The Subtle Art of Not Touching It

letting go of the dominance story

Photo by Thomas Bonometti on Unsplash

This past little while, I’ve been trapped in a story. I see it; I know it, and still it plays. So, I’m being still, and being still and being still, and still the story doesn’t resolve like it’s supposed to.

I want to make things happen. My body tells me to wait; things will work out. But I want to achieve, to push the river, to get my work out into the world. I’ve been working on this my whole adult life. I want; I want; I want.

I know how to be still, so I’m doing that. I’m doing presence, but it’s transactional. The deal is: If I’m still long enough, I’ll get what I want. I can hold my breath a long time. As you can probably see, that’s doing stillness to get an outcome. Yep. I see it too.

My reaction against that is to think: I’ll quit then. Stop doing everything. Become a hermit. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just finish that second novel for the fun of it - or not. I’ll sit in the backyard and vibe with the garden until I die. I quit.

Sigh. I hate losing control. Sometimes, okay, often, I have to lose control before anything shifts. And I’m not in charge of when or how that happens. Losing control is an experience of the perfect storm, created by grace.

I learned how to be still when I was a new teacher in middle school: one week of training, mostly about keeping records, no student teaching, just an emergency credential called “sink or swim.”

That 7th-grade classroom was a dark forest. Wolves circled. It was like the universe just picked me up with a Mario Kart crane and dropped me back into 7th grade. YIKES. A confluence of being bullied at school, domestic violence at home - an experience of deep existential helplessness - my core wound, which hurts to that life-or-death vibe I call “issues of safety.” My reaction pattern is to always be competent and in control because I’d rather die than be helpless.

Looking at that dynamic from a position of authority, I became a dominator like my father. I was a colossus demanding silence. Gentle reader, I yelled.

The kids went, blink, blink.

Into that silence, my nemesis, Gerard, said, “Ms K. gone psycho again!” And they’d all fall out laughing and return to whatever mayhem they were getting up to before, often picking on some poor kid, which enraged me further.

They were bullies. I was a bully, and we lived, moved, and had our being in a bully culture. Kinda like the political climate we are in right now, a domestic violence situation that is out of control. And no third parties (say the police or the Supreme Court) are coming.

I asked my spiritual teacher how to stop living this terrible story. Hmmm, something I’d like to know about my country, too. “How do we stop?”

“There is no how to stopping,” she said.

I went blank, confusion all over my face.

She laughed at me, held up her fist. “If you are clenching,” she let her hand drop, “Stop. In fact, stop all doing. Then stop all stopping.”

Cartoon storm clouds formed around my head.

She laughed. “There are three ways the mind moves: against in anger, away from in fear, or toward in neediness for love.”

“Neediness?”

She nodded. “Manipulation of others. Stop doing all three. See what happens.”

So, my prayer became: I will not move against them in anger today, because back then, I couldn’t see that I was also terrified of them and attempting to manipulate them through classroom management. No matter what they do, I will not move. I failed and failed at this, and didn’t know why. Show me, I begged. Show me.

Sure enough, one day they came pouring through the door after a lunchtime fight, all yelling, shoving each other, and throwing things. The quiet ones, of course, sat in the front and looked up at me. They wanted to learn and were still hoping I would provide a safe environment.

I stood and said nothing, watching my thoughts. In a normal voice, I welcomed them and asked them to take out their books and turn to page 10.

Someone threw a backpack. The crowd said, “Ooooh.” The target caught the backpack and hurled it back. “Oooh.” The backpack boys chased each other around the room, and several others joined in.

I will not move against them in anger today, I repeated. Not even if they pull the walls down. I saw the thought: If an administrator walks by right now, I’ll be fired. A chair toppled, an explosion of sound that stopped them for a moment. And that’s when I heard my trigger. It was so soft, a whisper through my mind. “That’s it.” When I still didn’t move, I heard it again, but with more venom. “That’s IT.” I watched the thought. I realized I had permitted myself to do anything after I heard, “That’s it.” After that, I wasn’t responsible; they were. But now, I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t move - the only thing I’d never tried.

My story about them flashed as an image, a picture worth a thousand words, like a dream symbol. Wolves circled me, looking for an opening to rip my throat out. When I saw that, I was fascinated. I just wanted to see. I didn’t tell a story about the image. I didn’t cast them as wolves to my victim. I just stood there.

The story collapsed. The floor fell away from my feet. The ceiling blew off like a farmhouse in a Kansas tornado. The walls tipped backward and disappeared in a puff. I was in a vast, empty space. Everything in space was just fine, like it would be at the bottom of the ocean. All the turbulence was far away.

The chasing, the pelting of paper balls and pencils, the noise… everything stopped. My face smiled at a boy, and he smiled back. I found Gerard, and all this love, which was not personal, bloomed. I, this I in stillness, loved him.

“Ms. K.,” he said, “Are you all right?” And we fell out laughing, because I had never been better. It was one of those laughs that feeds on the next laugh, or the lack of a laugh, or a snort-laugh, someone’s giggle. And we’d all start laughing again. Someone said, “What’s going on?” That was pretty funny, so we laughed some more. I wiped tears from my eyes, and we howled about the teacher crying.

Slowly, they righted chairs, sat down, and looked up at me. “Get out your books,” I sighed because my sides ached. “Turn to page 10.” And they did it.

That was a whole career ago. There were decades of clearing old stories like that by being still and willing to feel it all. I’ll call that my recovery phase. It was long and arduous. I had to transcend the story of my childhood.

After transcendence, the work is eminence, being reborn, fully in my body, listening to her, believing her, and right now, she’s telling me to be still. Don’t be grasping—no neediness; no manipulation, just be in this uncomfortable moment.

My current story is about achievement, how other people can have it but I can’t because there is something basically flawed about me that people can sense - or smell. I’ll just never break through. This is not about being an imposter, because in the story, I’m in my late 60s and I’ve never accomplished anything.

My body is telling me to stop. Wait to be moved by a breath of inspiration, excitement, or synchronicity. Let aliveness come through me - if it’s going to, and let it go if it’s not. I watch the stories flow through me about what I should be doing. Yada-yada. I hold the tension of not-knowing, or I flail and say things like, “I quit. I can’t do it.” But quitting is not the same as surrender, and I’m right back in it. The discomfort reminds me of being nine months and three weeks pregnant with my son, terrified of giving birth, and angry that everything is going to be so hard and painful.

Embodiment, the eminance phase, is about no longer participating in the collective story, because we were born into one that tells us how to navigate the world, and like it or not, I am in that story because I was born here. Our story is about dominance and making things happen. And whoo-boy, it’s everywhere.

Every culture has a mythology about the world and how it works, and every culture is right sometimes, but mostly wrong. In much of the world, we are examining a story about male dominance, about wealth as power, immunity from consequences, about women and their place, about the myth of race. About who gets to be free and who works like a slave. We, alive today, didn’t write this myth. It’s so big we can’t see the whole story or how it relates to the narrative we are living as individuals. Our American myth is very much about achievement in a culture that worships dominance. A culture of bullying that makes things happen through manipulation or force.

All stories, even that one, come to stillness to die. If you look around, you can see some of us waking up from it, while others, mostly the bullies and the terrified who think they need bullies to protect them, fight against that awakening. They want us to believe the story as if their lives depended on it. But we don’t. Our bodies recoil at hurting other bodies, of starving people, canibalizing them for shareholders’ profit.

Anyway, our stories all die when the body dies. That’s transcendence, too. But who could we be if we died before we died and then were reborn? That’s eminence, divine awareness living through the body. Aliveness. You have to be reborn and look out through new eyes, no story at all. Just space.

That’s what happens when you stop. From there, the right move comes. Now, I’m not saying that anger isn’t an appropriate response. Sometimes it is. No judgment. Our bodies know the truth if we would just stop overriding them. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself each time I want to take back control and make something happen.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.