Wishcasting Wednesday

image from Jamie’s post

I spent all day yesterday resisting Jamie’s wishcasting prompt: What do you wish to change? Change = to make or become different. It’s a risky, slippery concept for me, can quickly take me from good intention to judgement and criticism, to focusing on everything that’s wrong, practicing rejection and denial rather than working with what is from a place of curiosity and openness, understanding and acceptance.

For example, if I say I wish to change how I care for and relate to my body, it’s not long before I’m making a list of rules, shoulds, and restrictions, which leads to self-loathing, beating myself up, regret and depression, focusing on all the ways I’ve let myself down, rejecting the body I have now, denying it love and acceptance because it’s not good enough, because I want it to be different, because I wish to change it.

Wishing for change is also risky for me because it can so easily shift my focus to the future, pull me out of the present moment into planning and strategizing, doing, doing, pushing and pulling. In this state, there is no ease, no rest, no balance, no kindness.

Of course, I wish for change in all sorts of ways, specifically in the ways that the current state of things might be causing suffering. Alexandra Franzen always says she wants to leave the world a better place than she found it, to leave the people she encounters better than she found them, so I suppose this is a good, simple way to frame this wish: I wish to change things for the better, and in so doing may I release my agenda, avoid judgement and attachment, and ease suffering, in myself and in the world.

Today Jamie asks, “what rules do you wish to break?” It’s strange, or maybe magic, because I met with my therapist today and we got to talking about rules — all the ones I live by, the shoulds, the expectations, the restrictions and judgements about who I should be, when and why and exactly how I should do things.

As a simple example, sometimes I’m already hungry for lunch at 10:30 am, but I struggle with the decision to eat because lunch isn’t until 12:00 pm. In those moments, I often choose the rule over what I need, over caring for myself, and I either don’t eat when I’m actually hungry because “I’m not supposed to yet,” or I do eat and I beat myself up a little for it, (because then when I’m hungry again at 2 or 3 pm, what am I supposed to do?). And yes, I know this makes me sound like a crazy person…

Underlying all these rules is the belief that I have to earn what I need, I have to put forth some kind of effort, I have to be “good” and deserving in order to be worthy of care and love, in order to have my needs met, to feed my hunger. This is not accurate, I know intellectually that without doing a single thing, simply by being, I am worthy of those things, that I am innately wise and compassionate and deserving, but I don’t live as if that were true. Instead I struggle, convinced that something is wrong with me, that I have to fix it, control and monitor myself.

My therapist challenged me to start keeping a list of the rules as they arise. I paid attention as I left her office and went to the grocery store, came home to walk Sam, checked my email, did some work, really noticed all the times I judged what I was doing or thinking, assessed whether or not I was doing it “right.” It felt as if every single thing I did, there was an internal critic judging and evaluating, determining if I was good enough. I think this is happening all the time, every moment, and I’ve grown so used to it I don’t even notice it anymore, assume that’s just the way life is. That’s not okay, not at all workable, and will not lead to peace or contentment.

So, kind and gentle reader, I wish to break ALL the rules. Every single should or have to, every regulation or standard or principle or law I have constructed, anything that measures who I am and what I do against some prescribed guide for conduct or action. I wish to let all that go, to simply be present for myself, to give myself what I need, to take care of myself, to be gentle and kind, open and curious.