I’m Not the Church Lady | The opening Is unimaginable until it isn’t

||| I’M NOT THE CHURCH LADY by ROSIE KUHN |||

The Cultivating Intelligence Chamber isn’t necessarily a place where we cultivate answers. It is a space in which we become willing to rendezvous with what we could not previously imagine.

There she is. Houdini in a paper bag. Fighting like hell to get out.

From outside the bag, it’s absurd. “For God’s sake, just take the bag off!” But from inside the bag, there is absolutely nothing absurd about what Houdini is experiencing. She is trapped. Her body knows she’s trapped. Her nervous system knows she’s trapped. Her history confirms she’s trapped. Her emotions are entirely appropriate to being trapped. Her mind generates strategies appropriate to being trapped. She struggles harder. And every unsuccessful attempt to escape provides further evidence that what she knows to be true is, indeed, true.

See? I told you. I’m trapped.

Now, personally, I know this experience very well. When I’m in the bag, I experience: This is absolutely happening to me and I’m powerless. It’s hopeless and I’m hopeless. And, because I cannot resign myself to defeat, I keep fighting—even though the fighting itself continually confirms that there is something here I have to fight. Jeesh!

I recently got off a call with a client who is Houdini in her own paper bag. All her life she has fought against something she didn’t know she knew, couldn’t see, and couldn’t understand. Somewhere along the way she came to believe that stopping the fight would mean defeat, annihilation, naked vulnerability. That for her was a big HELL NO!!!

Growing up, she believed that if she could somehow win her father’s love, she would finally get what she needed. So she efforted. And efforted. And efforted. And eventually she resented the hell out of having to work so hard while he apparently did nothing.

Then she saw something enormous: part of her still believes that if she had been a better daughter, her father would have been a better father. Holy moly.

She can now see versions of this pattern playing out elsewhere. “I’m busting my ass here! And nothing is changing over there! Why should I change? Why aren’t YOU doing the work?”

She wants out of this pattern. And she doesn’t.

Her resentments are not simply unpleasant feelings she is unwilling to relinquish. They are part of the paper bag itself. And, they help her world make sense. Her paper bag says: This happened to me. It shouldn’t have happened. They were wrong. I was harmed. I am still owed something.

Painful as Hell? yes. But also orienting. The bag tells her where she is, who she is, who everyone else is, and why she feels the way she feels.

So from outside the bag, she hears therapists, sponsors, self-help books saying, “You just need to let go of your resentment,” sounds perfectly reasonable. From inside? “Are you fucking kidding me? Then what am I supposed to do with what happened?

Does letting go mean it was okay? Do they get away with it? Do I have to forgive them? Who am I without this? What protects me then?”

No wonder she stays in the bag while insisting she wants out. I know that’s true for me too!

The Cultivating Intelligence Chamber

This is where what I call the Cultivating Intelligence Chamber becomes important. It is the in-between, where what I already know has stopped being effective—it doesn’t work to bring me to balance, grounded equanimity. And, at the same time, what I will eventually know has not yet become imaginable.

Because stopping the fight may not initially be difficult for Houdini. It may not even be frightening. It may be unimaginable. It isn’t even an option she has considered and rejected. The option does not yet exist yet. And we cannot choose a possibility that does not yet exist within our consciousness as a possibility. (I know this is a brain twister—just sayin. But stay with me.)

This distinction matters enormously to me. Cultivating intelligence isn’t simply learning to make better choices. It is cultivating the capacity through which previously nonexistent choices become perceptible. (Yep, another brain twister.)

For Houdini, her paper bag isn’t shut, because it doesn’t need to be—Escape is unimaginable. Perhaps what Houdini isn’t yet cultivating, then, isn’t the ability to let go of resentment. Maybe it begins much more incremental: There might be a me outside of this paper bag. Not: I should let go. Not: Resentment is spiritually unhealthy. Not even: I forgive. Just: Is there a Me that exists without this ongoing battle?

Until that becomes imaginable, resentment may actually feel safer than freedom. Another Image to Consider. And then my client gave me another image. She said that, being in this Cultivating Intelligence Chamber feels like being the hole in a donut. “Who wants to be the hole in the donut?”

Exactly!

The donut has substance. Identity. Something to grab onto. The hole appears to be nothing. Take away the donut and what exactly have you got? A hole. And who the hell wants to be that? But the hole isn’t actually nothing. It’s space.

And perhaps that is what the Cultivating Intelligence Chamber is cultivating—our capacity to tolerate and allow the terrifying space that appears when we begin loosening our identification with what has defined us but haven’t yet discovered who we are without it.

Not yet freedom. Not yet forgiveness. Not yet letting go.

Space.

I don’t know who I am without this resentment. Okay.
I can’t imagine my life without this story. Okay.
I want out, but I’m terrified of who I’ll be if I get out. Okay.
Nothing has to happen yet. Okay.
This is a Big Fat Be-With in its purest form. Okay!

Because here is something sneaky about the paper bag and the donut: we don’t remain attached to something only because we like it. We can remain profoundly attached through our resistance to it, and we don’t know any different. Fighting it. Resisting it. Analyzing it. Understanding it. Blaming it. Healing from it. Forgiving it. Transcending it. Trying to figure out why we’re still in it. Even desperately trying to let go of it can remain a relationship with it.

I hate what happened. I don’t want what happened. I want to be free of what happened. And yet my life remains organized around what happened.

The paper bag remains the reference point. Houdini isn’t fighting something from outside it. Her entire struggle is occurring from within the reality she’s trying to escape.

What shows up if for just one moment she stops? Nothing is resolved. The bag is still here. She hasn’t forgiven it, understood it, transcended it, or figured out how to escape it. She hasn’t even decided to stop fighting. She is still in it along with the inescapable need to try to escape. However, in that one moment what shows up?

There is simply space.

SPACE HAS ENTERED THE BAG

Just stop fighting for one second.

Houdini doesn’t have to surrender to the bag, accept the bag, forgive the bag, transcend or become One-with-the-Bag.
Because in just one second, something might become available that wasn’t available while all of her attention was organized around escape.

“Wait. What am I actually experiencing? What is actually holding me here?” And perhaps eventually: “Maybe there’s another way to see this. Other people have gotten out of their bags, maybe I could too.”

Show me another way. Not because I’ve cleverly determined there must be another perspective, but because I have reached the edge that says “FIGHT HARDER!”

And this is where accountability enters the Cultivation Chamber

Accountability as a concept is so easily confused with blame. If I’m ask how I participated in something, it is assumed I somehow caused it. And if I caused it, I must be guilty. And if I’m guilty….

NO! HELL NO!!!

Human experience is entangled with countless conditions we did not consciously choose. We inherit biology, family systems, beliefs, relationship patterns, cultural expectations, opportunities and limitations. Other people’s choices affect us. Circumstances happen. Bodies do what bodies do. Mysteries abound.

So perhaps: Did I cause this? Is this my fault? Or did something outside me cause this? is simply another paper bag.

A more useful question might be:

Given everything that contributed to my being here—including what I chose, what I didn’t choose, what I inherited, what happened to me, and everything that remains mysterious—how am I participating now?

What am I perpetuating? What am I unwilling to see? What am I doing now that keeps me here, fighting a god-damn paper bag?

Accountability doesn’t require me to establish causation. It only requires me to willingly become conscious of my participation without requiring myself to be the cause, to blame or to fault.

Sometimes this is a scary space to sit in.

It’s scary because sometimes I already know something I don’t want to know that I know. Because knowing makes a claim on me—it claims that I have to do something.

If I acknowledge that this relationship is destroying me, then what? If I admit the way I’m living is unsustainable, then what? If I acknowledge I have choices, then what?

If I stop fighting the bag, my marriage might end. I might have to say no. I might disappoint someone. I may have to acknowledge something I’ve known for twenty years. I might discover that I have been participating in something I experienced entirely as happening to me. I may lose the innocence of believing I have no choice—that I’m powerless. Hell No, I’m not
going there! Well, Maybe!!!

Sometimes powerlessness protects us from the consequences of power.

The bag may be miserable. The bag may also be holding my world together. And suddenly I have enormous compassion for Houdini. Of course she keeps fighting. Fighting allows her to experience herself as desperately trying to change her circumstances without yet requiring the change that stopping the fight might create.

OMG!!! What a paradox.

I have spent decades fighting for change while simultaneously protecting myself from the change that might occur if I stopped fighting. Yep!

Perhaps this is where mental, emotional, and spiritual intelligence converge. Mental intelligence lets me question the premise: Is this really the only way to see what is happening? Emotional intelligence develops my capacity to experience what arises when another possibility becomes visible. Spiritual intelligence allows me to say: Show me what is true—and help me remain present when what I see changes everything.

So perhaps there are two thresholds in the Cultivating Intelligence Chamber.

• First: Can I perceive a possibility that was previously unimaginable?
• And then: Am I willing to live with what I can now see?

Because eventually the Cultivating Intelligence Chamber isn’t only where the unimaginable becomes imaginable. It’s where the imaginable becomes livable.

Houdini is every one of us. Sometimes we genuinely cannot see the opening. Sometimes we see it but aren’t ready to use it. Sometimes we expend enormous energy fighting circumstances that simultaneously protect us from exercising abilities we already possess.

And sometimes we find ourselves in the Cultivating Intelligence Chamber facing perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: What am I willing to know if knowing means I can no longer live as though I don’t know?

No blame.

No shame.

No guilt required.

Just willingness.

And perhaps, eventually, enough space to discover that the hole in the donut was never nothing.