Alienation and Spiritual Family

Using spiritual seeking to heal the karmic wounds and break the habitual predilections with which we incarnate into our family of origin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy stern,
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can.
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse

The wheel on the back of the disposable camera grinds beneath my tiny, ten year-old thumb. I struggle with it. I can’t get the next shot cued.

Thirty-five year-old me wants to say that one of the three subjects that I’d been immortalizing in film gets impatient and snatches the camera from me to solve the problem. But maybe that’s a sort of hallucination that didn’t really happen. I might only remember it that way due to the memory being “over-developed” from too much recall.

It took a quarter century for this image to clarify into something I think I understand now. And I recognize that every random time it sprung to mind, my remembering-self’s emotional state altered the original mental imprint a bit more.

Like an errant pixel in a deep fried meme that has been compressed to jpeg 50 times, maybe my subject’s irritation with my preteen incompetence is an artifact. 

Or maybe, sticking to the image technology of the time, it is a double-exposure. The way Victorian ghosts were imprinted on ancient film: semi-transparent because the same frame was used to capture photos twice. 

It could be that the frustration they felt, and the Alienation and unworthiness it inspired, comes from a different childhood moment. Cutting my steak wrong and having my plate slid, with exasperation, across the table. Vacuuming, observed by a guardian with bent elbows as if they were ready to dive in and take over when I screw it up.

The core of the memory, I’m pretty sure, is based in reality though.

My mom and the daughters she had in her teens to a different father, ten and eleven years before I was born, are posing as Charlie’s angels in our backyard. Back to back, hands held out as guns, each in a different action pose.

The pose speaks of solidarity. They are a team. An impenetrable huddle. They are ready to take on the world together. 

They are possibly a little bit buzzed, though I’m not sure I understood that at the time. Often, if things were treated as funnier than I found them, I just laughed along, not quite understanding. 

The weird little kid. Too talkative. Asking too many questions all the time. Constantly trying to entertain. Too needy and insecure. Too dramatic.

Other.

It’s far, far from the worst trauma. 

Another person in that three-girl, one-Geoff house would likely have a totally different recollection of it. Undoubtedly, their experience wasn’t one of intentional exclusion. I know that from another framing, like any baby boy of a single mom, I was babied and adored. 

Yes, my mom thought I was beyond special. Perhaps you could say, “God’s gift.” 

She never understood why I wouldn’t shut up about how much I felt I “sucked.” 

Maybe because I was genetically primed to be Bipolar, my personality-forming mental processes really clung to that seesaw. The poles of feeling like I absolutely Belonged—totally valued, accepted, and loved—and alternatively, feeling totally Alienated. Like I should be anywhere else.

I can remember being four or five and hiding under the table, trying to make myself as small as possible. 

I can remember feeling like an unwanted burden who needed a ride to school even though I should have been old enough to walk. 

I can remember being told I was whining constantly. 

Though appropriately boy-numb then, these days I imagine I can remember feeling my first stabs of alienation and loneliness when I was reminded, once again, that I was the only boy surrounded by women.

To a different child, who incarnated with different karma—or a different, neurotypical genetic makeup—none of this might have even made an imprint. 

I'm just a kid
And life is a nightmare
I'm just a kid
I know that it's not fair
Nobody cares
'Cause I'm alone and the world is having more fun than me

Simple Plan’s I’m Just a Kid

Because of my peculiar neurochemistry—a bipolar Creep, a Liminal Trickster Mystic doomed to vacillate between Alienation and Belonging—these innocuous events evoked the emotional charge to become long term memories. Not only that. Because of the disposition I brought into the world from either epigenetic trauma or metaphysical ephemera or the inheritance of a technological culture’s endemic isolation, I encouraged more of this behavior from my caregivers. 

According to Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, the samskaras of my body were likely twisted at birth to doom me to believe myself an example of the Hated Child archetype.

Samskaras are accidents of posture and gesture that communicate nonverbal messages, leading to different expectations and treatment from others. 

Seventy percent of communication is nonverbal and unconscious. Why would we assume the habitual tightening of one’s forehead to produce a worried expression or the unintentional slumping of the back that connotes meekness to not be communicative just because they’re the innate, unconsidered dispositions of children?

You don’t even have to consciously notice someone’s samskaras to have a reaction to them. The narrative you form about a person can be radically influenced by information that only your subconscious pays attention to. The way crows' feet signal that a person has a kind smile and a life of sun exposure and boozing gives someone a dangerous look, your interpretation of a person’s character is influenced by the muscles that they don’t know they’re holding contracted.

According to the tradition of Classical Yoga that Cope teaches, these communicative physical contortions are the result of karma that we’re born with from past lives.

Karma that can be burnt off. Wounds that can be healed. Experiences that our Higher Self has selected for us to learn through.

Let’s say Earth is a school for souls that are learning everything we need to know to create our own universe as fully fledged, compassionate, benevolent gods. It’s perhaps too woo to be grasped with credulous sincerity, but you only need to entertain it to the degree necessary to see how it will influence your experience of life in a pragmatic sense.

Applying it to my admittedly biased narrative above, what changes? Is my perception of Alienation from my family of origin the spark that starts a fire to burn away my little piece of our society’s collective shadow? Is the part of our global healing that is mine to bear a tiny, personal chunk of our collective isolation?

Is that why I spent my childhood indoors, staring at Barney the dinosaur and experiencing the rest of my surroundings as an intimidating void of darkness? Or why, as I grew, I was swept up into the isolating computer game craze? 

Is that why I punched my fist through a bathroom mirror when my friends made plans with my ex without me? Is my blood still staining my high school hallways?

Is this karmic mission to process a piece of our civilization’s built-in isolation why I was so affected by social distancing and working from home?

DALLE’s interpretation of the Jimmy Eat World lyrics below

Hey, don't write yourself off yet
It's only in your head you feel left out 
or looked down on
Just try your best
Do everything you can…

Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle

Should I look at this as a list of grievances and moan “poor me?” 

Or am I here to fully, deeply, viscerally feel the piston action as my mood vacillates between Belonging and Alienation. To feel that core tear, the hopeful return, and the anxious ripping away again… to learn something from it?

Is that why I have a son due in less than a month. A son with a ten year age gap between him and his big sister?

Am I here to nourish him the way I needed, but didn’t get? 

We can picture an enormous metaphysical reservoir of loneliness and isolation lurking in our civilization’s collective unconscious. We can think of it as a dismal beast built from all-consuming darkness. 

Am I meant to bite a chunk off that shadow, chew it for 30 years and begin metabolizing it into love, nurturance and support for my son, my daughter and myself?

Maybe that’s why I’ve manifested the Creekmasons.

Like any quasi-mystical Sangha, we can serve the role to one another as a sort of “idealized family.” Like how priests are Fathers, monks are brothers, or Manson had a Family.

These are the people who never seem to think I talk too much. I’ve never gotten feedback on my very whiny essays that I’m too damn whiny. 

The same karma that created everything I’ve spent this space complaining about—and all the resultant attachment style damage—brought me to a group of delightful weirdos who seem infinitely patient to hold space for my processing, development, healing and growth.

I think that’s natural. Almost like an inevitable result of karma.

If we’re open to it, causality tends to ferry us into situations and communities through which we can practice healing the wounds that we took on in childhood. When I project my trauma onto my idealized Creekmason family, their exquisite attention and deep tenderheartedness provide a safe space for me to break the patterns and heal from it.

Yes, unchecked, unacknowledged, unexamined, or unconscious, this kind of role projection onto a spiritual community could be problematic, even disastrous. It’s something every community should bear in mind. As Stephen Cope points out about Kripalu, seeing a guru as an idealized father or your fellow seekers as idealized siblings could leave you vulnerable to abuse—either as perpetrator or victim.

But I’m grateful. So grateful. My confrontation with the pulsating liminality of alternating between fierce Belonging and stifling Alienation seems to have drawn the Creekmasons to me. Resultantly, it drew books, practices, and beliefs into my life that empower healing.

Recalling Larkin’s poem, the one that started the essay, does humankind’s misery really need to “deepen like a coastal shelf?”

Or are we getting closer and closer to feeling our feelings, doing the work, healing from our trauma, and metabolizing the shadowy pain that seems to be the default inheritance of a human incarnation?