My Terror of Leisure.
+Working with symbol systems.
Self-work is often related to the layers of an onion. You observe something new, sort something out, accept a piece of yourself only to find another layer needs work.
I’m wrestling with one of those layers right now and finding that peaceful enjoyment of leisure makes me anxious.
I want to smoke all the time on this island. To be honest I have had two cigarettes in the last five days. Not a landslide relapse but more than I’ve done in the last three years.
As I sit with that craving I am reminded how smoking used to act as a ritual to mark time for me.
I smoked a lot in college, on vacations, while camping, it acts as punctuation to those days that have no scheduled rhythm, no agenda.
The more I sit with the craving, the more I sit with the anxiety the more I understand myself.
I wrote yesterday about aligning our lifestyle with our purpose and goals and I do believe that has a part to play here but as I go deeper into my experience I realize there is a wound to heal.
How symbol systems help us say the unspeakable.
One of the problems I’ve been having with my experience is how difficult it is to put it into words.
It’s not the actual quiet moment that causes me anxiety. I can meditate and enjoy it. It’s not a moment of leisure by the beach that causes this emotional upset, I enjoy those moments.
It’s the general theme of quiet leisure with no purpose other than to be.
The thing is I am just now able to put that into words. Before this, I was talking about it to a friend in terms of Pisces. That energy that waxes and wanes with the tides, that finds amusement where she will.
It pays to have friends who are interested in personal growth and it is incredibly useful to have multiple languages with which to talk about these experiences.
I wasn’t able to put my experience into words at first. It was a complicated feeling within.
All I could relate it to was Pisces and with time, with talking about my experience, I was able to pick up on the anxiety, the desire to escape, the depression, the resistance to leisure.
Hashing it out with a familiar symbol system that could summarize complicated feeling states gave me the time and space to explore what defied clear-cut definition.
This is why I love learning different systems; from models of neurology with the amygdala and frontal lobe to astrology, Jungian psychology and mythology, Hindu esotericism and tarot.
We are not experiencing words, we are experiencing the mind and body and from this we try to find the words to describe our experience. Symbols allow us to do this when conventional diction fails.
Feeling into it.
When I felt into my body I found tension, a tightening of the stomach, shorter breath, a feeling of “this is wrong.”
I felt anxiety.
Just the thought of spending the next few days doing nothing but lounging on the beach made me anxious, made me feel worthless.
The more my friend and I talked about Pisces energy and casual leisure the more frustrated I became. I kept finding myself asking “What’s the point?” “What does that serve?” “How do you do that?”
I know that leisure is good for you. We all have to rest. I’ve read scientific journal after journal that says so. I tell my clients that rest is important. I’ve had my own experiences to tell me that rest is important, I’ve written articles on it.
But my body hasn’t caught up to the lesson. It still has anxiety.
While talking about Pisces and this ability to simply let go and go with the flow of leisure my anxiety was higher than its been for months. I had to focus on my breathing.
When I sat in silence to feel into this experience memories started rising of my family, of my childhood, of our relationship to rest and leisure. I remembered how frustrated my mom would get when my dad zoned out.
I remember how frustrated I would get.
More and more memories played through and it was a struggle to simply sit and breathe. An image arose of a body in the desert and the word that came with it was “vulnerable.” I felt vulnerable in this space of leisure.
My body felt on edge like anything could go wrong. Writing this out I realize I was feeling into my hypervigilance, into the expectation that things go wrong, into the childhood message that I can’t let my guard down.
Writing it out.
Things come in layers.
I had to talk about my experience to get a grip on it. It’s just the way I process things, I like to voice them, sometimes that’s to a person, sometimes it’s to myself.
Once I talk around an issue I’m able to feel into it more and from that I’m able to write it out and then analyze it.
The following is the journal entry I wrote last night that took the sensation and followed up on its themes for later analysis.
i am hurting.
i want to smoke. want to escape.
i’m on a tiny island, gili air. pisces energy is all around me and i find i don’t know how to swim.
i miss aaron, i miss my sister, i miss will, noah, emma.
i miss not being the bad guy to my family.
i feel driven. i have my purpose but i don’t know how to fulfill it from this island. i hear i need to take a break to make space but its so fucking hard to do that. i want to smoke to keep the time, to give myself something to focus on. the drift of pisces is terrifying.
i’m afraid that if i just let go and go with the flow i won’t start back up again. it’ll be nothing more than another false start.
i’m afraid i’ll compensate with an addiction just to pass the time.
i resented my dad growing up for all his pisces energy. all of his withdrawing from the world in his games, in his music, in the way he spent time. mom hated him for it.
now the Moon is in capricorn, the sign of the father and i find myself adrift in pisces and it is terrifying.
i feel raw, exposed.
i tried to sit with the silence, with the stillness and so much anxiety came up. anxiety and feeling vulnerable.
there was always screaming growing up. always the words “there’s more to do.”
i’d hide in the closet, under the bed. you had to camouflage. you couldn’t just be under the bed, you had to be buried. you had to be under the clothes or between the wall and mattress, covered in blankets, in stuffed animals, breath held. you had to find the nook and crannies to escape it all.
my dad was depressed, endlessly dissociated in his music, his games, his “research.” it wasn’t my whole life. when he was young, when i was young there was passion and he was busy with it all but that died, that slowly died and he went from busy to withdrawn.
my mom moved from one state of anxiety and frustration to another, the PTSD peppered it all with blind rage when she felt overwhelmed. she had five kids, of course she felt overwhelmed. she tried to keep everything moving with the force of her will, with her screams and wooden spoons.
we were caught between, five children fighting and all the traumas, all the pains of those whose lives had hit rock bottom and came to live with us.
when i try to sit with the silence i feel like a child hiding under the pile of blankets. i feel the shake of the cabinets in the hall. the sign they’re walking by.
the blankets will be lifted and i’ll hear screaming, the question, “what are you doing? there’s still more to do.”
if i sit with the stillness long enough for the anxiety to go away i miss them. i miss all of them. i cry.
Three key issues with silence.
Three key issues come up for me when dealing with my ability to let go and enjoy my leisure.
- Boredom
- Work Ethic
- Grief
Boredom and addiction.
I struggle with addiction. I know that my brain has a peculiar relationship to dopamine. A lot of this has to do with my relationship to boredom and heightened neurological states.
Most people are familiar with dopamine in its relationship to addiction and cravings.
Fewer people know its relationship to stress, motivation, focus, awareness, fear, and so many other functions of the mind.
Dopamine is the “pay attention” chemical. It manages our ability to focus and make note of important objects, people, concepts, and experiences.
It is just as active in an environment filled with trauma, drama, and anxiety as it is in an opium den. For people who grew up with a lot of stress in their lives their brain is used to a lot of dopamine, often times this leads to increased risk of addiction and mental health challenges.
The brain is used to dopamine spikes so when the world around calms down and the brain chemistry calms down with it the brain doesn’t know what to do.
Its unfamiliar with the calm, uncomfortable with it and so it seeks out an intense experience to spike the brain chemistry. Maybe its a horror film, maybe its a cigarette, maybe its another fight, but whatever it is its pumping chemicals through the brain and so its familiar.
I’ve lived with a lot of stress, trauma, and drama, not so much anymore but its what my brain adapted to from my youth. When things get quiet and I feel relaxed my brain is faced with the unknown and seeks its familiar dopamine spike.
Work ethic and identity.
The memories that come up for me when sitting with the concept of leisure revolve around work ethic and my personal identity.
On the one hand is the narrative of my father, a man filled with passion that eventually cooled into depression and disassociation.
On the flip side of that is my mother’s experience and all the stress of taking care of five kids.
Both talked a lot about the need for a healthy work ethic, both in their own way motivated me to keep working, to keep active, to do anything else but be still.
On the one hand, my identity was shaped around not disassociating like my father does and not being comfortable with leisure, the experience that my mother has when she says “there is always more to do.”
Clearly, this doesn’t create a healthy lifestyle. A decade ago it would lead to the polarization of a lot of work and a lot of booze and drugs.
Now it means a lot of work (or at least activity) spaced out by forced days of rest which are normally my hardest as I try to figure out what to do.
How do you rest? How do you leisure?
A part of my self-identity whether conscious or not is associated with action and fears inaction.
This is a shadow I’m going to have to do a lot of work on so I can find a balance between the action and nonaction.
Grief
Beneath the layers of anxiety, I found grief.
Throughout our lives there will be things we can not solve, problems we cannot fix, relationships that no matter hard we try we can’t heal.
Grief is a natural part of our living experience. It arises in those moments where we can’t change the world into the shape we want and so we have to simply move forward.
It is in the loss of a friend, the death of a loved one, the world around us changing.
Beneath my fear of stillness is pain and grief. I am distant from some of the people I love, people I am close to. Some of it is the consequence of my own actions, some of it is a difference in our beliefs.
I can’t change it and it hurts. When I stay busy, when I am filled with confidence in my purpose, in the way my life is going these pains sink down beneath the current of everyday life.
When I enter into moments of stillness the pain floats up again. It’s not fun but it needs to be grieved so I am making space for that.
Cats and Friends. Preferences for letting go.
The oddest thing occurred when I sat with the silence last night at dinner.
A cat made a direct run for me from across the beach.
I have been trying to pet cats here in Bali for the last two months with no success. I laugh that I’m too eager for a cat to ever spend time with me.
But last night with no attempt to lure this particular feline it made its path directly for me and sat as I pet him and played a little.
He wasn't the only cat either, another one stalked me later in the night, one didn’t move from the road and let me pet him, another ran up as I was doing so.
I went from being avoided to suddenly becoming a cat magnet.
It reminded me of a scene from a story I wrote.
. . . another crash of the bottle and I look around to keep an eye on Julie. She’s on the other side of the yard collecting daisies.
It’s strange seeing her walk around so peaceful with the crashes. She never starts, her muscles don’t tense like mine do, don’t lock up, surprised, even though I know the next one’s coming.
She just smiles, doesn’t hear the shattering in the sound. Doesn’t hear sound. She’s calm, quiet, peaceful looking.
Maybe that’s why the cat follows her. Always stalking, cautiously waiting to spot that quiet space inside my sister. Waiting for that perfect moment to pounce and make it her own.
I feel the cat had a lesson to teach me. My friend has his own ways of playing with Pisces, with entering into leisure.
Those might not be mine.
Cats are lords of leisure but the ones who visited me wanted to play, to explore. I thought to myself “leisure isn’t only lying around or being still, it’s dinner with friends, it’s playing around, joking around.”
I’m a social person and another layer of this wrestling with leisure may be that I have certain preferences for how to do it.
Yes, I will need times of silence, of sitting with the waves, of just sitting; but this need for leisure can also be manifested in other ways. Ways that fulfill my desire for action, for a chemical spike without the chemicals.
A night of laughter. A night of friends.
How do you sit with leisure?
What is your relationship to relaxing? Can you simply let go and be still? Do you require stimulation? Activity?
What do you feel conditioned this within you?
How do you make room for leisure, for the calm and the fun? What do you find when you let yourself do this?
Love and share.
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