On Being Human by Jennifer Pastiloff & Lidia Yuknavitch

Author:Jennifer Pastiloff & Lidia Yuknavitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

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IN MY WORKSHOPS, I talk about how unbelievably hard it is to break patterns. How we can’t beat ourselves up when we struggle. We all struggle. Always. It’s part of being human. I would see someone come to my workshops again and again, the same person, and she would write the same things down when asked what she wanted to let go of. Every time.

I didn’t judge. I was, in my late thirties and early forties, doing the exact same thing. Moaning how I needed to let go of the belief that I didn’t deserve a future, that I couldn’t plan anything. I would panic when I had to think about any moment beyond the one I was living in. I’d hear these women (it wasn’t just one woman, we all do this) repeat the same things over and over. It was from the listening of them that I saw myself.

If I wasn’t asking now what? after every pattern I claimed I wanted to break, then I was just making a list of reasons why I sucked. I saw these women doing this, paying a whole bunch of money to come to a weird yoga workshop and just make a list that they would stick in a drawer and forget about. It’s what we do. (Which is why I hate New Year’s resolutions.)

I started asking them to ask themselves that question. And not for the litany of what they perceived as their flaws, but one at a time. If I was asking them to do this, I absolutely had to do the same thing. I thought about how, despite my complex relationship with my mom, she has taught me so much. She introduced me to Wayne Dyer’s work, and without him I would have never started the journey I am on. When I started dating Robert and I was deep in the cycle of overexercising and starving myself (yet another pattern that came and went over the years like a virus), I called my mom and said, “I don’t know, Mom. He’s so great, but I am not sure I am ready for a relationship. I like my routines. I like coming home from The Newsroom and being able to go and do my walk and exercise and not have to talk to anyone and sit on the computer all night if I want to. If I have a boyfriend, I can’t just do whatever I want.”

She said, “If you keep doing what Jenny Jen P has always done, you’ll keep getting what Jenny Jen P has always gotten.”

“Oh my god, Mom. Did you really just call me ‘Jenny Jen P’? But, ugh, you’re right. Why are you always right? I love you. Bye.”

Jenny Jen P was my nickname and my AOL Instant Messenger screen name and e-mail address at the time. Essentially, my mother was asking me to ask myself, now what? I would have talked myself out of allowing myself to be in a relationship just so I could keep up my self-destructive patterns.

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