METTA MIND JOURNAL WITH CYNIC’S PAUL MASVIDAL: “A BRIDGE TO THE VIEW”

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 5:00pm by Paul Masvidal

Journal entry, twelve years ago:

“Today I am sad. It hurts to be human. The walls are closing in on my peace and I go deeper into a sadness all too familiar. The tears from my formative years when I would cry incessantly because of psychic pain have arisen again. A resurgence of that old pain is in my body like a parasite I can’t control. I’m a suffering child. The human experience can be very trying and today I am tested. Today I am broken. All hope is lost. I am exhausted. Where does my fervor for life come from?”

…after that journal entry, I wrote this poem:

Cactus
Black bones in me
Corroding everything
They’re floating free in my eyes
You say I’m losing my sight
Don’t rescue me
I don’t plan on getting out
I’ve lost the key
Hug me I’m a cactus

I was on the edge that day.

Reading through old journal entries, those words struck me like a person from a past life—a person who’s not around anymore. I see in those words someone who didn’t know what to do with his pain. I spent many years in that place of sinking into my own sadness. My depression was insidious…and slow, like a turtle. It kept me in bed for days at a time. It was like a deep sleep that I couldn’t shake. Eventually the walls began to close in. If I didn’t put myself back together and find some way to engage with life again, I was going to end my story.

For the thing which
I greatly feared is come upon me,
and that which I was afraid of
Is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither
had I rest, neither was I quiet;
Yet trouble came.
—Job

This epigraph appears in Darkness Visible, William Styron’s true account of his descent into major depression. Since I was meditating even during this period, what I discovered was that the depression was in my biology and in my bones like a genetic disposition. Beneath this biology I found a lot of psychic pain that wasn’t my own, but like an empath (and all humans are empaths), I had been taking on the “life” sadness of my family, our collective history, and the environment around me.

(Chicken or egg conundrum: Does depression begin in the mind and spread to the body? Or, is the physical body weighted down, depressed, and suppressed by ancient human history / DNA…and this (ill)informs the mind? And, in all cases, the human spirit remains “untouched,” quietly cheering you on, until the mind or body, or both, give out and then that’s all you wrote?)

I was always able to reference a spiritual perspective throughout my period of major depression, but none of that mattered. And that’s why I return to the biological and psychic perspective. It was deeper and larger than me. The sadness overcame my entire being. On the other side of that sadness, I discovered courage. The courage to suffer with dignity and grace. The courage to look straight into the darkness and not be afraid. I realized that this sadness was actually powerful and beautiful, and it didn’t have to be debilitating. I could wield it and make it work for me, like an energy that gets channeled into something constructive. I had the courage to be sad and not push it away any longer. I accepted things as they were, and that was when the healing took place.

Whatever series of life events it was that initially triggered the depression now seems inconsequential. What’s crucial is that it acted as the “bridge to the view.” I was finally able to see the wealth of sadness and depression that I had been holding for so many years. This gigantic black whole finally gave me a vantage point to access the underworld of my deepest fears and quiet childlike pain that I’d been carrying around my entire life. I finally got intimate with this monstrous empty space and gave it a big hug, cactus thorns and all. I’d been a prisoner of my mind, my conditioning, my whole being, for all of my life, until that moment.

Today, depression still arises, but it doesn’t have the same charge. It’s a softer blow now, and familiar enough that I’m able to see it as though it’s someone else’s pain. I don’t have to embody it the way I used to, and I no longer care for it and feed it in the way that I had grown accustomed. Instead, I just let it move through me like a wind, and I’m better now at taking care of myself when the confusion appears. I see how transient these emotional energies are and I trust that they’re going to change and transform into something else. I don’t know if it’s years of sitting on the cushion and meditating that caused the shift. Maybe all these years of songwriting saved my life. I’d guess it’s a combination of the two that helped?

Life experiences rise and fall like the ocean’s tide, so I now choose to see depression as a big, unknown space that invites me in for a specific transformational purpose. Nightmares usually end, or “come to light,” when we face our fears and hang out in that space, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. When that happens, we begin to see into and through the darkness, making friends with our enemies or our own shadows that aren’t fully integrated into our personalities. They appear like phantoms that almost have a mind of their own, but once we become still enough to take a look at these “dark” parts of ourselves, we find that the monster was our own creation. We made it up in order to cope with life.

Life doesn’t require us to do anything except show up, but we try so hard to give it purpose with our stories of what we think life should be. We love to play god and think we’re running the show, but the show runs itself without our help at all. One could say depression, or darkness, in general, is not really negative at all, and that it’s more closely related to clarity. It could be an opportunity to slow down, take a long, good look, and get to know ourselves a bit better.

-PM

NOTE: Do you ever get into bed ready for a good night’s sleep, but all that happens is… nothing? You just lie there in the dark with your eyes open? A friend gave me a relaxation / sleep mask called “Mindfold,” that blocks out all light but allows you to keep your eyes open comfortably. It’s interesting to discover that after awhile, you’ll notice that you’re able to penetrate the darkness and see within it. It’s like using your eyes in a new way. Because my eyes are no longer receiving and processing visual information, one of two things happens: (1) the mind comes in and starts to turn the darkness into a movie screen for my monkey-mind thoughts, or (2) I relax into the emptiness and find a sense of ease in this unknown space. It’s like moving straight into a void of blackness and into “Darkness Visible.” Maybe the “Mindfold” returns me to the womb experience again and that’s why I like using it. I invite you to revisit your ideas of darkness and see where it takes you.

(Gojira showed me this and I wanted to share this with you all. I’ve never read something so inspiring.. I hope it makes me stronger and helps me to become patient and calm and happy and focus on my life till the right train comes along… This light is turned off.. )

Currently listening to
Chapter V
By Staind

old inspiration…

This is an inspirational essay written by Mary Schmich in 1997 which was published in the Chicago Tribune. This essay has been most famously used for giving advice to high school seniors who are ready to go out and make it in this big bad world. Many of you may have seen/heard this essay. It was remixed into a song by Baz Luhrmann in 1998 called “Wear Sunscreen.” I think even though most of us have already past the threshold of graduating high school we can still take something from this essay and apply it to our lives in some small way. Below is the orginal essay Mary Schmich published in her column back in 1997..

“Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.

I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen…”

Some people may see a lot of cliches and be bored of this by now but I still love the inspiration I get from this essay. This light is turned off…

Currently reading
The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
By Douglas Adams

insane

im  just a little devastated right now… i had an awesome brain storm yesterday evening.. typing away furiously on xanga… and when i finished i copied the damn thing in case it refreshed and cleared and in spite of doing that while i was finally posting it.. it somehow cleared what i was writing and didnt paste when i tried to paste what i was meaning to post… it has left me completely frustrated.. losing my piece of thought… my whole huge brainstorm cleared… thought i would remember enough of it to rewrite it and piece it back together.. but it just isnt the same… i hate that i was inspired like this after a long time to write something meaningful and it couldn’t save.. i could feel the power of it… and its just gone now.. sigh…. it started something about how life is so amazing and insane when we come across a spark in our life… a single second that suddenly sparks into a crazy thought.. a sudden realization that we have after so many years of living life.. existing.. and after so many years something dawns on us that we never noticed before… and its funny that we never noticed it before considering its been there all along… it went on to explain how thought provoking it would be not to just experience a single spark once in a blue moon but a continuous flow of sparks… and how the few rare people that are able to experience such a thing are termed insane because other people cannot begin to grasp the idea of such a thing. i also felt that life and how we experience it is a like being in a parachute way high up in the sky that’s coming down… and as we come down we land on these plateaus.. we land on them and learn what we can.. plateaus of learning and growth and evolving.. we take what we can from the plateau.. and use it to prepare ourselves for the next plateau.. which can come unexpectedly.. we don’t know when we will arrive at the next plateau.. how soon or how long it will take.. what experiences we can take from it.. but it’s up to us to take what’s put out there.. and if its not put out there then to find what we need to.. and scope out the learning experience. sometimes we land gracefully on each plateau.. sometimes its rough.. sometimes its stressful painful.. exhausting… i think it has to do something with how open we are to treating our life as a learning experience and advancing to the next level.. there are certain people who try and take what they can from it.. it shocks me how some people spend their whole lives monotonously through the same routine day in day out and don’t bother to take something from it.. or find the sparks..or bother doing anything with the sparks that they find.. i think others are capable of doing more with their lives but dont.. and it saddens me… i think im in between.. i find the sparks and i act upon them when i can but i could be doing much more… this is all i can manage to remember at the moment… it is so annoying that i can’t write the post originally as i had written it.. it’s like just not the same… maybe it’s for the best… maybe it wasn’t meant to be shared.. because it was solely meant for my own understanding.. another plateau maybe.. who knows.. all i know is im not gonna expect every landing to be the best.. but its definitely not going to be my worst.. and im going to enjoy life be happy and take what it gives me… im not going to sit back and just let life happen to me.. I’M GOING TO HAPPEN TO LIFE… hope to share another spark.. another plateau experience in the near future… this light is turned off..

Currently listening to
Extreme Behavior
By Hinder

ugh

I hate when I have to update a lot when I’ve been too lazy or busy to write. I know sure there’s no one forcing me to write everything but I feel like this is my little recount on life and I owe it to myself to atleast summarize what I’ve missed out on writing even if its not play-by-play details… sigh…. It’s funny… cuz I’ve had blogs in the past… and I ended them because I felt no one was commenting or reading them.. I wrote for all the wrong reasons back then… I was honestly a totally different person back then as well. I should have written for myself and not cared whether everyone read it or no one read it… I guess that’s what I do now… hmmm… I know theres some who comment and read this when they get the time… and i definitely appreciate the comments when I get them… but these days it doesnt make me feel bad if no one reads it… It’s just for me… hmmm… well to give u a lil summary of stuff I’ve missed out on… I’m still working at the same company as before… but now I work from home at approximately half the salary… It works out much better. save a lot of cash now that I dont have to travel across town to get to work… I dont have to see the bitches and dickheads from work and deal with them… I get to get up when I want and work when I want. The deal is I gotta submit two articles everyday… I’m hoping to pick up one more freelancing job so I make enough cash as I was before… I also get to spend a lot more time with family so its pretty cool… hmmm … wut else… well I’d been meaning to finish reading my boyfriend’s blog for the longest time. I’d finished reading 2005 and 2007 like a month ago and 2008-9 were pending… So anyways today’s Thursday so he usually goes out every Thursday and has a boy’s night barbecue with his friends so I thought I would sit and finish reading it… so I did. It was such a good read.. felt like what I did after finishing the Twilight series (Oh, man that was amazing…. I want more!!!) lol… cheesy I know but it’s true… I think he’d make some serious mad money if he wrote a book or something… hmmm…. Man, the time is gonna fly by fast now…. I can feel it… in my blood. in my veins…. its like instinct or something… just like how the birds just frickin know when to  fly south for the winter… well atleast the birds in the US do that… I donno bout these desi birds whether they fly somewhere for hmmm… maybe monsoon? oh well. who cares…

it honestly feels good to write on my blog after so long… I’m excited… I dont want to jinx anything but I feel so comfortable where I am right now in life. Sure I want things to move in due course… so I can be happy with my boyfriend… hopefully married soon and all that… but even though I’m absolutely dying to have that… to wake up every morning and see his face next to mine… wake up…cook for him… take care of him… have his babies… and the whole works… I’m STILL happy where I am right now… it’s weird because I don’t think I’ve ever been happy at this stage in my life… I’ve just been fucking depressed… so low…. not human for the past 3 yrs??? its hard to explain… but this is the first time Ive taken things slow… taken the time to speculate where I’m going in life and myself so I can be a healthy individual and happy with who I am… I don’t think I’ve ever done that before in my life… it’s insane….it’s weird… its almost like skipping a grade and then wondering what’s missing… or running before you learn how to stop or walk and then crashing into a wall… So now I’m finally learning to walk and stop and take a look at my life… and it feels so good…. its not all a breeze in the park I tell you… There are days where I am cringing and hurting and frustrated and tired…. but its easier to manage now because I’m learning more about myself… I think I never would have learned all this if it wasnt for K… hmmm….he means everything to me…  I think I’m done rambling… It was a good ramble though…. will write more when I feel a bit more clear… loll… bed time for moi…. this light is turned off…

Currently listening to
Walking in the Air
By Nightwish

My Latest Epiphany I’m Trying To Grasp…

You adjust to things that come into your life, good or bad…. and when they leave, you learn to continue living your life as if you never had it… Don’t go away empty handed. Learn from your experiences and your mistakes. Never depend on anyone else for anything whether it be happiness, love, money, confidence, success… gain these fruits for yourself, from within you. Do not expect anyone else to get these things for you. Believe in yourself. trust in yourself. be yourself.. because that’s the only one person you will be able to depend on always. Be comfortable being alone… create a barricade around your soul so that nothing can tear you apart and leave you weak. If that means being a bitch then so be it. At the end of the day YOU have to harbor those emotions of hurt, pain, and frustration when you become weak and soft enough to allow someone to make you feel that way. Harden your heart… Everyone looks nice from the outside but they all have agendas in their head. Don’t fall for them. Work is not a place to make friends. Do your job and leave. The more personal attachments you have, the more complicated life gets. Love yourself first. If you decide to trust someone enough to let them into your life, they come after you. If you allow them in, don’t be surprised if they pick up and leave tomorrow. In fact expect it. So it won’t be so hard to deal with when they finally do. Music is the only weakness you can allow yourself to experience recklessly. The only thing you can be vulnerable to without getting hurt. Experience it and embrace it whole heartedly.

Note: I cannot take credit for this epiphany. I had a conversation with someone (he/she knows who he is) and through a series of questions arguments and realizations I have come to find the above written. I thank the person who has helped me discover this. I am stronger and more enlightened because of this. This light is turned off..

 

Currently listening to Right Before Your Eyes  by Hoobastank
Daredevil: OST