Hopeful Lila at The Confetti Project’s Open Studios. Image by Jelena Aleksich. June 2018
A couple of years back, I had this unfamiliar — yet nearly intelligible emotion. It was a tip-of-the-tongue sort of feeling. Like an aroma I couldn’t quite place. A dream smell, maybe. I remember something like it the first day I opened a car door in Nevada.
It was 2008. My first cross-country road trip. We stopped on the shoulder of the highway to pee. (I know, I know, inadvisable!) As soon as I stepped out, I smelled this … sweetness on the air.
It arrested me.
I didn’t know exactly what it was — but it seemed as though I almost did, even though I was sure I’d never smelled it before. I stood still and I breathed it in.
“That’s delightful!” I said. “That’s delicious! What is it?”
It turned out to be sage. Sage growing lush and rampant on the side of the highway. Flourishing and wild and un-tended.
***
The unfamiliar familiar feeling … it had a quality of pause that felt like the sage. It arrested my momentum. It was such a faint slow rhythm that I had to physically stop myself still, in order to discern what I was feeling. Then I had to get quiet enough on the inside to listen to the tender bird of an answer.
The answer was: contentment.
Holy shit, contentment?!
I’m reminded of the Nathaniel Hawthorne quote, “Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
It’s a fucking butterfly! Don’t. Fucking. Move.
I got off the subway. Don’t fall down the stairs, my brain said. Don’t. Fall down. The stairs.
There it is. The Upper Limits problem.
***
The upper limits problem is a concept I learned from the book Conscious Loving. I tell people about this book. I recommend it to friends. I buy it for friends. And of the entire book, the part I continue to re-read is the part about the upper limits.
The premise of the upper limits problem is: at some point during our childhood we made an association between feeling good and then, rather quickly, feeling bad. We were jumping for joy and babbling exuberantly and got told to keep it down; we brought home good grades and were told not to brag, etc. So at this point, most of us (not all of us, but it really does seem like most of us) unconsciously created a personal glass ceiling — we decided just how much good feelings we are allowed to have.
In the book, they put it this way: “Starting in childhood, most of us seem to put a lid on our positive energy in order to stay at the humdrum level of existence necessary to function in the workaday world,” wrote Kathleen and Gay Hendricks.
My upper limit is much lower than I’d like it to be.
This is why I have buyer’s remorse. This is why I triage without even noticing I’m doing it.
***
Surely, you know an Eeyore.
Someone who seems to have a permanent cartoon raincloud that follows them around, and rains only on them? I have an ex like that. He was one such Eeyore. He had one such raincloud. He, effectively, had no upper limit — in the sense that: his upper limit was so low that any positivity triggered a backlash. He was constantly worrying about money, injuring his body in small ways, burning his tongue on food, complaining about burning his tongue on food, whining about, well, everything, and pretty much consistently annoying everyone around him with his poor volume control and his anxiety and his litany of poor-me’s. He didn’t see how he was contributing to his own raincloud.
He really seemed to think that his raincloud didn’t have anything to do with him.
***
One Valentine’s day, we had a fight after a dance. We were hardly having sex anymore, and I was frustrated (and truth be told, probably also hangry). Two young dancers — girls — were waiting for us to give them a ride home, but this fight had to be had. It had to be had. And so we had it there, in the parking lot.
“It doesn’t really put me in the mood when you get upset about it,” he said. “Maybe if you tried a different tactic.”
(That was a point well-taken. The only one I recall. The rest was bullshit.)
After we dropped the girls off, I asked him from the passenger seat, “Have you ever gone to therapy?”
“No,” he said.
“Don’t you think, it might be a good idea to go?” I nudged.
“Absolutely not!” he said.
“Why?” I implored, slightly scandalized.
“Because I don’t need it,” he said.
Then I was totally scandalized.
Perhaps I chose him because his upper limit was even lower than mine. Then I could feel superior. Powerful. Then I could be the one in our relationship who found joy more easy to come by.
After I broke up with him, he chased after me. Showed up during my yoga classes with flowers. Gave me handwritten love poems. (He’d been writing them for months, but never showed them to me until after I broke up with him.)
He also took to stopping by my apartment.
One time, when the breakup was fresh, he stopped by and I didn’t want to invite him in, so I went outside and sat with him in his car. He was shaking, feverish, his voice was cracking. He said there was something he wanted to tell me. It felt grave. And I had an inkling of what it was. He revealed that he’d been sexually abused as a child. By a family member. He had never told anybody before.
I held him from the passenger seat.
***
In Conscious Loving, the authors describe a typical pattern for reaching your upper limit in relationships.
have fun/have a crash
get close/get sick
be close/start a fight
When I thought back on my (few) romantic relationships, this pattern was obvious in every single one. In fact, immediately after beginning a new relationship, right at the crest of my initial wave of infatuation, I’d usually get a cold. A bedridden, useless to the world, achy, sniffly, pathetic cold. Just when I was feeling so great! Just when I got the good drugs!
The upper limits problem isn’t relegated to romantic relationships, though it might be most apparent with them. The Hendricks’s also note that most of us cannot spend more than a few minutes feeling good with ourselves before needing to bring our energy down to a more manageable level.
I recognized that I hardly ever experience bliss for more than a few moments at a time, without having a distracting thought, worrying, or dropping something.
I realized that, years after I unconsciously created my upper limit — which I don’t remember — I consciously reinforced it. Sometime around high school or college, I adopted a kind of checks and balances theory about my life. I imagined my life as a Trivial Pursuit pie.
In the game of Trivial Pursuit, each person tries to win by getting all of the slices of the pie. The game piece looks like a colorful cheese wheel. Each slice of the pie corresponds to a different category. Blue for Geography, pink for Entertainment, yellow for History, purple for Arts & Literature, green for Science & Nature, and orange for Sports & Leisure.
I imagined the Trivial Pursuit pie of my life to consist of work / family / friendships / romance / hobbies / spirituality / and art. If one aspect was going very well (I got a great part in a play), then another had to be going poorly (fight with my mom). In fact, as soon as something started to go well, I expected the other shoe to drop immediately, and wondered which area of my life it would drop in. I accepted this as the human lot. Not everything can be good at once. That’s just the way it goes.
And then someone said to me, “No, Lila, it can all be good.”
It can all be good? All at the same time? No … really?
No….
Really?
The Hendricks’ suggest that the best way to learn to tolerate more positive energy … is to rest. Take a nap, take a break, go to the bathroom, walk around the block, cut the date short, go meditate, go to bed early. This fascinated me. I had never before considered that positive energy was something I had to learn to tolerate. I could learn to tolerate positivity in service of my wellbeing, in the same way that I could learn to tolerate discomfort for it.
The Hendricks’ propose a new pattern: positive/rest, positive/rest, positive/rest.
So I have decided that “rest-positive” is now a thing, just like “sex-positive” is a thing.
Rest-positive means resisting the cult of busy, refusing to become indoctrinated. It means we don’t try to fill up every moment. Rest-positive means we give ourselves time to integrate anything we’ve just experienced. This is why my yoga teacher training insisted that we teach the Corpse pose at the end of every class for at least five minutes, and why yoga teachers often spout that it’s “the most important pose.” One of my students calls it The Gift. It gives us the chance to integrate the experience we’ve just had. It gives us a bridge between transformation and the subway.
Rest can mean any of a number of grounding practices.
“Part of the Upper Limits Problem is that your physical boundaries are transcended. Part of being loving to yourself is to find ways of coming back to the ground again without unpleasant side effects. Falling down is an unloving way to get yourself grounded, while taking a walk is much more kindly.” In case you were wondering how, I have made you a list.
Here are some ways to rest:
the power nap (20 minutes or an hour and a half)
the meditation / breathing / dance break (even 2-5 minutes would serve)
the artist’s date (per The Artist’s Way, taking your inner artist on a solo expedition)
the electronics/social media detox (TURN OFF YOUR PHONE)
the run / jog / wog (walk-jog)
the “excuse me for a moment, I need to use the restroom” (my favorite)
the brisk walk around the block
the Do Not Disturb sign (make like a hotel room)
the period of silence (“could we just be quiet for 10 minutes?”)
the restorative yoga session
the nature walk / sprawl
the lighting of candles (the UU’s have a beautiful practice of lighting candles for joys and concerns, both spoken aloud and silent, depending on your personal wish)
I usually think of self-care as medicine for what ails me, or as routine maintenance, but never as a technique to increase my capacity for good juju.
I want it. I want more goodness, more positivity, more joy, more orgasms!
Do you?
Rest. And raise the roof.
