Neutrality

Oh Holy Phool, Blessed Guides and Supreme Being! Please be with me in my thoughts, words, deeds and actions today, and show me the light, love and laughter in all that I encounter! Please give light and peace to my words and pull out of me that which is not me, and help me to share the best that is me with those who are needing it. Amen.

Neutrality. This has been the theme of the day. This is where most of my energy and focus has been going, working through layers and layers and layers of drama. I even wrote (and am now rewriting) a post about drama, one which was loaded with it. I felt like it was neutral, and then my precious Projector shone some light on it, and I saw that while it was closer to neutral, it wasn’t there yet. Still in drama.

So rather than write about drama, through layers of drama, I want to attempt to write about neutrality, through this new and exciting lens of neutrality. When I say “lens” – it feels almost like a combination microscope/telescope, with a viewer right in the middle that shows me both sides equally the same, at the same time, in perfect focus.

When I’m in drama, the connection is to only one end of the viewer. Microscope – minutiae, details, blind spots everywhere, no big picture. Telescope – no sensitivity, no subtlety. Both ends are exhausting. What’s more, when in drama, there is no awareness of the calm center, and so I make the mistake of thinking that I am the calm center, and that all drama is going on around me. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s the nature of drama. When I am in it, I’m in it, and I am therefore either blinded by my attention to (my own) detail, or I am oblivious by my fascination with the big picture. Either way, I’m only looking at one end, and seeing my end as the right end. It doesn’t matter what the drama is about, or who started it, or how long it’s been going on – drama is drama, and fixating on either end of the viewer is engaging in it.

Neutrality, however, is something altogether different. I’ve been getting interesting lessons lately in neutrality. I know someone who is so “Zen” about her approach to life that it used to disturb me a little. “How could she be so calm? There’s so much stuff going on! How can she not take a side, stand up for something, express her opinion, express her feelings?” (as you can see, I have always been very passionate and hard-headed. Aries Moon in the first house. I wear my heart on my sleeve. And as he said in “Fight Club,” “How’s that workin’ for ya?” exactly.) Last week, in the middle of my crisis, this person, this wonderful example, told me how much she loves me, and that she was neutral in my fight. That was a shock to me. “If you love someone, don’t you have to take a side? Don’t you have to stand up for them?” That was my first authentic glimpse into neutrality, my first real understanding of the idea of “Yes, And…”

The next day, I had my energy healing, and my wonderful energy healer gave me another big lesson. He was there to observe, and to remove anything that wasn’t me, to clear the clutter, as he said. Not there to judge, condemn, assess or evaluate. And yet he was quite clearly on my side, in the moment, of working to do the very best for me and all involved. Remove that which isn’t working, keep that which is, that is all.

Reading Michael Tamura gave me the word. I hadn’t really grokked the concept and applied the word to it until I read his book, and it just blew my socks off. Neutrality started to seep into my consciousness.

On Sunday night, working with my friend on her conflict – well, it’s so easy to see both sides of someone else’s drama, isn’t it? I looked at my beautiful friend and the tension in her face and said, “get to neutral.” And it was so amazing to watch as she struggled to find it. I could literally see the tension of the drama pulling her down, and I had never seen that before. It’s always been there, I just had never seen it because I had never willingly backed away from a fight before! Imagine, pulling away from a fight when it’s one of your best friends in it. I just kept getting these fleeting glimpses of neutrality, and how sweet it was there, how sweet she was there. It took us about 2 hours or so of focused work, but we did finally make it to a lovely neutral spot.

Yesterday, I got yanked. When you seek neutrality, you’re gonna get yanked. I got yanked, I got sucked into my own drama, I reacted in drama. I stopped looking through the middle of the viewer. And I got blindsided by the short-sightedness of my resulting reactions. Yanked-n-spanked. “Stay neutral,” whispers my spirit, and all my earthly guides joined back in chorus. Just stay neutral.

And I had one more lesson from a friend today. An incredibly gifted, amazing artist, she is about to have her first one-woman show – a long-awaited dream, and therefore one riddled with anxiety. I had just come home from a long walk, thinking about drama and neutrality, and she sent me a gift – her worries, her drama. It was like a miracle, this gift to be able to see the same miracle I was going through her experience. She gave me this sentence: “my career is on the line.” Wow. Having, of course, just had the course of my whole career change in a heartbeat and yet being on the other side and still smiling, laughing, learning, loving and breathing, I realized that I could be at perfect neutral for her for that worry, that drama. And I saw her career as a line, a line in one of her drawings. Both ends – success or failure – are both present, both are equally beautiful, and both are being held up by the same perfect composition. The neutral point, the place in the middle that supports both ends, is the place in the drawing where the eyes rest.

In my mind’s eye, neutrality is a fulcrum point. Drama resides at the ends of the seesaw. Depending on the situation, I get different seesaws. My work/life drama to me is a bright, shiny silver seesaw in outer space that spins so fast I can’t tell the poles apart and make the mistake of thinking there are no poles, no neutral point, no drama. My friend’s conflict seesaw was a good ol’ wooden playground seesaw, the kind with the deep grooves in the ground under it. My other friend’s drawing seesaw was actually a surreal vine supported by a feather (her drawings are amazing. Amazing.) And each seesaw has a neutral point, which has a bright, shining gem, star, beacon, something.

It’s so beautiful at Neutral. I’m still just getting fleeting glimpses of what it’s like to be there, but just that is enough to make it very enticing. The misconception I had before was that all the action was at the poles. Go to your pole, stay on your end, and that’s where the effort, energy and action would all take place. It’s true that at the poles is where you get to feel the g-forces – you do get that adrenaline rush, but it pushes and forces you into immobility. You can do nothing while spinning out of control, held down by gravity. What I’m learning is that all the action happens at neutral. Sneaky, huh?

At neutral, you get to see both ends. At neutral, you don’t miss a thing. At neutral, the heavens open, and there is magic. And light, laughter, love and joy. The miracles happen at neutral. Not at effort, or attachment or spinning out of control. The miracles happen at neutral, because neutral is where you can finally let go of attachment to outcomes, because at neutral you can finally see that both sides of the drama are perfect and beautiful, and so are all of the players.

Neutral is not passive. Neutral is not apathetic. Neutral is love for all. Neutral carries the power to stop the madness. Neutral is non-resistance. Neutral is defenselessness. Neutral can solve the economic crisis, the Middle-East crisis, world hunger, genocide, global warming, and can soothe a broken heart and mend a broken relationship. Neutral is that powerful. All we have to do is get there.