From my journal for July 3:
Etty talks about accepting both high and low tides in relationship, and that sounded like a good idea. Acceptance is something I can practice, unlike the letting go piece which I don’t do well at all. So I got out Radical Acceptance. She talks about how the Buddha teaches that there is no “self,” no independent self, we are all connected. Something about that felt uncomfortable to me. No, I am me! Why do I want to be this person who is such a failure? What if I could just step back from her and love her, this woman who is feeling so bad about herself? Somehow my heart goes right out, like it does to people who say they are having a hard time. I see the problem with the slide show. I want to impress people, not share something I love. If it’s not about sharing something I love, I don’t want to do it.
Oh, yes, I remember when I stopped working on “Written in Blood” when I realized I was trying to prove I deserve to live. Building Neskaya, I never thought once about impressing people, or proving anything about myself. I realize that worrying about “me” as being antithetical to “connected with all” is one of those paradoxes that the rational materialist paradigm has a hard time with. My individual qualities are the gift I have to give to the world, but I also am connected to all and part of the whole as a cell is “connected to” and part of the whole body.
Reading Radical Acceptance I am finding lots of suggestions for how to handle the parts of my life I have a hard time with. One important suggestion is to pay attention to my body. Often feelings that I’m uncomfortable with are in my body, if I pay attention to them instead of trying to make them go away I have a chance to find out what’s bothering me, at which point I can do something about it. I noticed recently that when I got a sense of what I was uncomfortable about, it was a situation with a friend, the uncomfortable feeling in my body went away. I still had the issue I was uncomfortable about, but now I can see what to do about it.