#MeToo

To all the men who’ve posted recently that you have never hurt women, or used to hurt women but no longer do: with respect, I don’t believe you.

Just as I don’t believe myself when I try to make the same claims. I have been reading your posts, and a rage has ignited within me. It is not us versus them. It is not the good men versus the bad men. It is all of us. Including me. The rage, I’m beginning to see, is a rage for my Self to step up and own not only how I’ve hurt women in the past, but continue to do so.

Yes, Brothers, let’s do our best to do good and be good men. I salute your efforts and successes, I will support you as best as I can, and offer my heart and my shoulder when you fall short.

And you will fall short. As will I. Because we are human, and we are stretching, and that is the nature of the human condition. So let’s please not make big proclamations about how all of what we did to hurt women is in the past, and we are somehow supermen who have it all together. These proclamations, in my experience, are mostly an attempt to feel in control, and to ward off the shadowy parts in us that have yet to receive the light of our love. They are attempts to throw an anchor out into space, attached to nothing, yet keeping the emperor’s clothes intact. (I believe that collectively, over time, our attempts at pushing away shadow manifest in the world in the hostility and violence and wars that we all wish would end). I’ve been throwing this anchor out all over the place my whole life, and keep coming to the same realization over and over again that it isn’t attached to anything. But of course, I keep on trying…

Perhaps part of being a good man is a willingness to be caught. To be in the middle of the mess and own it as our own. And as we do this, hopefully our hurtful patterns can soften and diminish over time.

To my sisters. I have hurt you in the past. I’ve treated you as objects, been expedient when patience was needed, pulled on you for connection, and blamed you for my unfulfilled hunger. [#Ididit]. I am truly sorry, and my sorrow is alive and growing. I have no excuses. 

And, [#Istilldoit]. Just yesterday a friend sent me a message about a long time ago when I told her she was sexy that left her feeling unsafe and objectified. Shit. It left me feeling ashamed, embarrassed, and humiliated. The patterns, though I’m more conscious than ever, are still playing out. Hopefully I’m a little wiser and softer now than I was before. And hopefully my heart is more open, and I have more capacity to feel the pain that I cause and that is in the collective.

This #metoo experience has been beautiful and painful for me and I imagine for a lot of us. It is illuminating and uncomfortable, exhausting and raw. This discomfort is a big part of the deal- it is food for the soul. It allows for a stretching- a reaching into vulnerability. I do not have a handle on this. I am a part of the problem, and hopefully a part of the solution as well. The collective shame mixes with my own, and I am in a sense of shock at the scope of the abuse, and wonder at the revelations of truth by so many.

This process is not an either or. There are no sides. We are talking about thousands of years of patterns ingrained within each of us. This doesn’t erase overnight. And I’m not sure it ever erases, or that erasing our patterns is the goal. 

Look, it all boils down to the willingness to feel pain, shame, discomfort, remorse, all of it. If we want to stop a pattern, we need to feel how that pattern hurts us personally (walking in another’s shoes). We need to welcome the pain as an ally until we are no longer resisting it, and it can then reveal its gifts of openness and tenderness and aliveness.

If we’ve assaulted or just looked at a woman as an object, there is a corresponding pain to those actions, because they cause separation, create a power dynamic, and ultimately aren’t nurturing, alive, or true. We are not separate, and our attempts at separation hurt us. As we welcome the pain, the shame, the discomfort, we also welcome a reality of helplessness. Even when we try our best, we still act stuff out unconsciously. Because we are not fully conscious. And this isn’t a problem. It’s just the truth. The only way I know into real remorse and self-forgiveness is through the membrane of helplessness and pain. Affirmations and commitments and confessions can be nice introductions to that membrane, but they won’t do the trick by themselves. 

Walt Whitman once wrote “I contain multitudes.” We all contain all the multitudes. All of us- people of all genders- have within us the seeds and the patterns of racism, sexism, and every other “ism.” This is by design. Because we are so connected to each other, cells in the same organism, there is no escape. We look at the racist and the sexist and say that they are the bad ones, when they are acting out patterns that we all have, that have been embedded within all of us. To the extent that we are not fully conscious (and I have never met anyone- even spiritual teachers, who I believe are fully conscious in every human channel), we are guilty of perpetuating the same things we are now all addressing on Facebook. 

Life is a messy continuum. If we have integrity and courage and kindness, then when we catch ourselves hurting others, or when others point it out, we greet that information with gratitude and humility, with curiosity, with earnestness, and we do our best to welcome the pain of our actions, so that we don’t have to do them again. We peel our onion, in search of the center where there is only love. And I suspect that there are infinite peels. There is no ultimate arrival, just a deepening reverence for the journey, and a deepening compassion for ourselves and everyone else who is struggling to find their own innocence, wholeness, and self-love.

And please know that this post is not an attempt to create a “get out of jail free card”-to create an excuse up front for actions I might take. It’s the reverse- a tender attempt to pin myself to the wall, where I can’t escape and thus have to face my own culpability, and feel more the deep and wide and expanding grief and sadness and remorse that is within my heart and all the hearts I know, for our personal and collective unconsciousness. I don’t know if we ever get to peel the whole onion. I don’t know if there is a rainbow at the end of the tunnel. For now, there is, I believe, each of us needing each other to help us to feel and let go and learn how to be kind.