Discovering New Frontiers on My Path

by Miki Kashtan

Over the many months of writing this blog, I have alluded often to having chosen vulnerability as a path of spiritual practice for myself, most recently when I wrote about the freedom of committing to a path. As I’ve been on this path for almost 16 years, I wasn’t expecting to be bumped back almost to the very beginning. This is precisely what happened to me over this past weekend as I was sorting out a painful reaction I had to something said about me.

In the past few weeks, I was exposed to quite a number of statements about me that took some effort to digest. I am grateful to years of practice that enabled me to go beyond old habitual ways of taking things personally. For the most part, I felt enormous tenderness toward the person who expressed these statements. Except for this one paragraph that kept spinning inside me. Every time I thought of it, I felt an inner cringe. I don’t like it when I am so preoccupied with something said about me; I feel less free, less open, less capable. I wanted to get relief, and I wanted to have more self-understanding why it was so hard to hear that under certain conditions of acute stress I was perceived as “unpleasant”. And so I brought it up in a conversation with my empathy buddy, fellow NVC trainer Francois Beausoleil.

What I got to after some poking around at the obvious, was the clearest way I’ve ever articulated one of the fundamental dilemmas of being me. The number of times people have difficulties in relation to me is quite high, and I have never been able to understand why. What I am aware of in terms of challenging behavior on my end doesn’t add up to the level of challenge people have expressed to me over the years. There’ve been times, sometimes lasting years, when I lived in debilitating despair about this. Since those days, I’ve developed a high degree of self-acceptance. I’ve also come to a place of much greater peace with the amount of pain and challenge that I experience in my life. Even so, I still experience bouts of acute pain and helplessness. What I became clear about in that conversation was that my internal response to the comprehension gap between my sense of myself and the amount of difficulty people have with me has been to believe - which I still do! - that only by being “perfect” in some elusive way in my social behavior will I be able to prevent the prevalent challenges that people have with me. This belief persists despite my knowing that “perfection” doesn’t exist; despite my knowing that it’s not in my power to affect other people’s reactions to me; and despite my deep self-acceptance. The result is that I put enormous pressure on myself in terms of how I act. During that period of stress when I was perceived as “unpleasant”, and at almost all other times, I strive to either be fully present despite the challenges in my life, or to be fully authentic about my inability to be present, and to ask for support so I can become present. What was so painful was to imagine that my stress “leaked” despite my valiant efforts to manage it with grace.

In this moment, as I am writing this, already calm about this situation, I am not surprised if this indeed happened. One of the areas of challenging behaviors on my end is precisely that I can become abrupt, even shrill in moments, when I am under a lot of stress and I am trying to make something happen. So, looking at it now, all it means is that it happened in some moments when I thought I was more present than I was. That’s only human. I can feel tender toward myself and toward others at the same time.

After my conversation with Francois, I went for a walk with a friend and shared with her my perception of the two ways that I could see myself contributing to difficulties people have with me. One is this behavior under stress, and the other is a certain kind of oblivion in terms of social wisdom, blind spots, lack of consciousness, which always surprise me when anyone points them out. They are always obvious after the fact, and I don’t catch them when they happen. I can so totally see how on the receiving end this can register as lack of care.

That was the point when the bigger surprise came. After listening to me, my friend, who’s known me for years, brought to my attention a third way in which interacting with me can be challenging. I hadn’t remembered that I often make it quite challenging for people to give me love and care unless it comes in “just so” forms which only few people ever find. While I have known this, and know where this protection originated in my childhood, I hadn’t until that day related it to my path of vulnerability. Suddenly, I saw the paradox: how could it be that after almost 16 years of being on that path it was still difficult for me to receive care in other forms than the precise ones that my organism favors? That’s when I understood that my path of vulnerability has been on my terms: I come out, by my volition, and “undefend” myself. I express myself and willingly accept consequences. This is only one side of vulnerability. I’ve not yet even begun exploring what cultivating receptive rather than volitional vulnerability would look like. I’ve had a couple of small experiences that have given me pointers to what this could be. One such experience showed me that this kind of vulnerability is about letting go of a certain kind of holding, allowing the world to “catch” me, and taking the risk that I might “fall” and there would be nothing to land on. A far greater risk to this organism than ridicule or lack of acceptance. It’s about stepping, once again and beyond infancy, into the experience of being at the mercy of others. It’s about a form of deep surrender I’ve only experienced fleetingly. Just as much as I wanted to reclaim my vulnerability when I started my path, I can almost feel the yearning to find my place, to rest in the grand scheme of things, to be part of, not so separate, not so alone.

Now, as I am wrapping up this piece, the confusion I so often have when I write about myself surfaces again. Why would anyone be interested in the intricacies of my inner life? How could this be of any meaning to anyone else? Would anyone judge me for this - as self-absorbed? Complicated? Wordy? And now I see that the journey, the new one, is beginning, because a new question arises: how can I open up to the possibility that some people may respond with love and appreciation? How can I allow myself to take it in, to enjoy it, to rest in it?

Incomplete, confused, raw, and so fully human, I place this piece and myself in your hands.

The Freedom of Committing to a Path

by Miki Kashtan
In June, 1996, I had an epiphany. In a motel room in Indiana, the night before returning home from a solo camping trip in Michigan and Canada, I discovered how much I had lost in my life because of so fiercely protecting myself. Up until that day, bringing forth my vulnerable self was to be avoided at all costs, which kept me numb much of the time, disconnected from myself and from much of life. Alone in my room, I cried, I talked out loud, and I finally exclaimed to myself that I wanted to reclaim every last bit of my vulnerability, just like I had it as a child.

I have had other dramatic moments in my life, before and since; rare and precious experiences of life opening up, my heart expanding, my spirit soaring, defenses falling away. Things suddenly felt possible where previously I was stuck, clarity replaced muddled thinking, hope came in as despair was leaving. I’ve also had such moments since. Only very few of those peak experiences turned into actual life-changing events. This particular one was the beginning of a clear path, the centerpiece of my practice of living the principles of Nonviolent Communication. At the time, I didn’t know this. Today, more than 15 years later, it’s easier to see how things have unfolded and what has helped me turn this from singular moment to a path I’ve been following all these years.

When I teach or even when I write, people sometimes tell me they experience that kind of expansive inspiration. For them, just like for me, many of these moments remain just that. Because I believe that the times are calling on all of us to respond differently to life, I want to offer some support to those who want to sustain these extraordinary experiences and make them part of their daily living practice. Here are some tips:

Clear Vision: I wasn’t just frustrated with my numbness and disconnection. I actually saw and sensed what the alternative was. I felt in my entire body and soul the pull towards the life I wanted. A path has to go somewhere, not primarily away from somewhere. To this day, the beauty of the vision is compelling, and helps me, more often than not, to find the energy to melt the protection and expose my soft self when the old habit still grips me.
Small Steps: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” said Lao Tsu in China in the 6th century BCE. I found this wisdom equally true of the spiritual life. At first, I was usually flooded and overwhelmed with the idea of becoming fully vulnerable again. I was so far from it, that imagining it to happen all at once was daunting and discouraging. For quite some time I didn’t make any progress, and then I stumbled on an insight that made it all possible. I realized that I cannot jump start vulnerability all in one step. I, for one, didn’t know what it would even look like. Instead, I discovered that many micro-choices take me closer to or further from openness. When someone asks me how I am, and assuming I trust the question to be genuine (sadly, that’s rarely the case in our culture at large), I get to choose how to respond. Which word I choose to express my inner state can be ever so slightly more or less vulnerable. If I keep making all the micro-choices in the direction of more vulnerability, then, with each iteration, I approximate my goal. I almost always have the strength to peel off one thin layer, even when I feel distressed and frightened. Conversely, although I have made huge strides in my quest, and I often reveal myself with ease in moments when others imagine it taking great courage, there are still times when jumping all at once is beyond me. With small steps, I also can feel and celebrate the micro-successes and build on that energy to continue.

Gentleness and Self-Acceptance: No path is going to have only success. In my experience, the long-term sustainability of a path depends on the level of gentleness we can bring to our “failures.” Being on a path requires enormous amounts of energy to walk directly into discomfort, to shift away from habit. Fighting with ourselves drains energy. Gentleness, on the other hand, creates internal harmony and allows inner energy to flow and be regenerated. Although by now I have very few instances when I am unable to release inner protection and reveal the soft self underneath, in earlier years this happened often. I don’t know what made it possible for me to accept myself to the degree that I did on those occasions. I do know that this acceptance has left my inner landscape truly gentle, a place for me to have a soft landing along the way.
The Freedom to be “Called-Back”: At some point along the way, I lost my interest in protecting myself. Whether by grace, effort, self-acceptance, or the power of vision, I came to full ownership of the path, completely free of any notion of “should” or “have to” about the vision. The most gratifying aspect of this inner alignment is my capacity to come back to the path when I fall off of it. Remaining at the level of vulnerability I now crave requires consciousness. Habit still remains. When I am not conscious, especially when my resilience is low and I feel helpless, I still stiffen up, protect, contract, and lose connection with myself or others. Even in those moments, my deep commitment means I can be called back to my path by anything that wakes me up and invites me to consciousness, even if it’s unpleasant. For example, I was once in a tough conversation with someone who then said: “You’re arguing with me, how about offering me empathy instead?” - and that statement was enough to bring me back and choose to respond empathically. I didn’t need to defend myself from the imaginary attack I could have read into that statement.
The ultimate goal, for me, of being on a path, any path, is to achieve inner freedom - to be able to live according to what my own values, needs, and goals are. I experience this freedom to choose from within, even in the face of a perceived “demand,” as an incredible aspect of what it means for me to be human, and a key reason I continue to be on a path.

Challenges in Real-Time

by Miki Kashtan

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything on my blog for some weeks now. This is a first since I started my blog. This is no accident, and not even entirely based on having a lot on my plate. These past weeks have been very challenging in multiple ways. The effort it would have taken to pull myself out of that state in order to focus on writing was beyond my capacity given the external stressors that were present.

I have written here more than once about how the path of vulnerability has been my primary spiritual practice in the last 15 years. I have also expressed myself quite vulnerably on a number of occasions. What I don’t recall having done is to share, publicly, my challenges while they are active and ongoing, before something gets resolved, addressed, settled. This is what I am about to do in this entry.

What makes it possible is a change in my outside circumstances. Right now I am sitting in an airplane, on my way to Poland and then the UK, where I have been invited to teach. There is something about being locked up in the air, without any possibility of being accountable to anyone, that feels freeing to me, even though the space is narrow and hugely uncomfortable and the options are so limited. In this space I can almost imagine that I am writing only to myself, or to a few trusted friends, rather than to several hundred people who read my blog.

My deepest challenge of all is one I have mentioned here more than once: I don’t believe, or experience the option, that there can be room for me in this world. Yes, there is room for me to contribute, to support people, to write, to inspire people, to do tasks, respond to people who want things, initiate projects, or even envision a new world. What I don’t believe there is room for is my deep authenticity, my difference in how I interact with people. Even more than that, I don’t experience the option of being fully myself, putting out in full what’s true for me and what I want, and having that received in a way that’s not at cost to others.

I’ve been feeling enormous discouragement. I’ve been working on myself for decades already, and I still struggle in such fundamental ways. I’ve had such clear visions for the world for so many years, and I don’t have a sense of having moved closer to accomplishing anything other than supporting individuals in having a better life for themselves. I’ve created an organization, and I don’t know how to influence it to be the shining force in the world that I long for it to be. I’ve articulated so clearly ways of working together with others to collaborate for everyone’s benefit and I haven’t had the significant effect I’ve wanted to have in supporting organizations to shift into this way of operating.

In all these areas, the gap between what I see as possible and what is actually happening is larger than my organism can tolerate and remain whole. On top of that, my fundamental way of operating is to be stretched slightly beyond capacity. I haven’t learned how to really and truly move from what I want, moment by moment. I have gotten much better at recognizing my limits, not at knowing what I want and trusting that I can go for it. Limits are not enough. I want to thrive. I don’t know how.

Then there is everything that’s larger than my own personal life. For as far back as I can remember I regularly fall into pits of despair about what’s happening in the world. At its most basic, the question that haunts me is this: How can we, collectively, continue to make choices that inflict so much suffering on so many people? I am not even sure which is more painful to me: those who don’t make the links between their actions and their effects, or those who are aware of the links and still make the choices. I personally fall more in the latter category. I delude myself, perhaps, by thinking that I inflict relatively little harm, and that I am dedicating my life to transforming the conditions that make such suffering possible. Still, in actual fact, I haven’t really done anything to reduce suffering in the world at the scale and in the places that matter to me most. Which then brings me back to the personal sense of inefficacy that I already spoke about.

Perhaps you can see, now, why it’s been difficult to know how to write. While all this has been going on inside, I’ve been immersed in an intensive family visit that was primarily joyous. My nephew Yannai had his Bar-Mitzvah, and we had family over from several states and from across the Atlantic. Then, on the tail end of that, I was completely engrossed in a major effort to find a drug that’s nationally out of stock in the US for my sister’s cancer treatment. Just keeping up with the activities of each day left me with no energy to wrestle with the difficulties inside me and find my way to write something.

Perhaps something is starting to shift, though I am far from certain. Two things happened in the last few days that give me some modicum of hope. One is that I am finding a readiness to create a new core practice for me: learning to identify what I want and make my daily choices based on that. Just as with the path of vulnerability, this will require many micro-steps. I won’t be able to jump start myself to where I want to be. It’s micro-steps that will get me there over time. I want to use any sign of knowing anything about what I want as a wake-up call, a mindfulness bell, that reminds me that I matter, that there’s room for me even if I can’t discern or experience it, that I am human like everyone else. The other occurrence which gives me hope is that in parallel with this insight I received a daily practice from a practitioner I see for bodywork. He suggested that I dedicate 10-15 minutes daily to wasting my time. I immediately saw the beauty and wisdom in this suggestion and decided to adopt it. Not even meditation, he said. Simply stopping any activity designed to create or contribute anything. The first day I managed to tear myself away from what I was doing, even despite the internal habitual chatter that suggested I finish first what I was doing. I knew better. I stopped, and I went and sat on the couch, and looked out my window on the sky, the birds, the houses across the street, and the hills extending up from the houses. I can see how within that fallow space of nothing a possible awakening of my knowing what I want can emerge. I know I want that.