For those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like, coming up against the feelings of guilt, shame, and frustration at being unable to get our work done can feel like torture.

This can lead to anxiety and the urge to run away entirely.

Instead, if we sit with these hard feelings to examine where they may be coming from, we give ourselves the opportunity to name it, and give it a tangible presense rather than allowing it to be a mysterious force we are up against.

Pausing with this fear then brings with it the possibility that the emotion is our mind's attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.

If we can have the bravery to sit with our fears and combine it with the care of giving ourselves space, we are often more receptive to the possibilities which allow us to move forward.

And even if we say, "This is all I can do for now," we can invite a future self to return.

Transcript

I should know this by now.

I should be able to do this by now.

Maybe I'm sitting at the piano, the spreadsheet, the page of whatever report. Somehow as this work sits in front of us, this tiredness appears, and we might wonder, maybe I'm just not able.

Maybe I'm dumb. Maybe I'm not confident enough.

There's that moment where the work stops making sense, and the mind reaches for some verdict about ourselves in that. That's where I wanna look at it right now. There's that feeling of tiredness, of bleakness, of confusion, a sense of not getting it, and it can happen anywhere.

Recently I'd been playing at the piano. I was trying to understand some jazz chords. Symbols are right there in front of me. I know what they mean. Still, something stalls. There's this cloud that forms, hard for me to memorize, hard for me to know what goes where and when, and somehow it's just not coming to mind.

Pushing through, using force often begins with that word of "should."

I should get this.

I'm not smart enough.

I'm not capable enough.

We're reading the emotion of confusion, or whatever it is, some negative feeling, as evidence of our own ineptitude.

A shift, and the practice of it

There is a way through, and it has a couple of parts that are hard to separate. A shift in how we hold the moment and the practice of that shift over time.

What do I mean?

The change of perspective is a change of how we look at something. We often hear this in a simple phrase like, "Don't worry about it."

But a shift of perspective cannot be done by dissociation. Don't worry about it doesn't exactly work. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a job. We can't simply leave the original perspective behind. There's history behind it, and therefore emotion, which can't be argued with.

We don't simply adopt a new view and drop the one that hurts. Instead, the practice is to hold both at once, the old sense and the possibility of the new side by side.

This is one of those strengths of the psychoanalytic approach, for example. There we practice following associations. We come to a recognition that conflicting perspectives can be held at the same time.

Nothing has to be banished for a new idea to show up. And then over time, one may form over the other.

So we begin often by asking how we feel about the story we're telling ourselves. That asking itself can create a space of observation, an area a little bit freer of that belief's influence, even in the act of acknowledging it.

That sense of, "Oh, this means I'm dumb." Okay, how do I feel about that idea, that thing that comes to mind? Well, I don't like it, or I'm upset about it, or whatever it is, but it's there.

The pause initiates that process, pausing with the emotion, with the pain, with the fear. That space then holds a possibility that the emotion is the mind's own attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.

It may not be telling us in the best possible way, but it's saying something. Confusion, at least in this way, is not inherently negative. The first step is to simply stay with it and to notice that the negative charge is something we have added in some way.

The shove

What turns the emotions negative beyond the perspective is that shove, is it's that I have to study this, the test is tomorrow.

When we cut corners in that memorization and bypass the play that would have otherwise let that understanding settle in, we leave the session without having understood.

We lose the signal that confusion could have given us. Further, we also deepen the sense that we cannot do things deliberately, that we must rely on these harsh measures against ourselves.

Instead, resting our attention on the emotion, on the confusion, or any other negative sense, we can ask, "What is confusing about this?"

An answer may or may not come. But more importantly, in that pause, in that waiting with that feeling, we've practiced bravery.

What makes it bravery

All right, what makes that bravery? There's this idea I keep returning to from a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich. "Anxiety," he says, "has no object." It's this cloud.

Meanwhile, fear has an object, something that can be faced.

Much of courage is the slow work of turning the cloud into an object, naming the thing so it can be met, turning the anxiety into a fear.

When we stay with the confusion, perhaps worried about what it might mean to us, and ask what exactly is confusing about it, we're doing that. We're letting the fog crystallize into something we can look at.

We remained with the sense that we do not know. We stayed with the confusion as it went on, being tangled up with the old belief that we're somehow dumb or otherwise.

Were we to shove ourselves through or bolt off to find something shinier somewhere else, something on fire somewhere else, we would have lost that chance.

That pause enabled the practice of bravery.

The harder part is that even while staying with this thing that we fear we cannot do, we may still discover that we cannot.

We may not understand it. We may still be just as confused as we began, if not worse.

Injured this way can be terribly hard to hold on to a larger possibility, which is that I can't do this now, but maybe it's just about now. Maybe it's just about not today.

That revisit again and again sometimes helps work it through. But it's hard to hold on to that perspective. Even so, it may never come to us, and we don't know.

Tempering bravery with care

That too is what makes this bravery. There's real fear. Fear is not always unfounded. So we temper our bravery with care.

A sword is made out of steel. Steel that's only hardened, quenched, and made as hard as it can be is brittle and shatters at that first real blow.

Tempering is a gentle heat afterwards, and it trades a little of that hardness for toughness, so the blade can flex under a strike and survive it.

Care is that gentle heat. Bravery alone, untempered, is hard, brittle, tends to shatter on exactly the day it meets real resistance, the day we find the fear was founded. But tempered with care, it can bend and hold.

So we can ask ourselves, to what degree does staying here actually serve me?

I'll give you another example. When we lift weights, we don't do well by trying to lift the most we possibly can. That's how we injure ourselves. Muscle grows faster than bone and tendon. If we just try to lift as much as we can, something will break somewhere.

We attend instead to the sensations of the movement, the good and bad pain that we can feel, a rough division between what builds us and what harms us.

The same principle holds in our work. This bravery and care becoming courage.

When care itself holds us back

Care is not an unmitigated good. I did a episode on this some time ago.

Overzealous, it can hold us back from the work. We procrastinate. We avoid on impulse. Maybe we tell ourselves we are waiting for better conditions or that things must be just right before we begin.

With this hypertrophied sense of care, we may avoid the work entirely. And bravery without care is reckless.

While care without bravery can lead to stagnation. Bringing them together, bravery and care, courage.

Simple, but not easy

The practice is simple and of course, not easy. Simplicity is this: when we run into the difficult sense inside work, the confusion, the overwhelm, the loss, we can pause and ask what exactly is confusing, overwhelming, and raging about it.

Somewhere in there, we may be able to shrink our vision, slow ourselves down, find something smaller that we can hold onto, maybe even find some ease, and maybe face that question, is this all I can do?

Back at the piano, the chord chart sits in front of me, C minor seven, F seven, B-flat major seven, two, five, one, rootless chords.

How do I ever remember these formations? I don't know how to do this. How does anyone know how to do this?

I feel that strain. My mind goes blank. I could stay and push, but then frustration builds. Trouble builds in that push.

Try to give ourselves the hollow reassurance that belief alone would carry us. I can make it through if I only believe enough.

No, I don't have that belief. Force is hollow. Instead, I face it with that courage, and I find, yeah, that's all I can do right now. It's all I know.

And I can sit there and maybe somewhere in those moments I'll be able to find something. But if I push, I'll become injured. I'll start to not like it. I'll start not to want to play.

That's where that child says, "Ah, I don't wanna play the piano anymore." That's why they say that, "I'm not good at this."

Time, and the return

But there is another strength at our side: time. We can say, "This is it for this moment," whether we pause for a few moments and see if another wave of something comes from within, or we go longer.

We can invite a future self to return — a difficult thing for all the reasons I already mentioned. But if we can make that visit tomorrow, meaning an invitation to ourself, we might find that some part of us has worked out of sight, loosened the confusion, eased the overwhelm.

Those are the moments of insight that seem to arrive on their own, that stir out of the times we stayed when we faced the demon, the lion, the darkness of the forest.

So at the piano, I let go. I let go of the keys. In a few moments, I might bring my fingers back to the keys.

Or I might realize, "No, no, no, this is pushing. This is going beyond something. It's time to let go of the session itself." But then invite myself tomorrow.

I rest in the knowledge that I've been there now, and I can return tomorrow. And tomorrow comes, and I realize, "Ah, what if I shrink the vision to only practicing the two chord and the B formation? Ah, so that's the shape."

And I work to only get better at that, that little tiny something. And in the ease that gradually forms in that simple repetition of something tiny, a bit of play often appears.

What if I poke randomly at any key? Can I form a rootless two chord from that? Oh, yes, I can. What if I tried it there too? Ah. Well, sometimes nothing comes.

Whatever we find, we're stronger for having made the attempt. Both care, bravery, and ultimately courage.

Music — Unwritten

Staying with a hard thing, setting it down for a while, its own kind of a return. I end with a piece called "Unwritten." I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

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