A Day in the Life of Transformation
Yesterday, I was running with my dog, who, when he turns around to vociferously bite and wrestle with the leash can trip me up. I had realized a few days before that he was doing this because biting the leash was a discharge—something he did when he was startled by the sound of loud cars or trucks passing, or when he was excited and aroused by something unfamiliar (new dog, trash in the arroyo), or both. All he needed to let go was a little bit of information and feedback from me. The “It’s okay” was all he needed. There was no wrestling, just letting go.
Today at 4 AM I awoke as if an alarm clock inside me went off. This is is normal for me to wake up in anxiety in the weeks before I teach a class and the preparation required. On top of that, in the same time frame, I’ll launch book I’ve cowrote—all happening around February 18-20th, both only weeks away, The first thoughts that usually permeate my waking moments are not pleasant. My anxious thoughts grip the beliefs of:
I haven’t done enough.
I should have more done by now.
My dog and me. We are both wrestling with the “leash.” (Photo by Darinka Kievskaya on Unsplash)
A few days ago I deeply acknowledged I was motivating myself out of shame. It was still a foggy cloud that easily settled into my mind’s folds for me to wake up to every day. Yet, in this just-awoke moment, I paused and said, “It’s okay.” I praised myself for letting go and shifting. It was like I was giving myself a treat. I listened to a guided hypnosis about overwhelm and imposter syndrome to deepen a new groove.
Right now I’m preparing for my next weekend zoom class at Southwestern College, The Psychedelic Experience: Transcendent Personal Growth and Transformation, February 17-18, 2024 (open to the public in any state). I’m also just weeks away from the official launch of the book I co-wrote with my friend and colleague, Shin Yu Pai: Small Doses of Awareness: A Microdosing Companion Guided Journal @ChroniclePrism. When I deliver the class or someone reads the book—it will look like a finished project or product. But here I am sharing what goes into the preparation. It's messy, beautiful, a wrestling match, and flow, all at the same time.
This is what happens in my process of integration and transformation.
I want to show you the messy side of cooking the pizza, not just the fully, beautifully cooked pizza.
The psychedelic research and other writings, podcasts, and commentary is a very abundant apple orchard. ( Photo by Skylar Zilka on Unsplash)
In creating the class, there’s a firehose of reporting, research publishing, opinion, programs, YouTube, vimeos, podcasts, articles. At any given point, it feels like there is such a bounty of information. So much ripe fruit to pick and harvest, to share. And yet at any given time, I fear that I am missing a valuable piece that I will fail to share.
In the preparation of the class curriculum, I fight the urge to go to my old ways. I call it the:
The “White Kuckle Way.”
This is not Taoist.
This is not some “Ancient Chinese Wisdom.”
Through years of watching my father work his butt off running restaurants to the point where he had painful varicose veins in his legs and bought every sort of foot and leg massager and compression sock, I have typically done the same—if I work hard enough, I will produce something worthy enough. In this, I am used to chaining myself to my desk, computer and a stack of books on my weekends and days off, mornings before work, and at night after work. Because my belief is if I put in enough hours, I will produce something good and useful.
For the first 50 years of my life I’ve gotten to much of where I am in my career and in my personal life through grit. Discipline, focus, tenacity, and putting in the time. There are moments of lucidity and flow in this dogged way, but it comes with a lot of suffering and is motivated out of shame.
To “White Knuckle” something means to grip to hard enough that the blood runs out of your fingers and knuckles, causing an appearance of white knuckles. I started whitewater kayaking when I was in my early 20s. I’m intimately familiar with what it feels like to “white knuckle” a through whitewater river rapid where you are gripping the paddle so hard you lose fluidity and flow, which is needed to paddle the medium (water!) that you are in. The adrenaline rush of being in a rapid can be exciting (it’s why I paddle) but also can force a tunnel vision and thinking there is only one way. My girlfriends and I jokingly call it “cryaking.”
I also know that there is a different way to be. To be in the flow to trust myself. The key is to stay grounded through breathing, focus on where you are going, trust your skills and knowledge, visualize and execute your maneuvers in concert with the water’s movement, and have fun. That is the way to transcend white-knuckling.
White-knuckling a rapid
While this is not me in this picture, I know the white-knuckle way, (Photo by Josh Wedgwood on Unsplash)
On the other side is my mom, who is a life-long learner. She learned from her own mother, who was a life-long learner, but who couldn’t learn all that she wanted to. My grandmother came to Brookline, Boston for an arranged marriage after her father, who was a translator for the western railroads disappeared—he most likely died in a mine or was murdered. She married my grandfather who ran a Chinese laundry in Brookline, Massachusetts, and who controlled everything about her life. My mom told me that my grandmother grew up educated in China and at age 18 was considered a little too old, a little too educated, and a little too worldly to be a suitable wife in China, so she was sent off in an arranged marriage in America. My mother said my grandmother was very social in China, but in America my grandfather wouldn’t allow her to leave her duties in the house—caretaking of the 8 kids they had or the Chinese laundry.
The only way she got away from him and the work was to tell him she was learning English through the Christian church. She agreed to be baptized “Mary” for this privilege to have a life of her own. Eventually she had what was called at the time a “nervous breakdown” and went to the famous MacLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. The psychiatrist who treated her gave the prescription (and it wasn’t psychiatric medications), rather upon discharge she was told what was best was for her to work outside of the family business. She got a job as a seamstress. This was her social time and her escape. Thank you to that psychiatrist. You were a genius to give that prescription.
Learning as liberation. Self-learning as liberation. (Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash)
In these dark weeks before the February new moon on February 9th, which heralds the Chinese New Year, and the Year of the Dragon
I am thinking of my ancestors and relatives.
All that they have imparted to me and all that I carry forth.
I honor their lives and spirits, how they lived, what they stood for, what they taught me about change. When I think about what my forebears left behind in China, I am humbled. When I think of what life they created for my parents and for me in the United States, I am humbled.
As the previous lunar year, the Year of the Rabbit comes to a close, I can feel a new pathway consolidating its new grooves in my mind and in my heart. Maybe it’s because I’m 51 and the crossing over the middle point of my life, but the Year of the Rabbit invited me to let go of The White Knuckle Way, which is not an easy thing! I have been wrestling with letting go of The White Knuckle Way the way my dog wrestles with the leash for many years.
The White Knuckle Way is one way. That’s for sure.
I bite my own leash when I do it.
And while I honor The White Knuckle Way, because it helped me and my forebearers in America to succeed where we could, I am ready to release that leash. There is a new way of honoring the open space where ideas come forth and are born.
A love letter that I doodled to myself (that’s what my coauthor @shinyupai said when I sent this to her.
Doodled in the very small but delightful book, 642 Tiny Things To Draw, designed by Eloise Leigh, Chronicle Books. Chronicle Prism (a division of Chronicle Books) will publish our book on February 20, 2024!
I was prompted by 642 Tiny Things To Draw by Eloise Leigh (a Chronicle Book), to draw a message on a candy heart and a firecracker. I found the firecracker particularly poignant because firecrackers are what we use at the Chinese New Year to clear away bad spirits, call in our ancestors to join us and feast, and to make way for abundance, prosperity, good health, and being with family. The Chinese New Year falls on the second new moon of every year—it always felt and feels like a very dark and bleak period of the winter. But we would start to gather the materials, clean the house, and get ready for the new year in the weeks before. My father was an amazing chef and cook—and we still have a giant restaurant-sized wok with restaurant-sized range hood in our family house. As he would cook the 8 jewels of our Chinese New Year dinner and give us Hung Bao (the Lucky Money that is bestowed on the unmarried), I feel he was reminding us to remember there is abundance coming in these cold, dark weeks before spring’s arrival. This is how my ancestors reminded themselves there was another season.
Over the past weeks I have been starving The White Knuckle Way,. I have gorged on it for far too long. When the urge to do anything motivated by the beliefs “I haven’t done enough” and “I should have done more by now” I am inviting a new way. Here’s what I have been doing instead:
I listen to hypnosis and guided meditation sessions customized for what I’m hoping to shift (@AdamCox)
I listen or read my notes for sessions I’ve had with mentors and teachers (Vanessa Stone School for Transformational Facilitation)
I visualize animals and places that represent for me a new way of space and creative flow coming through
I journal
I run or do a ski workout
I talk to friends and laugh at how funny it is this process of transformation
I watch Ali Wong’s standup and laugh so hard (@aliwong)
I read erotica and read or listen to Alice in Wonderland
I draw
I snuggle with my dog
I make soup
I fall asleep listening to Christopher Fitton’s voice in sleep hypnosis (@sleep_cove)
I eat a juicy pear
I tell my friends I love them and ask how they are, and listen
I do anything that will nourish the new way of creative flow and keeping the space open for it.
I microdose
I breathe
I remind myself that I can do the work in a way that makes space for ease and pleasure. (Thank you adrienne maree brown for Pleasure Activism! @pleasureactivismthebook). I keep saying this mantra:
Don’t deepen the groove of motivating out of shame and not enough.
Deepen the groove of motivating out of mission and purpose.
This morning the dial of transformation clicked one more turn. A hybrid of both dynamics occurred inside—the White Knuckle Way and honoring creative flow coming through open space.
The new way: Grit + Self-Trust = Flow
A light bulb went off in me to set up Feedly with all of the psychedelic sources organized by different keyword searches for each of the courses I will teach over this year. The beauty of synchronicity occurred, and the first article I came across a most excellent article by Adele Getty about Leo Zeff in Lucid News: Leo Zeff and the Non-Directive Style of Being a Psychedelic Guide. What a treat! I had loved Adele’s talk at Psychedelic Science 2023—one of the few moments during that conference where I felt real wisdom was imparted.
And as I read Adele’s article, I felt a tingle of an idea come into the open space inside of me about how therapy for trauma survivors involves helping them integrate the trauma in a way that they embody their post-traumatic growth—they own it, they…themselves. My job is to hold space for them to witness that the choice is theirs to feel however they want to feel about what irrevocably changed their lives, but most importantly my work as a trauma psychotherapist is to support them as they celebrate their own growth from something so painful, and to do what is right for themselves at those crux points. It is an honor to witness. Choice is often what has been taken away without their consent. To realize one has choice again in those micro-moments IS a celebration. I really love celebrating that regaining of choice with my clients they realize it. That is a separate article I’ll post, hopefully soon.
For now, I offer a thank you to the “unseen forces” (as Rachel Harris says in Swimming In the Sacred: Wisdom from the Underground) that guide me to trust myself enough to continue to resist The White Knuckle Way, let go of the leash, and make space for creativity and flow to come on through.
These small doses of awareness – the name of the guided journal I coauthored with @shinyupai, is an opportunity to make a choice to water the seed that grows me in a new way.
Integration can sometimes be a very pleasurable. It’s that edge of where we are bringing realization into real change into our lives.
That’s satisfying. That’s pleasurable.
That’s transformation. That’s integration.
(Thank you to my many close allies who read and reflected what was here so that I could clarify my message. Post updated 1/31/2024.)