Vulnerable to Self-Betrayal

Hello beloved reader,

I couldn’t resist one more post before the new year.

My family of origin is definitely counter-cultural.

Not only did my parents build a home that was accessible only by water in Pittwater, an hour North of Sydney, Australia, but these days my family doesn’t really “do” Christmas. This year none of my three sisters, nor my mother, nor I, joined any Christmas gatherings.

My baby sister — who’s 47, and is the youngest of us four sisters (I’m 2nd) — and her American boyfriend (it’s a pattern😉 I’ve been with an American man for 35 years. If you want to know more of the story of my origins, you can read part two of the memoir I’ve serialized here) anyway, my youngest sister and her American boyfriend live in Perth, on the West coast of Australia, and took off for a “12-day bike-packing route in the Jagungal Wilderness area” over on Australia’s East coast, in the vicinity of Kosciuszko National Park.

My older sister who also lives in Perth drove down south with her partner in their “Earth Cruiser” to camp out under the karri trees.

A few years ago, my third sister bought a house in Bulahdelah, NSW, an Australian country town three hours North of Sydney. She turned her garage into a gorgeous granny flat with high ceilings and skylight windows, where our 87-year-old mother now lives. The two of them spent Christmas day hanging out at home.

And I spent Christmas alone in our decades-old log cabin in Southern New Hampshire, USA.

Christmas eve here is simultaneously already Christmas Day in Australia, where of course it’s summer now, compared to 5F/-15C here the other night. We had a one-inch thick, white blanket of snow spread across the landscape and I sat in front of our Jotul wood burning stove watching the orangey-yellow flames dancing over logs and glowing embers.

At 5:00 p.m. my time it was already dark, which was 9:00 a.m. Christmas morning in Bulahdelah. I called my 87-year-old mother, and when she answered the phone I said, “Merry Christmas!”

She’s still sharp mentally, but she replied with surprise,
“Oh is it Christmas?”🤣🤣🤣
Definitely counter cultural🥰

I guess I identify as Interfaith with a particular fondness for Buddhism.

~

Recently I read the following in the astrology app called The Pattern:

This month was about trusting your inner guidance. Right now, at the culmination of the month, it's about how this theme impacts your relationships, particularly your romantic relationships, because that’s often where we’re most vulnerable to self-betrayal.

We so don’t want to be alone that we’ll do anything to be in a relationship, and that’s often where we will compromise ourselves.

So I’ve been thinking about how human beings — women especially — are conditioned by the patriarchy to self-betray.

Examples of self-betrayal include:
saying "yes" when you really want to say "no",
staying in a toxic relationship,
ignoring your own needs for the sake of others,
doing things only from a sense of obligation, rather than feeling a genuine desire,
neglecting your health by not getting enough sleep or eating poorly,
sabotaging your own success,
not speaking up when you feel something is wrong,
essentially acting against your own best interests, despite knowing better.

This old, crumbling, patriarchal hierarchical system that still dominates our culture, benefits the men who are supported by the women who are conditioned to self-betray. Which is a pattern I’ve had to train myself out of too.

And from my perspective, it’s an insidious cycle — women develop an Inner Patriarch to survive in a culture that’s dominated by the patriarchy, and then it’s these women as mothers who raise the men, while often unconsciously self-betraying. So the pattern repeats and repeats.

Until now.

When we bring awareness to self-betrayal, we get to stop doing it.

I’ve spent Christmas alone before and I chose to do so again this Christmas. It’s not that I don’t love my in-laws, I do. However, as Eckhart Tolle says, families can be crucibles for unconscious behavior. Perhaps it’s just that the more history we have with other people, the more challenging it can be to stay in the present moment and not get triggered.

It is true that by putting myself in settings where there is the potential to be hooked into unconscious behavior, I get to challenge myself and practice my ‘self-aware’ muscles. And sometimes I do that too.

It’s like working out — it’s important to challenge the muscles to strengthen them.

But sometimes I want a break from being the ‘outlaw’. And this Christmas, I gave myself the gift of practicing the art of extreme self-care. And I’m ecstatically grateful to the part of me that loves and values myself enough to make this choice. Perhaps it’s my Inner Self-Nurturer🥰

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed my Quiet Christmas. My heart felt full of bliss.

I’m so grateful to have loving relationships in my life, both near and far. But I love my solitude too. As I sat in front of our Jotul wood fire in our decades-old log cabin, with the snow falling gently outside, I felt a peace and harmony in my heart that I like to think radiates out into the world.

~

Yes, there had been negotiations with my partner. I think I’ve shared this on Substack before the phrase I heard a friend say that I adore:

“We’re joined at the heart, not at the hip.”

And I love the themes of interdependence that the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh writes about extensively. I love how interdependence highlights the middle way, with each end of the spectrum being co-dependence at one end, and hyper independence at the other.

My intention is to walk the path of interdependence.

And when when you’re in a 35-year partnership, sometimes it’s healthy for the relationship, to have a little break from each other. There’s truth in that old adage, Absence makes the heart grow fonder, for each of us.

~

I also want to share about the Buddhist sutta we’re presently studying in our sutta study group. It’s called the Satipaṭṭhāna sutta, and it’s working its magic on me. In particular, a friend shared this set of meditations, which I cannot recommend highly enough: Satipaṭṭhāna Meditation with Bhikkhu Anālayo (free meditation recordings.)

Just Bikkhu Anālayo’s voice alone is so soothing and gentle, and I cannot help but smile at the beginning of each of the 7 meditations when he says, “We’re aware of the body in the sitting posture…” He’s German, and there’s something about how he says that phrase that just makes me smile each time I listen to it.

Also the fact that when he’s guiding the meditation about the breath, and he says, “And this breath brings us closer to death…” Maybe I’m just a weirdo, as it makes me smile every time. I just LOVE how Buddhism encourages us to face reality — this physical form of our body will die. And no matter how we may try to deny it, the truth is the truth. The future death of this physical form is a fact of life. And yet consciousness continues.

And the truth of my experience is that the more I remember that I will die, the more I value this present moment here and now. This quote is from Bhikkhu Anālayo’s meditation, just to give you a little grin too.

And we connect with the breath as that which connect us to life.
And we may bring to mind the image of a skeleton, as a reminder of the ultimate destiny of this body, of its fate to fall apart.
And with every inhalation, we’re aware this could be my last breath.
I cannot be sure.
And even if it is not my last breath, it is certainly one breath closer to death.

~

May you enjoy this moment, here and now, with an essence of carpe diem✨🌟💖🙏🕊️

And to give you a chuckle, I used AI to try to create an image based on the above text, and I laughed out loud when I got this:

Maybe the following image is a touch closer, but it shows me just a fraction of what book cover illustrators must wrestle with.

p.s. if you know anyone who may appreciate this Substack, please do invite them to subscribe. We’re at 396 community members and readers, and it’d be fun to get to 400 before the New Year✨🌟💖🙏🕊️