Things I'm Reading
I’m going to challenge you in this one.
Current collection of active things:
Great fucking article by DJ. Shows of strength, skill, and power should be celebrated and used as inspiration, yet we are in this sickly weak society that encourages us to tear down the strong in order to avoid feeling bad about our own shortcomings. I vote we start celebrating strength again. It brings to mind how much we’ve lost by not letting men settle things with fighting, at any age. How much we have outsourced to others, particularly those who dictate from the pulpit of [their own] fear, what is the right way to run the world.
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-banquet-of-whiteness/ - I’ve read this and am partway through the brilliant second piece in a series of essays which will culminate in this one, with links to each part of the series -
Eisenstein was mentioned in my article on the importance of Ecstatic Experience. I don’t always check up on his writing and I really want to work on his jaw, tongue, and skull when I watch him speak, but I’m often left wondering what there is left for me to write after engaging in his longer, well-crafted online words. The Banquet of Whiteness (linked above) awesomely pulls together questions we all have around why the fuck modern life isn’t working while we also consistently hold it up as the pinnacle the world strives for across medicine and other baked-in categories of our cultural experience. It offers a shift in how we direct our eyesight around what we regard as real and valuable.
Jesus, right?
The part I’m pointing to in the third picture
“I brought out the memory of being hit because I don’t want my relationship with my father to get better.”
actually fits in with the structures I use around parts therapy and Internal Family Systems, though not necessarily in the lessons from the book, and truly around my beliefs regarding choice and how we are always in choice in everything we do.
Unfuckingcomfortable thoughts, I know.
They still are to me in many circumstances, but many less than they used to be.
Remember that the only thing that makes something a trauma is the meaning and interpretation we hold of the event. Which is something that can be changed, and often does in my care through shamanic-style journeying.
The idea that you could bring up the memory so you could avoid changing things is absofuckinglutely true, and in Internal Family Systems-speak would be in the form of a protector that is trying to remind you to stay the fuck away from the trigger because bad shit went down last time. Keeping memories with a negative interpretation at the surface is a great set of security steps.
So no, I don’t think you do it consciously. But you do do it. Avoid making things better by recycling the current interpretations of what happened in order to avoid what is possible. Probably, because you don’t know there is another way.
From the book, The Courage to Be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. (Thanks, Ian.)
One more thing I’m reading at the moment, from the early pages of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad:
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, ‘followed the sea’ with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames [River]. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea.