Heart-marketer supreme and pal-o'-mine, Mark Silver, tells a story about how, the very month after his business passed a huge financial milestone, it did one of its worst months ever.

You don't need to look to business for sad, weird tales of woe, either.

Lottery winners and freshly-minted celebrities routinely blow through their respective piles of currency until they're back where, perhaps, they feel deep down that they belong, if not even lower. People on the fast track to real love will, all of a sudden and seemingly out of nowhere, do something colossally stupid and often uncharacteristic to push someone away: I'm recalling a particularly egregious incident where, en route to my own bed one late night with my brand new, kinda-sorta-I-hope-I-hope boyfriend, I tiptoed past some sleeping guests sacked out on my Brooklyn apartment floor and said, pointing, "I slept with him...and I slept with him." It was lucky for me my new swain had the courage and openness to share his hurt and befuddlement, albeit a bit later, after he'd already gotten laid. (And, frankly, it's also lucky that my roommate and I only had two guests visiting from college that weekend. Another slutty story for another day.)

What is it about getting a bit of what you want that sends you running screaming from it? Why, oh, why are we so quick with the self-sabotage?

I'm not sure, but I have some theories. Change is painful because we don't know what's on the other side of it, the devil you know, and all that. There's also the starkly terrifying feeling of making oneself vulnerable: to love, to need, to want. You have these great, toughening experiences growing up that inoculate you against stupid, life-squelching hazards like walking off a cliff or setting yourself on fire, but a side effect is toughening up. That excellent scar tissue that builds up to protect you from the bad stuff can keep you from accessing so much of the good stuff.

The longer I live this vida loca, the more it seems to me that if the job of youth is learning, the job of maturity is unlearning while preserving the learning. I've said it so many times my friends are sick of hearing it, but I really feel like my work from roughly 40 years old until now (almost 48 as of this writing) has been about getting back to the me I was at 10, playful, curious, reasonably carefree, openly loving, and decidedly non-post-ironic, only somehow while retaining the juice and the life and the lessons of the experiences I picked up along the way. Carrying pain on your back while opening your arms to more of the same? Or, like a fairy tale dragon, painfully peeling away layer after layer of protective, scaly coating to reveal the handsome prince within? (Calling Joseph Campbell!)

I suppose you can choose the metaphor or myth that works for you. I suppose you can write your own. It seems to me that the more important thing here (assuming we want to move past the rolling backward into the slop) is learning your defense mechanisms and the feelings associated with them and probably some of the tools that work best for putting the brakes on (or winching yourself out of the slop) so that you spend less time in the slop and more time moving forward.

Me? My high sign is judging. Maybe that's a Virgo thing, maybe it's an ACOA thing, maybe it's just Colleen's Special Thing. But if the thing that's moving me forward the fastest these days is the ability to remain open and connected with love and kindness and The Force, the thing that shuts that shit down lightning-quick is judging. Creates a delightfully safe distance between myself and anything meaningful, while pushing away all but the most stalwart of loved ones. 99% of the time, judging is like telling happiness to go fuck itself. And the other 1% of the time, it's like telling it to go fuck itself at a slightly later date. Because a heart that lets in even a little bit of judging is like the Sorcerer's Apprentice* creating a little bit of help. It's the help that's ultimately so not helpful, you need to call in the big guns to help clear it out.

That's a breakthrough I had today, courtesy of my good friend, Patty, and my secret obsession, Yehuda Berg's Daily Kabbalah Minute, or whatever the hell they call it. (I'm jokey-judging because I'm embarrassed, which is the shame thing from the title kicking in, which I'm getting to in a minute. Be patient. This stuff is H-A-R-D, okay?) I did a little public judging, all in the name of a good cause, of course! of course!, which Patty saved me from, which made the shame bloom up my back over my shoulders and to my ears. Heat. Lots of heat. I copped to it, but in kind of a cold, uppity way. You know, the whole "not by way of excuse, just by way of explanation, tone-lost-via-the-internet, iciness-born-of-lack-of-context kinda way. And then that goddamn Yehuda Berg dropped this bomb in my inbox, and dammit if I didn't laugh and, after my even milder prickle of shame had subsided, email Patty copping to my status as Temporary Asshole of the Universe.

Lesson learned; move on, nothing to see here.

Well, wait, maybe there are a few things to note first.

Daily, or at least regular, maintenance is important. This learning is, as anyone on the path knows, hard-won and easily lost. I'm still new at this "being able to stop it thing," and it is coinciding with what might, at almost-48, be called critical mass in terms of lessons, but some kind of regular practice of reflection has got to be a help...right? I think it's no coincidence that some of this fine understanding coincides (ha!) with my doing a semi-regular practice of Remembrance.
Emotions are awesome, if annoying, indicators. Shame, fear, guilt, whaddevah! There's no getting around it. Crappy stuff lets you know you're off-plumb in some way. If the judging is the thing, the shame I feel getting called out on it is like semaphore by oiled, buff, Mr. Olympia contestants wearing sequined hot pants and neon nipple rings. In other words, hard to look at and even harder to look away from.
Be nice! It's becoming my cure-all for everything, or at least, the balm I apply to these newly-opened wounds. Works, though, and is available in infinite supply, believe it or not.

I will likely grapple with this issue on and off for the rest of my life. Somehow, it's the hand I drew, one of the things in my basket, just like Crohn's, on the downside (or not) and my scary-fast healing powers and capacity for withstanding pain on the upside (again, or not).

The more I remember that 1-2-3 above though, the shorter the lag time between the hammer coming down and recognition that I have, once again, been bonked on the head.

And who knows? Give me another 40-some-odd years and I may be able to step around the sucker entirely...

xxx
c

Image by the learnr via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*Again with the Joseph Campbell!