Riding out the itch.

I.
I had a great aunt who carried a Portals of Prayer with her wherever she went. Having arrived, she would find a chair and shove that tiny prayer magazine under her left buttock. Once she forgot it. Someone offered her a Reader's Digest. No, she said. Too thick. Only Portals could give her spine the balance it needed.

The family made jokes behind her back, of course.

But lately I've been doing a lot of talking, and from a chair. Chairs can put the pinch to my short legs, cutting off blood flow at the hamstrings. I found myself shifting and jerking incessantly, until I started keeping a stool under the chair. I use it when I need to raise the floor to meet my legs.

I kind of wish we hadn't made so much fun of the Great Aunt. I'm thinking how nice it would be to carry a stool around with me.

II.
I sat next to a man yesterday in a meeting. He couldn't stop twitching, shifting, reaching for gum from his briefcase and, later, for chapstick and his smart-phone. That's what I used to be like, before I became aware of how strongly my body, mind and spirit argue. One of them is always rushing off, sulking and pulling my mind with her.

People have different names for this thing. Some people call it The Committee – nay, the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee. Anne Lamott calls it Radio Station KFKD – or K-Fucked. Other smart people call it ego, or self-identity, or karmic conditioning, or conditioned self-talk. A friend of mine calls it the thing that lives in her head that would kill her if it didn’t need her for transportation.

It's a thing that used to carry me routinely like a bicycle away from whatever was happening in the moment. Yes, bicycle is the apt simile. It carried me, but I agreed to do the pedaling. It was – and still is -- an itch that begs to be scratched; but when I scratch it, the poison spreads. The itch grows. I'll be in the middle of a meeting about budgets and I'm thinking about whether I should sell my wall-mount kayak rack on E-Bay. What kind of price would it fetch? Would I miss it? I was such a dunce to buy it. And in a nanosecond, I've managed to end up in the mental equivalent of Zambia -- wondering how long the tires on my car will last, and should I sign up for AAA this winter?

It's like carrying Ratatouille in my hat. I’m being jerked and pulled involuntarily by this invisible thing that I’m convinced is helping me out.

III.
Once upon a time I wasn’t even aware of that my body, mind and spirit were never in the same place at the same time. I just knew I was miserable and suffered. I couldn’t get comfortable. My spirit felt like a spine that was one Portals of Prayer short of being in alignment. This was Stage 1.

Then life intervened. I arrived at Stage 2: the recognition that this thing lives in my head. I started becoming aware of its voice -- the various pitches and tones of its calls, the shapes its arguments take. It's like the colleague or student who always plays devil's advocate: It simply resists whatever is. That's the only thing it knows how to do. It tries to convince me that the thing I'm thinking, feeling, or doing is unacceptable. It wants my default position to be resistance. If I wake up to hear birds chirping and feel richly blessed, it will convince me that this feeling is unacceptable. You're being lazy, it will whisper. Look. It's 8:04 a.m. How are you ever going to get that project finished if you lie in bed listening to birds sing all the damn day?

It snorts in disgust. I cower, my back again against the wall. Tell me what to do, I whisper. It smiles. Go yell at your kids, it sometimes says.

On a good day, it compliments me just enough so that I want to keep it in my hat. Like, it might tell me that I am really good at opening soup cans with the can opener. The next day, though, the honeymoon is over. I'll go to open another soup can, expecting to hear the compliment. But this I get this: That thumb still causing you trouble? Too bad. Looks like your career as a triathlete is over. Oh, and you'll never find a mate with that arthritic stub. Before too long it will resemble a woody knob on an old oak tree. Good luck finding a mate with that thing. Best you can hope for is a guy who wears leather vests without a shirt underneath.

Then, in Stage 3, I became aware that this thing is not a friend at all. It’s the meanest, nastiest, sickest family member I've ever had. I consider kicking it to the curb. In the end, though, I reconsider. My conditioning tells me that it is hard on me, sure. But so was my best track coach, the one who pushed me beyond my limits. If I stop struggling, I'll stop aiming for perfection. I'll slip. Sloth and atrophy will follow. Do I want to be the loser shoving a Portals of Prayer under my ass at the family reunion? People would laugh. But I’d be too busy listening to the stupid birds to hear them. Next thing I’d be so interested in my own comfort that I’d start doing odder things -- maybe carrying a foot stool, hairbrush and water pick to work meetings and laying them on the conference table before me.

At that point, I recommit to the relationship. This was Stage 4.

But I couldn’t un-see what I’d seen. And I’d seen a bit of the truth. This is nothing more than resistance, twenty-four hours a day. And the resistance isn't working. It doesn’t make me happier or safer. It doesn’t bring the peace and security that it promises. It doesn’t help me nail down joy; joy will occasionally get up and walk out. There’s nothing me or the thing can do about that. The voices, I realized, just make me suffer. If I’m living in fear – of losing something I have or not getting something I want – then I’m easily controlled. This thing controls me by keeping me in resistance and fear. So what if I start carrying a Portals of Prayer with me. At least I'd be comfortable. To hell with the people suffering because they've got something stuck in their molars and no water pick to flush it out.

This awareness brought me to Stage 5, when I accepted the pervasiveness of my conditioning, the pervasiveness of my resistance. It’s no simple matter of telling this creature to piss off. It is woven too deeply into fabric of my minds. All I can do is roll up my sleeves, identify with compassionate awareness, and say yes, even to the creature when it shows up. After all, that thing kept me entertained all those years and provided the only safety that I knew how to accept. But now it’s time to move on. Find better voices. Move aside so this thing can find a better friend.

Want my advice? Don't even give it the satisfaction of resisting it. That's what it wants.