Experiments with love.

I have trouble receiving love. My preternatural instinct when love manifests in some form is to deflect, interject, self-deprecate, reciprocate compulsively and prematurely or do that most damning of things - trivialize. Elsewhere, I have an even bigger challenge asking for love, which, for a long time, seemed like operating from a sense of entitlement. I am nearly confident now that it is not.

I am also confident that a frighteningly high number of us have an overdeveloped capacity and appetite for guilt and shame. The deep fear that disentitled people have is that we will get caught asking for ‘too much’ and that feels like a sin. It takes time to realise that it is not a sin to ask for something - anything - even if the answer is no.

Last week, I managed to do something deeply uncomfortable after nearly convincing the mind of a hundred good reasons why it shouldn’t be done. For an amber of a moment, I stuttered, hobbled and stumbled to a state of vulnerability. For perhaps the first time as an adult, I asked and held space for receiving love on the most public of platforms - facebook.

It was a break from the 24*7*365 philosophising and proselytising that I do on these pages. There was an avalanche of affection; a love storm. For which I am and will always be grateful.

The action can be traced to a moment of truth that came earlier this year - bang in the middle of an unscheduled meditation, yoga and performance art retreat in a non-descript mountain town in south India. It was a workshop that was being facilitated primarily in Spanish, a language I do not understand very well.

There was an unmistakable dawning that my primary driver in life is affection. That it is my default emotion. Maybe I have an extra-ordinarily high need to give and receive affection. Maybe it is normal. More accurately, this affection need not be even directed at me specifically, but what I crave for is simply an atmosphere that is playful, light and affectionate. Indeed, the absence of affection has a tangible detrimental impact on my physical and emotional health.

In the last ten days, I have been reflecting on why it took as long as it did for me to arrive here. It should have been the easiest thing to do, except that it was not. In the course of multiple conversations, it became abundantly apparent that I am not the only one who forgot my true nature. There is a small chance that some of the lines here may resonate with your own journey.

In the course of exorcising the ghosts and excavating the root cause, all roads eventually lead me to a single precept: the act of judgement.

A study of the nature of judgement is fascinating - our helpless addiction to the act to the point of it being a reflex, impulse and defence mechanism. There is a lot of talk in popular parlance about judgment that is directed at others, but the more you hold space on the subject, the easier it becomes to see that self judgement is the original sin.

All judgement is self-judgement. Violence of any kind and at any level can be traced back directly to self- judgement. You cannot judge a person or their actions without first judging yourself. What we do to others is merely projection, intensification and amplification.

Judgement comes from a sense of lack, a sense of inadequacy, that, in the world we inhabit, can and is picked up faster than a sexually transmitted disease. The first and most damning consequence of self judgement is that you start living almost entirely in your head.

Until such time that you can see, trust, remember that you are enough and have faith in your intrinsic and inherent goodness, it is likely that you fall prey to virtue signaling.

When you are not sure that you are fundamentally a good person - whatever that means to you - is when the idea of having an image rises to the surface. Your own image of yourself becomes predominant. Your imagination of how you show up in the imagination of others becomes paramount.

I should know because I have been there. You dot every i. You cross every t. Your priorities, predilections, projections, prerogatives and performances are all geared towards making you look good. You leave bread crumbs, make the right kind of noises and ensure that you leave a traceable trail of your ‘goodness’ everywhere. Being passive-aggressive becomes your favourite form of non-contact olympic sport.

You unwittingly enrol yourself full time in demonstrating that you are a good person - mostly because you are not sure anymore. The consequences are dangerous, deadly and not worth it.

Right through my mid-twenties, I stopped doing the very things - singing, dancing, writing - that gave me the fulfilment of full expression because I thought I was not good enough. I started making myself disappear or feel that I had disappeared when in front of people.

Opportunity after opportunity - small and big - would pass me by and I would not take them. I would intellectualise that I couldn’t have made use of it in any case or how it was not a big deal or how I have not developed my talent while the rest of the world has run amok or how I totally deserve my lot and feeling that the best days in life are all totally behind me.

You start pushing away the things that you crave and as if that is not bad enough, you hold the world responsible for it. What you end up with is a subtle victim mentality on the one hand because you don’t feel seen and on the other, for the things that you are doing, you feel taken for granted.

Not only are you not good enough, no one else on the planet seems to pass muster. Self-flagellation is also a twisted form of vanity, after a point.

There was nothing wildly wrong in life - I was experiencing meaningful success in my profession as a public speaker and facilitator but the simple fact of the matter is that lack that you feel in one area of your life cannot be compensated by the excess that you might be experiencing in another.

The thing with labels or an image or a reputation is not only that people slot you in a domestic box but that if you don’t pay enough attention to what is going on inside, you begin to question the validity of your own feelings in that moment.

Because you have fallen in love with the image or the sound of your own voice. Because you have fallen in love with the story that you are telling. Because you are tragically, amusingly even, unwilling or unable to call your own bluff.

A few months back I started putting out clips of singing and dancing. I wouldn’t dare do it until last year and would have killed myself for even thinking on those lines until a couple of years back.

I am learning to give myself permission to walk the talk. The most attractive thing in the world is seeing someone who eats their own cooking. Someone who is embodying what they are saying. Someone who is authentic. I have always wanted to be that person.

To me, there is no 'next level' in life.

Being connected with that which is unchanging inside you, finding tribes of people that spread affection like confetti and finding work that fulfils the triple bottomline - invigorates the heart, stimulates the mind and makes you hitch your wagon to something that is larger than yourself.

I hope you find the reckless abandon in you. If you have already, I sure as hell hope that you make it count.

P.S: This is already a long piece. An even longer edition available for those with appetite and attention spans.