Ppl don't have to f w u, Dissociation and Detachment

See People don’t have to fuck with you, the whole you, parts of you, or even you all together. It’s not in the rule book. No one has to fuck with you for a single moment, or for every moment and face you’ve ever worn or will ever wear. No one has to like the essential and real you, not with your mask on nor when you that drop the veneer, lay bear and vulnerable, freely you. You, living from where the heart is born, aren’t impervious from someone not fucking with with you. You don’t fuck with everyone either. We are everyone, all participating in an indivisible living fabric with a shared destiny, a fabric and its inhabitants we don’t always show care for. And yet, we still don’t have to fuck with everyone.

We each carry a few people, our people, through time with us. An incredibly difficult yet fruitful choice to make is detaching ourselves from those we care the deepest for when we step into or across time. We can meet up wherever we’re going anyways haha.

We can often confuse detachment from the form or shape of someone or something, for dissociating from the moment of our experience of them. When we dissociate, we jettison ourselves or the world around us, from the experience. We cut ties with the warm livelihood that unites us with both indispensable parts of the story of how we got to this street corner. Both parts of the story, Us AND the World. Where your Mom is at, your family’s at, the brothers and sisters we paintsainkingly and sometimes blissfully light bonfires of burning love with.

I get it, life’s tough as fuck, and love can be poisoned with violence and distrust. The people supposed to love us can break our hearts, discard us, make us feel unloved, unworthy of acceptance as we are or are becoming. Their turmoils could have boiled over to us, they might have had reason to challenge the grounds of your love, or perhaps they just don’t fuck with us; which is unfortunate when we can often gove so much care to the people that deserve it least.

We can try building spider nests over the spaces that promise the familiar sting of a distant and barren love, the one that keeps us around with moments of relief at the convenience of their captivating hearts. We can grow up learning to tie together love and fear, comfort and discomfort, pain and love, chaos and peace. When we uncouple the two, experience the unconditional love of the people closest to our hearts, it can be overwhelming. We might freak out and count the ticking seconds till fear of our selves or the world creep their ugly mugs and distort our perception of the moment.

We often dissociate to keep ourselves safe of sabotage, especially self-sabotage. If we’re not 'in' we can’t mess up right? As though if we step far back into the parts of our mind that dip into oblivion, far away from the experience we’ve castrated ourselves from, then we’ll be safe. Safe in the comfort of a working mind, where I won’t be bothered or judged, where no words can reach me, where I am the master of my own world and no one could lay a claim to my heart.

Detachment does a similar thing, you gain inner autonomy, you become your own centre of gravity, except the catch is you can only detach yourself from the orbit of loved creation when you lay your heart bare to it. Not when you cut yourself out of it all together in some non-existant void.

Detachment, in a basic sense, is stepping outside a binary relationship and occupying a third seat, the seat of an observer to a dynamic and experienced story. Here neither of the components of this co-authored story is discarded, instead, both are preserved, and in our efforts to detach ourselves from either component’s exclusive interests, the singular outcome of their expressive force, we let go of the reigns of either one of these two fishes circling one another in a pond, and allow them to flow around each other in their most natural and untampered expression of harmonious being. When you try neither to re-write who you are in an effort to be accepted by the world, nor re-write the world and its people in order to cater to your insecurities or fears, you allow both parts of the story to simply Be, as they are, in-themselves. 

People don’t have to fuck with you, you don’t have to fuck with everyone, what’s important is that you fuck with you. That will only ever happen when you’re true and real with yourself, when you drop the faces or your appeasements of others at the expense of who you are. When you accept every face you’ve ever worn as it fits in the unity of who you presently are. As the Lord’s love sees you, as your loved one’s feel you, as you know you. 

P.S.: A passive character in a film with unreliable and unintentional direction vs. An active observer with an awareness of immediate experience.

Nourish

Mind

Noorish the mind with wonder, allow it to swim in a pool of imagination. Point it towards the notions that grow it, not the old wounds and lessons, or the promises of glorious ends. Accept the motion of our being across time, its place in our own personal and collective spaces. Embrace the entirety of your past, open yourself to the entirety of the possible future, the beauty in the struggle, the dreams we intentionally and practically choose to move towards. If we don’t accept and choose our own struggles, the direction of circumstantial resistance we point our growth towards, the world will choose and blindside us with its own struggles. Sometimes these obstacles are unavoidable, the unknown is vast and just as intricately nuanced, wondrous yet elusively difficult as the experiences we’ve come to make known. Acknowledge all that has shaped you, but let it go, move towards something new, something more fulfilling, something that opens up your life force to new horizons, rather than the recycled bubbles of experience we relive vicariously through in fear or doubt of living again. Embrace the pain, the fear, the doubt, move along side it, do what you will inspite of their presence. They’re here to protect you from danger, from the world, from yourself. The inevitability of suffering is what we sign up for when we opt to live intentionally, so might as well do it on our own terms, with the clarity of an unclouded and playful mind, and the courage to prioritize our goals, our ambitions over tending to the doses of discomfort that ensure our growth; the scars we hand in when we’re asked if we truely ever lived.

Heart

Poor your heart into the moments and the thoughts that align with your Spirit’s pursuit. Our hearts are volatile, and we can’t really control how or how much we feel, but it’s useful to be able to step back in observation of our passing thoughts or passing affects, and choose whether to animate them with life, let them pass through, or tend to them if they keep responding to something the same way, hanging at the centre a lesson our spirits refuse to move forward without first learning. Human beings, we’re funny like that. The past gives us foundations yes, but we refuse to move on from it until we’ve allowed ourselves to heal, learn and grow from it. We’re geared towards personal change and collective evolution, and I think that’s brilliant. These anchors to the past or these trauma based response patterns can be overwhelming though, so facing the emotion honestly, as it is originally sourced rather than through the lens of the emotions we’ve layered around this initial affect, is really important. An incomplete trick to feeling through what we have to learn from in this difficult emotion or mental realization, is withholding our emotional response to it as a neutral and impartial observer. This practice can really help whelm us to this ball of yarn we wish to untangle; this isn’t to be confused with rational and calculative intellectualization of our affective dilemma - we can’t substitute feeling through our pain with observing it impartially to learn why it’s been reocurring. After that, don’t forget to nurture your Heart with real love. 

Spirit

Noorish your Spirit with faith, with the release of our attachment to our mortality, our desire to immortalize ourselves or live on through the memories or imaginations of others, by surrendering to the experience of Life, the journey from the One, through One, and to the One. As long as we’re here, there are no ends, only means. I am a medium for my spirit’s expression within an ecosystem of spirit that move as the passage of human history just as it is animated by the lives of other plants and animals. Within a Spirit that moves towards Allah, the final instance of my and collective existence, not solely of our bodies, but the motion of the spirit that was instigated with temporal creation, and that ripples across time and space every time a living being makes a choice. My being actualizes what it observes potentially, in turn, my internal sets of beliefs and values are just as causally significant within the spirit as my acting on them. A single act of of authentic and intentional good inspires another and another, and another.. Same goes for distortive and ostensible acts of wrong. Individually our impact on the surface of our lake can only be so big, collectivley, we start pushing waves, civilizationally and cosmopolitanily, we eventually start moving stars. Nevertheless, the call of our spirits is first and foremost a call for Love, quaint, genuine, and communal love. We can’t hope to care for our loved ones if we aren’t able to care for ourselves. We can’t care for the advancement of our communities if we don’t start by caring for our circles of friends and family, our people before we’re ready to meet and support the people. Our spirits know we’re going to die, it understands our mortality, even if our bodies and hearts struggle to stomach or familiarize themselves with death. Why were we designed to migrate between the bedrock and the Light if we have no choice but to leave it all behind when Death visits us? To make sure we truely live I suppose. We would never have known the value of time if we could never lose it, the importance of caring and supporting our loved ones if they could never be taken away from us, the worthwhileness of living, truely living through the eyes of stroms and warm afternoons, living true, living raw, if we were never at risk of losing it all, of losing our self and the chance to love while we still can.

Notes on anxiety

Noorish your spirit with meaning for its existence with love, with purpose, with the embrace of the Grand Loving Spirit that houses us All. You angst about the storm, the one you’ve seen on the horizon, it looks just like every other storm that turned out to be a stubbed toe and a tipped popcorn bag. As for the real storms, when the tycoon comes it would have come and departed just as all the previous tycoons have, with one thing remaining constant. You. You’ve always made it through alive, to see a brighter dawn, you survived stronger, with a gentler heart and the scars to prove it. When and if the threats we woe before their time arrive, our fears and self-doubt wouldn’t help us, we hesitate and we get stuck fighting two battles, one against ourselves, and the other against the world we’re frightened to navigate. That’s tough, even for the most seasoned warriors. Discomforts and resistance teach us about who we are. Most truely, when the partner for this Dance is a life-long friend. We remember and grow along the path of where we’ve been. Also worst worst care we die? Bet, lmao. Actual worst case your loved one dies; all I can say to that is brace yourself for a real life long mission of painful or beautiful remembrance. That’s when we really learn what death as to teach us; love while you still can. 

"Those that'll tell don't know, and those that know won't tell." - Da Mayor, Do the Right Thing

Yassin has the wonderful presence of a Buddhist sometimes. He neither clings nor releases, doesnt’ push or pull others closer he just lets others be and come as they are. He remains grounded, centered and rarely judgemental. 

Far as I see it, most of our suffering comes from clinging onto stuff, moments, joy, pain, friends, loved ones, clinging resists an inescapable truth of the living world, that the nature of things is both their passage and their stillness. The pleasant and unpleasant, the good and bad, the meaningful and meaningless, it all passes. Clinging onto any of it is a resistance to an ever-changing world, decaying and rejuvenating in the same breath. I can’t place it but I recall Swagdy quoting something along the lines of ‘if you think you’ve faced your mortality, wait till you find out its your body that’s decaying!’ Letting it all go, letting life pass through into decay, without growing indifferent and careless, is necessary for the courage needed to love the nature of a dying world, and yet, a world we keep everliving. 

Over the last few years I’ve befriended an old street artists called Gary the Bray. He told me the other day that people are always putting on their masks, the characters they like to play around other people, and yet he also believed that most our actions are inescapably the performance of a character we’d like to be, that we’re all walking around on a big stage where everyone’s an actor. I feel like Shakespeare said something along those lines didn’t he? People front instead of braving their reality, their worth in the Light of Love. The trippy part for me is Gary suggesting that none of us have a choice but to front. Even when we’re being real we’re fronting being real, not in the way that’s obviously a performance of what this person thinks is ‘being real’, but rather that even when someone, by all measures of realness is being real, this is still a front. The only way I can wrap my head around this and still keep the obvious intuition we get when someone’s being ‘real’ as opposed to wearing a mask, is if a person’s real realness is a performance not because they’re fronting, but because the stage they act on is by nature a performance hall. Even if an actor emerges on stage from the place their heart was born, where their Mom is at, their brothers and sisters are at, the essential part of their nature, they would still be performing not because they have a mask on, but because they’re acting on a stage made for performance. A lot like that movie the Truman Show but its Real life! Well, I guess it’s more like ‘real’ life, Reality would have to be outside the bubble of our corporeal world, watching the show of human and universal history from their seats outside space&time. 

This still leaves a huge question mark on who we are, really, if all of this is just a show. Off the bat, who I am is not a rigid category, a profession, some interests, not even the aggregated and collected history of my life. Our nature is passing, a continuous and slow death, and a pulsing rejuvination and becoming. We are dynamic and ‘becoming’; in trying to establish rigid monoliths of who we are, unwaveringly, without room for challenge, we miss part of the picture. We are also rooted in our ‘being’, and if we disavow any shape in our wills, any sets of persistent wisdoms, beliefs, values, boundaries and preferences, we’ll miss the other part of the picture. We find two necessities then on the nature of our being and becoming, not clinging posessively or instrumentally onto passing moments, internal capacities and beliefs; as well as the need to actively and consciously individuate one’s identity as emergent but uniquely distinct from the community, culture, love you emerge from.

انا أفتقد الشخصية في بعض الأحيان

P.S: I’m a dumb bratty kid bro. Real life, real wisdom, can only be earned through experiencing who we're becoming over time. It comes from real challenges, new challenges that bust our ass as we grow up. When I look up at my big bros or sisters, my dad and my mom; there’s this respect and deference we owe them, just for having lived through more. Now I say lived, I mean grew through more, with awareness of their beautiful struggle and their hard earned wisdom. I actually have nooo fuckin clue how much rougher life can get, but it’s okay, because I’ve been through rough and bright times, and always made it alive to see another sunset. We can’t simulate experience and wisdom by reliving vicariously through the past we refuse to let go of, and the future we refuse to step towards.