Hosting yourself with generous authority

Spoiler alert: In the third season of the British TV show Downtown Abbey, the charming blue-eyed husband of the protagonist, Mary Crawley, dies in a sudden car crash. Mary goes into shock. She retreats into herself, barely paying any attention to her newborn son and slinking away from all responsibilities. After 6 months (or, well, 15 mins in TV-time), her family gives her a wake up call. It is time to move forward, they say. You must make a choice. Choose death, as you have been, or choose life. This cold-water treatment knocks Mary out of her stupor, and she begins to take on responsibilities and a role in the world again.

The harsh but deeply loving suggestion to dispel grief with obligations struck me. I (and many of my friends) struggle with the freedom-obligation conflict. Obligations are all the things we know we should do. Work hard. Exercise. Go to that networking event. Get good grades. Be productive. Freedom is the shrugging off of all of that. Endless days with no commitments, and the ability to go anywhere at anytime doing anything.

The freedom story is tantalizing. There’s an entire therapy narrative around throwing out ‘shoulds’ and being gentle with yourself. Yet, despite how it appears, living without shoulds is a one-track road to unhappiness.

Amidst watching Downtown Abbey, I was in a bout of running away frantically from shoulds. I had been holding a gun to my head to force myself to fulfil obligations, and I resented it. I found any excuse to turn away from the gun, avoiding scheduling calls with friends and saying no to side projects. I pined for a feeling of vacation and endless days without commitments. Then, I read the Art of Gathering by Priya Parker.

It sounds like a strange source of emotional advice, but hear me out. Priya, with insight and captivating stories, breaks down types of hosts of gatherings:

The generously authoritative host exerts her power in the best interests of the guests. If everyone at a table is introducing themselves and one person has been talking for 10 mins, a generously authoritative host would step in and ask to move to the next person. They're authoritative, in guiding social behavior, and generous, as it protects the guests.

Ungenerous authority is exerting power that is not in the best interests of the guests. Priya gives an example of a dinner hosted by an alcohol company. Despite serving dinner at 10pm (i.e. famished-o-clock), they made everyone wait until a panel of experts had explained the dinner and how it paired with each of the alcoholic drinks. The organizers held the guests hostage for purely self-interested motives.

And then there's the dreaded Chill host. The chill host abdicates power because they don't want to impose; they think that leaving guests to their own devices is magnanimous. But, in the absence of the power of the host, someone else steps into power. You end up with that one loud guy monopolizing the conversation the entire night. In trying to create freedom, you instead create a space where anyone can step in and shape people's experience.

How does this relate, you ask? I realized that we're actually hosts of ourselves. We so often host ourselves with ungenerous authority – enforcing shoulds that are really societal expectations and not in our best interests. I should get coffee with this person. I should work an extra hour. Yet the opposite, being a chill host, is equally as bad. By giving ourselves freedom, we let anything step into the power vacuum that emerges. And, let me tell you, binge watching Netflix and browsing Twitter are powerful guests. Depression, in part, comes from learned helplessness. And if we don't impose structure on our lives, other forces will, leaving us feeling helpless.

What we really want is to be generously authoritative hosts towards ourselves.

Obligations can be in our best interests. If you want to write a novel, you need to write a little bit every day. If you want to build a community, you need to consistently call friends. Everything that is meaningful takes discipline and commitment. The danger comes from mixing up the obligations from social expectations (like I should work an extra hour) and obligations that are good for us (like going to sleep early).

Once you realize this distinction, you can throw out the ungenerous shoulds without throwing the baby out with the bathwater; you can start to be disciplined in a way that's kind to yourself.

I'm still thinking of Mary Crawley's friends looking her in the eye and saying: You're stronger than this. Get up, go outside, and take back your responsibilities, because you need to choose life. I'm working on developing that kind but firm voice for myself, giving up the fallacy of freedom and signing myself up for obligations that are good for me.

A Treatise

The first tendrils of a treatise on being.

• Existence is a process of folding in on oneself. That is the light. The heavy is the magnetism of particles drawn into a steel ball that radiates all energy.
• The experience of I is a continuation of memories, this moment, and the next, drawn from a foundation of the last moment and the moment before. If you duplicated I, I would be I and I, ever diverging from the same thread of memories and self. I and self is memories and an experience of right now. Lost memories, and I begins again. New memories, and I begins anew.
• The expanse of possible actions is more vast than imaginable. We walk the railroad tracks of what has been laid before us, but there is life at the furthest outreaches of the imagination (a dewdrop forms at the edge of existence, and no one is there to experience it – no one but the phantom of you, eyes closed, pushing yourself to where the silver thread linking your existence to this moment becomes hazy).
• One cannot be ahistorical. All words must be grounded in the zeitgeist of every single conscious experience dancing right in this moment. Ahistorical is to be devoid of the life force animating every particle; all things are a spider-thin web. Touch me here and I ripple on the other side of the earth.
• The solidity is in the sacrifice. In the tear of losing a moment, a possible world, a possible self, the dust settles on the terrain of this self. This self – rugged, inhospitable – turns its shoulder to the wind to shelter its loved ones. This self can withstand tidal waves. The power is in the sacrifice.
• Pinpricks in a vase – we are all expressions of the same energy. At once the same, and all parts of a whole. Meeting another is like meeting yourself (a direction of energy not yet encountered). Loneliness is unfathomable in the vase, where my existence is given light from the same source as your existence. Unkindness is unfathomable when we are but shapes through which the light filters.
• I echo against the walls; I think, and particles draw to me. I move my hand and I create a reality that is an imprint of my mind. I close my eyes, concentrate, and the road bends underneath my foot. I build each stepping stone I step to. I color the walls I live in. My essence moulds the shape of reality around me, and the shape of reality moulds my essence. I am an infinite loop, modulated only by intention.
• Thoughts bend the fabric of the universe. Ideas are physically present. One darting thought falls like a droplet on spacetime; one thousand years from now, the world is on an entirely different trajectory.
• The bounds of my consciousness and yours are pulses that radiate as waves. Here, the edge of a wave, here the point where waves overlap. Here the point where waves merge into each other and one cannot tell one vibration from the other.
• My quarks, too, feel I-ness. Experience, with a quiet dullness pulses (here, here, there) of light. Movement. Warmth. Drawn, repulsed, dissipating, existing suddenly. I am an emergence of pulsing experience.

Re-architecting our mind

Every second, we rewrite reality. Every time we recall memories, we give them a new tint (the colors we’re feeling when we recall them are woven in). Instantly, our narrative of the past is different. And our self-identity, premised on the past, shifts.

A few months ago, I signed up for a course offering “complete healing in 4 days”. Part of me thought it was a scam, but most of me was extremely curious. In the lead-up to the course, we were told to make a vision board and meditate in front of it every day. “You’re going to be that person in a week,” the soothing voice of the instructor told us over a guided meditation. “Get ready to get your life back”.

Getting one’s life back is not an easy task. Many years of my life had been shadowed by what one might call perfectionist-overoptimization-neuroticism, manifesting as anxiety and depression. I had tried the litany of therapists: CBT when I was 14 with a therapist who told me to sit on the floor but refused to join me cause her skirt was too tight; talk therapy for 4 years in a warm room with potted plants and a ticking clock; couple’s therapy with a doctor of religion and psychoanalysis (yes, it was deep, intense, and really weird). Over the years, I became more and more fluent in the world of emotions. I learned how anxiety is a response to emotions I’m blocking, how dissociating from emotions causes memory loss, and how my relationship with men is defined by patterns I learned from my mother and brother and father.

Yet at the end of all of this, I still had anxiety. I still ignored my friends for weeks because texting them back was too stressful, and I still had debilitating breakdowns over the wording of an email.

Enter the crazy healing course. What intrigued me was how much it promised so quickly. The internet is awash in articles proclaiming that doing ‘this one quick trick’ will solve your problems. We’re drawn to easy, magic pill solutions. But, of course, we must be very skeptical of such claims. In the efficient world, there is no free money on the table. If it were really that easy, people would already have done it.

So my curiosity was piqued by the videos on the course website of real people standing up from wheelchairs and walking for the first time, or talking about their first meal they enjoyed in years because they had conquered their eating disorder. What was I missing?

What this course was promising wasn’t a magic pill, it was a leverage point: a part of a system where a small amount of effort has outsized effects. The leverage point this course had discovered was beliefs.

Ok. So here’s where I freak out about the power of beliefs. Sometimes you come across something that feels like the key to everything – beliefs are one of those things.

Beliefs are the architecture of our mind. In the physical world, the structure of a house subconsciously affects our behavior and emotions. If the hallway is narrow, we’ll feel suffocated. If the windows are small, we’ll feel gloomy. If the living room is large and beautiful, we’ll spend more time hanging out with our family. Similarly, beliefs are the pillars and walls and roofs that we mentally inhabit every single waking moment.

Beliefs moderate our perception. We perceive the world through two streams: bottom-up processing, which is the sensory data we get from our environment, and top-down processing, which is our context and models of the world. To make sense of the jumbled mess of sensory data, our brain is constantly predicting what it *expects* to see based on all the prior knowledge we have. As Scott Alexander says in this great review, “You’re not seeing the world as it is, exactly. You’re seeing your predictions about the world, cashed out as expected sensations, then shaped/constrained by the actual sense data.”

Let me just say that again. Your brain *predicts what it expects* based on your beliefs, and this determines *what you actually perceive*. This is why beliefs are so powerful – we can predict experiences into existence. When we develop beliefs like “I am not good enough”, we throw blankets over our mind and it contorts the data to fit them. We stop noticing times we were good enough, and fixate on times we thought we weren’t. We stop interpreting events as “maybe it was just an accident” and start interpreting them as “it was because I wasn’t good enough”. Our brains are habit-machines, and we run the same thought patterns over and over. Eventually, we forget that we were the ones who created the beliefs. This is how we trap ourselves: by forgetting our fundamental utter freedom, and by forgetting that we constructed the beliefs we feel trapped by.

Beliefs can develop in a second. You forget your books at school and a teacher tells you off. “I must be forgetful,” you tell yourself. Then, we experience what we expect. The next time you forget something, it reinforces your belief. “I forgot my books again. That just proves it.” This particularly happens when we’re young, because we don’t have much evidence either way. Our brain over-updates on a few events, and forms beliefs that become so strongly reinforced we forget there was ever an alternative.

Okay, so beliefs are important. But theories like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy have focused on beliefs for decades. Why haven’t we solved all our problems already?

Beliefs are extremely sticky. They develop for a reason, and become so familiar that we can’t imagine a different reality. To knock them down, we need to both hit them hard, and expand our sense of agency dramatically. When changing beliefs, you can operate on a local level or a global level. The local level says things like: “You don’t need to believe that people will abandon you”, and people gradually infer that they have agency over other beliefs too. This is what therapy often does. You dismantle beliefs with the help of the therapist, but you still need the therapist to help you through it. You learn agency on the specific issues you’re working on, but it takes years to build up to feeling agency about your entire life.

The global level says: “You can change literally any belief. Here’s a tool for you to do this yourself”. Your sense of agency radically increases, since you realize you can change *literally any belief-based behavior*, on your own, with practice. Therapy chips away at beliefs for years. By targeting beliefs globally, this course bulldozes them in a few days. Improving my mental health became like HIIT: gritty, intense, and quick.

The key idea was to talk to myself to re-route my negative thought patterns every single time I had them. For weeks, I muttered to myself in my bedroom every day, every 10 minutes. At first, my inner voice was petulant. “But why should I believe this will work?” she pouted at me. I cajoled with soothing affirmations (“You’re already feeling better, aren’t you? Doesn’t that tell you it works at least a little bit?”) and undeniable evidence (“This works for 80% of people who go on this course”). I coached, listened to the voice inside, reoriented and coached again. Sometimes I had to reframe: “You don’t have to be scared of this not working. If you start to be anxious again, just do this process again!”, or “Unwinding your anxiety is just about not giving up, and you *know* you’re capable of that”. Always it was with kindness – the way a wise and loving friend would talk to you. And always with persistence, continuing to coach until my inner voice settled back comfortably and my whole body relaxed with the belief change.

Sometimes I had to go further back. My inner voice was speaking under the weight of years of reinforced patterns. I spoke to my 3-year-old self about her fear of my mum leaving for work and never coming back. “She’ll come back in the evening,” I promised, and “People come and go all the time, you don’t need to worry”. Children are remarkably easy to persuade. After a few back and forths and a suggestion to play with her toys while she waited, 3-year old me laughed happily and let go of the belief. My entire body unwound, 20 years of fear of abandonment dissipating within me.

A few days after my conversation with 3-year-old me, I was sitting on a quiet balcony looking up at the stars, musing on our insignificant and fleeting existence. For years, I had felt sadness when I looked at the night sky because of all of the possibilities and worlds I wasn’t going to get to experience. I waited for the sadness and fear of death to well up.

It wasn’t there. I dug around in surprise, looking for it. Instead, all I found was a quiet, sparkling enthrallment at the lives my kids would live. In a rush, I could hear my children laughing as they traversed worlds and expanded consciousness. I could feel their small sparks of energy amongst the stretching, spinning, ever-shifting web of human existence. It was like opening eyes that had been clenched shut for 23 years, and discovering *light*, *color*, perception beyond what I had imagined.

The next day I was driving down an empty road as the sky became pink from the sunrise. Looking out at the dawn blush, I realized how long life was. I could wander into the woods and mark art, or spend years doing a PhD just for fun.

All of these beliefs (fear of abandonment, of not being good enough) were intricately woven together, reinforced by years of prediction and confirmation. Dissipating one belief rippled through my entire network, in a moment unwinding old beliefs and rethreading new ones.

Since then, I’ve sent many an email without fear, called my friends a lot, and hosted big events; I’ve gone on long, carefree walks and found myself genuinely telling people: “I don’t actually have deep fears anymore”. I’ve knocked down walls, rebuilt windows, and created warm, open rooms with beanbags and flowers. And, the light has been streaming into my house.

Memories I never lived

Carl Jung, when he was 15, had two people living inside him. Growing up was a tumultuous reconciliation between the wise aristocrat who lived hundreds of years before, fighting for control over this new body, and the naive, arrogant youth.

The multiple selves theory of mind says that there is no singular self: Our psyche is in constant battle between selves with different wants, beliefs, memories, experiences. And if so, why not name them? Why not give them a form and a story?

Sometimes a phrase or an image passes by, pauses, and then nestles inside you. Memories and imagination are made of the same thing: hazy images that slip on the edge of awareness but pulse with familiarity. I overflow with memories that others lived but I imagined, aching for experiences that no longer exist; the same way the tree I spent days in as a child is only a stump now.

Sometimes I am Itsuki, a woodcarver, whittling and honing in the farmhouse I have lived inside for 40 years. I wake up and watch the trees change color. My hands trace the outline of perfection with every stroke.

Sometimes I am Francis, a 22-year-old-turned-soldier in the resistance in France, 1940. The snow flurries against my face as I carry canons through the night, footsteps muffled by mountains that keep me safe and hold me hostage.

Sometimes I am Kai, a pottery maker, in a forest by a tinkering stream. Rows of clay pots - gradients of blues and greys - sit quietly on the wooden shelves. Every few months someone slips in, wanders slowly, buys a small pot, then slips away.

Sometimes I am Geneviève, an avant-garde in 1910. I am smoking a cigarette and leaning back in a chair in a salon in Paris, musing on the potential of futurism and the futility of perspective.

Sometimes I am the child of a Neaderthal and Denisovan, hunched against the cold, carving stones behind the rocks we have settled between to protect us from the wind.

Sometimes, I am a never-ending foetus, curled up in the warmth of the womb, deeply asleep, breathing to the rhythm of my mother's heart.

Sometimes these selves are quiet; sometimes they whisper to me incessantly until I am lost amongst threads of consciousness. That I will never again see the snow falling in the Alps in 1944, fall asleep between the 50,000-year rocks, or watch the Japanese farmland change day after day for decades, is more heart-wrenching than all the photo frame memories I can accumulate in one lifetime.

Bush Spirits

There is a park, in San Francisco, at the top of a hill. There are trees criss crossing each other, stretches of forest you can’t cross without cutting your legs, unplanned flowers growing on the upward slope. It is a small wilderness: contained chaos.

There is a place, in our minds, where we keep our suffocated bush spirits. They bear their teeth at the walls around them, cry with anguish at trees falling; they can hear the whisper of storms in the pitch of the wind. There is no God but chance, no law but the rhythm of dance; a mass of unconscious existence.

The shape of our world defines our mind (or perhaps the other way around). In the daylight of consciousness, we tell ourselves that one plus one is two, tomorrow it will rain, trees belong in boxes on the street edges, I determine my fate, I am happy in my concrete box, my feet do not miss the earth. One plus one is two, next year I will still be alive, oil disappears from oceans when I am not looking, I am whole, I am in control, I am in control.

But the shadows are creeping closer.

2 million years, we have breathed with the forest. 200 years of smoke-choked intellectualism and we think we have tamed chaos, catalogued everything there is to know. Nature knows no rationality. It is a sickness creeping up the trunks of the hundred-year trees. We cannot subdue the forest - if we let it in it would take our breath away and remind us how to breathe. My body is of the earth. My body is from the insects and damp grass. I am bamboo, swaying, it is the only way to survive the earthquakes.

There’s a little bird on the tarmac by the side of the road. It bobs its head, pecking mindlessly at the concrete, but there is no warm, soft soil underneath. It doesn’t know any better.

Listen. Your bush spirit is beating against your heart. Listen. Let it in. It knows when the storm is coming.