#I’ve been trying to undo that programming and accept criticism better for all things

[biocrafthero]

If you guys (ambiguous) don’t start engaging with media properly and critically and thoughtfully I’m gonna start hitting you over the head with hammers

[palimpsessed]

Please please please could you talk about this parallel internal monologue—what are your thoughts?

BAZ

I kiss him back, squarely. Firmly. Matter-of-factly. You’re all I want, I think. And you can have everything you need.”

“I’m not sure what he’s telling me with this kiss. I pretend it’s Yes and Yes and Be kind to me.”

SIMON

“Fine, you fucker. Have me. Just have me. Do your worst, you stubborn twat. Be the death of me. You’ll be the death of me.”

Oh ho ho, my dear Anon. Of course I will talk about this part!!! What a meaty passage to sink my teeth into.

To put things as simply as possible, the juxtaposition we see between these two sections is the perfect encapsulation of the different ways Simon and Baz express and receive love.

Let's start by taking a look at Baz's piece, as it does come first. (Read that sentence out of context, I dare ya.)

At this point in the book, Baz and Simon have just had one of the most critical relationship-building conversations thus far. Simon has set boundaries about magic being cast on his body that Baz has agreed to. They've talked about Lamb and America and settled that matter for good. Baz has managed to lasso Simon with own tail and proceeded to do some very interesting things to it. (I'm going to do my best not to get distracted by that, but, Anon, if you know anything about me, you'll know what an absolutely monumental struggle that is.) Simon has asked Baz to be less kind to him and Baz has delivered, as only Baz can, one of the most romantic lines in the entire trilogy: "I can touch you less gently, but I won't love you less kindly."

And that leads me neatly to my first point: Baz wants to be gentle and kind with Simon, because that's what he thinks Simon needs and deserves. Gentleness and kindness are what Baz wants from Simon. That's how he thinks love should be. They've both seen and done horrible things, and he believes their love should offer a solace from all of that.

(That offering of solace is a theme throughout AWTWB. Slightly off topic, we see their bed become more and more such a sanctuary—perhaps the only place where the troubles of the outside world cannot reach them. @theflyingpeach has shared some beautiful thoughts on the bed's symbolism—their own Eden/paradise and a place where they help one another lay aside the burdens that could otherwise separate them. I've remarked before that Baz's childhood bedroom serves as a kind of refuge for them in CO in the midst of some truly steep trauma, so it was really lovely to see this kind of idea brought forward and deepened and expanded on in AWTWB in this way.)

Baz wants to give Simon kindness, safety, gentleness—three things he's been sorely deprived of in his life. When Simon is beside himself because Baz makes him a sandwich the way he likes, Baz responds internally with: "As if I wouldn't make the world spin backwards if I thought he'd like it better that way." Baz would give Simon anything, would do anything to make him happy. Baz wants to be a kind, caring, thoughtful boyfriend to the love of his life—who he knows is struggling with trauma and self-worth. All the while, Baz himself is also struggling big time with trauma and self-worth. (It's almost like they match.) It feels pretty logical that someone in Baz's place would look at Simon's struggle and wish to be soft and gentle—especially basing this logic on how he feels. He asks Simon to be gentle with him their first time together. Maybe that's because it's Baz's first time. Maybe that's because he wants to feel fragile instead of being reminded that he's an indestructible vampire. Maybe that's because gentle is just what he wants. Maybe it's all of the above. In this case, the reason isn't really important, but the fact that it's what Baz needs is. If it's how Baz needs to receive love, then it follows it's how he would give love. (Rainbow tagged a post about AWTWB shortly before the book was released with the Beatles' lyric: "and in end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". I don’t think that was by chance.)

All this is to say that the conversation Simon and Baz have before the parallel passages in question reveals that Simon isn't comfortable receiving love in this same way. He doesn't want gentle and kind and soft because he doesn't know how to process feelings like that. I'm going to do something different and tag the @youhearbiggirls podcast whose July 29 episode talked about this in a really great way (at 26:20)—including discussion of a message from Rainbow's now-deleted Twitter account. I was so happy to hear that old tweet being talked about, because I thought it was really great and was sad it was lost when Rainbow deleted her account. And! Because they mentioned the date of the tweet and people and the search function on discord are awesome, I was able to locate a screenshot someone shared!

The takeaway here is that Simon isn't programmed to accept love and kindness from others. His brain and his body have been conditioned for violence and fight or flight by trauma. He doesn't know how to accept or process good feelings and sensations, because to him, those sensations actually feel bad. They're foreign, and therefore frightening to him. That's why he feels like he has to flee when he's being physical with Baz—or, rather, I think, when Baz is trying to be physical with him. This is what Simon is attempting to express when he tells Baz that he doesn't "like that feeling. That, like, feathery feeling. Like, touch me or don't—but don't, like, whisper on me." Simon takes a huge step forward when he's able to finally verbalize this to Baz—it also goes a long way to allowing them to be physically intimate.

Baz's half of the parallel passage addresses this directly: "I kiss him back, squarely. Firmly. Matter-of-factly." This is Baz consciously making an adjustment in how he treats Simon to better give him the kind of love that Simon needs, the kind of love he asked for. His thoughts here reinforce this. "You're all I want" he tells Simon in his head, and he means it.

He understands much more about Simon now. He's seen more of who Simon is. And he still loves him. Simon—all of Simon—is still the only person Baz wants. "And you can have everything you need", Baz promises Simon. He's going to give Simon the kind of love and affection that Simon has asked for. He's going to be firm. He's going to kiss him squarely on the mouth, not softly. He's going to be direct and he's not going to let himself be scared or timid or shy away. Simon needs boldness and bravery and unequivocation. Baz is up to the task, and this is his way of showing that to Simon.

And then…! "I'm not sure what he's telling me with this kiss. I pretend it's Yes and Yes and Be kind to me."—Be kind to me.—Baz has admitted that he's "more used to guessing what Simon is thinking—what he's feeling, what he wants." He's once more trying to fill in those gaps in his mind, except this time, he actually understands Simon. They've finally gotten to a place where Simon is speaking for himself and Baz doesn't have to guess. The kiss comes immediately after Simon asks Baz to be less kind, and Baz has refused on the basis that it is exactly the opposite of what Simon needs, even if Simon doesn't see it that way. While Baz is kissing Simon—firmly, squarely, not in a new way, but definitely in a way he hasn't for a while—Baz is hoping that Simon will feel differently. That he'll feel good enough and safe enough with Baz to not only accept kindness, but to ask for it. To understand and internalize his need for kindness, and then to be able to accept it from Baz. For Simon, accepting kindness is being vulnerable, and as much as he loves Baz, he's not yet at a place where he feels safe and settled. He convinced himself early on that there was no security in their relationship, and he doesn't yet trust any security in his life—it's not something he's had to count on. So for Simon to ask Baz with his kiss to "be kind" would be monumental—it would be him undoing a lifetime of programming for violence and giving himself fully into their relationship and their future together.

Of course, we know what Simon is really telling Baz with his kiss. Onward to part two!

"You're all I want," Baz says, trying to convince Simon not to be jealous of Lamb. "Fine, you fucker. Have me. Just have me" then serves as Simon's response. In fact, this whole section seems to be in conversation with Baz—but more so the reconciliation scene than their preceding conversation.

Let's take a little trip back to Chapter 16. "If we do this", Baz says then of getting back together—of Simon trying—"I want the full Simon Snow treatment…I want the locked jaw. The squinty eyes. The shoulders." (I mean, same, Baz.) "I want you to slay a dragon before you give up on me, do you understand?...I want you to try everything before you give up on us again." If we start here, then I think we can trace these threads through directly to what Simon is thinking when he kisses Baz.

Baz wants the full Simon Snow treatment? "Fine", Simon says, "Have me. Just have me." Baz wants him to fight and "try everything" before he gives up? "Do your worst" is Simon's answer. "I thought you'd go down fighting if you believed in something…" Baz says. So, Simon responds with: "Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me." The kiss in Chapter 32 then becomes a rebuttal of sorts. It's Simon's closing argument. He's opened himself up to Baz and told him what he needs. He's "Use[d his] words" and now he's using his mouth the way he's most comfortable—kissing Baz. Kissing him fiercely and telling him everything he's feeling with it. More than that, it's his way of showing Baz—not just telling him—that he's going to keep his word. He's going to try now, and this is him trying for Baz. This is him meeting every challenge, every demand that Baz issued, and slaying them like dragons. He's going to fight, he's going to give his all, he's going to risk everything to make his relationship with Baz work this time. Simon asking Baz for what he needs was a major victory in his ongoing battle with insecurity and I think he's feeling buoyed by that, a swell of confidence that comes through in the fierceness of his thoughts.

I'd like to spend a little more time with the last line: "Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me." Let's look at this in terms of what we know of Simon. He needs fierceness, passion, violence to feel comfortable.

Both Simon and Baz are all or nothing in the way they think about each other and the love they feel, but I think we're seeing something else with Simon's "Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me." The first time he tells Baz that he loves him, Baz is shocked. He truly doesn’t believe that Simon is in love with him, and when he questions it, Simon's reasoning is: "I've killed so many things for you." And when Simon is facing off with the goblin, he lets the goblin get close because "The Mage taught me that sometimes the best way to get under someone's guard is to let them close." If violence is what Simon knows and understands, if that's what's comfortable to him, then it makes sense these are the terms in which Simon views everything, including his relationship with Baz. From his earliest moments under the Mage's control, Simon learned to think of himself as expendable. He was the Chosen One, a weapon, a blade to be kept sharp. He internalized the idea that he wouldn't live through the war and the Humdrum—he said "I’ll fight until I can't anymore". He spends most of his childhood with the belief that the greatest thing he will ever do is die—fall in battle saving the world. His highest aspiration in life is to sacrifice himself for the people he loves. I think this is at the heart of what he's thinking during that kiss with Baz: the way he knows best to prove his love to Baz is to offer him his life—"Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me."

I don't think Simon’s moved passed this way of thinking about himself & the price he thinks he has to pay to prove his love. (Further underscoring this, Baz tells him to “slay a dragon” and Simon is—probably—a dragon...) But I think this is so much of who Simon is at his core, beyond the manipulation he suffered at the Mage's hands, that he'll always play the hero because it's inherent to his nature. He does put himself into harm's way & lies to Baz to protect him. The good part in all this is that living a life of peace with Baz will present far fewer chances for Simon to put his life on the line in order to prove himself, and finally, someday, he'll realize that he doesn't have anything to prove. Until then, he'll keep trying for Baz in the best way he knows how.

Thanks so much for this ask!

As ever, if anyone has thoughts to add or other questions to ask, please do send them along. 😘

[olaluwe]

Seun Onigbinde [photo credit] Daily Post

In less than four months or thereabout into the second term of the Buhari administration, nemesis in a way has caught up with two of his proven critics in a manner, arguably, never before seen in the political history of the country.  

I say this, reasons being that, I’ve been around for some time now and I don’t think I’ve heard or seen similar scenario ever played out in Nigeria where politically active personalities would be barred from joining, in whatever capacity, a government of which they once hold critical opinions.

I might be wrong as I don’t have a monopoly of knowledge. As such anybody with a superior experience is free to correct me.

And the executor of the judgment on the two was none other than the Buhari Media Organization and by extension his die-hard fans.

The undoing of the two, like I hinted above, was after all the while of throwing invectives at the person of President Buhari and his government they suddenly make a U-turn by accepting an offer to serve in the same government.

The first casualty of the Buhari Media Organization’s intolerable stance for anybody who looked double-faced a personality was Festus Adedayo.

Festus is a brilliant writer and critic who has not spared the Buhari administration with the vitriol of criticisms ceaselessly flowing from his pen.

He has a well-referenced stockpile of unkind words for the president and his men in his locker-room as an opinionated writer.

It is fair enough, you might say. After all, being a Nigerian and a writer, he is such a critical stakeholder in the country’s democratic project that’s duty-bound to breathe his perceptions on the state of the nation.

He is also eminently qualified to hold the government accountable as far as governance is concerned.

But more often than not, his written pieces are borne out of bad faith, personal aggrandizement or a calculated but hidden lure of lucre through self-promotion unto the government consciousness by way of launching scathing attacks on it which all played out not too long afterward.

All seem to be going well for him as an independent critic until he veered off the track in a manner of speaking by accepting the appointment as the chief media aide to the current Senate President Ahmed Lawan.

The Buhari Media Organization, as well as his supporters, would have none of it. And their response was tidal enough to cause a significant shift in official quarters.

Adedayo was not only severely criticized by the group for accepting an appointment from a government he sees nothing good in, his innocent benefactor; Ahmed Lawan was likewise hounded through a frenzied social media campaign into terminating the said appointment.

That settled the score with critic Festus whose only rebuttal was his vehemence resolve to continue criticizing the government where and when it appears it’s not doing well as it concerns good governance no matter whose Ox is gored.

I personally wish him well at such a laudable endeavor from which I also advise that he should never deviate.

But if feelers from his antecedence are anything to go by, that’s left to be seen because I’ve it on good authority that he was once a media aide to one of the governors in the south-south region of the country. 

This makes it a forgone conclusion that he would always be on the look-out for similar openings by whatever means suitable including demonizing his targets.  

This time around the victim, literally speaking, is Seun Onigbinde.

Before his appointment gone awry as the Technical Adviser to the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Clem Agba, he was the co-founder of a certain IT company named BudgIT which specializes in fiscal transparency.  

Like Festus, Seun has been a long-standing caustic denigrator of the government of the day, and indeed of the president.

He had at some points in the past described the president in the lowliest of language imaginable. Summarily, the president to him is 'incompetent, dictatorial and perpetuating illegalities' in one of his rabid jibes.

And those men and women of goodwill and genuine interest of the country at heart which includes my humble self who support the president he had also uncharitably characterized as 'ethnic jingoists'.

It is a thing of interest that long before now the route of criticizing a government of the day at every opportunity has been traveled by many with clearly the singular motive of getting noticed and followed by an appointment.

And many indeed were later appointed into the same government they had harangued at every turn even needlessly for the reason of not appreciating its limitations as a bunch of elective and appointive persons seeking the good of the country in their various capacities.

What usually happened next is they were not only quieted but would go on to singing a new song of praise of the government in which a while ago they see nothing good to write home about. Isn’t that hypocritical? Yes, it is. The reality that had stared us in the face-up until now is that they always get away with it.

With the few examples so far seen, it seems that is not working with this government because its supporters are strict, conscious and are well-armed to take on individuals who might want to access the government on the back of being self-entitled critics of its programs and policies.

And I think it is a good one. People, by whatever names they go – critic, opponents, name it should not be allowed to eat their cake and still have it. You cannot describe something or someone in the most odious terms and still want to co-travel with it. It shows in practical terms a total lack of honour, decency, morality, and integrity.

If the critics truly believed in the ideas and ideologies they are espousing which indeed most of the time are at variance with the government one should expect that they find an alternative home in the wide skies of our political climate to push them rather than seeking to sneak themselves into the same government at nightfall thinking people will just look the other way.

To me, it is nothing short of an act of moral instability or bankruptcy if you like which has long been condoned in the political landscape of the country.

It is even quite different from when politicians switched allegiance from one political party to the other no matter how ridiculous the stated reasons are.

In their case, they constitute themselves into arm-chair critics and are from their cozy inner-rooms slashing at the heart, body and soul of a government only to emerge as beneficiaries of such dirty antics while the real party men get soiled from head to toe in the murky trenches of Nigerian electioneering campaign. 

Without mincing word, Seun Onigbinde is a social and intellectual scoundrel who seeks to profit by a calculated subterfuge. He is a horrible wretch hoping he would not be uncovered.

And his types should be restrained or resisted if you like by every means possible from having their ways in our society just as the Buhari Media Organization has done.

It is not about clamping down on the rights of Nigerians to keep an open mind and freely expressing their views and opinions on issues of national importance like some people are saying.

It is about the critics themselves not condescending into the domain of imbalanced and hysterical commentaries and analyses of national developmental issues for selfish gains which is what the likes of Seun and Festus has been doing when they have the platform to constructively engage the government.

                                                             Instead, all they spend their day doing was shading the government without proffering solutions. And they still have the effrontery to step forward to accept an appointment from the same government.

Whereas if they have shame, they would never have even secretly desire to serve in a government they both had at one time or the other called illegality among other unprintable words while deliberately overlooking the fact that it is a democratically elected government we are talking about here.

And for going as far as deleting his Twitter account so that his ridiculous and denigrating posts against the President Buhari administration would not be recalled, Seun has shown himself to be a tendentious opportunist - a scam artist to the core.

And that's mostly regrettable because it is coming from a young Nigerian whom we all have been vigorously campaigning for to be given a chance in a leadership position in the country.

I think more searchlight should be beamed on him lest we have another Obiwanne on our hand pretty soon.

Now if we think the political class is the worst set of people in the country, I think more than ever before, we should begin to have a serious rethink.

I believe like the Buhari Media Organization said that there are countless supporters of the President who have more powerful backgrounds and records, who are better qualified, and who would offer better professional and intellectual support to the attainment of the President’s ideas and goals, which they believe in – which Seun, from his posturing, has said he does not.

More so, I also think it is high time conscious efforts should always be made by public office holders to recruit only people whose political positions aligned with theirs into appointments to avert a similar occurrence in the future.

This is because we have had enough of people of imbalanced and unstable morality trying to reap roses where they had sowed thorns.

It is the most unimaginable evil. And it should never be allowed to stand.

I pledge my availability and support to fight the scourge of moral instability wherever it rears its ugly head because it is not good for the progress of this country.

And for those who think he (Seun) shouldn't have resigned from the post, and that he should have come prepared for the criticisms that was bound to follow his appointment knowing fully well his own antecedent as a critic of the government, they are not only being dishonest with themselves they are equally promoting the cause of travesty of decency, honour, integrity and above all moral stability.

Finally, I for one strongly believe there should be a clear demarcation of political ideologies in operation in Nigeria; instead of the current ideological fluidity in the system which is leading us to where.

No wonder Nigerian politicians’ cross-carpet at will from one political party to the other simply for a lack of political ideology. What we have today is more of politics of interest, of jobbers, of butchers and not politics of pan-national development driven by ideologies.

[sarahburness]

3 Healing Practices That Can Free You from Ego-Based Pain

“Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.” ~Sharon Salzberg

One of the symptoms of living in today’s fast-paced world is the underlying feeling of loneliness, overwhelm, and disconnection. Chronically stressed and under financial and familial pressures, we often feel alone in the world, out of touch with others, overwhelmed by our emotions, and disconnected from our own bodies and ourselves.

Our world is ego-driven. We constantly compare ourselves to others, judge our performance (usually harshly), define our worth by our financial and career achievements, and criticize ourselves for failure.

This ego-based drive for success and happiness is of course ineffective. We keep wanting more, never feeling quite satisfied. And that’s because our definition of happiness as something that can be obtained externally is fundamentally misguided.

It’s a good thing to achieve external success and take pride in what we’ve accomplished through hard work. However, happiness comes when we feel fulfilled, and in order to feel fulfilled we need more than material possessions and accolades—we need to feel loved and that we belong.

This feeling was always fleeting for me growing up. A difficult childhood and my highly sensitive personality meant I grew up believing that there was something wrong with me. Feeling deeply insecure, and without an anchor at home, I had hard time making friends and felt mostly misunderstood, hurt, and alone.

Eventually, chaos at home and bullies at school led me to disconnect, both from my body and myself. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere, so I made myself small, almost disappearing behind a veil of hurt, fear, and shame.

I associated my body with pain, and love with getting hurt. Living in my head was safe, and so I put up big walls around my heart and decided to make the best of what I was given.

I compensated for internal pain and emptiness with external validation: straight A’s, degrees, a career in high tech, people pleasing, perfecting, performing, putting on a mask to make myself look better than I felt. Eventually, I found love and friends, but the internal angst was still there, unexamined.

Unbeknownst to me, my ego was in control and the driving force behind my constant search for approval and validation. This perpetual state of searching for contentment kept me feeling empty, unhappy, and alone.

Running from yourself can only work for so long. Eventually, the walls I built became my prison.

I had to face my pain, confront my fears, and unleash the chains I’d built around my heart so that I could go on living, not just functioning.

If I wanted a fulfilled life, I had to look inside and find love there first. I had to undo years of disconnect and pain, and reconnect with my body and my heart. I had to recalibrate my life toward inner peace and joy, and away from self-focus, fear, and my perceived brokenness and separateness.

Over the years I spent healing and getting back to myself, I discovered that some practices can help us drop the swelled up ego just enough so that we can embrace our life with love. Those practices include…

Reconnecting with Our Body

At some point in our lives, most of us went through a traumatic experience that left us feeling disconnected from our body. Childhood abuse, sexual trauma, a car accident—all those experiences can lead to disembodiment.

Even if we were lucky enough to avoid trauma, we live in a world of chronic stress and overwhelm, which puts a lot of strain on our bodies. We often operate in “survival mode” and experience chronic muscle tension, fatigue, and pain.

When our body has been the source of pain, we might want to disconnect and numb out in order to protect ourselves from the hurt. We end up living in our head, often completely unaware of what is going on in our body.

Getting back in touch with our body is the first step in healing our soul, opening our heart, and dropping our ego. And yoga is a perfect tool here.

Yoga is a gentle practice that can help us reconnect us with our body. Yoga means unity, between the body and mind. With breath as an anchor, flowing through poses while holding ourselves gently, we center and reconnect with ourselves in the present moment.

We get out of our head (and our ego-based identity), and back to our body and our true self. We quiet the mind, softening its grip as we turn to movement, being fully present and aware.

As we tune into each pose, we begin to feel every part of our body. We start cultivating a close relationship with ourselves, exploring our own feelings, thoughts, and relationships to the poses. Yoga becomes an intimate practice for self-exploration and self-acceptance. And it slowly dissolves the ego as your heart takes center stage.

Certain poses are particularly good for grounding and centering , like child’s pose, tree pose, and warrior poses. There are also many heart-opening poses—like camel, bow, or bridge poses—most of which focus on rotating our shoulders, opening our ribs, and doing backbends, which release muscle tension and unlock sensation in the heart center (also great for anxiety relief).

Kundalini yoga is another practice for awakening and healing our energy body and releasing trauma/blocks, whether in our heart center, root center, or elsewhere.

The important thing is to focus less on the “exercise” component of it and more on the mind-body-heart connection that happens when you slow down and become really present in your practice.

Befriending and Taming our Mind

Once we’ve reconnected with our bodies, we need to befriend our mind, which can easily be overwhelmed by fears, worries, doubts, self-criticism, and obsessive thoughts. We can do that through meditation.

Mindfulness meditation specifically helps us cultivate a sense of awareness and teaches us to look inward, observe our experience, and learn to let go. It brings to our attention the impermanence of life—as our thoughts and sensations change constantly, so does our experience. This means we can let go of our grip and take life as is, moment by moment.

With the breath anchoring us in the present moment, we gain a sense of freedom from our past troubles and future worries. Our fears fall away and freedom sets in—freedom to choose how we experience life that’s in front of us.

With practice, we learn to notice feelings, and emotions underneath those feeling, and the thoughts underneath those. There’s a freedom in that too—freedom to choose to not buy into those thoughts, to let go of them and choose differently. We learn to respond wisely to what’s in front of us, choosing love instead of reacting from our unconscious programming and out of learned fear.

By observing our thoughts and sensations we learn to recognize when we are afraid, hurt, angry, or ashamed, and that awareness is what allows our ego to fall away.

We begin to understand the meaning behind our experience and surround ourselves with compassion for our pain, holding ourselves with tenderness and care. We learn to drop our fears and our beliefs about ourselves and the world, and begin to live from our heart, our authentic self.

When we meditate, we start to gain a better understanding of ourselves, and our way of being starts to shift. We come into wholeness, the realization that our lives are both joyful and painful, and no, we are not damaged, we’re simply human. And the best thing we can do is to love ourselves in this moment, to offer ourselves the care and compassion we need in order to feel soothed and safe. And then we can extend that love and care to others as well. We all suffer and have moments of struggle; this simple acknowledgement can open our heart and connect us all.

In moment of chaos or anxiety, when our mind is restless or overwhelmed, we can do simple practices that will calm our mind and tame our inner dialogue. A particularly nourishing practice is Tara Brach’s RAIN of self-compassion meditation. By observing our thoughts and feelings without judgment—the core of mindfulness meditation—we can shift from pain to compassion in a gentle way.

Another practice to try is loving-kindness meditation popularized by Sharon Salzberg.

And if sitting meditation is too hard for us, we can tap into a meditative state through movement. Rhythmic exercises such as walking, swimming, or dancing can help integrate our body-mind and reset the nervous system through the rhythmic flow of movements that will relax and soothe our mind. These will ground us in the present moment so that we can be there for ourselves, and others.

Accepting and Rewriting our Story

If we’ve been running from our pain for a long time, as I once did, this pain becomes our story; our ego is entangled in it. It’s time to untangle and release it so that we can make a new ending. It’s time to rewrite our story.

I’ve found journaling to be particularly helpful because it allows me to explore my thoughts and feelings without worrying about being judged, criticized, or rejected for who I really am.

Through journaling, we can uncover our inner pain and suffering and bring to the conscious our fears of feeling not good enough, unlovable, and ultimately alone.

As we explore our deepest thoughts and try to make sense of our experience, we begin to discern our true feelings from adaptations and programming that we’ve accumulated over our lifetime—messages we received from our family, peers, and society as a whole. We tap into our inner wisdom and intuition, and gain a new perspective on ourselves and the events in our lives.

Writing is like having a deep conversation with ourselves. Faced with our shame, grief, and the sheer depth of our pain, we learn to offer ourselves the compassion and care we’ve been searching for outside of ourselves. Tending to the wounds we’ve been avoiding, we develop empathy for ourselves as a vulnerable and wounded person.

Journaling is the ultimate release; we can drop our masks and explore our hang-ups and limitations head on. We slowly unpack our deep-seated beliefs, bringing them to light. This deepens our inner knowing, helping us examine and change our beliefs about ourselves and the world. As we release the pain we’ve been holding onto our whole life, our hearts begin to soften, our armor drops, and our story changes.

There are two main ways you can journal to heal: expressive writing and prompt-based writing.

To begin expressive writing, relax your body and close your eyes. Look inward and wait for thoughts to arrive. Begin writing them down without censoring yourself. Spill it all out onto paper, letting your unconscious step forward, giving it a voice. Bring up your real feelings about yourself and the world—and not just what you’ve been conditioned to believe.

Prompt-based writing can help you think about how your family history, your cultural background, and your religion have all played roles in why you are the way you are.

For example:

How did your family of origin show (or withhold) love?

What are you most ashamed about regarding your family?

What did you not get as a child that you are now seeking as an adult?

How was anger expressed or repressed in your family growing up?

By examining your past and what shaped you, you can shed a light on your unconscious patterns and the beliefs that you accepted as truths. This is the first step in changing them and rewriting your story.

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These three practices—yoga, mindfulness, and journaling—helped me heal, reconnect with myself, and learn to love myself, and self-love is a prerequisite to feeling the love and belonging that leads to happiness.

Whether you’ve experienced some sort of trauma or you’ve disconnected from yourself as a consequence of living in our stressed out, achievement-focused world, these practices can help you too.

By making a little time to reconnect with your body, befriend your mind, and rewrite old stories that no longer serve you, you’ll soon stop being a slave to your ego and start living a freer, happier, more authentic life.

About Joanna Ciolek

Joanna Ciolek is a self-taught artist, recovering self-critic, and a firm believer in the transformative powers of mindfulness. She runs a free 20-week mindful self-discovery course to help others overcome self-defeating patterns and build self-compassion. She is also the author The Art Of Untangling, a writing journal/coloring workbook for deeper self-inquiry, healing and transformation! Follow Joanna on Twitter and Instagram.

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The post 3 Healing Practices That Can Free You from Ego-Based Pain appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

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STEVE ALMOND is the author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times best seller Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times Magazine, among others. He teaches at the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism program at Harvard University. His newest book, which occasioned this conversation, is Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country (Red Hen Press). William Giraldi is the author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and a memoir, The Hero’s Body. His newest book is a collection of criticism, American Audacity, to be published in August. This conversation was conducted over email in January.

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WILLIAM GIRALDI: With many millions of my fellow baffled Americans, I’ve been trying to comprehend, as the subtitle of Bad Stories has it, what the hell just happened to our country. It wasn’t until reading your synthesis that I began to get the myriad cultural and political forces that needed to align, over several decades, in order for Trumpism to prevail in 2016. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Nothing comes out of nowhere. Your take on the Fairness Doctrine is one of the most riveting sections of the book, something I didn’t know about. Can you speak about the Fairness Doctrine and why it’s necessary to understand it in order to understand what’s happened?

STEVE ALMOND: To begin at the beginning, our Founding Fathers simply never envisioned the technologies that comprise our modern media. To them, the Fourth Estate consisted of broadsheets and pamphlets. When radio emerged, early in the 20th century, our leaders suddenly had to contend with a medium that could reach millions of Americans instantaneously. The smart ones were good and freaked out by that prospect. Back in 1926, the Texas lawmaker Luther Johnson said this:

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

These concerns led lawmakers to pass various measures, culminating with the Fairness Doctrine, which said that broadcasters should use the public airwaves to serve the public interest, not private gain. They had a duty to cover important issues and to provide “reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.” It was basically a spoiler plate for propaganda.

Under Reagan, the head of the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, arguing that “the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” I realize that sounds kind of wonky. But what he’s saying marks a precise fault line in our history as a country, the moment when our free press became, officially, a for-profit industry.

And the effect was immediate: a revolution of conservative talk radio hosts (and later Fox News anchors) who have spent three decades telling the bad stories we’ve come to associate with Trumpism. A government that seeks to redistribute wealth or curb greed is evil. Brown people are lazy and/or dangerous. White men are under assault. Elites and academics are mocking you. The mainstream media can’t be trusted. It amounts to a retailing of what the historian Richard Hofstadter calls “the paranoid style” in American politics.

This proudly ignorant aggression, which cloaks itself in the language of self-victimization, is the mindset that now animates much of our electorate. Guys like Rush Limbaugh have been indoctrinating their dittoheads for three decades. Talk like a populist and rule like a plutocrat — that’s the basic con. Trump didn’t create a movement. He simply inherited audience share.

Americans have come to accept the demented idea that for-profit demagogues have a constitutional right to use the public airwaves to spout falsehoods and propaganda. As a result, we now have a sitting president whose consciousness is guided by the caffeinated misinformation of Fox & Friends.

Which brings me to another important facet of Bad Stories: your analysis of the astounding moral vacuity of our Fourth Estate, their conscious and unconscious credo of entertainment over information. During the primaries and the election, even the outfits that were against Trump’s lunatic bluster — CNN or MSNBC, say — seemed helpless not to cover him incessantly. It was a ratings rodeo for them, and to hell with the fact that they were helping to elect him. Or consider even The New York Times giving front-page prominence to FBI director James Comey’s nothing-letter on the Clinton email nonsense, mere days before the election. You have an expert appraisal of Neil Postman and his masterwork, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Say a little about Postman and his ideas for those who might not be familiar with them.

Postman was a cultural historian. In 1984, he was asked to deliver a lecture at the Frankfurt Book Fair about Orwell’s 1984. But he argued that Reagan’s United States could be better understood by examining Huxley’s Brave New World. He saw a population mired in passivity and egoism, a republic that had devolved into an audience. The resulting book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that every aspect of our culture (politics, religion, news, education, commerce) has been “transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.” Public figures, therefore, are no longer judged on experience or competence. All they need is “a talent and a format to amuse.”

Candidate Trump’s training as a tabloid and TV star endowed him with the talent. And cable news, as you note, supplied him the format. Networks aired his speeches and fulminated against his antics and cast his tweets in shrieking chyron. They treated him like a celebrity. If they had covered him like a traditional politician — Jeb Bush, say — he never would have claimed the GOP nomination. His inexperience and erratic nature would have reduced him to a fringe candidate. He became the frontrunner because he was treated as the frontrunner.

And the networks made no secret of this double standard. The most shocking statement uttered during the entire campaign came from CBS CEO Les Moonves, who noted that Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. […] The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” I probably don’t need to tell you that Moonves said all this at a media conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley.

This is exactly what happens when you turn a civic institution (“the Fourth Estate”) into a business. You wind up with a cash register rather than an editorial sensibility.

What’s so astounding about Postman’s book is that he saw all this coming down the pike more than 30 years ago. He knew TV news was destined to become a sewer of disinformation. He predicted the rise of parodic news programs that would convert our dysfunction into disposable laughs. He foresaw that Americans would “come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” I think about that statement every time I pull out my smart phone, and every time I get on the subway. What I see is a car full of people locked onto their tiny screens, amusing themselves to death.

Postman’s book helped me understand the 2016 election was ultimately a coup we engineered against ourselves, arising from unseriousness and bad stories.

And part of how we’re currently amusing ourselves deathly is by viewing the daily, almost hourly dramas of the White House as another reality TV show, albeit one with annihilating consequences. After Watergate, Gore Vidal pointed out that Americans had become addicted to scandal. That was nothing next to what we’re seeing now. It’s stunning to me how Trump’s every asinine tweet is treated by the media as something worthy of our attention. When a soulless and intellectually incurious entertainer with dysphasia steals the presidency with the help of a hostile foreign power, we really shouldn’t be continually surprised when he behaves like a soulless and intellectually incurious entertainer with dysphasia. One of the stories Bad Stories tells is the one about how Vladimir Putin saw his chance with Trump. Can you speak a bit about Tsar Putin?

One of the problems Americans have always had is a kind of ingrained solipsism, one born of privilege. We’ve been incredibly lucky as an empire. We have vast natural resources and weak neighbors. We’ve never been invaded, let alone occupied. Because we’ve been so sheltered we are, broadly speaking, unaware of, and incurious about, history. We live in the Capitalist Now, an era of monetized distraction, “within the context of no context,” as George W. S. Trow put it. Our national stories are either downright false (“all men are created equal”) or dangerously naïve (“the Cold War is over and we won!”). The Berlin Wall came crashing down. We all danced to shitty new wave music amid the rubble.

But what if we looked at our democracy through the eyes of Putin, a fiercely nationalistic KGB officer who was in Dresden when the Wall came down? The driving force in his life has been to restore the stature of his disgraced homeland, to Make Russia Great Again. Jump into that guy’s head and ask yourself: Is the Cold War really over?

Of course not. One of Putin’s central goals as a leader has been to attack the American empire. He’s smart enough to recognize that he can’t hope to win a military or economic war. So his attacks have come in the form of cyber-warfare and disinformation. When Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee, they were doing the same thing as the Watergate burglars, and for the same reason: to smear the Democratic nominee.

During Watergate, the “story” was about the burglars — who had hired them and why. In 2016, journalists barely bothered to ask those questions. Instead, they eagerly spread the smears. They essentially did Putin’s dirty work for him. He knew they would, because he could see the cracks in our democracy: a free press that had degenerated into a for-profit tabloid operation, widespread voter apathy and disaffection, a conservative media complex devoted to stoking racial grievance, social media platforms that happily amplified Russian propaganda, state-sanctioned voter suppression.

For Putin, Trump represented a kind of geopolitical unicorn: the useful idiot abruptly elevated into a Manchurian candidate. His entire agenda mapped to Putin’s intentions. Trump consistently sowed discord among Americans, and undermined their faith in liberal democracy. His foreign policy called for the United States to retreat from the world stage, leaving Putin free to expand Russian ambitions. Putin also knew more about Trump’s financial entanglements than the US electorate.

Putin is a brutal autocrat. But he understands history, that empires, from the Incas to the Romans to the Mongols, ultimately collapse from within. They are made vulnerable to foreign invaders by internal divisions and delusions.

That’s the most chilling aspect of 2016. Whether or not they ever shook on it, Putin and Trump made a deal. But only one of them understood the true terms of the deal. Putin knew Trump was a long shot, given his flaws. But he could see the magnitude of the payout: the chance to elect a man capable of initiating what the Soviet Union never could — an era of permanent American decline.

One of the ways Bad Stories shines is by not being another lefty screed fueled by pharisaical grievance and holier-than-thou condemnations. It doesn’t traffic in the cliches and sanctimony and anti-art that fouls so much of what we now see coming from the commissars, and it even manages to have a goodly bit of mercy for Trump’s base. You can also be pretty critical of lefty sacred cows, among whom are the comedic minds liberal America, in its ballooning desperation, has taken for their prophets and seers. What’s your view of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

They’re both brilliant comedians who have used their shows to call out the bullshit that predominates our media and political classes. In doing so, they’ve trained viewers to think more critically, and helped educate lots of low-info citizens. Those are real and laudable achievements. The problem, as you observe, is these guys — our high-tech court jesters — have become the prophetic voices of our culture, the moral backstops. And that’s never good. Think of King Lear. When only the fool can speak truth to power, the kingdom is kaput.

Another way of putting it would be that these guys represent a kind of opiate for the left. While conservatives gin up votes by casting the United States as a horror film (with various dark-skinned villains — “thugs”/Muslims/immigrants …), the liberal response to our civic dysfunction is to cast the United States as a farce. Stewart and Colbert and their disciples convert our anguish and rage into disposable laughs. Look at all those corrupt politicians and pundits! What fools! It’s the same message Trump delivered over and over on the stump.

Why are we laughing at the moral erosion of our democracy? To protect ourselves from the fear and rage we should be feeling, the kind of destabilizing emotions that might force us to get off our fucking couches and take action. Meanwhile, those fools we’re laughing at are having the last laugh, because they’re the ones steering our ship of state. They’re deporting kids and slashing our safety net and strip-mining the EPA and reshaping our federal judiciary and turning our tax code into an open-air kleptocracy. Ha-ha-ha.

Again, I’m not criticizing Stewart and Colbert. Those guys are just doing their jobs. What troubles me is that we’re mistaking mockery for genuine political engagement. It’s not an act of protest to share the latest Saturday Night Live clip or Samantha Bee screed. It’s an act of therapeutic passivity. It makes us feel a little bit better about a circumstance that we shouldn’t feel better about.

Mencken once declared that “as democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

He was joking. But it’s not funny anymore.

I’m reminded of a line that’s almost always with me, from D. H. Lawrence’s characteristically seditious take on our nation’s literature. He lived in New Mexico for a spell, and he says at one point, in Studies in Classic American Literature, that he’s never been in a country where individuals are so downright terrified of one another. He saw us as a land of great violence and divide. “The essential American soul,” he says, is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Look, he said, at the “Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness.” Bad Stories tries to parse that inner malaise and madness. What else could have led to the election of the gilded Mafioso currently in the White House? Your book stars Trump, of course, but it isn’t specifically about him. It’s about Americans — the American soul. Do you agree with Lawrence’s take on us?

I use that very quote in my last book, to explain the predominance of violent sport in our country. But to be completely honest, it’s a reductive statement. There is no “essential American soul.” There are more than 300 million people in this country, and each of them, presumably, has a soul. What the 2016 election cast into bold relief was not some lofty, monolithic version of the American soul, but a soul in conflict with itself. After all, 70 million Americans voted for other candidates, and 65 million for Hillary Clinton. It was only a very small percentage of Trump voters whose minds and hearts were filled with violent ideation. We saw and heard a lot from them, because they make for good TV. But they were hardly stoic, or isolate. They were, in fact, emotionally wounded and lonely and desperate for a sense of belonging.

Hannah Arendt discusses this in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She argues that totalitarianism is a kind of organized loneliness, one that takes root in societies where people feel angry and dislocated, left behind by capitalist expansion. People who lose this sense of identity and rootedness come to feel superfluous, and this makes them frantic to find a grand narrative that will grant their life meaning and direction. (As noted, conservative demagogues on the AM radio dial have been working this market for decades.) But most Republicans recognized their standard-bearer as ethically and intellectually unfit to serve. They voted for him out of an ethically enfeebled tribalism.

It’s important to note this, because it’s really another bad story to suggest that Americans are doomed to express their most savage and self-destructive impulses. I don’t believe that. I believe we can and will do better. But only if we can rouse ourselves from the thrall of hate-watching this administration.

In this sense, the book that presages the 2016 election is Moby-Dick, an epic that is entirely driven by the seductive power of wounded masculinity. Consider the moment Ahab appears on deck to announce the true nature of his mission. He’s not interested in harvesting whale blubber. He’s out for revenge.

“All visible objects […] are but pasteboard masks,” he roars. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! […] Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Who does that sound like?

That’s what Trump channeled: the volcanic sense of grievance and spiritual poverty that lurks within America’s absurd material plenitude.

But here’s the thing about Moby-Dick: everyone goes along with Ahab. The crew signs on for his doomed crusade. That’s the most powerful analogue to the election. Whether in rapture or disgust, Americans turned away from the compass of self-governance and toward the mesmerizing drama of aggression on display, the capitalist id unchained and all that it unchained within us. Trump struck through the mask. And it was, alas, enough.

There’s another analogue to consider, too, when it comes to Ahab: Melville modeled him in large part on Milton’s Satan, the greatest poetic quester in the canon, rebellion incarnate, sublime hero of the seditious, “self-begot, self-rais’d” by his own “quick’ning power.” One of the bad stories you tell is called “Trump Was a Change Agent,” a story that tried to peddle him as an outsider, a self-begot rebel who would overthrow the greedy gods in Washington and usher in a kingdom of the neglected. We know how that story ends for Satan in Paradise Lost, and we know how it ends for Ahab. The question is: How will that bad story end for us? Your book doesn’t close with either manufactured uplift or resigned despair, but rather a levelheadedness and inwardness devoid of sloganized idealism. What’s your vision for us now?

America has always been a nation of high ideals and low behaviors, of all men are created equal and slave labor. The moral regression we’re seeing today — the overtly bigoted policy, the cronyism, the exploitation of fear and loathing — is nothing new. Just ask any woman or person of color or immigrant. Part of what I’m trying to articulate in the book is that history is cyclical. You have moral atrocities, such as slavery, which lead to moral corrections. You have the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, which led to the New Deal. The War on Poverty. The Great Society programs. The Civil Rights movement. Those are examples of the American people enacting their high ideals. That is still possible.

I know there are days — a lot of them — when the ravings of our current president and his congressional quislings feel like the apotheosis of a certain inexorable capitalist decadence. Maybe Mencken is right, “that the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.” But if that’s the case, it’s not because Americans are “downright morons.” It’s because too many of us have sworn allegiance to bad stories, stories that encourage us to weaponize our self-doubt, to project our destructive impulses onto others, to drown our shame in aggression. But evil is never purely borne. It is the distortion of love, not its absence.

The question is whether we can begin to tell better stories, ones in which our citizens muster the courage to confront the dire threats facing not just our democracy, but our species and planet. It’s possible to see the 2016 election as a warning and a wakeup call, a reminder that moral progress is inconvenient but not impossible.

I’m getting at a question of faith, I guess. Can we renew our faith in the basic principles of the Enlightenment — science and reason, liberty and tolerance, the common good? Can we rouse ourselves from the twin spells of cynicism and distraction? Maybe America can be made great again only by facing what we are at our weakest.

The post Bad Stories in America: A Conversation Between Steve Almond and William Giraldi appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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