F#@$ the self

Note: This post is old. It was boiling when I wrote it so I let it simmer for a while. It simmered for a while and now, well, it's just water down the drain. But I thought the teaching was good so I'm posting it anyway.

"Fuck you!
You are NOT in charge of me
You do NOT decide whether I leave or stay
I can leave at anytime
This is not up to you
it's up to me."

This is the IMAGINARY conversation I had in my IMAGINARY dokusan with my teacher. In reality, my teacher was, well, who knows where he was because this conversation happened on the sidewalk as I walked home after my restorative yoga class at 9 at night. And then it continued while I was in the bathroom so really, this is a conversation between me and myself.

I am pissed with myself. I followed myself and it was right. What I did was right and I know that and I know I had no choice in the matter but now I am here and here is a very unsettled place. It is both incredibly more beautiful and blissful and at ease than I could ever have imagined (that would be the first part of self- realization) and obnoxiously uncertain and taking me places I didn't expect that are disappointing and sad and lonely. It is lonely when the only one left is you, when your delusions and alternatives and excuses are gone, when you actually trust yourself and it leads you here.

And so I went to my "teacher" and asked him to just witness, to just let me be. And I tried to speak and I couldn't and so I said that I was leaving, that the next person could come in for dokusan, that I just couldn't do it today.
"I just can't see this," I explained.
"See what?" he asked calmly.
"Be quiet!" I yelled at him. Only I didn't yell it, more like commanded it, like you would a dog. And I looked him straight in the eye when I said it.
And then I looked down, and I was quiet, and I cried in silence, and then a tear hit my hand, and my breathing slowed and I calmed down.
And then I looked back up at him.
"Apparently, I can..." I said as I made eye contact with him again
"Did you get to a point?" I asked, and then I looked away again.
"Did you get to a point when you finally reached yourself? When yourself and all those other people were the same? When you were really..."
And then I looked down again.
And that's when I went into the whole Fuck You tirade- telling my teacher off, letting him know that he wasn't in charge of me and that I could leave dokusan anytime.

But as I heard this I knew that it wasn't him that I was mad at, it was the self. It was the fact that I am not in charge of myself, that when I trust myself it takes me wherever it goes- that simply trusting yourself, going with your feelings, staying to what is true leads you to intimacy; which is who-knows-what-happens-next and that was great when what happened next was self- fulfillment and actualization of beauty. But it is not great when what-happens-next is not what you expected and you feel like you can't do a thing about it.

"That's it, I'm leaving," I said and shook my head. I shook my head some more. "I'm not doing this, I don't want to see this, I don't want to know if you got here, I don't want to know that this is what I am doing, this sucks."
And I got up to leave.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm leaving," I said and turned away.
"You can't leave dokusan," he said.
"Yes...I can," I said.
And I walked out of the bathroom. I refused to stay there- refused to sit with the suffering that I was experiencing: the knowledge that ALL of this was me, that I was capable of ALL of this, that there was nowhere left to turn or to blame or to explain or to make better. This was it and I was supposed to accept that.
"F that," I said, and considered turning to the right, to the kitchen, to eat cottage cheese and crackers and leftover Christmas candy- self pity to the max: love, comfort, and safety.
Instead I huffily turned to the left, walked into my room, climbed into bed and wrote this.

And I get it. I get that all of this comes together, that I wouldn't have all that self actualization and fulfillment and beauty if I hadn't trusted myself to follow it, but what gets me is this place. Self realization is basically intimacy- not knowing; the magic of all that I experienced came from having no idea that I could do that. So apparently the sadness and loneliness comes from there too. But still, it's just unfair that a thing of beauty can also lead to things of disappointment and things-beyond-control.

Mostly though, it's kind of funny. I am laughing at the person in me who when she sees, truly sees, that the universe is in charge, not her, she thinks she can actually do something about it and she thinks she can do this by asserting herself and walking away.

But the thing is, I never actually left that dokusan room, and I went into my bedroom instead of the kitchen, and I wrote this out to whoever might be reading.

Darn you...