people. I also noticed though that a large majority of the people insisting on this kind of attitude were mostly men. In the last few months I have come to slowly accept and even embrace the fact that my inner nature is inherently chaotic. Everything from my moods, to my physical energy levels, to my cognitive functioning seems to be both cyclical and difficult to predict.

Our current patriarchal society still perceives these kinds of traits negatively, valuing instead calm, consistent linear living (A woman’s mood swings = “She’s crazy!”). However, a lot of ancient Eastern philosophies acknowledge and revere this beautifully chaotic aspect of human nature, labeling it as the ‘feminine’ side of existence. It is inherent in all of us regardless of gender, but as a woman I feel this aspect is magnified.

I see chaos a bit like a typhoon. It can come forth violently and destroy everything in its path, but from this destruction can also come brilliant creation. Although chaos may be impossible to mentally grasp, it also has magnificent depth. This is not to devalue linear living in the slightest — it has its own splendor and beauty. But it would be a shame to stamp out this other side of human existence through only valuing one side of human existence, a side that I often see the self-improvement movement championing as the only life worth living.

3) Self-improvement can be at the detriment of your inner voice

I’ve heard several people say that the key to self-improvement is to relentlessly stick at something, even if your whole being is resisting against it. This is one way to live your life, and I’m sure you will improve wonderfully at any skill you desire to cultivate. My personal conclusion regarding this kind of living is this: sure, you will externally achieve something, but it’s at the cost of ignoring your inner being. The physical sensation I get when I am in this kind of mode is a very heavy head and exhausted body. My attention, instead of feeling expansive, starts to feel very narrow. My head doesn’t seem to stop working and often I get insomnia. It’s only when I distance myself from whatever I’m doing, like in the form of a holiday, that suddenly I feel how detrimental this kind of living is for me personally.

If I’ve not snapped out of this through a break then usually my tumultuous moods will halt my productivity to a stop anyways. The painful thing about this is that despite my inner-self telling me that work isn’t possible, I start to berate myself for not being consistent. This is a negative spiral that doesn’t help. Recognising and accepting that my inner being actually is cyclical has changed things for the better. I may not be super consistent, I may often stop and start things, but I feel much more aligned with who I am. This in turns brings a sense of peace, one that I don’t feel if I’m forcing myself to do things repetitively.

4) You don’t create who you are, you unfold into who you are

I think that often we first try to craft the person we think we want to be. Only to find out that this is a vacuous endeavor that slowly drains our souls. No matter how much we mold our lives in ways that we think will bring us happiness there will be something missing. This can also lead to us clinging desperately to our achievements because we feel they’re the only things that make us “someone”.

But what if one day you lose everything? Your money, your academic degrees, your medals or even your memory. Who are you then? We then realise that actually we don’t need to create who we are, because we are “there” already. All we need is to gently unfold into it by surrendering and letting go. Listen to that inner voice. Relax and float on top of the waves of life instead of swimming against them. Be still and make space inside yourself so the song of your heart can soar through.

 

On Being An Expert

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I have been thinking about what it means to be an ‘expert’ in one’s field. The thought was triggered by a quote from Danish Physicist, Niels Bohr:

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”

What am I an expert in? I thought to myself. From the outside, someone may say that I am an expert in psychology and cognitive neuroscience as I have doctorate. But have I made every mistake that can be made in this field? Nope. I have simply spent eight years of my life cramming facts into my brain and rearranging them on paper. At a push, I could sort of call myself an expert in producing a PhD, as boy did I make a hell of a lot of mistakes along the way. This makes me more of an ‘expert’ in time management, stress regulation, procrastination and organisational skills, rather than psychology…and still I’m very, very far from being a master at any of those yet.

From a very young age we are taught to simply study. The more we know the better. We are rewarded for our ability to cram facts by getting awards, our teacher and parents’ approval, and by getting into schools which others will praise us for. Yet, in my twenties I came to the stark realisation that just because I could name parts of the brain this didn’t mean squat, at least to me. True expertise I personally felt was being able to say I knew something, not because I understood it, but because I’d lived it.

I think this was one of my main sticking points when I was teaching psychology at a university. I loved teaching so much, yet I continuously felt like an impostor assuming this position of authority. All I was doing was regurgitating information to students, and then checking how well they could then put that down in an essay. I longed desperately to teach things that I could say to students, ‘I know this, because I’ve been there’, or to conversely say to them, ‘try it and find out for yourselves whether it’s true’. I think that is why I felt particularly in my element when a student would chat to me about their mental health issues. The advice I would impart wasn’t coming from a book somewhere. It was based on knowledge I had gathered making mistake after mistake on my journey on becoming an ‘expert’ in depression.

At the end of the day, I think we become an expert not by knowing, but by doing. This is not to take away at all from people who have impressive amounts of knowledge on a topic. It’s just that I feel we truly shine when we take all this information out of our heads and manifest it in some form in the outer world. Unless we do, we can’t learn, and if we can’t learn, we can’t evolve. It’s probably why being creative is such a fundamental urge that exists in all of us.

Writing and Healing

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Recently I was looking through previous posts. I was feeling a bit self-conscious that I had so many posts on darkness. I know that this is my own stigma towards depression coming out. A little voice in my head starts nabbering that people are judging me for being such a downer. However I made a promise to myself when I revamped this blog that I would express myself honestly. What I’ve wanted to write is what I’ve been posting, so I would like to work on accepting that this is how I want to be.

It’s easy for me to show the happy side of my being. I can openly express the joy and love in my heart in a myriad of ways. Expressing darkness though, now that’s a challenge. I find it difficult to even be openly grumpy because I’m embarrassed. That’s one reason why I write a lot about “negative” emotion. I’m writing for all the times I couldn’t say in the moment how I was feeling. I’m writing so I can have a conversation about the human emotions we all experience, yet keep behind closed doors.

Meryl Streep in her Golden Globes speech recently quoted the late Carrie Fisher as saying, “Take your broken heart, and make it into art”. On a similar vein, I once heard someone say that the purpose of art was to “heal and reveal”. I think there is a very good reason why things that are considered masterpieces – whether they be literature, film, music or fine art – tend to be those that really tap into and express the gritty, heart-wrenching aspects of existence. Think about it – how many happy books were you made to read in English literature class?

When we experience art, we are given permission, through a safe medium, to experience tough emotions that we otherwise suppress and bottle up inside. Through fully connecting with the feelings, we release (heal) and further our understanding of what it means to be human (reveal). To me, writing precisely plays this role. So yes, I will continue to write what I feel flows through me. Bare with me if it can get a bit dark sometimes. Like all of us I am navigating this weird and wacky experience of living as a human being, feeling deep pain, healing it and then revealing truths of living. As Rumi said, “The wound is where the light enters”.