TRANSCRIPT
A pet peeve of mine is when people say, “Oh, I live in the now. I’m in the here and the now. I’m very much in the present tense.” I’ve heard lots of schools of philosophy, religion, even talk about being focused in the now, being focused in the present tense. “Oh, don’t live in the past. I live in the present. I listen to my breathing, and I’m just totally focused in the here and now. I’m centered in the here and now.” Well, why is that a pet peeve of mine? Why does that bother me?
I think the reason that it bothers me is when I hear people say they’re really in the here, they’re really in the now, I often don’t agree. It’s really not my observation. And I think what I see a lot of times when I get to know people better, when I hear their stories better, when they say they’re in the here and now, I think really what’s going on is about one percent of their inner self is in the here and now, and 99 percent of their inner self is actually dissociated. They’re not actually even in touch with 99 percent of their self. And where is that 99 percent of themselves? I just used that 99 percent number arbitrarily. Maybe it’s 80 percent, or maybe there really is no way to quantify it at all.
And what does it mean to be dissociated? What I’ve seen is dissociation is a consequence of trauma. It’s a defense against feeling all the pain of trauma. It’s a long historical, very effective defense against feeling all that pain. So what I see is when long ago people were children—and this is speaking about myself too, so I think I will just say it in terms of myself as an example—once upon a time, way back when, when I was being traumatized in my family of origin, largely by my parents, but the external world—in its own screwed-up way—what happened to me is I had to dissociate. I had to take whole sides of myself and push them down, push them out of consciousness.
I had to take my reactions to the traumas I was going through—my anger, my rage, my sadness, my frustration, my anxiety—and push it down so that I could survive, so that I wouldn’t further offend and anger and infuriate my traumatizers. And the result of what happened, of me putting it away, putting all my feelings away, putting my memories away, putting my consciousness away, putting it all down into the unconscious and burying it, was that I could survive and I could be kind of happy. I could be less offensive to my traumatizers, to my traumatizing system. But I was not so much there anymore. I lost whole sides of myself.
And part of the process of dissociating is that I wasn’t even aware of it because dissociating is an unconscious process. So I didn’t even know it was happening to me. And what was left, what remained in my consciousness, was the parts of me that were not dissociated. And let’s say it was 1 percent or 5 percent of me remained, and that was the part of me that I knew as me. And as I grew older, those are the parts of me that I kept and that I called me and that I identified as myself. And all those split-off, buried, unconscious parts that were still stuck and lost in my past, and with all those unresolved feelings and anger and sadness and grief and rage and all that that was buried, I did not associate that with me. I didn’t even know it was me.
And later, when people talked about meditating and they said, “Ground yourself in the present,” I took the consciousness that I had, the awareness that I had, the remaining parts of me that were still conscious, and I focused them in the present. And I focused them on my breathing, and I could be very centered and present. However, all those unconscious and split-off sides of me, they were still there, and they were profoundly affecting my life. So actually, if 5 percent or 1 percent or 50 percent or 20 percent of me remained conscious and was in the present, all the remaining sides were still stuck in the past. They were stuck in all those feelings and were still acting out in all sorts of different ways, if only self-destructively, through me not having my spirit, not having my soul, not having the full connection of my feelings, not being fully integrated, not being able to have full, healthy relationships. All those parts of me were still stuck in the past and were still living through my life unconsciously.
So when I hear so many people say, “Oh, I’m so grounded in the present,” and yet they haven’t dealt with their traumas, they haven’t dealt much with their past history, or sometimes people say, “Oh, let go of the past. Move on from it. Be centered in the here and now,” I think, “No, they can’t do it.” They’re not only are they not doing it, but they can’t do it because all that buried stuff, all that dissociated stuff, all that split-off feelings from the past profoundly affects their present tense, my present tense, everyone’s present tense in all these different ways.
So even though, yeah, part of their consciousness may be very focused in the here and now, the whole rest of their character, all their unresolved stuff, is actually not in the present tense at all, and it’s profoundly influencing their present tense. So for me, the real way to be more in the present tense is to exhume my past, is to bring all this stuff up, bring all my feelings up, study it, study my history in a way, live in the past, as it were, but live in the past for a purpose. Not to just wallow in the misery of the past forever, but to live in the past for the purpose of grieving it.
And to me, there’s a strange thing about grieving the past—grieving it in my body, grieving it in my soul, grieving it in my feelings, my memories, going through it, wailing, letting out all the anger, pain, sadness, and resolving it for a purpose. It’s living in the past in a purposeful way, and it’s actually living in the past to take all that unresolved stuff from my past and transition it to my present tense. So to me, to grieve is to make the transition from unresolved past historical traumas and feelings and all that stuff from way back then and to bring it into the here and now. And that’s the way to come back to the here and now in an integrated way, in a whole way within myself, so that myself becomes rooted in the here and now.
I think a lot of people want to skip that whole process. They want to skip it and take the remaining part of their consciousness and just make it focused on the here and now and almost discount that past stuff even affects their life now. And in a way, I can kind of understand why, because the process of exhuming all that past stuff, it’s so painful. It’s so horrible. It has consequences for present relationships. It has consequences for how we look at our childhood, how we look at our parents, our relationship with our parents. It may have consequences for our present friendships, romantic relationships we’re in.
Also, part of the process of exhuming our past is we have to look at our past behavior, look at the bad things we’ve done, look at the ways we’ve replicated the traumas that were done to us. And in a way, who the hell wants to do that? It’s horrible. It’s not easy. It’s like looking at ugly sides of ourselves. It’s a lot easier, in a way, if we can stay to sow seed. There can be a real comfort in it. But when people say they’re living in the here and now, and what I observe is they’re still very dissociated, or me myself trying to be saying I’m in the here and now but knowing that parts of me are still dissociated, I know that it’s not really honest. Not that I’m trying to lie, but fundamentally it isn’t telling the truth because so much of me, so, so much of other people, it’s still rooted in that past stuff.
So for me, again, to encapsulate it, to really get centered in the here and now, I have to exhume my past. I have to grieve my past and bring all those split-off, stunted past sides of myself back into the present.
Myself up to speed, up to my present tense. And then I have an integrated whole of me that really is centered in the here and now. And with that, I open the door to my real centered future.
[Music]