Mindfulness
By Simon Barget
- 138 reads
So you can’t stand yourself and you’re pretty much fucked. Everyone knows it. You’re not having fun. You’re unhappy. You’re waiting, holding your breath. Gritting your teeth, putting on a brave face.
You think you can just turn round and start liking yourself, well it just ain’t that easy. For one you’re not that easy to like. Nothing personal, it’s how you are. And so it’s not just you then. Do you really think other people like you? Well, they do and they don’t. That’s if they spend more than the duration of a gnat’s fart thinking about anything other than who’s going to like them. Maybe they’re even thinking about you liking them, but I doubt it. Bit far-fetched. Do you ever dwell on the ins and outs of liking anyone but you? Do you spend more than one second of your wasted days not swilling in the sewage of your own self-absorption? Could you spend a little bit less time thinking about being famous for instance? What are you going to be famous for? Your charisma? Your wisdom? The unique way you have of expressing things? You see, if you want to start liking yourself you have to start admitting to yourself all the disgusting things you’re thinking. And me being you, my friend, I know exactly what you’re thinking, you’re thinking quite a lot of the stuff that you just expressed in these nice words you put on the page above. Does it surprise you no one likes you? Re-read. Take a breather. Have a look at what you are, what goes through your mind. But don’t take it personal.
And blame all you like. We know we know, you gave up the blame game yonks ago and substituted it with self-responsibility as your all-encompassing panacea. Now if someone comes and calls you a ‘cunt’, it doesn’t faze you. All about them, 0% about you. Free to slurry you with their own nefarious judgements. You’re impregnable. You have decided once and for all who and what you want to be. Shame no one got the message. Shame they’re still calling you cunts behind your back. In a manner of speaking. (We don’t call other people cunts at our age.) If they didn’t get the message, not your watch. You are not their ears; you do not personally convey the sound into their cortex, you do not have to do what it takes to then convert it into meaning. All you know is that you treat yourself properly and let that be the end of it. Who knows, maybe quite a few good things will follow as a result, as Jesus alluded to. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God etc. No forget the last sentence, it was merely an afterthought. You treat yourself well full stop. You never keep this adage in the back of your mind as some hidden consolation. You are not holding on to it fiercely like a stubborn child to its pet donkey. Of course you wouldn’t do that. I can attest to that.
Furthermore if anyone wanted to say anything about you, go on let them say it, because beyond everything, beyond all the talk and hot air, you’re just scrupulously honest, honest to a fault. You’re so damn honest you can’t quite believe how virtuous this makes you compared to all the rest of their lies. There’s some solace in this. You know yourself so damn well. You know you’re a cunt before anyone else does. If you are it doesn’t matter.
Now I want to say there is actually an easy way out. One word ‘change’. Change what you’re thinking. Imagine if you didn’t think all those awful heavy crippling debilitating nasty things you just wrote above, imagine how liberated you’d be. Imagine how you’d just breeze through life. Imagine. Imagine how you’d just get your own way every fucking time. You could literally think anything within reason. Who’s going to stop you? Now it’s not that I want you to dislike yourself. What do I have to gain? I’m not saying that the fact that you need to change implies that what you are right now is gross and untenable. Nothing in it for me. I can quite happily sit around all day doing nothing. I don’t need to start telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. Ok, maybe I do get a little juice from it. It’s nice to speculate, to advise, to tell people what to do. Isn’t it nice when someone comes to you and says they’ve got a problem and then that moment just before you speak and they look up imploringly like a moron? It can really make you think you know something. It can make you feel in control. Even if I don’t know anything about myself, somehow I convince myself I know something about you. Well I do know something about you. I also know about Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and I know about mindfulness, and I know about restorative yoga retreats, and I know about Vipassana, and I know about Qi Gong and Ju Jitsu and I know about Ayahuasca and I know about trauma and blockages and plant-based healing modalities, I know about depression come to think of it I know quite a lot.
But really, what do I stand do get out of convincing you that of course there’s nothing wrong with you and that you don’t need to change but in that ‘not-changing’ the inherent change you need comes from a subtle change in the way you see yourself -- no better word for it and words all we got -- which isn’t really a change of course -- just go with me on this one – and that therefore the thing holding you back is you and not me and certainly no one else in this world? Why would it make any sense for me to do this? I think you are deluded if you think this. I think you’re misguided. I’m not trying to very subtly suggest that what you could be is something different to what you are. That’s preposterous. I’m saying that you should be exactly what you are, a cunt if that works, but you should do a whole lot of soul-searching to get there. Perhaps go and get acupuncture while you’re at it. I have no hidden agenda. I’m, basically you, I want the best for you. And so if you want to believe that you’re going to be famous and important then I’m totally with you. No intention of disabusing you of that notion. I do not want you to secrete some far-fetched and false idea in the back of your mind that external things are going to change for you. I wouldn’t want to hold you hostage. I wouldn’t want you believing things are going to get better in some tangible way. Like everyone will start liking you and sending you WhatsApps. Or your mother will start to respect you and stop being ridiculously patronising and judgemental in a way that is so judgemental that it makes her say paradoxically nice things about you through gritted teeth because she’s scared you’ll know she’s judging. I am not trying to get these things in via the back door. That’s your own suspicious mind. I’m not in that business. Do you really think I understand all this stuff? What makes you think so? Admit also, that you like to think that I do. You like to think you understand it so that at least you’ve got something to bolt onto to your frustration. Don’t think you can bamboozle me with your words. I know how you feel. I know exactly what’s going on. I wouldn’t want you ever to realise there’s no way out. You don’t have to go through that, you shouldn’t have to. Everything’s rosy and death is a mighty long way off.
No, you should never have to experience the mind in an eternal loop, it’s like you’re a rat in a maze -- it’s not exactly that but it’s a good way of describing it -- and then you look in front of you and it’s all black and there’s no way forward, you can’t move one inch forward because it’s just blocked off, all closed and dead and strangulated and cocooned and black and inky and sticky and dark but you’re still breathing, you’re alive and so naturally you’re a little bit panicky but you turn round, but when you turn round it’s as if you’re facing the same way and there’s no way forward either, and the same goes for up or down or any which way you can invent or fathom, so a little more panic has now set in, perhaps you’ll try a couple more times, and then that’s all very well but what are you going to do, how can you do anything, there’s no resolution, you’re stuck. And you better come to terms with it, because otherwise it’s agony, it’s agony anyway, but what you need to see is that this is somehow your essence and there’s no glossing, going around it, no help, support networks, you have to go in, whatever that means, right in, you’re facing the beast, which is yourself. And then you feel, you deeply feel you’re the only thing in the world and you feel torridly and helplessly alone, deeply existentially alone, like you can’t see or touch anyone ever ever again, like they can’t reach you either, as if your insides have been blown away and you are nothing now but a peanut. I would not want you to have to realise this, well to start with you’ll tell me it’s unfair, and well we know that you could never imagine that things could possibly be unfair in this life, that that couldn’t possibly be the case, that some things could be mistakes, that pain is not the negative you’re thinking of, it’s way way way way more trenchant. So I won’t bother you with all this and you can carry on hoping.
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