On Creations of a Panopticum of (In)voluntary Actions

I let myself float through the city, the crowd, feeling like I can simply be. At least for a short while…
I know there is complexity to everything, beneath the surfaces of what is graspable, but for now it’s a balancing experience to those I have made so far.
In Vienna I oftentimes felt like I had to pretend to be someone I’m not for the sake of acceptance and only open up in private or to openly mess with the mental pictures of social expectation and feel the judgement and eyclusion.
In Germany, I felt it to be wiser to hide my soul away even from myself and to pretend to not exist.

 

It is somewhat rough, the people seem honest to their human experience.

The natural human contradiction and bubbling energy has been kept alive and cherished, which I find refreshing.

I start relaxing.

To wonder.

To allow distance fill some gaps.

Letting my legs carry me to places my eyes detect and that energize my heart.

I slowly come to life again. Frustration of unsolved energies and exhaustion mingling with quiet peace.

 

Enticed by a travelling singer with an angelic voiceI I sit down near the Grand Hotel. Souls surrounded her in a growing gathering – what a power she carried to bring us all in one place, even though we don’t know one another one bit. A young man sat down in front of me. Resting, after he slowing down his city stroll, coming to a gentle halt, clearly taking in her energy, his body language changing to a rested expression of impression, deciding to light a cigarette for this moment – a smell, which I don’t particularly appreciate, but couldn’t care about, because of my fascination of how perfectly he expressed what I felt towards her voice. The link of respect for the talent of this woman that we both shared mattered more.

Another man approaching, somewhat elderly,looking worn, yet with humble

open eyes that told a story of a troubled recent life. Asking him for money? Ah no, for a cigarette. Instead of offering a new one, the younger one offers his own as though he recogniced a brother of heart. Touched by the gesture, the approaching man goes in for another question: asking for the time – and receives an answer. They share knowing glances, though being from different stances in different clothing and fragrance. A connection I can feel from afar.

 

I sense the sniding cut of cognitive dissonance that I feel vividly in my body when a conflict of position, mindset or thought occurs.

 

 

 

In Vegetarium we are advised and guided to treat our body like a temple. Protect what you got and clothe your stomach, your mind and soul in what nourishes and strengthens you. There is deep investment in the fine details of noutrition to restore and maintain health.

 

Growing up, I heard many such sayings thinking our noutrition was healthy until I learnt it was apparently not.
The contradiction between what to consume and what to avoid is constant and changes every couple years,when one wants to follow noutritional advice – even scientific – with cultural understanding and time. So my journey to transform my diet, experimenting with different kinda vegetarianism and veganism flexitarianism and all the -isms that I scuff as much at as I am fascinated by them began years ago and continues to begin daily for me in Vegetarium for me.
I believe in none of them and in nothing (I tell myself to handle the tension of the unknown). I cope with distancing humour.
And am honestly trying to figure out how to genuinely integrate that into my future life in away that I am ready to embody.

 

In all those outer influences and advises on how to live ones life and what to eat and how to behave to “reach and maintain health”, I observe some health addiction as much as I notice the other addictions.
And I wonder about its link to societal avoidance of themes of death and decay – both as part of life and also symbolically found in beginnings and endings.

For some time now I felt a connection to what health hunters call poison and I saw some shades of cruelty in the race for ideological health from various angles. All while, now and then awakening from my personal imbalance, experiencing hot flushes of rising fear within me with ideas of the potential harm I might have caused to myself (as a non-believer) – becoming obsessive in thinking how to restore my own health – and with that brutal to others and thus unhealthy in the dimension of my mind.

Do we search for God in health at this stage of human development? 

And of course I want to obtain health myself as well.I’ve struggled with enough pain – both physical and mental – to desire it, but I’m also afraid to desire and even more to actually receive it.
Afraid to receive it, because what a privilege it is to be healthy and what responsibility comes with that! I’m afraid to not be wise enough to use my health correctly and in the service of others.

And afraid to desire it, becauys what’s perceived as protection and boundary-setting from “poison”-  once you are “in health” – can also turn into social exclusion. In many cultures food, nourishment (water, even air) is the shared and thereby a linking component of social gatherings and with that has the power to devide. As do drugs, languages, ideologies, etc.
No wonder, now that I think of it, why all-eaters feel so easily attacked by people renouncing certain foods. As social beings we need the tribe to ensure our safety. Some brave ones – the explorers – go first to try new things and gain the respect and honouring backdrop from the group if something goes wrong. But when people start withdrawing from foods that once were deemed as safe, an unconsciously life threatening abandoment wound is created – especially when moralism is as convincing method to move others to step away from priorly socially considered safe foods. Survival mode is culturally activated.
People try to stay in their state of being as long as they can, so afraid of the unknown, which change can help them enter into.

 

So, to me consuming something that might or might not be unhealthy is not only a connecter to childhood memory, – which is an effectively strong and binding factor to it in itself – but also an attempt of maintainance of social balance and reassurance.
A message of “You are safe” combined with “Let’s grow together”.
Yet, is it so easy, when we all are tied to different attachments? Especially, when poison connects and regulates as much (through shared coping and social regulating of underlying suffering) as it divides (wrecking mind and/or body) – such as health does (since it prefers and lives of an isolation from what threatens its stability -immunity – and thereby excludes it).
Notice how immunity is a verbiage used both in the medical and in the political field?  “Granting someone immunity”. Becoming untouchable.
Isn’t that a mental picture that’s oftentimes associated with that? At least in my life, I saw so much moralization of  health and judgment of anything that falls out of it: “How could one be so careless to lose their health”, “why did they do not enough of this and that to prevent any state of dis-ease”, it was blamed and judged, instead of helping others up from the bottom line. Blame being pushed around, because everyone reaches a point when empathy runs out of ressources and reaches the tricky realms of those fears that are personally shaped and configured to our emotional wounds.

That’s when the demon comes out and tries to protect us. And we gotta train it to learn how to (re-)connect as well.

Maybe a theme I recognize is that of growth, then.
Needed from the outside just as much from the inside , from top (as role model) and from below (as role of phoenix to rise from the ashes)
– and I find myself attached and torn by all sides.

Still, I cannot help but to see an  arrogance of a distorted understanding of health wherever I walk, so far, even though I would like to be healthy as well.
I see it in society, in loved ones, in Vegetarium and of course in myself
(maybe I wouldn’t see it elsewhere, if it wasn’t such a present conflict within me).
For sure, there is something to unravel for me, because I myself become judgemental there, but so far I find no starting point without using scissors.

An external scene grabs my attention, which somehow connect to my inner processes.

 

 

 

On Energetic Wounds Passed on Through Time

How to get rid of these slings that are connecting everything? How to detangle myself?

How can we be brave enough to face them?
Because I, too, am contributing to other people’s dreams that don’t seem like they are meant to survive. Robbing me from valuable energy!
Some warning from the past comes to mind that I suddenly start understanding:
People can indeed easily become actors of other’s demands (whether openly expressed or subtly hidden) that one has not yet been willing to address within themselves.
Right now, I feel like my limit of being such a false actor has been reached.
And yet I also want to transform with compassion.

Because it is true, after all, that I jump, that I feel responsable for someone else, the moment I feel someone else needs something from me. Or else..
I’m afraid of the else. I’m afraid of consequence. I’m afraid of feeling the weight of someone elses disappoimtment. Of the tearing gap that can devide that I’m not ready to let go of, a false dream and believe that I’m holding up.
Even more to not survive the change. So, I as well, fear change.

Especially when it comes to those, who are close in heart, in mind or location. I’m afraid to not be strong enough to lose others and rather try to avoid to see what might in fact, when I allow myself to feel it all, be more important to me.
Losing a connection is a terrifying act for me.
Investing more in others than in myself. That’s an equation that won’t add up much longer.
Only that I am afraid to be not strong enough to defend myself in the time I need to grow stronger.
There we are with the (emotional and spiritual) immunity again – because mine is certainly weakened currently.At the point right now, I’m tired out. I don’t want to ride the anxious waves of others. Even though they make sense to me.
My system is in overload and I can feel the systems around me shaking and breaking as well.

 

So what is it I would like to protect and what to am I ready to burn for the fuel of my transformation?

 

Difficult to know when my values are all astray living in such a confusing and contradictory world.
I’m still experimenting, in order to find my true values, because even those I once believed in firmly weren’t as difficult to lose as I expected.
Which is a whole other level of shame and guilt – to experience the lightness of letting go of what I tried to cling to for so long.
And yet, this very lightness is what energizes me as well.

“There’s a difference between wanting and needing”, someone I love(d) once expressed to me.

There’s a difference, too, between wanting and choosing.

And choosing and feeling.

 

Symbolically and literally speaking:
I can grow without you living on a mountain, but when I want to return to the village and city, how can I adapt in a way that allows me to grow in such a way to overflow and share what I’ve gathered?
Where is the bridge that it needs between these two realities?
What Vegetarium seems to be building to me seems like an idea people momentarily start building onto more and more.
Yet it makes use of constructs of the mind that also have their weak spot and are not sustainable by itself on levels outside of the realm  of plant and animal care.
It needs a bridge to the outside world and I believe that is only built on genuinety of the humans coming here.
Which means that we need to work with what we arrived with. Beautiful, mind-shattering, ugly, brutal and full of potential.
That at least is my view (for now).

That’s the fascination I carry for groups. Thrive or dive. Or whatever one wants to call it 😀
They can carry transformative powers by steadily integrating new informations, even though they can also overload and hinder individual systems in their personal groth. Balance being needed again.
So that’s why I don’t want to live above from the crowd – and instead learn and grow with them.
(Checking into my motives: Maybe also avoiding to challenge myself to be all by myself, hoping for a group to provide space for what I find difficult to process?)

I truly love creative communities and especially those that are consciously devided and able to bond over that,because of that and beside that and are able to build from there. I know, I want to engage in the mind-shattering conflict of cultural division and build bridges, connections and transmit what gets lost in translation.
Re-wire what is tangled to set free some stuck energy.

 

And stuck energy is everywhere. Internally and externally. The imbalance of our nervous sytems.
Which I would like to balance for myself.

 

And what I observe myself experiencing in Vegetarium within myself, as I have noticed in a previous voluntary social year and plenty other engagements is what I call the

 

 

That is to say, that I see a difference between volunteering and voluntary actions.

Which shall mean that voluntary actions in my understanding are built on conscious will that has been crystallised through previous experience and learnt lessons, which in turn help to prioritise values amongst which certain actions might be preferred over others (to avoid negatively experienced consequences).
Whereas free-floating will is not in need of experience, but rather curiosity (the outcome and consequences are yet are unknown, mistakes are likely, which help again to prioritise values for the future).

 

Yet, how shall curiosity be built, when one does not work with one’s limitations, when one does not work with what one tries to protect themselves from?
You cannot force change – only fool yourself into believing illusions of it.

That’s what I do love about Vegetarium, it does dig into horse shit, in chicken shit – and I believe into its power of digging into the human shit of the mind, heart and soul (if the souls having come together here agree to jump that deep and feel ready to swim. And if they are not, then maybe I can find my peace in digging into someone else’s shit, – again – while maybe becoming a little more aware of my own. Which is the most growth I currently undergo here, even though I would in fact be interested in some deeper trust fall).

 

 

And yet, I do still search for a retreat from the world on a mountain with only two hand-fulls of people.
Some things seem to threaten my core, even if I’d isolate infinitely.
There are other things to heal first to grow through that.

 

 

 

But I do have hope!

I am starting to realize the importance of dreams.
They help us connect to our needs and envision us a path that guides us closer to them.
For now, I need my inner protector, my inner demon – too much do I tire of wanting to be only compliant to other people’s visions alone. I can feel it’s my time to wake up from some long soul slumber. With a bit of luck and intention, I can learn about possibilities to (re-)connect.
I want to face what bothers me and make space for the dreams that my heart has connected with so far and see where it can connect with others.
(That is maybe another reason to explain, why I need to connect to multiple societies and cultures – because my dreams rarely resonate in their entirety with only one group & I am aiming for a win-win experience. And I haven’t seen an outcome yet, in which such a scenario is possible without me limiting contact with a single group and spreading it out. Or maybe I’m just repeating a pattern, because my parents split up when I was a toddler. The world of thought and interpretation is an infinitesimal joke)
The more I lose my false dreams, the lighter I get – but it could also be symbolical diarrhea, so what do I know.

Yet with each lesson on grief and loss of connection with the soul, my body was beguided with, I do understand that compassion for myself is the defence against the perceived “attack” of other people’s demands and their internalization and internal distortion.
So that’s what I’m going to experimentally following.
And for now sharing online.
Maybe not wise. But with an intention that will suffice.
Which rhymes. 
Am not looking for more meaning in life.

~Michelle B.