Twenty-nine days into 2024 and you can color me unimpressed. January has absolutely sucked. My car broke down, I continue to battle an undiagnosed health issue, my depression is back, and if I am being honest, creating content for the deconstruction community is more often than not discouraging AF. The financial burden, time commitment, and lack of reciprocity from our audience makes me question this entire project. Worse, the compelling pressure to post content everywhere and at all times to please the algorithms is debilitating. Maybe I’m battling content fatigue, burnout, or just feeling sorry for myself. Because I’m exhausted, irritable, lonely, and ready to quit.
What I do know is that despite all these external issues, the real problem is inside me.
I word vomited all this to my wife on Saturday morning, and as usual, she challenged my woe is me attitude with direct and self-reflecting questions. “Are you tending to your soul? Are you actively engaged in any spiritual practices? To even be healthy enough to create content for other people, are you putting in the necessary spiritual, mental, and emotional work?” My initial response was gee, thanks mom! But after I sulked for a while, I realized the answer to each of her questions was a resounding “hell no.”
So, I put on my big boy pants, went downstairs, opened my altar, lit my incense, and sat in silence.
Meditation isn’t magic, but something happens when you pause long enough to sit with all your shit and resist the urge to react, reject, grasp, judge, or identify with your thoughts. “The first thing that happens in meditation is that we start to see what’s happening,” writes Pema Chodron in her book When Things Fall Apart. We realize so much of life is spent responding to external stimulus, internal storylines, or the constant thoughts popping up in your monkey mind. Meditation creates mental spaciousness, or the ability to see what’s going on without reacting. Through meditation, our primal animal instincts give way to intentional self-awareness. Or as Buddhist monk Ajahn Chah wrote, “When sitting in meditation, say, 'That’s not my business!' with every thought that comes by." I like that.
Psychologists report that patients who practice meditation develop greater self-awareness and expand their ability to regulate mood swings and emotional outbursts. If you struggle with insomnia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, anxiety, or depression, meditation will help you find peace in this very moment. It will not solve all your problems, but it will give you a modicum of control over your emotions and impulses. If meditation is new to you, watch this guided meditation by monk and mystic Father Brendan E. Williams. Find a quiet place, sit down, close your eyes, and experience the transformative power of mindful awareness.
The future of Holy Heretics is uncertain. I do not know if I still have the capacity or desire to keep creating content in this space. Something must change in order for me to continue serving the deconstruction community. I need your help, encouragement, support, and feedback in order to move forward. More than that, I must take care of myself in this tender season.
I can’t begin to know what is going on in your life twenty-nine days into the new year, but I bet you have similar feelings about all the crap that makes up so much of life on this hurting planet. I’ve got room in my pity-party if you need a friend, or just want to vent. Or, maybe your privilege blinds you to what the rest of us deal with on the daily. If so, turn your privilege into power for the benefit of others.
It’s easy to become discouraged, self-indulgent, disappointed, and debilitated. Mindfulness, and mystics like Julian of Norwich who made meditation a regular part of life, remind me “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
May it freaking be so.
Gary Alan Taylor
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I am 100% with you, Gary, and I'm sad to hear that you feel burned out. Mostly because I very much appreciate your voice in this community. But also, as Mary Oliver said, I hope that you are able to able to "let the soft animal of your boy love what it loves." And if creating content and podcasting isn't that for you anymore, I applaud that, and am cheering you on in finding what that animal craves.
I am just starting my second podcast in the deconstruction community (I have 50 followers on my new IG! I'm insignificant!) and am in a daily conversation with myself about the WHY of it all. The algorithm is maddening and addictive, and no one may listen, and I might just be toiling away at putting proverbial messages in bottles and tossing them into the Pacific. One or two of those bottles may totally delight some wayfinder out there, but it's just as likely they will end up buried in the sand on a deserted beach somewhere. And I wonder: am I ok with that? Do I love creating the messages enough to not give a damn what happens to them? I don't know.... on my good days, yes. Other days I wish I had the validation I so earnestly crave.
Either way, I see you, my fellow meaning-maker. You are good and loved. I'm going to go open my alter and sit for a bit beside you.
Thanks, Gary. I am tired as well. Your podcast has led me through tough shit these past what, 2 years? Abusive ex + abandonment of friends, start of deconstruction, and the consequential rejection by churches. It's been one hell of a ride. I thought that I had really found myself in atheism after being a mystic for awhile. But now I'm back at this idea of a God, and it keeps picking at my brain. I want it to be real. I want there to be some sort of being or beings that care for me out there and ultimately have something good to do with the outcome of my life and the world. Even in my so-called atheism, I found myself saying or thinking little prayers out into the void. This is my mini-rant, and I hope it ties in well to what you've written - I'm not sure who else relates, but I've always thought of atheism as the end of deconstruction, like that is the farthest one can go, and boom, it's over. Atheism feels like the easy way out, looking back, because I chose to deny spirituality as real. When spirituality isn't real, I imagined it was easier to deaden the pain of the past and present. That was a little naive. I have a sick soul, and damn do I need some chicken noodle soup.
Tying it back in - I want to go back into those practices that make up that chicken noodle soul soup. And your podcast always brings up and reminds me and gives me hope that the world is not a bunch of assholes and their shits. There are very good people out there and they are plowing ahead, and that gives me energy to do the same. Thank you for what you do. It's precious work.