When You’re Raging in the Kroger Parking Lot

July 27, 2019July 27, 2019 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

One of my kids and I ran to Kroger this evening to grab a couple of things for dinner. It was just one of those quick in and out trips that should have been uneventful. As we were pushing our shopping cart to the back of my SUV to unload the groceries, I looked over to see the guy parked next to me loading up his truck with his own bags. And then, I saw that his open truck door was firmly smashed up against my driver side door. The door that I JUST got fixed when a driver backed her SUV into mine a couple of months ago. The exact same door that I had to take back to the body shop and have them redo the decorative metal strip because they apparently didn’t know to use a level when applying it, and instead of being parallel with the ground, it crept upward at an annoyingly obvious angle.

Of course, as it would turn out, the paint on my driver’s side door was damaged. Chipped, not just a paint smudge that could be wiped off. I was LIVID. Livid at the man for knowing I was watching him and actively ignoring me. Livid that the man knew his door was hitting mine and refused to do anything about it. Livid that he decided not to take responsibility and at least apologize to me. And livid, because what the heck?! Why does life give you these freaking exasperating experiences when your week is already stressful enough? It’s like God knows you are teetering on the edge of losing your mind and he thinks it would be helpful to offer you the last little shove necessary to finish the job…

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I know, you are reading this and thinking, wow Julie, you need some serious therapy. It’s just a little paint chip. And yes, it is just a little cosmetic flaw on a 10-year-old SUV. In the grand scheme of things, it is a piddling little problem. Except…..I was already angry. Like…really, really angry.

In fact, for the last couple of months, I have been furious. Deep, dark, seething anger that has risen up out of nowhere….or so I thought.

Now, don’t get all upset on me…I’m not homicidal or anything, and I’m not about to go ballistic on anyone. The point is this: I’ve realized I had some intense pent up anger that built up over a decade, and I now finally have the space to deal with it. At least, that’s what the universe seems to be telling me.

Anger is a tough emotion to deal with. Growing up a good Christian girl, I was always taught that anger isn’t OK….you’ve got to eradicate it before you go to bed at night, and geez….who can really do that? It’s not exactly possible to have all your frustrations and wrongs addressed during daylight hours. As far as I understood for years, the only justifiable long0term anger is righteous indignation, like when you’re angry about injustices that occur in the world. I’ve noticed, however, that people usually have limited patience when individuals feel angry about injustices or wrongs personally done to them, and they aren’t able to get over their anger quickly enough. We tend to be uncomfortable allowing others to grieve or be angry for very long. We want them to fix it or get over it.

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I have a super wise therapist friend who once taught me that anger is a secondary emotion. It really is a front for four or five other primary emotions: fear, embarrassment and shame, guilt, frustration, etc. One of my kids was having real struggles with anger a few years ago and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Once my friend explained this concept to me, it was much easier to ask my son the right questions, dig deeper, and find out the underlying cause of his anger. And she was right. He was usually embarrassed about something when he became angry, or afraid of looking incompetent.

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I’ve been doing some digging now into my own anger. I don’t like it honestly. The raw, human part of me wants to feel and flesh out my anger because anger makes you feel validated, and justified. But anger burns you away from the inside. Frankly, it is also exhausting.

It became clear that I carried years of pent up anger from my 12-year marriage. Like, ALOT of anger. For the first couple of years after I got divorced, I was trucking along just fine, and then BAM!, a volcano of all kinds of vile emotions started pouring out from the recesses of my mind. As you recall, I grew up a good Christian girl and I still have enough of that in me that it makes me control my outward behavior and I can present myself appropriately to the world. 🙂 But my best friends know my struggle – they know how I want to yell and rage and stomp and throw things, and that I’ve used the word HATE on multiple occasions, and all the shame that comes with that because good Christian girls aren’t supposed to hate anyone.

But this is real life, y’all. Which is why it needs to be written about. Because we all have situations like this. And we all get angry.

So why all the anger now? I think that this is part of the healing and grieving that comes from going through hard things in life. God knows the dark parts locked away inside of us that need to be dealt with, even if our conscious minds don’t. And God clearly knows that I have some stuffed up emotions and a big pain body locked away within. And until I deal with them, they insidiously poison me and control other areas of my life, limiting me from being the best me.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t know I was angry for all those years, because I had developed coping mechanisms to survive. We all do this at times in life. If we are faced with difficult situations that we don’t think we can escape, we construct stories or ways of dealing with things to avoid the despair and frustrations that we don’t think can be resolved. I know I felt this way. For most of my life I thought divorce was wrong in pretty much every circumstance. I knew I wasn’t happy, but I also knew if I was going to be married for the next forty years I had to figure out a way to make things work so I wouldn’t be absolutely miserable.

And so I justified, rationalized, created stories, overlooked wrongs, etc etc, etc, to try and cope with a life situation that I absolutely didn’t want. I couldn’t be angry at the time because that certainly doesn’t help create an easy forty-year path.

But now, I am no longer in what felt like a seemingly hopeless situation, so all of that suppressed anger has come up. And believe me, you can build up alot of anger over 12 years.

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Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk who you should absolutely acquaint yourself with if you haven’t already, wrote a book on anger called Don’t Bite the Hook. Actually, I think its an audio recording of a talk she gave once. ( I have it on audible). In this book, she talks about learning to see anger as a teacher, not as an enemy. She offers that if we learn to work with anger and be open to it, it can teach us to be more compassionate and wise instead of just escalating on autopilot into aggression and violence.

There is a concept she discusses called shenpa. Literally, it means “attachment”, but the idea behind it is the same as the theme of her book title: “getting hooked.” A review of her book in Tricycle magazine describes it well. Something happens to you that you don’t like, and a shift happens deep inside you, and you’re suddenly hooked. Or, as Eckhart Tolle describes it, the pain body, that was lying dormant within, suddenly wakes up and begins to arise, taking over your thoughts and emotions. A couple of possible examples to illustrate: My ex-husband says something that irritates me and suddenly I tighten up inside and feel snarky. A colleague drops the ball and I have to do extra work, but instead of just letting it go and doing what needs to be done, I latch on to the “unfairness” of the situation and seethe until my ego is soothed. Or, I come out of Kroger and find that a stranger wasn’t diligent with his own property and allowed mine to be damaged. And, instead of giving grace for it, I clench my teeth and latch on to the angry emotions arising. This is shenpa.

I’ve been thinking about Chodron’s idea of working with anger alot lately. Other Buddhist teachers discuss similar ideas, like inviting difficult emotions in like they are good friends, not fighting against them. Apparently, when this practice is done regularly, those emotions begin to dissolve and don’t seem to be quite the toxic invaders they once were.

There are many emotions that are easier to sit with than anger. Give me some sadness, grief, joy… But anger is harder because you either want to feed it with delicious fantasies of getting revenge on the person or thing that wronged you, or it makes you want to retell your stories to everyone who will listen and revel in their assurances that you were treated terribly and you poor thing and how dare someone do that to you and…..you get the idea. Shenpa, as the Tricycle writer wrote, is very much an itch that yearns to be scratched.

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If there’s one thing I know about life, it is that is it is very patient and generous in helping one learn lessons. God will keep bringing the same lesson around again and again in different forms for you to learn until you finally learn it. It is really, really aggravating.

However, since I’ve learned this, I’ve also gotten smarter and recognized that if I want to decrease my suffering, I might as well learn the lesson early on. God has no problem waiting me out. But, I’ve also learned that you can’t be sneaky with God. My first tendency is to pretend I’m not angry about anything and act all kum ba yah with the world. God sees right through that and will promptly allow something to happen that proves to me that my anger is still ripe and ready for picking.

My second tendency is to run straight to therapy and try to fix my anger asap: a little EMDR, a little talk therapy, maybe even a little primal screaming. Yeah, nope. While therapy is brilliant, it is not a quick fix. We have to do the hard work, and the hard work insists on sitting with things, creating space, and just allowing things to be for a while.

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So, I’m totally writing this post from an unenlightened state. But I’m giving myself a billion points for at least being aware enough and willing to admit that I’m really angry about alot of stuff that has happened over the last 15 years. But I’m also giving myself another billion points for knowing that my anger really isn’t all about my ex-husband, or the Kroger parking lot guy, or any other person or event. My anger is really rooted in all the stories I believe about life and myself. It is rooted in underlying emotions of shame and feelings of incompetence and fear.

Welcome anger, come in and sit for a while. Teach me about the deepest places in myself. Tell me about my fears and insecurities. Help me to become more compassionate and wise. And may I enjoy a deeper sense of connectedness with every other person who has also struggled with their own shenpa and anger.

When Maslow’s Pyramid Tips Over…

July 19, 2019July 19, 2019 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

You know how when you’re sitting on your back deck, drinking coffee before the hot of the day, listening to your favorite podcasts and audiobooks, and all of a sudden…BAM!!!!…..an idea suddenly hits you….a convergence of the many different voices and ideas that speak to you on a daily basis…and it feels kind of mystical?

I had one of these moments today – when I was jumping back and forth between Richard Rohr’s The Univeral Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Beleive the latest Robcast episode, and reflecting on my job as a med/surg nurse. This is a regular “spiritual practice” of mine; my ADHD daily races along the rails of words and ideas, trying to make obscure connections between the most seemingly unrelated things…all the while trying to balance my left-brain scientific side with my sometimes “woo woo” right-brain spirituality. I’ll try to explain in the next little bit the “aha” moment I experienced this morning while enjoying the cicadas, a cup of coffee, my beloved shade trees, and a comfy Adirondack chair.

Two of the things that are constantly on my mind are what it means to be human, and the underlying connectedness of all things. Taking these concepts further, what is our responsibility to others while remaining true to ourselves? How do we live out our true selves in a temporary space-time construct, while at the same time loving and serving all creation and all sentient beings? (This is a rhetorical question: there are no tidy answers to neatly wrap this one up. I’m skeptical of those who try).

While I’ve always been a bit eccentric, with a bent toward spiritual and theological things, I started out life like most people…trying to build a safe, secure world with comforts, toys, options, and defined goals to pursue. As Richard Rohr has so often said, the purpose of the beginning of our lives is to build up a “container”, to learn who we are and create an “external self”. Rules, defined limits, and boundaries help create security and a sense of identity in life, according to Rohr, and are a necessary foundation to lay for the successful transition to the “second half of life”. (Side note: Rohr derived many of his ideas about the halves of life from Carl Jung). As Rohr describes it, our first half of life, this building up all the things I just mentioned, is a strengthening of the ego. It is a way of grounding ourselves to this material world, which is a good and necessary step. But, this ego and the first half of life can only take us so far. In the end, it offers only disillusionment because it is encouraging us to constantly chase what is really just vapor, simply the ghost of a non-existent reality, Only when we can begin to transcend our ego containers can we learn to taste what being a spirit-human is really all about.

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Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is pretty well known, I think. It was discussed in almost every introductory psychology or health class I’ve sat in, ranging from undergrad liberal arts to counseling courses to nursing school. You’re probably pretty familiar with it yourself, but just in case you’re not, here’s a graphic:

Basically, Maslow is making the point that we as humans have fundamental needs in order to thrive, and those needs must be met in a sequential order to be able to move on to more and more abstract ideas….or to become our highest, most actualized, most creative selves.

There are certainly exceptions to this hierarchy, but in general, it really rings true with what I’ve seen and experienced in life. One particular area that I’ve thought alot about is back when I was in high school and college and I would go with my churches or other groups on mission trips to third world countries. There were basically two camps of thought among the various leaders of these groups: 1) preach Jesus and salvation as paramount importance, because being “saved” is better than physical or emotional security in this life, or 2) meet people’s felt needs, because a hungry belly isn’t capable of listening to talk about the sweet by and by or admonishments to radically change ways of doing life in the here and now.

I’m no longer trying to proselytize or get anyone “saved”, but I do believe this: it’s disrespectful and unfeeling to preach to people about anything if we aren’t willing to step into the grime and horrors of their lives and try to help them with their immediate hurts.

So all this to say, I’m totally on board with Maslow’s hierarchy…..except for maybe the idea that sex is a physiological need. I’ve still never yet met anyone who died from not having sex, although there have been plenty among us who insist it is true. (Tongue in cheek here). Sexual intimacy, on the other hand, does seem in my mind to be a legitimate need in the love and belonging category. OK, away from that rabbit trail and back to building my primary thesis…

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…..which is: Maslow’s Hierarchy as we traditionally view it is only the FIRST half of the story.

Having now reached my 39th year of life and having done a bit of shadow work, I believe that Maslow’s upward rising pyramid of needs is absolutely necessary to build the first half of life container, per Rohr and Jung. But, it fails to explain the second, and maybe most important half of life that not everyone reaches…..where the pyramid flips over. The needs that were so fundamental suddenly become the least concern. When we were once so worried about and centered on our environment and relationships, we now learn that true meaning, wellbeing, and joy spring forth from within us; we don’t ultimately achieve them from what is on the outside.

Ann Voskamp, author of one of my all-time favorite books (One Thousand Gifts), uses the phrase “the upside-down Kingdom of God”. I love this; I think it describes succinctly how the divine works in the world – directly opposite of much of the conventional wisdom that we hold so tightly to. This alternative way of looking at life says that the most important thing is for us to know who we truly are at our core, and to move, act, and live out of that inherent knowing. However, the wisdom that most of us live by tells us that we must first build an external life and hinge who we are on it. We judge the quality of our lives by what we own, what we’ve done, and who we do it with.

What is so interesting to me, and what most of the great spiritual teachers I have read say, is that to get to this upside-down kingdom, you first have to live in reality as we currently experience it, where things, success, goals, and safety are the most important. Then, as if by moving through a worm hole into an alternate universe, something causes our perspectives and paradigms to change….we suddenly see that what we once thought was so damned important for our happiness really isn’t so necessary after all. Sometimes this happens to people by methodically moving up Maslow’s hierarchy through socioeconomic and emotional development. Others shoot through the worm hole rather quickly because of some intense suffering they have experienced that brought them to the end of themselves. A few, like Rohr admits about himself, have somehow made this transition for no explainable reason other than a great insatiable thirst to know the truth of Life. Still, many others never reach this transformation, never know it even exists. As a side note, this is the salvation that I firmly believe Jesus was offering: to tell those who were desperate, hopeless, and willing to hear…..that this upside-down Kingdom exists and is accessible to all who will learn to see with new eyes and hear with new ears.

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As a nurse, formerly on an orthopedic floor, and now on a general medical unit, I love to watch and talk to patients. I actually think I could never work on an ICU floor….patients on ventilators don’t tend to talk back to you. My interest in gabbing with patients and learning their life stories is my biggest time management issue: by the end of a shift I may be rushing to check off all of my tasks, but I can definitely offer a good commentary on my patients and their lives outside the hospital.

It seems to me that Maslow’s hierarchy is very tangibly experienced when people are in the hospital. Here they are usually stressed, afraid, in pain, and overwhelmed. As such, the level they are on seems to stand out. If I pay close enough attention, I can tell which patients are most concerned with their physical environments and making sure their physical needs are met in just such a way. I can tell which patients are most craving solid relationships or struggling with how to do relationships well. I can often tell which patients have deep-seated insecurities that are holding them back in life. And then, there are the patients (usually elderly, but not always) whose pyramids have tipped over. They know what is important in life and how to do life well. They know what ultimately matters, and what is temporal and superficial. These are the people I have the hardest time pulling myself away from; I may be nursing their physical bodies, but they are nursing my soul.

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I personally live a very wobbly existence. What I believe to be true on my good days doesn’t always translate to my bad. Some days I feel very in tune with the upside-down Kingdom, and other days I’m the most ego-driven, selfish person I know. My pyramid will start to get a little top-heavy and tippy, and then some fear or insecurity of mine will cause it to come crashing back down with a resounding clunk, reminding me that there is much shadow work left to be done and that I have not yet fully escaped my first half of life container.

But I suppose this is the spiritual path. Maybe instead of a one time all or nothing flip, our pyramid of needs will turn back and forth like a magnet searching for true north. Rohr even discusses something along these lines: the stages of spiritual development, in his book, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See. Or as Ken Wilber, Don Beck, and others have described, spirituality and increasing consciousness is a spiral dynamic. Ultimately, I think the path is never a linear one, due to the extreme complexity of life.

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As a final thought here regarding all my pontificating in this post….

I am SO glad that my pyramid is tipping and threatening to permanently topple one day. It is so freaking liberating to not be quite so tied up in all the things that I used to believe made life meaningful. It is SO good to have experienced that being married, or having alot of money, or owning a nice house aren’t things that automatically bring happiness. It is SO good to have learned, even if only to an extent, that having strong relationships is more important to me than my own safety, or looks, or possessions, or physical comforts.

However, I am equally grateful that I had people in my life that helped me build a strong first half of life container. I am grateful that I’m learning to transcend and leave behind the things that haven’t served me well, and yet include those things from the past that are still serving me.

And most of all, I’m grateful that I have the freedom and time to sit on my deck under a canopy of shade trees to drink coffee, listen to some great teachers, and ponder life.

Expectations for Life and Why God Loves Rock Bottom

July 9, 2019July 9, 2019 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

*I use a masculine pronoun for God in this post simply out of convenience.

A couple good friends and I closed down a Starbucks the other night, catching up after not being together for several months. These are two of my people – the ones I can get REALLY real with, ask the deep questions with, and speculate about the point of ALL of IT.

One theme that each of us has struggled with at different points in the last few years is having our expectations for the way life works completely thrown back in our faces. We thought that if we only worked hard enough, played by the rules, were nice to everyone, and sacrificed ourselves….then, the kinks of life would unravel, we would suddenly find our true purpose and financial security, we would be treated well by all, and would live out the rest of our lives in relative ease and happiness.

Along the way, my friends and I have each discovered that life doesn’t play by the rules, at least not the rules that we were raised to believe. Rather, the best-laid plans can fall apart before our eyes. The people we struggled to understand and love often turned their backs on us or remained just out of our grasp. Many goals we worked so hard to reach were finally achieved, but with a bittersweet taste left in our mouths as other troubles rose up to join the ones we thought we’d left behind. And when the quiet moments come, we wonder when the other shoe will drop. Was all of our striving for naught in the end? Is life only, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, a mere chasing after the wind?

We have each fought hard to cling to life, to let it dance us, to doggedly pursue hope time and again. But as one of us asked the others, if working hard and doing all the right things doesn’t get one anywhere, what else is there?

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I once heard Anne Lamott say somewhere that God loves rock bottom. Part of me hates this. Like, what….God needs us to get suicidal before he can work with us? We need to be beaten down again and again as “punishment” for all of our good intentions and hard work? And why is life so timely? You barely start to crawl up from one clubbing only to be throat punched by some other trouble.

I guess if God loves rock bottom, he’s either absolutely hateful, or there is something good that can come from it.

But if I’m honest, the more God bloodies me, the more resilient I’m becoming. It’s getting harder to knock me back down, and takes bigger blows to get me there. This kind of battling makes one see what is really worth getting upset over, and it reveals my ego’s own pettiness in the past for getting so riled up over the dumbest of things. Every once in a while I get a little brave and Captain Dan-ish, screaming: ” Is that all you’ve got? You really think that’s gonna bring me down?”, with a belligerent yet still timidly respectful middle finger held out in my mind.

Remember that praise and worship song from a couple decades back, Refiner’s Fire? I used to like the song, but now I laugh when I hear it because of how superficial it is. It’s a lovely melody always sweetly sung about how we are simply delighted to be refined in God’s fire to become holy and pure. I can’t help but wonder if the writer of that song had ever suffered. Suffering is not sung about in major chords to an audience of swaying and softly sobbing onlookers. Real rock bottom with God feels like a shit-hole, like you’ve been abandoned and there’s no hope for much of anything. When God burns away parts of you that you thought were necessary for your identity and security….that freaking hurts like hell….especially in the dark nights when you’re not sure if he will rescue you when he’s had his way with you. I think appropriate music for what God often takes us through is much more along the lines of minor chords and death metal, followed up by some mourning bagpipes once he has successfully broken us to pieces.

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Having expectations has never really helped me out much in life, though I still seem to latch on to them. Very few things or people have actually turned out the way I’d expected or hoped. In fact, the more expectations I have, the more disappointed I end up being all the way around. But we cling to our stories, don’t we, as though we had such great control over much of anything in the first place?

As I get older, expectations around fairness seem to be absolute folly even though I haven’t been able to rid myself of them. Life isn’t fair, never claimed to be fair…yet we always put that demand on it. Where did we get that from? Even the God of the Gospels wasn’t fair in how he treated people. Maybe he was just, but he wasn’t fair.

It’s like that line from the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe….Aslan isn’t safe, but he’s good. God isn’t safe, but he’s good. Life isn’t safe, but it’s good.

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How do we know that life is good, that the Divine big picture is working in our favor and not against us?

Though I hate to admit it, I’m coming to realize that rock bottom part is the only thing that can truly show us the inherent goodness of all things. But it’s really hard, because if we fight against rock bottom, we are so blinded by our suffering that we can’t see anything but ourselves and what we “think” we’re losing. But if we breathe through rock bottom, and let the suffering shake us hard and then pass through, we can find that something pure, something real, remained. Our real selves. The divinely infused core that is connected to all things, is loved completely, and is well.

Even if it seems silly, I believe that from rock bottom springs forth deep magic. It is the same resurrection magic that transformed the suffering of Jesus into hope and transcendence. Didn’t Jesus say all along that to truly live, to truly understand what is real and lasting, we must die to ourselves? (Or, in Julie’s commentary, we must die to who we think we are – our identities, our stories about ourselves and others, our illusions about the permanence of what is around us).

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So, maybe God really does love rock bottom…not because he wants to see us in pain, but because he knows it is the one place where we can finally be freed of facades, and all the games we play, and all the belief systems we construct, and all of our expectations for how life should work. Maybe, as Don Miguel Ruiz says, we are born into this life and fall into a dream…and maybe we need a hard shake (or many hard, gut-wrenching, strip-us-bare shakes) to wake us up again.