The Root of Busy

This one hits a little hard.

I’ve added two new pages to my site. The first is a collection of my favorite healers and resources. The other is an events page, which includes some new additions: A Friday evening discussion and Saturday workshop in Montecito at Godmothers; brunch and conversations in San Diego and Chicago; and a September evening event in San Francisco. More will be added soon!

---

I’m back in Montana this week, riding horses with friends and regulating my nervous system in nature. There’s grounding, and then there’s spending a week in the woods, climbing mountains, loping through meadows dotted with sage brush and racing down old logging roads.

This is Ruger.

Growing up, my dad and I would do these 50-mile endurance rides on Arabians, similar in ways to marathon-ing. Thirty odd years ago, we’d rig our horses up with old-school Polar heart rate monitors and condition them for months. When you compete, you clear vet checks every 10-15 miles, give your horse special bran meals and electrolytes during breaks, and you wear running shoes, so you can get off on steep climbs and tail them up the hill. While some people tried to win, completing was the primary goal: You had to finish with a perfectly sound horse in under 12 hours, though most of us accomplished this in about eight or nine. We all rode English, which is a much lighter saddle—and you’d do your best to balance your weight off your horse’s back. When you cantered, you’d get into a two-point position and hover over the saddle.

These days, I ride Western, which requires a much heavier get-up and a totally different seat. When you get moving, you’re supposed to be able to see the top of your cowboy boots in front of your knees, meaning you’re braced against your stirrups and leaning back, though still moving with the horse. I’ve been trying to coax myself into this position for six years. It’s hard for me: Not only does it violate my muscle memory, but I hate giving my horse all my weight.

I’ve come to understand that this reticence is not limited to horseback riding. The other week, during a session with Dan Bienenfeld, he kept asking me to let him have my leg or my lower back. “Try to release and give me your weight.” I try, Dan, but it’s awfully hard. (You can read more about Dan here: “Unlocking the Patterns of the Body” and he’s also on my list of trusted healers here.) Even when I’m driving, I have to remind myself that the car can hold me, that I can let the clench go and settle into the seat. I think I spend most of my life in a defensive squat, refusing to accept support, even from inanimate objects built for that very purpose.

It’s a rich metaphor. I wrote about this several years ago—“Whose Lap Can You Sit On?”—and it’s a little disappointing that three years on, I haven’t made that much progress. As I wrote in 2022, “It’s a process, this accepting help thing. Learning to relax into support. Maybe sitting on someone’s lap is a weird metaphor for an adult woman, but it works for me. I hold the image in my mind whenever I feel the urge to pull my weight back from others who are willing to help me carry the load.”

I still feel that urge to pull my weight back a lot. I don’t want to be a burden or to “put people out,” though I’ve learned enough to recognize that this is also about a core story I carry as well, a story that’s become a primary prop to my personality. This story goes: “I’m the only one who can do it right, so I should do it all.” I use this story as my example to workshop in the Sloth chapter in Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness (out in under two weeks!), as I’m pretty sure many of you carry this story as well.

As I’ve done more work on it—both what I get out of believing this story, and what this story costs me—I’ve come to understand that “I’m the only one who can do it right, so I should do it all” is about control. Duh. But more pointedly, I also use this story as armor against all types of rejection, and as a measure of my value: If I keep this story going, I don’t have to worry about my utility to other people. They’ll obviously keep me around because I make things easy for them—“I do it all!”—without asking for much in return. Plus, if I don’t ask for help, I don’t need to suffer disappointment when I don’t get it, or it falls short. As I’ve come to this understanding, I’ve seen how I’ve structured big parts of my life around being of service to other people to ensure I can stay in connection. Being handy, competent, giving ensures this. Recognizing what I’ve been up to has been a hard and sad pill to swallow.

In In the Absence of the Ordinary, Francis Weller writes about listening to David Steindl-Rast speak, explaining: “I do not remember the overall theme of his talk, but as is often the case with Brother David, it circulated around the heart. At one point in his talk, he shared that the Chinese spell the word ‘busy’ with two ideograms that mean ‘heart’ and ‘killing.’ We all gasped as he shared this idea. We pride ourselves on how busy we are as if to suggest worth and value are attained by our exhaustion.” I think we break our own hearts because it’s the only way to feel like we have any control in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. After all, busy-ness is the perfect antidote to existential anxiety: If you’re super busy, you don’t have to think about anything hard, at all. I use it as a buffer against life, for sure.

The other day, when I was tubing down the Blackfoot with friends, one offered that I seem a little down—striking, I guess, considering this is my happy place and I look forward to these weeks like Christmas.

I thought about this for a minute. “I guess so,” I offered. I’m really adept at higher-minding my harder emotions, and I get a big assist for this through busy-ness. Absent anything “to do”—tubing down a lazy and low river is one of the least active, most relaxing things you can do on a hot day—I’d been left with my feelings. I’ve been writing about grief lately—much of it collective—but on the personal level, I also think my busy-ness bill is coming due to pay. I think I’m breaking my own heart in two ways: Through busy-ness sure, but also by not attending to that core story that keeps me so busy in the first place. I think the thing I want most of all is support. I think I’m feeling like a dried up well, and that my old tricks are costing too much. I’ve spent a lot of my life being the work horse—pulling carts for lots of other people and entities—I’m still trying to figure out what it would feel like to do it a little differently. (Related: “What Kind of Horse are You?”) In order to change the story and receive this support, it’s time to teach myself how to both ask for it and accept it.