Doingness and Beingness

It’s probably a little dangerous to post about ballet on an eating disorder blog. But last night, I was reminded of something important from an interview I watched about a NYCB ballerina. As she talked excitedly about Tchaikovsky’s Pas De Duex, Tiler Peck says, “every time I do [this ballet], I find out something different that I didn’t know about my dancing.” What is it about this comment that hooked me? Of course, people talk about their developing art all the time. Why did this comment grab me?

I realize that it struck me because Peck was talking about her dancing as being separate from her Self. She did not say, “I learned something new about me as a dancer,” she said, I learned something new about “my dancing.” Do you see the difference? In a way, this seemingly innocuous statement is actually quite profound. Our actions, our doings, they are belongings. She views dancing as a part of her life. Her actions and her vocation are objects that develop alongside her. But they are not her, and likewise our actions and vocations and thoughts and beliefs are not us. We carry these belongings with us through life, but without them we would still be. In the Art of Mindful Living, Thich Nhat Hahn has said, “our actions are our only true belongings.” We are, beyond, beyond, beyond our action-belongings, we are. No action, aside from being the victim of homicide, will cause us not to be (and perhaps that is not even true, as I would honestly still argue that the body is also a belonging that is separate from our beingness. It is a precious belonging, but a belonging nevertheless). We carry our doings, our professions, our hobbies, our life-roles, all of these actions, and some are light and others are burdensome. But we forget that they are explicitly separate from our inherent human beingness. And this is one of the causes of suffering.

I think that Peck’s comment hooked me because she touched a subject that I really need to sink into. For those of you who know me, you know that I have had a lifetime struggle with perfectionism. It was debilitating. At this time in my life, my struggle is productive because it is characterized by insight, but do not make the mistake of believing that insight obliterates suffering. Insight is a tool; and dancing and crawling and white-knuckling and working through the suffocating suffering is the process. Flip flopping back and forth between resisting the suffering, blending with the suffering and sitting with but separate from the suffering; this is the process of eating disorder recovery.

So, let me tell you a little bit about my current perfectionistic struggle. This semester, I am taking Practicum II in my mental health counseling program, and I’ve been feeling terribly anxious. I’ve been having panic attacks in most of my classes, which have reappeared after having receded for the past year. Luckily, I spent time in treatment making friends with my panic, so I can sit beside it and witness it ride its bell-curve. I’ve increased my mindfulness and meditation practices, which help me tolerate sitting with the panic when it happens. Still, it’s tremendously uncomfortable and my anxious parts are on high alert; they have again taken on a lightening-like startle response to any “should” that floats around in my daily life. They want to compensate for shame that I am not “where I should be,” meeting some cultural standard, having a solidifying career, getting married, having kids, etc. So, as I have delved inside, I’ve realized that I’m consistently thinking: If I don’t master my counseling ASAP, if I am not perfect, then I am seriously never going to feel like I am okay. The refrain: what if I’m not going to be okay? Then shame at the prospect of not okay-ness...shame for not being somewhere that's imperfect, then anxiety for having shame because I know that I am capable of profound compassion, and then a panic that I am not going to BE okay. These voices are trying to ensure my success. They are trying to point out areas of improvement. I get it and I honestly appreciate the help. But simultaneously, they are preventing me from connecting and being present. Their fear and their desire to act on behalf of fear and clutch onto certainly will invite the very fear that they want to avoid, which is disconnection, anxiety and a sense of not being okay. When we act on behalf of a feared perception, we incite the feared outcome. You see, these are the voices that we need to discern because at face value, this particular experience just feels like an enormous pressure that sits on the chest, that spins in the head, that fluctuantly keys up and depresses the body. It doesn’t present with ease, and you and I owe it to ourselves to really comprehend the messages that we send ourselves, one must find a place of Self and delve internally.

So the subject is acting and being. To be. To quote or not to quote the over-quoted Shakespere? “To be or not to be, that is the question,” needs to be reframed in my situation as: to be or not to be, that is my choice. I am never going to feel my profound beingness on a consistent basis if I do not challenge my sometimes unconscious but always automatic belief that what I do or do not do makes me okay or not okay. And for those of you who can relate, I do not mean to lessen the struggle by using the word “choice,” but I do sustain that this is a choice. It is a choice to have the courage to develop awareness of the unconscious beliefs that drive our actions, to reframe our perception of our beliefs from a self-compassionate frame of mind, and then to act in a self-compassionate way so that we begin to solidify compassionate habitual neural pathways and simultaneously dissolve the self-hating ones. This is the re-training ourselves to adopt the perception of eternal ok-ness. Why? Because we are okay, and the belief that we might not be okay causes unnecessary suffering.

I want what to work on sinking into what Peck said about action. If I succeed in counseling, I do not succeed, my counseling succeeds. And I don’t need to succeed in order to be okay because success and beingness are mutually exclusive. Success has to do with doing and not with being; as a being, I just need to be present with me. I do not mean to say that I do not need to work. I do need to and I want to work. But if I detatch my sense of okayness from my doings, then I will not feel unnecessary suffering during the working process. Non-attachment is the answer (not to be confused with dismissiveness, do you understand the difference?). If I am doing well or struggling in my counseling, I will speak to myself in this language: my counseling is doing well, or my counseling needs work. I will not say I am doing well or I need work. I need to do this because it’s freeing. Because it breaks the old perfectionistic core-belief, which (by the way) underlies eating disorder behavior and profoundly affects our willingness to let go of the eating disorder.

I think that one of the unconscious limiting choices we make is to constantly place our doingness before our beingness. I make art, I am an artist. I write, I am a writer. I have a job as an accountant, so I am an accountant. I have a job as a lawyer, so I am a lawyer. I counsel, so I am a counselor. In the line of eating disorders (and there are so many beliefs about the body that would be doing a disservice to attempt to include all, so here are just two): I need my body to be a close approximation to my ideal, because then I will be closer to my ideal persona, to the person that I feel I should be. Another body struggle that is heard often is: I judge my body to be fat, and I believe that fat is inadequate, therefore I am inadequate. There is an enormous and self-defeating mistake inherent in each of these statements. Since our doings are not permanent, to define ourselves by something that is inherently fluctuant is a dangerous game. For example, for me to say that I am an counselor because I counsel, and then something comes to pass that prevents me from counseling, then I might have an existential crisis because I don’t know how to define a major part of who I think am, right? Or an eating disorder example: if I go through treatment and am willing to restore my body weight, then I begin to feel that my adequacy is dying, that I am not who or what I am supposed to be. That if I must keep up the treatment, then I never will be the person that I think I need to be in order to be adequate and deserving of love and connection. I remember this time, and it was excruciating. To be perfectly honest, it felt like something in me was dying. Because ultimately, the critically painful parts of the process never really have to do with the figure or the food. And when they do, they are about the fears, based in histories of attachment-based fear and trauma, which orient around the food. It is always about the emotional distraught, the disintegration, the dismissive/preoccupied attachment dance, the grief, the constant ungroundedness, the non-acceptance of what is, the fluctuating unwillingness/willingness to surrender, the self-loathing, the fear of chaos and ambiguity, the feeling of emotions in the body, the fear of the body, the anger, the struggle to feel that you deserve attunement, the disconnection, the feeling that things are not going to be okay, and the process of changing the core beliefs that must be changed, perfectionism included. 

I worked a lot of on perfectionism in residential treatment. Actually, for a few months, I had these two cards that I carried around and when I felt anxious about doing-ness, I pulled them out. Here they are:

Card 1

Card 2

To use, I would take them out and read both and decide which felt more true to the situation. If I was honest with myself, I always chose the truth, and I think you know which card tells the Truth. You probably know which one prevailed. It was always the second, the creased one, the one I probably curled in my hand, perhaps in a frustrated desire to clutch onto perfectionism. Actually, I think I might bring these cards with me to my practicum site and read them before my sessions. I'll also remind myself of how Peck referred to thoughts as belongings that we carry alongside our eternal beingness. I feel incredibly grateful for the lessons that encounter me, just at the time that I need them. I feel incredibly grateful for being in this world. 

This perfectionism process is really about developing awareness of perfectionistic thoughts, linked with some cognitive therapy about replacing the belief that: I chronically should be doing something other than what I am currently doing with the truth, which is that perfectionistic thoughts are just theories about the present. These thories reject the present and project a perfectionist into a hopeful theoretical situation where one is ALWAYS meeting your perfect “potential.” It's sad and we owe it to ourselves to reframe it. It also cultivates some incredibly nouriashing self-honesty and meaning making.

To be honest, this blog is a really great challenge for me. Parts of me find incredible fault in so much of what I post. So much that my perfectionistic part, voice, emotional and sensory experience wants to change. Its hard to not go back and edit things in order to edit them to meet my perfectionistic standards. I'm grateful for the process, I guess its a little bit like exposure and response prevention therapy :) Thanks for reading.