Some things are just unspeakably beautiful. Today for me it was overheard the psychiatrist singing to his patient. So beautiful. I occasionally overhear him singing and I just love those moments. He's a kind of harsh man at times, he tells it like it is, he brooks no fools. He tells it like it is. He's not soft. The other male here, of the same ethnic group, is all kindness and sweetness, humor and irony, so you can't generalize. My experience with every ethnic group is they are both beautiful and there is always a dark side, a shadow. Some people identify more with their culture of origin and some people assimilate to the new culture, depending on personality and also the time in life when they moved. There is great complexity and wonder her for me.
I've had many female patient who ex-husbands beat them, put them in the hospital. Now no ethnic group owns brutality. Maybe it's also an immigrant thing--life is very hard when you switch countries. Maybe it's just a way of coping--when you are frustrated with life, beat women because they represent life, earth, nature. Men can get pretty jumbled up in their heads.
What ever the reasons for domestic violence, it's cruel and people don't desrve that. I was reading in Jessica Benjamine last night that you have to take into account the participation of the oppressed in their oppression. You can't just say they are helpless victims who are visited by oppression. Once you can see participation in oppression, you can also see resistance and transcendence. Those are my words, not hers. But she was pointing out the a thing I've always know--that if men are brutal, there are people who accept their brutality on some level, and participate in it by not resisting it. We live in an interconnected world, and we can always be complicit with what is going on or we can resist.
How did I go from the coping skill of appreciating beauty to domestic violence and thoughts about culture's interplay? Dichotomies are everywhere. Yin and yang, beauty and ugliness, beauty and disharmony, beauty and unskillfulness.
Unskillfulness is the Buddhist way of saying someone is being unethical. It point out, to my mind, that people just have bad strategies at getting their needs met. I get that language from Marshall Roseberg and Non-violent Communication.
As season change, things change. Things are always changing. We don't like the negative changes, and we want more of the positive changes.
Many of my patients feel the changes of the seasons. There is a particular meaning. Going back to school after a summer of relative freedom. Maybe seasons represent something we can't control or even death. I am entering the autum of my life, I feel the season changing in my life.
I feel like you can't people what's really going on, but often people don't really understand the depth and breadth of their experience.
I like cold weather. I welcome the change of season. I've left summers where I don't work a long time ago, so I'm not going back.
Today was the first day I felt like lingering in bed. I love my work and I don't think I'll ever have a better job than psychotherapist. But sometimes I don't want to work. I want to loll, laze, linger, and all the other Whitman type things to do in the grass.
I am responsible for the life of responsibilities I've created. And I'm getting better at saying no. Some days you just want to call in sick, but I feel guilty about that because there's one patient a day who's really counting on me being there, and many who really need to keep plugging away at our work. They have great courage and determination. I'm amazed every day by the will to transcend in my patients. They really want to improve their lives. It's really quite beautiful to watch. And without the muck, there is no lotus.
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