Last week’s gathering in the comments section was a BANGER of a good time. Holy moly. Our subject of the week was signs and coincidences, and I had no idea that would open up a portal into a world of real and actual magic.
The stories that poured forth out of all of you about impossibly uncanny instances in your lives when the signs and the “coincidences” were too astonishing to ignore . . . well, all I can say is: there is more going on in this universe than we can see. And perhaps the bits that we can’t see are the most interesting parts of all.
What I gleaned from all these stories was that it’s a very excellent idea to pay more attention to the world around us. Because glorious things are happening in every direction, wherever you look, and all too often we miss the details.
I love waking up with all of you. (That came out wrong, and a little bit suggestively, but whatever, you know what I mean.) We are awakening together!
You have renewed my belief in magic, everyone. Thank you.
Our special guest this week is the incredibly magical Yasi Salek, my current favorite podcaster, whose show (more like: comprehensive audio library of amazingness) BANDSPLAIN has been in my ear all summer long, teaching me about the deep, fascinating, often unknown history of iconic musicians and bands across the years. I love Yasi, and I think she’s cool as hell. But she is not so cool that she wouldn’t attempt to do the most vulnerable, earnest, beautiful thing in the world — which is to try to write herself a letter from love. And her letter is perfect.
As are all of you. Every single one.
Let’s keep going.
Dear Love, what would you have me know about how people perceive me?
Oh frightened child, come here.
Come here and sit with us, in the better place — in the place where love does not judge, nor strategize, nor demand, nor flicker out with the waxing and waning of the approval and disapproval of others.
Come sit with us where it is safe and warm. Consistently safe and warm.
Little lover, we have told you this a thousand times and we will keep telling you this until the nuclear death of the sun (and beyond): we will never ask you to do something that you cannot do. Love, true love, never makes impossible demands upon anyone or anything — but loves things just as they are.
As such, we are not going to tell you not to care about how people perceive you, when we know that you absolutely do very much care about how people perceive you.
And anyway, you know.
You know everything about how much that caring costs you, how much pain it brings to your life. You wish you didn’t care, and we see how much you wish it. You wish you had no fucks to give, and we know exactly how many fucks you give, and it is all of the fucks, sensitive child, dearest of our heart.
And you know those people who say they don’t care about what people think? Hasn’t it been your experience that, in fact, they do care? Immensely? They care so much that it toughens their hearts and makes them closed off. There is nothing more tender and pained than the heart that is hidden behind the words “I don’t give a shit.”
Rayya was like that. It’s what you fell in love with, more than anything. How much she seemed not to care, how she spoke her mind, how she would tell her truth, stand with both middle fingers in the air, proclaiming that everyone could just fuck right off — how glorious and free she seemed.
But was she free? So how did she become a heroin addict? Why did she need to drink so much? Why did she need to smoke so many cigarettes? What was she medicating, what was she numbing? How many substances did she have to consume every day in order to hold onto that posture of not caring how people saw her? How frightened was she, really?
Is it possible that she was more afraid of other people than you are? Or at least as afraid?
Think of all the rock stars who embody the ultimate rock star “I don’t give a shit” stance, when they really do. Why do they need so many drugs to get through the day? Someone who is truly free does not need to be endlessly medicated in order to survive in a world filled with the terrifying opinions of others.
Think of all the tough guys from all the movies in the 1940s. How many pictures of Humphrey Bogart did you ever see where he didn’t have a drink and cigarette in his hand? What was he hiding behind that tough guy demeanor?
Think of your toughest family members, who turn up their noses at therapy, at feelings, at emotions — look at the medicating and the hiding that they have to do, to survive.
We see it all. We see the hearts that beat in terror behind everyone’s coping mechanisms, and we know the truth that very few things — not even pain and death — are scarier for a human being than worrying about how they are perceived. And nearly everyone is worrying about how they are perceived.
We know that you heard recently that people who are deep, deep meditators at the highest level — people who go off into caves in mountains to sit for years at a time in silence — these people report that the very last thing that drops away, as they become free and enlightened, is worrying about what other people think of them. Up there in their cave after two or three years of stillness and connection to their breath, they are still wondering if the people down in the village like them, approve of them. “What are they saying about me?”
And we also know that all the love and approval in the world (and you have certainly tried very hard to get all the love and approval in the world) cannot heal this wound. Social media has taught you that 200 people can show up one day in the comments to shower you with love and praise, but if one of them says you’re a stupid lying fraud and an ugly waste of breath, you will hold onto that comment only, with sharp terror. Real terror.
We know the reasons, too. We know the evolutionary reasons. The existential, atavistic terror of knowing that you cannot survive this planet alone. That if your cluster of hominids casts you out, you will literally die.
“Belong, or die,” might be a good motto for most of human evolution. We know the desperate, atom-deep need to belong, in order to live.
We know that you know that almost a million years ago, your early human ancestors faced an environmental catastrophe that almost wiped them out into extinction, bringing the population down to approximately 1,300 people. That was all who was left on this dangerous planet. Thirteen hundred of you — and every single one of you, every single one of you alive today is descended from that evolutionary bottleneck. From those 1,300 whose immediate descendants, by the way, barely made it through the next 120,000 years of glaciers, droughts, catastrophic volcanoes, and other disasters. For all that time, the total number of early humans hovered around 1,300, all of them barely making it.
Do you feel the terror of that? Let us put it this way: do you remember the terror of that?
Of course you do. Every cell in your body remembers it.
How did our ancestors survive? By banding together. And what would have happened (what probably did happen) to anyone who was not approved of, or who was exiled?
Certain death.
This is in you. This is in your body, in your spirit, in your collective memory. And this is why it feels like you’re going to die when somebody doesn’t like you or approve of you. But there’s more.
Your friend-you-never-met Ram Dass once said something very interesting about the evolution of the spiritual path: in order for us to evolve, there has to come a point when you care about something more than your own survival.
Take that in, little trembling aspen leaf.
What do you care about more than you care about survival? Because if it’s only ever going to be about survival, then it’s only ever going to be about survival — and survival is the basest, most energetically jacked up, terrifying way in which to live. Survival is living at the very lowest level of your spirit. And when you live at the very lowest level of survival, you have to care about what others think of you, and you have to think about it every single moment of the day. Because without them, you will die. Or at least, you believe you will die. And as you know, this is no way to live.
So we will put the question to you. What do you care about more than you care about survival?
We won’t answer this question for you, but we want you to live in it. Because we know something to be true: if you sit in that question, the answer will arise. It will be something else. Something softer. Something quieter. Something far, far more liberating than either hustling for approval or putting two middle fingers into the air and pretending not to give a shit.
There is something that is not either of these stances. Not “If you don’t love me I will die,” and not “I don’t care.”
There is something beyond all of that, and right now you stand on its beautiful, quivering, expansive precipice.
I think you know what it is. I think you know what you care about more than you care about survival. I think you will find that it is the same as the name that you call us. It is the same as your true name. It is the everything.
Come with us, darling. Come with us if you want to be free more than you want to survive.
And you do want to be free, more than you want to survive.
Come with us. We’ve got you.
And we’ve got everyone.
This week, together, let’s see if we can confront a subject that is uncomfortable for so many of us. Before we even arrive at how we are perceived, the very idea of being perceived at all from the outside can be scary. If you’d like to explore that with us, begin by writing down this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about being perceived?
And if instead you’d like to go back to basics and apply our original question (the spiritual Coke Classic of this community, if you will) simply pose this question instead: Dear Love, what would you have me know today?
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