How Not to Be a Hot Mess - A Survival Guide for Modern Life - Craig Hase Page 0,29

But what starts to happen is that we get a little less off track, and then a little less, until finally we’re on track, or pretty semi-close to on track, most of the time.

One of my teachers used to call this the fluorescent light bulb theory of enlightenment. Remember those old fluorescent light bulbs that, when you hit the light switch, would click on and off, then on and off, faster and faster, until what you saw was just a continual stream of clear light? (Okay, if you’re under thirty you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.) Anyway, our experience with refining speech is a little like that. We do good, then not so good, then good again, then a big kerfuffle. But gradually, gradually, we get a little better and a little better and a little better as time goes on, until one day we look up and actually our life is way less hectic than it used to be. We’re apologizing less for the dumb things we said. We’re not constantly putting out fires. Our friends are, actually, pretty much never mad at us anymore. That’s the capacity that we have to live a sane life right in the middle of the hot mess of the world without being such a hot mess ourselves.

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So lying is bad. But we all lie. It’s actually really hard to stop lying, but there are good reasons to try—like better relationships, less stress, and feeling good about yourself when you rest your head on your pillow every night. Still, we don’t have to go on blathering about everything that traipses through our skull, either. In fact, the Buddha offered a framework for how to think about this in four questions: True? Kind? Timely? Helpful?

All that said, my observation is that speech—which we’re doing, in one way or another, constantly, all day, every day—is right at the heart of the matter of bringing more sanity into your life. Or, in the reverse, making things that much more crazytown. Now, of course the world may continue to spin out and get messy and people may keep gossiping and criticizing and aggravating and undercutting. A lot of that might not change. But there is something just a little extraordinary that happens when you make a conscious decision to stick with these principles we’ve been talking about over the past bunch of pages. And this speech thing, especially, is huge. You can really start to shift things for yourself if you take this one to heart.

Next up, sex. Because actually the Buddha had a lot to say about sex. Okay, what Devon’s going to say here is only very loosely based on what the Buddha actually said, to be sure. But I’d like to think that if the Buddha were alive today as a cisgender thirty-eight-year-old American nonmonastic woman, he’d say something a lot like what you’re about to read.

MAKE SEX GOOD

Devon

Let’s kick off this chapter with a quick contemplation about sex, shall we?

You can do this while you read but you might want to slow down a bit. Maybe take a brief pause after each question. Let it drop in, let it work on you. No need to come up with a clear or perfect answer. Just ask the question. Pause. Feel your body. And see what comes up.

Ready? Please get cozy, and take a few mindful breaths. Now ask yourself these questions:

What is sex about, for me?

What is my version of good, powerful, meaningful sex?

How do my deepest values inform my sex life?

How might my sex life express my deepest values?

Okay, how was that? Don’t worry if you’ve got nothing. Maybe you feel blank and numb and weird inside. Or maybe you’re flooded with a disorganized river of thoughts, images, memories, emotions. Or maybe you had a little insight. All those experiences are fine. The trick is, whatever’s happening in the mind and heart and body—whether it’s newfound clarity or a truckload of sludge and muck—just know it clearly, and keep knowing it, and see how it develops over time.

For me, I’ve been sitting with these questions my entire adult life. I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I thought I’d share a few pieces of my own story and a couple of thoughts on where I believe we are, all of us, in this sociohistorical moment of highly sexualized global capitalist culture.

Which is to say, I’d like to start by talking about shame.

THE