Letting Go Of Everything I Think I Know

What collective burnout/collapse is teaching me: To find renewal and surrender to the moment, I'm striving to cultivate a beginner's mind, the toughness of the serpent, and the softness of the dove.

On the eve of my 29th birthday this past August, my dear friend Jonathan invites me to climb high above the Delaware River. Somehow, after years of turning the fundamental ideas of myself over again and again, I still feel lost—so he takes me there to be with my grief.

We lie under an elder tree in the rage of high summer and I close my eyes to meditate. The blades of grass pierce through my sweat-drenched shirt. Breathing in, it is okay. Breathing out, I am here for you. Soon, tremors rack through my whole body. Beginning in my diaphragm, my whole body seizes, lifting off the ground from my mid-section. My shoulders push down into the ground as my waist lifts. My stomach tenses, my breaths become labored, violent. I heave for air. The sun burns as I writhe beneath the fluttering leaves.

You have been here before. Surrender to this feeling. Don’t run from it. Suddenly, I am falling through the dark. It is me but not me—many apparitions of me, shifting age in real time—tumbling through spindly clouds of ink. Memories, ethereal fragments of selves, haunt me like swirling dark water as my suspended body struggles to find gravity.

A self-portrait I made when I was 15, with Eckhart Tolle’s invocation.

It’s my own memories that materialize first in the void. The violences of all-boys Catholic school: whispered slurs in the library, death threats on Facebook posts, punches I once ran from. Feeling scared in the locker room. My first sexual assault at 15 from a 18 year old who I thought I trusted. I conjure an impression from that year: gathering the strength every day, trusting I am not alone—and though I could not see it then, I never was. I had been protected by so many mentors and angels. (Rest in Peace to Jeanne Brabson + Dennis Bloh, dearest guides and mentors who recently passed).

Then it’s my ancestors’ memories. Sometime in the 1910s: My great-great grandfather boards a ship to leave Ukraine during the Bolshevik revolution. December 1943: My grand-uncle takes his last breath on US John Harvey—2000 hidden mustard gas bombs in the hull, hit by a Nazi air attack in Bari, Italy. Then the 80s: I see a choir of queer ancestors lost to AIDS, angels with lives cut short that live on in me.

A family letter passed to my Grandmom, from her older brother in the navy who died in the 1943 bombing of Bari, Italy.

Then the void opens far beyond: The Lenape who had been driven from this very hill. The Revolution that spilled blood on this very river hundreds of feet before us in the name of a free nation that enslaved Africans built. This land then developed, tamed, defiled, extracted—only to burn, to flood, to drought.

In this trance, I feel no separation between my suffering and that of the world. Your pain is my pain. I am falling, falling, falling, spinning, crying out, arms flailing through the nothingness. I’ve been here many times before in this suspension, without a feeling of resolution in my body. Feeling the sweat on my brow, I gasp for air, my eyes squeezing so tight that my head throbs. My fingernails gouge the grass. How will I/we ever get free?

Two things happen at the exact same moment—neither action provoking the next, and yet impossible without each other. Jonathan reaches out to grab my hand as my back collides with the bottom of the tunnel. I fear I might die, shatter. No—instead, light explodes through everything and the nightmare turns to daydream. I feel his fingers trace my palm, knuckles interlocking. That place in my diaphragm from where I felt pulled releases. My writhing body stills, and now in the physical realm, my back lands softly, flat to the dirt.

The tightening inside transforms into a warmth that radiates through me as if from a divine force. A force so beyond my knowing that connects all time, all beings. I had never felt something like this in my body before: a belief in the power of humanity—a love that transcends all violence.

From my very first roll of film at age 14, some early spring.

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Who Will I Become in the Time of Collapse?

These bodily shocks I felt on the day on top of the ridge over the Delaware River were not new to me at all. I had been dealing with tremors and shivering during meditation and yoga in increasing intensity since I started trauma healing therapy and mindfulness in 2020. Over time, however, the shakes just became louder, more intense, as if I was unraveling some great secret of my body, and as some healers told me, some memories that lived in me from beyond my memory or my lifetime.

In 2023, while I shared my suffering with my teacher, Sister Dang Nghiem, she caressed my face and said, My dear, do you know your cheek is quivering when you speak? I could not feel the shakes at all until she said it; I’d never noticed. But the moment she uttered the words, a deep pain across the whole upper-right of my face came sharply into awareness. For nearly four months after, I felt my right cheek and eyelid twitching all through the day every day, a slow lessening. Sometimes single tears would fall down my face without me conjuring them. After, my neck and chin would vibrate like I’d just gotten a massage—the resonance of endorphins, an emptiness that shook my vocal cords and made me feel deep freedom.

During that time, I experienced a level of tenderness towards myself that I had never felt before. I quit nearly everything—football, bars, social media, video games, dating apps, socializing, leaving the house, even the act of aspiring. My body understood some things long repressed could finally come forward, and I had to slow down to create the space. But all the while, the shakes from my diaphragm continued on. What was my body trying to teach me?

During this time, I turned to many narratives of PTSD healing. To name the most resonant: Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You; Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under; Legend of Korra; and Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA).

In Book 2, Episode 18 of ATLA, the key antihero and firebender, Zuko, experiences his own dark night of the soul. Zuko is traumatized by inheriting the mark of colonial violence, the son of a King from the Fire Nation who has committed a great genocide against a whole population, the Air Nomads. In a pivotal moment, Zuko makes a choice to help Aang, the show’s protagonist and last living Air Nomad. Immediately after Zuko’s act of rebellious generosity, the young firebender falls deathly ill with intense tremors and fever dreams. He grieves his lost mother and even sees himself turning into Aang. Sitting beside him, his Uncle Iroh—who long ago found redemption from the ills of his nation—offers him tea and explains what Zuko is about to undergo:

Iroh: You should know that this is not a natural sickness.
Zuko: What's happening?
Iroh: Your critical decision. What you did beneath that lake. It was in such conflict with your image of yourself that you are now at war within your own mind and body.
Zuko: What does that mean?
Iroh: You are going through a metamorphosis, my nephew. It will not be a pleasant experience, but when you come out of it [takes a cloth and wipes Zuko's head], you will be the beautiful prince you were always meant to be.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book 2, Episode 18, "The Earth King"

By the end of the episode, Zuko is forever changed, and rejects all notions of the violence that his dogmatic youth has implanted in his body. He becomes guided by a sense of deep inner freedom and a belief in the possibility of redemption. He “betrays” his upbringing to choose the bend towards justice.

Zuko’s feverish metamorphosis reminded me of my own, and the lessons that lay beneath: To move forward, I had to let go of everything I thought I knew. I had to welcome—and grieve—the death of all ideas, beliefs, and notions of myself and the world. (I wrote about this first step this time last year, in my missive Dark Nights of the Soul and Everyone that Lifted Me Out). I had to accept the collapse of everything inside and outside of me, in order to connect with this feeling that had been right underneath all this time. It could only be through total surrender to the swirling darkness that I could gain the strength to embody the deepest aspirations of my own life and heart. Once I gave myself over to desperation, only then I discovered the strength to love that will guide me in these dark times.

I share this deeply personal story because I believe in my heart this is the level of candor these times demand. In order to build in the world that’s emerging, we must deepen our communities and break down the separation between our notions and ideas of ourselves—while also being sacred in our boundaries, and staying resolute in our own personal healing. How can we be radically honest and share ourselves openly, while also creating safe enclaves that guard the sacredness of our own hearts, and that protect our dear communities from the immense danger we are facing? The broadening and tightening required of this moment seem to pull in opposite directions; I believe these two forces will brighten one another if we learn to practice them with full embodiment.

These last few weeks, my heart, mind, soul, and spirit all said just stop.

I started writing this post while sitting in an immense burnout—emotionally exhausted; cognitively overloaded; deeply anxious; listless; craving adventure and play; struggling to remember basic things; seeking any kind of low-energy-high-reward mental stimulation. I took two weeks off from work to sit in this feeling and realized my brain was running 1000 miles a minute, but the mental script was complete gibberish. In a conversation on burnout with Brene Brown on Unlocking Us in 2020, Emily and Amelia Nagoski described the state I was in: my stress level was outpacing the resources I had to drain off the stress, and the unmanaged overwhelm kept accumulating until it turned chronic—detached from its original source.

I know I am one of countless people who have been struck by this kind of burnout and paralysis—grief, rage, desperation, shock, helplessness all swirling together. My dear friend Amirio sent me this amazing piece by Jenna Wortham, speaking to this current moment so saliently and how it was showing up in them day to day thought and behavioral patterns and how they are rooted in the far-right’s strategy of “muzzle velocity” and militaristic tactics of overwhelm:

you do not have to consent to being flooded

After a decade of working in arts and justice movements with a myriad of maps for abolition and restoration, questioning everything has become a core muscle. But in these past months, the emotional weight of this kind of transformation has been heavy as I grapple with this question: While I gather the strength to transform all of the artifacts of violence that live inside of me, how could I also possibly gather any strength at all to show up for this seemingly hopeless moment?

In these last two weeks, I have leaned into a slant of an answer for myself: We are living in a portal moment for a country whose deepest ideals seem up for debate and whose shadows many eagerly refute and repress. And it’s in this very context that I have spent years guiding my spirit to this ego death. I believe this is a kind of death we all are going through and must surrender to as we enter into this uncertain chapter of our nation’s history.

I do not want to be so paralyzed by my grief and overwhelm over my own suffering that I do not show up for the world. I do not want to be so paralyzed by my grief and overwhelm for the world that I do not show up for myself. Every time I aspire to heal the world, I heal myself. Every time I aspire to heal myself, I heal the world. When I live from that light at the bottom of the tunnel, I am ready for this moment.

And I must never forget that I have countless friends, teachers, and ancestors who have faced their own dark nights and found strength to love, to rewrite themselves, and to embody a just world every single day.

Calligraphy by Thay Phap Huu, the Abbott of Plum Village and former attendant to Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

Weaving the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove

When I was 19, I was lucky enough to find bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, which outlines the key myth that life in Western society functions on:

That love and domination can coexist is one of the most powerful lies patriarchy tells us all. Most […] continue to believe it, but in truth, love transforms domination.

I think I spent the first 29 years of my life untangling this tension in my body. Lately, I have been trying to send some gratitude to 20-year-old me who committed so deeply to the intellectual pursuits that would lead me to the embodied pursuits I ultimately needed to free myself of the violence imprinted on my body. That moment on the hill with Jonathan embodied an inflection point in that journey.

In that tunnel in my own fever dream, I fell through the traumas and violent histories that manifest in me. By surrendering to the place in my body where these harms live, I have been able to greatly deepen my connection with the rage and grief that has been the undercurrent of my entire life growing up in America. As a white person, as a gay person, and as a man, this feels like the ongoing work of a lifetime.

At the bottom of the tunnel, once I could surrender, I connected with a love that hooks speaks of in All About Love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing our own—and others’—spiritual growth.” This kind of love invites me to practice compassion more fiercely, to release any kind of separation my mind creates between self/other. Paradoxically, it also demands me to create safety, boundaries, and security for myself and the people that I love, protecting sacred community in the quest for justice.

In the opening of Strength to Love, Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his sermon: “Life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. […] We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove.” Individual life, he asserts, requires a tough mind and a tender heart.

Another passage in the opening chapter of Strength to Love about Hitler sends chills up my spine for its resonance:

We do not have to look very far to see the dangers of soft-mindedness. Dictators, capitalizing on soft-mindedness, lead men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society. Adolf Hitler realized that soft mindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said on one occasion: “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” In Mein Kampf, he asserted: “By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell—and hell, heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”

Just Start Here: Cultivating tough-mindedness and beginner’s mind.

On my twelfth grade retreat, Mr. Chesnik—the teacher I first learned anything about Buddhism from—played me a song, “Everyway,” by Circa Survive. (Anthony Green, the lead singer, went to my high school and was his former student and they were quite close.) I absorbed the cacophonous, thundering metal guitar of the chorus:

Every way you wonder if you're wrong
Inaccurate and imprecise
There is no gift without a price.

At 17, this lyric hit me like a tsunami. I broke down sobbing in Mr. Chesnik’s arms. It was the first time my body ever allowed me to truly show the suffering I carried to another person. For this breakdown to be received with such great love has stayed with me throughout my adult life. To me, then, I understood this lyric as a testament to the light of the compassion and creativity (my “gift”) that I had cultivated amid deep interpersonal violence (the “price”). To have his arms around me and to acknowledge the gravity of that price felt like the first time in my life I ever truly felt like I did not have to carry it alone. By being radically vulnerable with myself and having someone carry it with me, I could lean more into the “gift.”

On the drive up to a weekend meditation retreat at Plum Village’s Blue Cliff Monastery this past November, I thought to revisit the song. The opening stunned me, as if I was hearing it for the first time. It describes a sort of loss of faith, Green’s own dark night of the soul, and how he channeled it into his artistry:

I would find a different way to say
You're going to have to change everything you've made
You're going to have to reword every metaphor you'd use
So that people who are hearing aren't confused
If that's the most important thing you do
Detail every ounce of pain that you went through
Make sure you leave something down to show the way back
Make sure you leave something down to show the way back

I understood it anew as an evocation for this blossoming of a new self within me. In a search for redemption, justice, and renewal, I had spent my whole life cultivating a manner of telling my own story that empowered and freed me. I had created my own story of the world that gave my life a sense of mission, order, and purpose. But I’ve been changing and I need new foundational stories. As I’ve healed, these decades-built narrative maps no longer work. Should I want to move forward, in this time, I will have to embrace Green’s chorus. Abandon everything I know as a means to say: There is always a new way. It’s okay. Just start here.

Of this nature, Thay Phap Huu (Abbott of Plum Village and former attendant to Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh), spoke recently of Beginner’s Mind on the Christmas 2024 episode, of the podcast The Way Out Is In, “Renewal”:

Each and every one of us has a beginner’s mind, the Sanskrit or poly world is bodichitta. It is the seed of awakening, a mind of love…It is your openness, your willingness to learn, your willingness to relearn, sometimes to unlearn to learn again… Especially now with our world constantly changing, with technology, with AI, with the new span of attention…we have to adapt even our ways of communicating… For us to survive to now, we [must] constantly review and constantly change and constantly come back to [our] fundamental aspects…

As so many things we deeply care about are facing destruction, he says, we also know that things have to collapse in order to be renewed. Because without something ending, something can’t begin. Something has to die to be reborn.

Soon after, he takes a resolved breath and speaks to the quest of our lifetime: “We are all part of the world and our way of being able to cultivate inner peace—to transform the bombs and guns inside of us, the hatred inside of us—that is a gift we can offer to future generations so that new wars won’t start.”

With my deepest love and gratitude…

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