gigantic

Recently, I spent a week in Boulder, Colorado with my cohort at Naropa University. There are nearly 30 of us, each coming from a different background, to study MTC (Mindfulness-based Transpersonal Counseling). We spent every day, Monday through Friday, together talking about our mindfulness practice, our interests in expressing a future in counseling, and yes...our own shit.

There was not a person in the room who didn't utter the phrase "my therapist" or "in therapy". And in retrospect, the week seems to have been a group session. Each of us shared parts of ourselves that are normally reserved for close friends or private parties. But here we were, a group of practical strangers, talking about the deepest & hardest things in our lives.

As one of the few members of the cohort (perhaps the only one) who finds themselves between therapists, I wasn't expecting to have uncorked a hidden little well inside myself. But using the 20/20 vision that hindsight grants, I can see that even leading up to the week I had been wiggling that stopper loose.

A few months ago, I started transitioning all of my clothing away from the jeans-and-tee-shirt persona I have been portraying for the last few years. Instead, I've been collecting more sacred pieces of clothing like qi gong pants and simple tops. (The black tee shirts still come in handy, though). As I was packing for the trip, I can remember feeling some unnamed insecurity about being taken seriously in these clothes. There is a sort of reverence involved in "looking the part", I think. And I am already sensitive to what people think. Dressing myself as a sort of holy person in front of strangers left me wondering whether I was going to look like a phony.

And it's that brand of insecuirty that the week helped me shake free. Imagine a giant piece of rock, and a section falls loose. You can look at the pieces of rubble that were once part of the original, or, you can look at the void that was created in their absence. The void is what made its presence known inside me.

One illustrative moment is when we began using a microphone so that everyone spread across the combination-meditation-hall-and-lecture-room could hear us. I love a microphone. I admit I'm still negotiating comfort around being born a performer and trying to limit performative nature of being (hacks welcome). So when I get a mic in my hand, my true nature tends to elevate itself. By the third or fourth time I took the mic to comment, the demons (a la Kornfield) began to surface. "Am I talking too much? Are the others annoyed? Is everyone getting equal opportunities here? Is my voice too high/low?"

I know my own mechanisms for muting those voices when they begin to surface, but never could I have imagined that, when we soon took a break, other members of the cohort thanked me for my comments. In fact, over the course of the week, more and more people began to tell me how much the related to my thoughts, how much they enjoyed my input, and -- in two very special moments that caused me to openly weep -- how I am the embodiment of joy. These folks have little to no knowledge of Joy Farm as a project, the role of joy in my life and healing journey, or that my overall purpose seems to be shaping up to be modeling a joyful life.

I'm telling you the truth when I tell you that the more the week went on, the more this group of people held and supported each other the way you normally hear about but rarely see communities form. And personally, the more I knew I was being seen, the more I wanted to lean in and let them see more. By day four or five, I dropped my worries and was able to just be. And in doing that, words came to me that I don't know I've ever really embraced before: I'm big.

Dechen, which means "he who seeks joy", can also mean Bliss. This is a meaning I'm starting to embrace.

I'm big, man. Fucking huge. I take up a lot of space. I make things uncomfortable sometimes, in fact. Because I'm just not someone who can successfully make themselves smaller for approval. A new friend from the class and I were talking and I ended up apologizing because, in all my bigness, I can be a bit of a bulldozer. That's not how I want to show up to life. Although, I will say that the scoop on this bulldozer is full of the best hugs you ever got, so if it hits you, you're not in terrible shape.

But learning to properly wield the love and care I have for all living things is a big part of why I bought Joy Farm in the first place. Out here, I can stretch and learn to step into being as big as the universe will have me. Kinda feels like that's gonna be pretty gigantic.