Why I'm Insecure

Just a few days back, I was at the receiving end of a lashing out over a comment I made "I'm jealous of that person", which was based on a misunderstanding that the person was showing me their object of fascination, which wasn't the case, after all.

I don't know how many ministers will admit to being insecure. I would.

To be an effective minister, I need to question my comfort zone, my assurances, my sense of certainty, my relevance and effectiveness. Despite that I do not at all question the value of me being alive and worthy of love, it still matters to me to give space to the fact that I may not be valuable to one person or another, and those people may be people who matter to me --- they could be my congregants, my stakeholders, and others. 

Is insecurity evil? Do we have to be secure all the time? What is it like being insecure or secure?  How many people can actually say, "I will be in a great place no matter if no one likes me at all?"  I wonder if those same people have any appreciation for human connection and how isolation is really evil.

Do I get jealous? Hardly, but yes. I'm human. I would wonder about inequalities, discrimination, and equal opportunity.  Is jealousy evil?  Does it deserve a huge harsh reaction that judges my insecurity? Without giving the self-interested answer, I would then ask the question, "How was the jealousy expressed?"  Was it expressed to assert control over a person or was it a friendly?  It's like how a love song by Damien Rice can go, "I can't take my mind off of you.  I can't take my mind off of you.  I can't take my mind off of you. I can't take my mind off of you", and so on.  This is dangerous and lethal at its worst, but really very very normal for people who are in the beginning stage of romantic attraction.  Must the object of fascination feel threatened? Not necessarily, especially if it wasn't told you the way Damien Rice said it repeatedly.

Once, I entered the office of the New York Anti-Violence Project to have myself checked.  My partner said I needed myself checked. After a series of tests and interviews, it was concluded that my easily-offended partner was the one who had been violent to me, psychologically.  She, after all, held my passport, was controlling the finances, and earned 3 times I did. She also wanted to control my interests, managing my band, etc. Bossy was not something I easily detected because I grew up with really strong women.  My grandmother was like Margaret Thatcher and we lived in an all-female home with my cousins who were great decision-makers, all at least 10 years older than me.  I have a blindness to this kind of domination and controlling behavior.  And the guilt trip is such a useful tool against me, someone who constantly re-examines, "Have I done well? Am I harming someone?"

A single minister like me, looking for a potential partner, is highly vulnerable.  I have a policy that I can only see counsellees in public places like a café, otherwise, they will have to chat only online.  I don't know how far worse it is for the members of a royal family, but we, ministers, have to ensure that we have our vocation in mind when we connect with people. Sometimes my friends joke, "Do you play your minister card when you date people?"  I have unequivocally said no.  How can someone do that and expect an authenticity on the other side of the table?  I think the best way is to play the crazy girl card and let the other person feel comfortable with their own crazy.  And so I usually mention I'm an artist with many mediums, --- a drummer, a music video director,  a training designer, an entrepreneur. 

And this is what keeps me wanting to maintain my insecurity - that I want to keep myself open to surprises, avoiding being comforted with my assumptions or my expectations.  I'd like to know that I can live with uncertainty, surprises, the unplanned, the getting lost, the errors and the trials.  I will occasionally say I'm jealous, don't worry, it will be harmless, you don't need to address it, you don't need to change, I never wanted to be in charge of someone else's life.  I think it's better to be loved than feared.  I took on this "job" of being inspirational to other people and have been paid well, have been recognized, and have been consistent in making sure I've been accountable to those whose lives I affect.

I am insecure because I want to make sure you are okay with the things I do, that I don't harm you, that I help you, that I don't live in a bubble of entitlements.  This makes me anxious sometimes, that's for sure.  Again, not to worry, I am an avid learner of Zen in order to breathe in the unexplainable and befriend my demons. 

Attention. Conversation. Communion.

In business, politics, and religion, any revolution needs these three means of transformation. And they could be the last frontier of preserving the soul of the human race.

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In medieval times, Empire can do as they please and ranters get killed. Now ranters just go on FB and complain and think there’s free speech until disappearances, assasinations, mass shootings and hate crimes go unabated while health care is doomed, drugs insist upon our social fabric, poverty rises and oligarchs get subsidies and protections from prosecution. The very act of organizing society has solidified inequalities in power and economic opportunities.

I’ve always marvelled at the difference between East and West. Yes, I’m likely to extol our Eastern values of community, interbeing, and fluidity, while consistently questioning if there’s anything that came from the West that has nothing to do with nihilism. Many Western research do not seek beyond the West in attributing how ideas and thoughts have emerged, often completely ignoring the sophistication of ancient Eastern civilizations for their own supremacy notions.

I am biased, that is true. And that’s because it has been an excruciating journey of decolonizing from the dominant narrative. For three decades, I’ve supported, been employed, volunteered for, and assisted more than 30 social development agencies, non-government organizations, and other non-profits possessed by one question : how do we make the goods of the world more accessible to those who are disadvantaged by the prevailing cultures and systems.

In the course of my years-long inquiry, I’ve observed that organizations tend to produce the very problems that they seek to address. For instance, if inequality is to be solved, how can inequality within organizations first be resolved? My inquiry has brought me to become an avid student of organizational development and led me to found a company (Aman Sinaya Management Services) which is currently undergoing its own leadership transformation. The very act of organizing is inherently characterized by a scarcity model of power, where roles are assigned theoretically by merit and expertise, is restricted by “professionalism”, and compartmentalized from the individual’s personal life. Organizations often measure their performance based on consistency such that the goal is to become closer to an automaton with each variable becoming predictable in its tendency given certain scenarios, in essence killing spontaneity, creativity, and divergence.

I have always had trouble accepting that organized religion was Jesus’s aim in telling Peter, “On this rock, I build my church.” It seems that the manner of his disruption was more in keeping with the way to social transformation without creating a problematic organism called an organization (Jesus did not have a organized hierarchical structure among the 12), but to free up creative tendencies by focusing on the why’s. His was more a counter-culture than a community-organizing effort. He reminded us, look at the birds, they worry not what to eat next. And that’s exactly what happens when people learn to share like the birds and live in harmony with natural abundance.

In this time of losing hope, with only 11 countries in the world not engaged in wars, as of last time I checked, and we are grasping at shreds for what transcendent weapons we have that cannot be taken away from us, intrinsic and durable, I submit the following:

ATTENTION

By now, it’s pretty obvious that one can monetize attention. It does not only create value, places and people we pay attention to are visited by helpers and are reached by people who have the capabilities needed for the work. The first act of love is attention. Beings we pay attention to glow and grow overtime, science has proven time and again. Sadly, much of our attention is still directed by the dominant narrative and many of us haven’t found the way out of our socialized preferences in order to pay more attention to more beauty, mystery, and richness of the world. The comforting familiarity of stories that privilege some and ignores others, fairy tales or Hollywood material, reinforces those who play god among us whose gaze determine who shall rise and fall. The most revolutionary thing one can do is to pay attention to those we haven’t paid attention to before, mindfully checking your own tendencies to pair one thing with another, like science to boys and dolls to girls. Changing these tendencies by changing the tendency of your own attention is going to change the world faster than any protest. Pay attention to your neighbor, for starters.

CONVERSATION

Our conversations are a reinforcement of our freedom of association, a fundamental freedom that ensures we are truly free human beings, whose interests are not dictated upon by the powerful. “No self survives a real conversation” is a refrain I oft repeat, thanks to David Whyte. We often do not pay attention to how we conduct our conversations and often think that conversations are only limited to the ones talking, or the ones in attendance, or the ones spoken of. Our conversations shape our culture by the way we choose its focus, its participants, its stakeholders, and its aims. Teachers know that informal conversations teach better than formal conversations, and yet we insist on formalizing the conversations that truly matter when words are limited while the spirit in the conversation can transmit the message faster than words. The spirit in conversation can transmit sensibilities that can change the world under the radar of those who do not get the spirit being transmitted. You may have experienced conversation where people around you thought you were talking about the cooking, but you and your loved one are actually alluding to a more intimate topic. Conversations can transmit values without insisting on them. Parties, dancing, music, and art are ways of conversing. The culture that emanates from a group is a result of many elements conversing, and most of them have no words.

COMMUNION

It is easier to imagine a communion between two souls, and yet it is very exciting to learn community intimacy, where the trust level achieved is so strong that each person is understood for why they do as they do, freeing them to be authentic individuals while partaking of each other in communal responsibility. I often tell a joke about two people, survivors of a shipwreck, who found themselves in a place after their death. One of them guesses, “We are in hell. I mean look at these puny people who have no sense of their own selves, quite like doormats, they welcome strangers and danger unto themselves.” The other says, “Oh, so we are in heaven.” And a Filipino passes them by and says, “No, you’re just in the Philippines.

“We see things for who we are not for what they are”, says Anais Nin. A communion helps people build stronger moral imaginations and a sense of trusting what a community can hold together as what they know so far. Today’s capitalist societies often sabotage communal knowing, the role of elders have all but disapppeared with being “progressive”. But the role of elder serves as a marker of evolving communal wisdom, a sense of the journey of a people and their rootedness in their values. Communions supplant ill systems. Communions are rituals that help community visualize social transformation. Who we eat with had always been the subject of heavy regulation in many cultures and religions for this very reason.

SOCIAL CHANGE

A government is always a people’s indictment. I like social questions; however, government is not the answer but culture and the way we situate power within this complex society. We can change the government all we want but if our conversations have not become the platforms of transformation towards a new culture, then we are just trapped on the platforms of politicians along with their given options to us — we are trapped in the matrix of nihilism — choose your poison: death by gun, by starvation, by hacienda massacres, by disaster, by illness, by drugs, by invasion, or by capitalism, etc. If we want another way, we must produce it independently of this matrix until a better reality competes competently with this system we’re in. And that new order must first be found in conversation. Right now our conversations are hijacked by our reactions to the system and we’re not really producing anything independent of it. Religious culture has that potential to produce something independent of the realities that bind us at the moment. It can compete with rationalizations we have made to do and act the way we have in perpetuating existing problems. However, it must learn to be in the loop of developing a deeper understanding of human nature by listening to science and art.

Not all is lost. The war has always been spiritual. If evil organizes more efficiently, as Martin Luther King says, we have to remain disorganized even as we foment a counterculture that needs no formal roles. Let us be like the birds who know when they lead, when they serve, when they fly and be still. Birds are not anarchists, they are co-leaders. All because they have a sense of paying attention, being with each other, and communing with all that is good.