Self-Talk Heart-World Transformation Fairy Tale

Preface

       The book for the month of March at Portland Center for Spiritual Living is The Art of Communicating by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Sunday March 1st our talk was about listening to yourself. And Sunday March 8th (today) was about listening to others.  Both were presented by Reverend Larry King.  This is good subject matter for March, for me.  Being new to Portland and having just moved into a new home here, I set the intention in February (as hokey as it seems) of spreading love.  I made it a priority to socialize heavily, strengthen newly established connections and make myself purposefully extra available and open to new and spontaneous developments. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I certainly was able to have a lot of fun nights, full of unexpected surprises and often strangely substance-filled conversations with complete strangers. I found so many beautiful new people to invite into my life with such passionate and creative hearts and minds. I'm super grateful to have found a lot more love and light here in Portland than I think I have ever found since moving away from my parent's home.

       However, a lot of this connection had an impulsive element to it, in that I set the intention of spreading love freely, and then did so without thinking at all about which of these new connections might stick or grow.  I was focused on being very present in the moment with other people and on not pushing anything to become anything else (detachment from outcomes, as mentioned in previous posts). But inevitably things do or don't. Stick and grow, that is.  And then, should they do so, there is a next level, which involves caring for those connections and learning to communicate with those new people on a regular basis with love and respect.  And also, as always, there is the practice of healthy communication with yourself. But in this particular circumstance, for me, it is about having a healthy open discussion with myself, and others, about what I really do want or need from new connections.  So it was good to have a service that brought self-communication to the forefront.

       In the book, Hanh refers to speaking as a way of nourishing the planet, either with good or with evil.  The idea is simply that when we speak, it has an immense impact on the world. Whether we complain, explain, preach, teach, tattle, babble, theorize, proselytize, gossip, conceal, confide, repeal, editorialize, memorialize, praise, reject, rephrase, reflect, eulogize, apologize, scold, fabricate, parabolize, it all makes waves.  And the state of the world is an aggregate of our words (and actions, of course) toward ourselves and one another.  And the words of one person can greatly influence the words and actions of another.  So really the ability to communicate is imperatively important on a global level.

       And on a personal level, practicing loving, positive, healthy communication with yourself increases your overall quality of life.  The first thing to notice, if you suspect that your self-talk is less than ideal and may be contributing to some of the ways that you aren't yet where you want to be is that--if we have not consciously adjusted it--we are likely doing what we were brought up to do, when it comes to self-talk.  This primarily has to do with the attitudes and ideas we grew up around, both within our immediate families and within our culture.  If members of your family tend to have always spoken negatively of one another or of themselves, without conscious changes being made, you will probably do so also.  This is not to say that you are not capable of doing otherwise, but habits and behaviors learned in childhood have an incredible influence on our adult lives. And, for me, I wasn't even conscious of my inner dialogue as something that was affecting my outside life until I actually took the time to conceive of that possibility and to be mindful of what was going on in my head. If you have never done so, it is an incredibly enlightening thing to try to be conscious of what you say to yourself in your head and how you say it.

       After all, this self-talk is the primary form of communication we perform on a daily basis. The conversations we have in our brains are far more common than the ones we have with other people.  And the ones we have with other people, the words we choose and our attitudes and perspectives, are pretty much just an off-shooting of our internal conversation.  We could think of ourselves as seeds and our internal words that we give to ourselves as the fertilizer and water and nutrients that we spread on that seed. So then, logically, the words that we give to others end up being the fruit that we give forth to the world. And if we are nice, loving, positive, and respectful in how we talk to ourselves, our words with others will be just as sweet and juicy and our fruit will attract everything around us.  And if we are hateful, negative, critical, and harsh to ourselves, our fruit will be bitter and no one will eat from it. Those that do will spit it out and have a bad taste in their mouths.

       Self-talk is a major component in the reality (the life) we create for ourselves.  And I've noticed that a lot of the people in my life who could clearly benefit from some better self talk, have a tendency to complain of unhappiness and to actually blame that unhappiness on some other outside circumstances.  So that even if you were to say "You would be a lot happier if you weren't so negative all the time." They would often respond with "Actually, I think I would be a lot happier if my car hadn't broken down and if my kids weren't flunking out of school and my wife wasn't always nagging me, and blah blah blah babble babble babble mush mush mush *verbal equivalent of oil spill pollution on a BP level*."  But really, what people need to realize is that outside of certain types of very objectively excruciating circumstances (serious illness, starvation, natural disaster, death of loved ones, etc.) most of life's suffering is entirely self-inflicted and solely related to one's attitude about the (often self-created) circumstances of one's life.

       Thich Nhat Hanh points out that when we claim for ourselves that we are stupid or unlovable, it is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.  But when we can eradicate it and create something else it is nothing short of a fairy tale.  I will explain...

...

Fairy Tale

...

        Bad self-talk is a grumbling grave-digger standing on top of your heart perpetually digging a grave for your happiness.  And the hole he creates leaves a pretty obvious deficit in your self-worth that is very visible to the people around you.  And even though not everyone consciously understands why it drives them away, we all know on a sub-conscious level that someone with a hole in their heart is not spilling over with love and joy to give to others. And there is nothing worse than investing in a relationship with this type of person because everything you give to it is just going to plummet into the black hole inside their heart-grave never to be seen again and never to be reciprocated.  And so by allowing this process to go on internally you quickly find yourself in a vastly empty barren wasteland of non-love and standing in the middle of it with the grave-digger grumbling "I told you that you weren't and you wouldn't and couldn't. And now there you are and they aren't and you suck. You are pitiful, ugly, stupid, and lame.  You smell and you're boring. You'll never have fame.  You'll be poor, you're unwanted, an old piece of trash. You're no good to look at, you feel like a rash.  There's a grating, obnoxious sound in your voice.  You'll die fully alone. And you don't have a choice."

       The funny thing is that all you really need to do to turn things around is push the grave digger into his own grave when he's not looking, put the top soil back on and plant some pretty flowers over it.  Thich Nhat Hanh calls this process recognizing, refuting, and replacing bad self-talk.  And the great part about it is that the grave digger is not a real person so there is absolutely nothing to worry about in administering to him an immediate, brutal, and fatal punishment.  Use your imagination.  It's ok! He deserves it.  And since you're replacing him with love and light, you can recognize that just because you chopped up your internal grave-digger and put each little bit of him in a different barrel and sent them down ten different rivers in ten different countries, does not make you a raging sociopath.  You're just passionate about making a permanent changes.

      Once you've said good riddens to the grave-digger planted the nice flowers over top of the grave (Daphnes? Azaleas? Yummy!) here's the best part: nobody is keeping closer tabs on your life than you. That means that this total internal 180 should not really bother anyone around you in the least, other than those that felt a morbid sense of comfort from living in a symbiotic environment of self-hatred. But you are not helping them or yourself by nurturing that relationship, so the consequences of your changes should not be met with panic.  Whatever happens because you murdered the grave-digger is for the best.  (A sentence I did not anticipate writing today.) And the cool thing is that once he's gone you can fertilize and feed the soil for a bit. It's probably going to need it. But before long you can invite a sexy landscaping gardener to come in and turn your whole entire heart into a lush paradise all while wearing something incredibly arousing, sipping from some sweet lemonade, and occasionally looking over at you to toss you a playful wink. (Sometimes hard changes are made easier by a vivid imagination.)  You can throw up a hammock and take a cozy nap in it.  You can build a beautiful warm cabin made of ponderosa pinewood with a stone fireplace hearth and a big cloud-nine bed covered in thick red cotton quilts.  You're heart is a safe and sacred space now. It is quiet and serene with playful chirping towhees bouncing from branch to branch in the bushes in the morning.  Fluttering around the feeders, taking patient turns to feed. And it is a magical vacation destination away from the harsh vibes that (unfortunately) are still going to emanate from other people and continue to shake things up in your outside world.  Your paradise will probably need to start as a gated property.  Especially since your previous internal landscape likely attracted you to a harsh neighborhood.  But overtime you'll probably find yourself so happy and content in your paradise that you don't have much desire to leave. Unless, as you discover, it's to venture out into someone else's--after all maybe you have a romantic wooden mountain cabin in Oregon, and they have a seashell encrusted shimmery ten-story castle on the hot sandy beach. That could be a great change of pace.

       But then, over time, you will also find that the memory of the grave digger will become nothing but a distant hazy dream. And you won't be able to fathom how you started with so little and grew such a luscious wonderland with fruit so succulent and ripe.  And with the grave digger so distantly dead and unthreatening, you'll find that maybe you don't need to keep the gates locked all the time, since you kind of feel like if something putrid creeps in, you and your sexy gardener could probably take the right steps to dispose of it.  And some days you find that you feel so confident and good about your internal resources and your cup runneth over so much with the impulse to share that you say "Fuck it. Kegger." and you put on the fancy disco lights and you set up the fire pit and make pizza and invite everybody over to your gorgeous property to dance with the sexy landscaper in the flowers and grass all night.  And you may wake up in the morning with a few broken lamps in the cabin, and a funny looking stain on the rug.  And that's the danger of letting people in.  But like most parties that don't end with police sirens, you find that the memories you made by opening your heart up far outweigh the cost of replacing a few damaged items.  And besides, you know how to do that now and you didn't even own this house but a few months ago! So the chore of a little post-party clean up is really no chore at all for a grateful person like you.

       The biggest thing that can happen when you make this kind of a change is that maybe someday  you invite somebody in and they are beautiful and fantastic and then they say "Hey my place is cool too!" and they show you their magical beachfront castle, which is grand and ornate and fun to hang out in.  And most of all, just so different. One day, you show your companion how you can shake a branch on that one tree outside your cabin and all the petals from the blossoms will rain down on their head and cover them in good smells.  One starry night, your companion asks you to close your eyes and listen to the crackling of the fire and the ocean waves simultaneously on the beach next to the castle and you notice how the salty sea air mixes with the smoke. You dig your toes into the sand with a roasted marshmallow melting in your mouth, those two sensations combined for the first time ever in your life, and you think, "Wow! This is nothing like what I had over at my place."  In a year or a month or a week, you exchange keys and find yourselves perpetually hanging out in one paradise or the other, alternating.  Eventually you both agree that the walk is really far and it would save you both the trouble and you build a magical bridge together with a cool teleportation portal in the middle and each of your fabulous properties on either side.  The teleportation device looks like the queens mirror in Snow White, but the glass is aqueous. The bridge is wooden.  On your side it is covered in moss and has ropes for rails and sways with each step over a splashing rocky river.  When you step through the metallic portal you instantly come out on the other side, where the bridge is now a dock overgrown with coral and seaweed on the sides that takes you to the castle of your companion, who lives on the coast.  This bridge is a WHOLE other experience more magical, mysterious, and intoxicating than even hanging out in your own paradise and throwing parties in it, or visiting another person's for a bit. You are directly connected.  In different worlds, even with different looking sides of the bridge.  But you each hold a key.

       But then one day you wake up, and your whole cabin and garden is covered in a roaring blaze of fire.  The entirety of your heart-world pounds and aches and heats up and hurts.  So you grab your sexy gardener's hand, who is calm and serene still planting in the garden amid the fire. You pull your gardener away from the flames and run to the bridge. You run up to the portal, but it's sealed over completely into solid metal.  You can't walk through and on the other side the bridge just goes out into the dark wilderness.  Screw it, you straight up sprint through the trees and travel all day to the castle on the beach. You run up to it and you bang on the door. You try to use  your key but your companion has changed the lock and is nowhere to be found.  You stop for a minute to try to understand what is happening but you are at a total loss.  It's just simply that some things disappear without a trace when you least expect it.  There is nowhere else within reasonable walking distance to run to in this heart-world of yours, so you have no choice but to go back to where the fire burns.  Your gardener walks with you every step of the way.  Your gardener is never tired, never angry, never sad.  When you get back to your paradise, it is still softly aflame. So you safely hide on the bank of the river under the bridge, holding the gardener's hand, and wait for the fire to burn itself out. You fall asleep on the bank in your gardeners arms. In the morning, you approach your heart-world together and inspect the damage.

       You might speculate as to how it all happened.  You might suspect that your castle companion had a total freak out and maliciously maniacally torched your paradise. Or you might wonder if maybe you foolishly left a candle burning in the night.  And then again, in such a natural environment, forest fires are a fairly recurring thing. So it is possible that it got started on its own.  I don't really know what happened. And neither do you. It was all really sudden. And these things happen sometimes.  So let bygones be bygones and let's look at the situation.  Here you are once again in an empty barren waste land. Everything else has been burnt to the ground. You kick your feet around in the dirt and a shred of white ropy hammock turns up between your toes.  Fuck man.  You look around, the gardener's consoling arm around your shoulder. Remembering suddenly makes you tremble with fear.  This looks just like the barren wasteland you were standing in when the grave-digger's grumbling drove you over the edge with murderous rage.  And even though it has been planted over for years now, you and the gardener stand staring and what you simply know to be the exact spot where he used to dig, and where he is buried. For a brief moment you can almost feel the grave-digger's presence. In a fleeting instant that defies the rules of space-time, he pulls himself out of the grave by his knuckles, it falls deeply open again, and he instantly zooms around behind you without using his feet and pushes you in, laughing and grumbling.


       That was just your imagination.  It has been years since he has decomposed.  And he has actually fed the flowers that bloomed on top of him because something about a dead grave-digger produces some extra juicy petals on a good heart-garden.  You stare at the grave-site for hours. Maybe days.  But good news.  Nothing happens. He's dead.  He has been dead for many years and zombies are not a thing, even in this magical fairy tale world.  Yes the soil is barren and deserted once again.  But your gardener did not run and has been standing here all while you were waiting for doom. Your gardener is still beside you holding your hand right now and looking as luscious as ever. And looking over at you with soulful compassionate eyes, your gardener says, "Well, we will just have to start over. Huh! Such a funny thing. Never thought it would all burn down.  Life is something else. Come lay down. We'll get you a stand-alone hammock and a nice cool lemonade. This won't take long." Your gardener gives you that playful wink, hooks arms with you. And as you look down at your feet in the scorched earth of your heart-world, a little grape hyacinth shoots up and blossoms between your last two little toes.