(The) Mother’s Little Helper

(The) Mother’s Little Helper: A short instruction manual through the various afflictions of the mind

1.To temper anxiety: apply access to the archetypal realm. Anxiety is the desperate beating of the heart like wings flapping in a cage to break out and get back home. Do not get entranced with the frenetic search, do not do what it says, which will be to distract, grab for a salve, or engage in grave rumination. To master it, there is a chute that runs straight down your center; allow yourself to drop down as if you are in an elevator shaft to your groin. There are portals into the realm: art, poetry, sex, sacred sex, nature (especially feet in soil), water. Engaging with is good. Making is better. 

2. To unwind obsession/compulsion: Imagine a pencil is turned upside down and the eraser side is on a sheet twisting and twisting. Where it was once flat it is now a knot, a ball. That is obsession. There was a moment of bliss that went beyond what you could open in vast open space to. You contracted. The spin began. You grew separate from the object of obsession. To return to the interdependent state that resolves all, apply compassion. How? Reduce the inflation of the projection by deliberately looking at the humanity side. The nature of obsession is that the “bottom half” , the humanity, is ignored and denied, and the top half is blown up. It/they look bigger than you, leaving you at the mercy of this uber-being or addiction. Seek for the vulnerability, the place where the other is fragile, weak, hurting, imperfect. Not to judge but to issue an injection of compassion. This reduces their size and gives you height. 

3. To give breath to exasperation: Exasperation is the result of foot on the gas and foot on the brake simultaneously. A drive for a result sets in, like the drive that bypasses sensation in the moment when it’s gunning for climax, in order to avoid an aversion. It’s a get-the-hell-out-of-here response where awareness withdraws and instinct takes over. Because the system is locked, like the smell of burning rubber, irritation arises but cannot go down the drain. It rises and lands outside on others. They/it/the situation are never the cause. To mitigate, open the trap door that allows all to fall in and run down the river of consciousness. To do this, apply deliberate relaxation. With the warm, strong, adult part of the mind, speak to the amenable mind (yes you can do this, yes it works): Relax. Note the drop of shoulders or the entry of breath.  You will feel a rise again, warm and without strictness. “Relax. Relax, relax, relax, relax, relax.”

4. To fill the chasm of insufficiency: That gnawing sense of not enough. I am not enough, this is not enough, there will never be enough, my partner is not enough. The world did not deliver on its promise. Our read on the situation is often upside down. The experience of insufficiency is the result of undigested material blocking ventilation. You know the feeling in a plane where there is recirculated air and you can’t breathe deeply? That is what you are working with. You exceeded what is called your having level and stopped processing the good. You are “storing fat” and feel hungry due to discomfort, not actual hunger. To alleviate, note in a real and immediate way, not dramatic and performative, what you have, what you have been granted. Appreciation is the digestive enzyme. 

5. Cynicism/Apathy: The sense that I don’t fucking care, I cannot see the point, “I’m not surprised another tragedy happened.” The place where you are inured to the pain of the world because you can’t hear one more heartbreaking thing. The place where you hear about another’s pain and know that you are under-responding or blocking but you just don’t have room for this. This is the result of a seed decision, a crossed wire, a moment where the hurt was great and you said some version of “never again” “I will not play the fool” “no one gets over on me” “I refuse to believe again–-there is only disappointment.” The antidote is to dive in directly. Aim for disappointment. In alchemy they say that only nature can tame nature. Only deliberate disappointment can undo cynicism. The avoidance overdrive is shut down. Set yourself up for it, but this time deliberately. What you will find is that disappointment is not so bad and god it feels good to take that numbing armor off.

6. Putting hyper-vigilance to rest: Hyper vigilance is the result of getting hurt in the face of hypo-vigilance. The brain with its limited solutions swings to the opposite as the curative. So in a moment of being checked out, something negative happened. Now the brain tries to punish absence by “showing it a thing or two” and holding eternal vigil for all potential threats. Let the guard down. Let the guard go home and rest. Tell the guard that people who are drunk in car accidents are less likely to incur injury, that this rigidifying of the nervous system is more harmful than inattentiveness, much less simple open awareness which is the salve for all things. 

7. Can’t do not one more thing: The feeling that there is a 1,000 pound weight on your soul and you can’t. Get out of bed. Exercise. Face your life. Deal with work, your bills, your feelings.  Somewhere your engine, your motor got turned off, most likely from undigested material clogging it. It will justify remaining there, it will lull you into depression and death in your own voice. It will find “self love” and “just unplug” memes. Do not listen under any circumstances. You are in what in the Phantom Tollbooth is called the Land of the Doldrums and just like Tik Tok the dog you must sound the alarm. You must move through the drowsy at all costs. But force does not work here. You are under a big black heap. You must do “just one thing.” Find one thing, anything that you can do. Start with a bath even. But in that one thing, baby step your way forward.  Like an obese mind taking first steps, do whatever you can do, but do not stop. What you will find is that eventually you will catch flow and be carried. 

8. Disorientation: The sense that you cannot find your ground. The good news is that there isn’t any ground. The bad news is that you have to navigate your way through an uncertain and insecure sky. The good news is that once you get the hang of it, it’s a lot of fun. You must root yourself in principles rather than appearances. That is where folks get lost. Your principles are a compass that can guide you through any circumstance. Content, beliefs, hopes are the karmic waves that will toss you to and fro terrified and exhausted. Get your true north. Log on. To get out of suffering, the causes of suffering, and help others get out of suffering. No matter where you are, or what is going on, if you use this as your GPS and ask how to do this, the sweet voice will come in loud and clear to guide you. 

9. Put out the wildfire of betrayal: Oof, this one goes deep. Literally. To your roots. Betrayal is a most wonderful rug pulled out on your instinctual nature that wants to fasten reality down. That tendency is like refusing to understand gravity, holding an object, opening the hand and the object falling, every time being shocked. 

The insider’s trick: 

No matter what it is, no matter what is coming at you, no matter what is said

Open

Open where you would otherwise close

Open into such vast space that it keeps shuttling through 

Every time

For the rest of your life

And then the single instruction becomes the path that takes you all the way home

(For beginners, do arduous work, austerities, precepts and promises.)

10. Hysteria: That panic feeling where the mind is obsessively, anxiously and you-know-but-can’t-stop disproportionately feeling a sense of dread. Like a web crawler that is grabbing every last piece of evidence that points to an imminent, unlocatable danger. The election! Fascism! Climate disaster! Covid! The bugs that will destroy all plant life by 2025! I could go on but I don’t need to because hysteria goes on its own. Your mind is too porous and your anchor not deep enough. There needs to be a resolute understanding that your life, your joy, your meaning, your purpose is not at the effect of any of those occurrences but that you are to affect those occurrences by learning how to live in your light bubble. For this, if you can look online to practice Tara, do that. If that sounds like a drag, imagine a white light emerging from your heart that surrounds you, then a yellow light that surrounds you and the white light, then red, then blue, then green. Until there is a rainbow. Now imagine an impenetrable but transparent sepia shell and where every layer meets are blue flowers. The temporal can remain outside. The infinite can radiate out to aid the world.  

11. Unauthorized supplication, commonly referred to as “giving my power away”: You are so positively insulted, you can’t believe that they are asking that of you, you are clear that you don’t want to go and for some unknown reason an almost desperate “yes of course, I’d love to” is coming from your mouth. There is no more backward that you could bend and yet you can’t stop. You have to build you a backbone one vertebrae at a time, lest you remain a ragdoll for the rest of your life. In Buddhism it is called Vajra pride. In Sicily it’s just called being Sicilian but it boils down to this: you have got to be your greatest advocate at all times. Like a mother who defends her child at every turn and quite frankly doesn’t care if the child messed up. She will deal with that at home (and you will with warm forgiving self inquiry) but for now they all need to know they messed with the wrong mamma and that mamma is you.

12. Duct tape mouth, commonly referred to as unable to find my voice: Here the culprit is like a rodent or a bedbug that is pervasive and difficult to eradicate: perfectionism. To get to the source, you have to go deep, very deep. There’s a medusa head of directives sending you in ten different directions trying to find the “right” thing to say but the “right” is not right. Down down down you have to go, to the bottom of the ocean where the flash comes: all the waves are me and all the waves are perfect. That is how you loosen the tight grip of perfectionism. A great way to bypass the stern mind is before bed say, “Please let me dream my way to perfection, let me wake up inside of my dream and feel it and let me remember.” If you know what a red OM sign looks like and want to put it in your throat, it helps to activate the dream energies. 

13. Voluntary invisibility and all invisibility: It stems from a contorting of oneself into the projection that the world has of “your kind”—female, person of color, younger, older, traumatized, disabled. It is not only your right, but your obligation to not nestle up into the invisibility cloak where you disappear behind silence or a persona, and instead demonstrate the real. The real always trumps the projected.  When you come out as your natural uncontrived self, you do it for all your kind. You know that “but I can’t” whine that pops up? Give it a good stern, “Ah, but you can. And you must.”

14. Self-pity, the worst: “I had a difficult experience and all I got was this victim’s badge” is how the book written by self pity might go. It promises that the badge will get you into big important places for your pain as it grabs for attention from the biological obligation of others through our social animal status. It tells you that enough attention will heal the pain. What it does not tell you is that the only attention that heals is the attention that comes from your greatness. You no longer need self-pity and the attention you give to a wound shifts with a single question, “what do you need to transform into creative expression?” Remember that the victim fixation identity (not the one where you are hurt and feel dynamic compassion for yourself which, it turns out,  is creativity) has thorns and you get pricked when you try to defy it. Healing hurts. But a hell of a lot less than numbing. It’s like black mold and once you get it you will have to be like a relaxed ninja for life, ensuring that it does not come back. “I deserve this (positive unearned thing)” or “they deserve this (negative thing)” or “they don’t deserve this (humane treatment)” are ways to note that it has made it all the way into the behavior system. Take special note of boundaries versus barriers, barriers have a hit of satisfaction that you are blocking another where you felt weak. 

15. That endless ennui/malaise: It’s the French in all of us, the existential crisis of meaning.  There’s a funny comic of a French man in a beret saying to a bank teller, “Hand over the money, or I’ll explain the absurdity of all human activity,” and the title is “existential threat” which is funny, until you’re the bank teller and the French man both. Keep a meaning list. Meaning you have places to go to find great poetry, great art, great movies, things that move you deeply and begin to wake up that spark inside of you. The feeling of malaise is often that your candle has been snuffed out.

16. Painful Indecisiveness: You are in the quicksand of between this and that. It feels like there is a train barreling in your direction and you can’t decide if you should leap left or right. Throw it! Imagine a big god of great wisdom in front of you and like you are at a carnival and have to throw as hard as you can at a target. Throw the question to “the one who knows” and go. Leap. In any direction. Just break the spell. Once broken you can get your wits about you and adjust accordingly. Not to say “what’s the worst that could happen”—because I know what it is like to feel that the entire universe could spin off its axis if you made the wrong decision—but even then. So what? It flies into the sun and burns up and no one is the worse for it. Well, everyone is, but no one is there to judge you for making it happen, so lighten up. 

17. Uncontrollable distraction: First and foremost, thank god that your impulsivity and curiosity were not stamped out by the cultural demand that we go straight, go linear, and walk the line when the reality is circles of spheres. You have an inordinately strong system. It refuses to be controlled or corralled. It may act shameful about its wiley ways but it is playing for your life force. The instruction here is that if you want to tame a cow, give it a wide pasture. Let it roam and graze and do what it wishes. It’s waiting for you to know that it knows better than you. Give it time and space and from there insight, even revelation will emerge. Remember in many places cows are sacred. For good reason.

18. Rage that consumes a thousand—people, forests, spheres: Rage is what happens when the wild in us feels caged, when the hurt in us feels stepped on, when the roar in us feels silenced. At its foundation, it is the result of the trespassing of a dharmic boundary. By us or by another. That is right; when we bypass a deeper truth, a boomerang rage rises up within us.  The only force strong enough to subdue the tyrant rage, is the one that birthed it—the “mother” otherwise known as emptiness or wisdom. A good start is to see what is being hurt in such a way that it is reflexively throwing a punch. Apply cool loving attention to that space. You will want to thrash but as if a child is throwing a tantrum, grab that part of you, pull her in close, and put a cool washcloth on her head. “I know it hurts baby, I know.”

19. Can’t stop, won’t stop: That feeling where you are at the top of a mountain, you see something you deeply love and you’re in a car with no brakes barreling toward it knowing that you will be destroying something soon. This can be described as the addiction impulse and (a surprise to many) the creative impulse. Heads or tails. But to get it to the heads side and not get your tail in a spin, the best application is veer toward the forest. You may not have brakes but you do have a steering wheel and can aim it in the direction of art, of the creative, of dance, of paint, of clarity of words. You will have much velocity and will be able to convert a head on collision into a last-minute flight of creativity.

20. Restlessness: Sometimes the solution is deceptively simple. Exercise. Heart rate increasing exercise is great. Stretching and emptying the muscles is great. Energy builds up and like a pinball it pings through your nervous system, racing around without a way to exit. You want to find the sweet spot; you don’t merely want to expel energy, you want to circulate it. If you go too hard you will feel sleepy rather than relaxed. If you don’t empty enough you will feel a racing insomniac feeling. If you find the spot in between, it’s like Platform 9 and 3/4 where you can find a secret lift off into the mystical.