Wack-a-Mole
Whether they are thoughts, memories, and sensations from things that happened in our past, or the spontaneous reactions that our minds and bodies are having to what we’re witnessing in the present moment, there are times when cultivating a contemplative consciousness feels like being sucked into a giant game of wack-a-mole.
This silly carnival game features targets that pop up at random from a grid and the objective is to bop the mechanical rodents with a mallet. I still remember playing for the first time at a raucous birthday party at a local Chuck E. Cheese franchise. While it might be a fun and exciting rush of endorphins in the context of a noisy arcade, this sort of action happening within us, can be quite distressing.
We experience the shock of the memory or the present distress and ride the surge of adrenaline and cortisol that comes with it. This temporary high leaves us anxious, searching for the exits, irritable, and feeling alone. Sometimes in our effort to combat the sense of powerlessness and isolation we seek to evade our suffering by transmitting it, either in unkindness towards the people around us, or by inviting the nearest safe person to join us in our state of activation and distress.
When we are experiencing a steady drip of activating news and information, we begin to experience the pop, the decline, and then pop again! Pop! Pop! Pop! Startling, exciting our nervous system and never really allowing us to recover to a lower stress homeostasis. Which might make our less than helpful coping mechanism, whether grounded in anger, despair, or even spite a source of activation for the people around us. Pop! Pop! Pop! Wack! Wack! Wack!
I recognize this pattern in myself. I’m embarrassed by it. I want to be able to be present, even to the hard stuff, when things feel like they’re falling apart, and even when they are collapsing at a rate that is too quick for my rational mind to process and my body-mind to metabolize. Even so, I know that as a person called to suffer alongside my neighbors, I’m also desperate for relief.
I pray for a boring day, where nothing unsettling happens. I begin to crave a day when climate collapse, social disintegration, genocide, the march towards the formal resegregation of the United States, the violence of poverty, the terror of disease, war, loneliness, and death do not intrude on my consciousness. Pop! Wack! You can’t win the game if you don’t bop all the moles. At the same time, there is another part of me that is certain that flailing wildly with the mallet is the only way to lose the game. I can’t control what pops up. I can’t control what arises in me. I can control what I do with that impulse if I just slow down. Let each Pop arrive and recede. Just observe, don’t chase, don’t swing, try and notice what is happening in me, to me, around me.
This isn’t passive dissociation that I’m describing. I’m trying to create space to let go of first thoughts, of snap judgments, of unloving responses. I can simply observe, and I when I find that I can’t get myself to that space, I reach out, not to help spread the distress, but to connect with someone who can help me find that slower self.
I reach out, so that together, we can validate, notice, wonder, and begin to tip into curiosity. What is actually happening here? What are the things I cannot control? What are the ways I can act? Whom can I invite to act along with me? How can I attach to something solid outside of this present moment of dysregulation? How can I attune to each mole that pops without needing to smash it instinctively?
I can attune to what my soul actually needs in that moment, whether that’s to take a break, to move, to cry out, to lament, to grieve, to feel deeply, to gather community, to dance, to stomp, to sing, or any other human need that might begin the work of metabolizing that hard thing, those hard things, indeed many hard things.
None of this minimizes or invalidates the strong initial reaction. That too is body-mind wisdom trying to keep me alive. If anything, the increase in observable suffering all around me is an invitation into the heart of my contemplative practice. Beholding and bearing witness to the world as it is, sitting in contemplation and consenting to the divine presence in what is, being stirred to action and inviting others to freely choose action, engaging in robust and loving practice reflection, that the actual outcomes of our action would be the seeds of new beholding.
In my imagination, each mechanical mole slows down. The pop sound elongates and becomes mysteriously slow. Hands opening and palms facing up in a gesture of supplication, the mallet falls away. This latest worry is one more invitation to pray. So into the silence I go, so that into the world I go, so that into the silence…
Be gentle with yourself, you are worth it.
Peace and Everything Good,
The Rev. JM Longworth, OEF
Spiritual Direction and Trauma Care
https://www.sdicompanions.org/sdi-profile/GreenMtFriarOEF/
To book an appointment:
https://calendly.com/greenmtfriaroef