Dreams of my living situation

This summer, Z, E, and I are embarking upon six months of living in our house without other housemates. I've felt anxious about this, about losing the presence of other people and about losing income. I've also felt anxious that we would become entrenched in the lifestyle of living without housemates and that inertia would keep us from having housemates again.

Z has been the mover toward this period of not having housemates, and often, she thinks her ideal is to never have housemates. I've expressed my anxiety to Z. At one point she said, "well, I might be open to having just one housemate, in the basement" and I said, "but I like it better with two housemates." In exasperation, she replied, "What is it that makes you want to stuff our house with people?!"

I felt very defensive in that moment. But lately I've realized more and more that when my partners accuse me of something in anger, it almost always has important truth in it. So I've pondered this question on my own: what is it that makes me want to stuff my house with people?

In 2008, I bought the 3-bedroom house I now live in. My intention was to live there with E (I had not yet met Z) and two or three housemates. E and I would share one of the two large bedrooms, a single person or couple, or parent with small child, would live in the other large bedroom, and another person would live in the third bedroom. I would receive rental income that would enable me to afford the monthly mortgage. With the income I had at the time, I would not have been able to afford the mortgage payment without rental income from E and at least one other person. Even if I put nothing into my retirement fund, I'd still need that rental income to stay in the black.

I was anxious that I would not be able to create a harmonious living situation. I'd always been in favor of living in community. At least in theory. In practice, I found that when I lived with others, I almost always over time developed irritations with people's idiosyncrasies. In fact, these irritations have developed in every living situation I've stayed in for more than a year. For each such situation, I can remember complaining to somebody about the situation and, from time to time, feeling dread about returning home at the end of the school/work day and needing to be in close contact with my housemate(s).

My solution back in 2008 was to only have housemates who wanted to live with us for a year or less. This is in contrast to most communal living situations, where folks are seeking long-term housemates. I was anxious about my solution because it revealed to others my misanthropic intolerance. However, I mustered the courage to move forward with it, and it has served extremely well. We have had over twenty different people live in this house and each situation has been quite harmonious and enjoyable.

Then, in 2015, the 4-BR house directly behind this house came up for sale, and I bought it with intention to extend our household. I added a bedroom in the basement of that house. Now, there are typically six people living in that house (the west house) and five living in our house (the east house). By U.S. standards, both houses are indeed stuffed with people! What is it that drives me to create this uncommon situation?

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I've had two dreams lately that have helped elucidate the answer. The dreams were similar. The second came last night and is fresh in my memory.

In the dream, I am living with the same people I live with now in the east house, but instead of being an aesthetically pleasing 1926 Craftsman, it's a very plain ranch style house with a plain white walls and inexpensive wall-to-wall carpeting. It's a long house, with the living room in front and a long hallway with bedrooms leading to the back door. There is a scene where I'm standing in the sparsely furnished living room talking with a woman housemate, and in the middle of our conversation I notice that two young men are also standing and talking in the living room, and I remark, "This household is so great, there can be two pairs of people conversing in this room and it doesn't feel crowded, in fact I didn't even notice those guys were there until just now."

Through the course of the dream, people are constantly coming and going in the house. Some are housemates, some are familiar friends, and some are people unfamiliar to me. They are young people, multi-racial and multi-ethnic but mostly white, and there is a sense that they are flowing through the house. Often they come in the front door and leave through the back door. At any given moment, I don't know exactly who is in the house, and this provides me with mild satisfaction and delight. There is also some uneasiness, but it is manageable and worth bearing because it is so pleasurable to know that the house feels like home to so many people.

The backyard is barren, triangular, and enclosed by a low chain-link fence with a gate on each side of the triangle. This backyard is similar to the backyards of houses I've stayed in in Denver, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. I go out the back door and into the yard. People are flowing through the yard, too, sometimes staying a while, sometimes just passing through. I have an encounter with a dark-complected man in his 30s. We have some kind of disagreement. There is struggle, verbal, emotional, and physical. We end up on the ground, and I know that he is considering raping me. I think I could get away and run into the house, but I feel drawn to staying in this interaction. There is something I want to get out of it; I want resolution. I can't remember this part of the dream very clearly now; it has faded from memory faster than other parts of the dream. It is similar to many, many interactions I've had in real life; it is typical for me to feel that I cannot extricate myself from a relationship, even an unwanted and potentially harmful relationship. Through psychotherapy and solo inner work I have a strong sense that this relationship pattern began in infancy with my mother, and was reinforced during a very dimly remembered episode of sexual abuse with an older male relative (who, I realize now, would likely have been a dark-complected man in his 30s). At some point the interaction with the man in the dream ends and other things take place.

In the dream it is very close to the birthday of K, a woman who in real life was our housemate until just recently. K has planned a party for herself at the house, and guests have begun arriving, but K is nowhere to be found. In fact, none of us has seen her for several days. I am anxious, but not so much for K's well-being as for the party that she organized-- I feel I must do something about it, I must make it happen successfully. It's not clear to me what day the party was set for, today or tomorrow. Guests arrive at the house, then leave as part of the general flow of people. I fear that they won't come back. Still, I order a cake for this party. I'm irritated that K was so flighty as to disappear without telling us where she was going or when she was coming back, and had organized this party leaving me to take care of executing it. I'm vaguely aware that I am getting myself more involved in this party than is called for, acting out a pattern that recurs in my real life.

Nearby there is a community swimming pool, also with a low chain-link fence around it. There are two pools, small and large. The large one has a deep end, like a 12-foot deep end. I am standing near it talking to someone, maybe the dark-complected man from before. He is explaining that the large pool is supposed to be empty for maintenance, and as I look more closely I see that it is empty with a layer of dirt at the bottom. And he points out to me that the heavy rain currently happening is accumulating in that large pool. Again, I look more closely and see that there is a puddle at the bottom and that the dirt is dark, like mud. It is known that this is important, something should be done about it.

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After waking I talked about this dream with E, and he helped me relate this dream to what may be going on in my psyche, and what is happening in my real life.

Throughout my life I have found it uncomfortable to be alone with one other person. I fear being trapped, or feeling trapped. When I am alone with one other person, I feel that I must give my full attention to that person, especially if they are talking to me, and that it is dangerous to stop paying attention. Anxiety arises and my sense of my own wants and needs almost completely disappears. This manifests in short, medium, and long time scales. For example, I'm ill at ease talking with one other person at a party, working one-on-one on a project, and being in a long-term intimate relationship with one partner.

When I was first getting to know my partner E, we went to an event where scores of friends were all camping in the same campground. After we set up our tent, E wanted for the two of us to hang out there together. I felt a strong drive to get out of the tent and mingle. I explained, "I want to be with the people."

In addition to feeling afraid of being alone with one other person, I also fear committing to a small group of people. I don't join leadership teams or boards of directors. I once joined a musical group with full commitment, but after a very painful interpersonal conflict, I declined to ever offer that kind of commitment to any other musical group. I sometimes feel an initial burst of enthusiasm for starting a new small group of people to pursue a common interest, but almost always escape before the group has coalesced. And I don't want to commit to living long-term with a set group of people.

So all of this contributes to my desire to live with an ever-changing group of people.

In 2008, when I envisioned the kind of community I wanted to create in my house, I envisioned exactly the kind of flow that I saw in my dream! One specific of my vision was that we'd have weekly salons at our house where an ever-changing group of very smart and interesting people would gather, enjoy refreshments, and develop amazing world-changing ideas. I also envisioned that my goddaughter R would regularly drop by the house after school with her friends. Flow!

Perhaps this why the one major flaw I saw with the house was that its only door to the backyard was from the basement bedroom. There was no way to get directly to the backyard from the common areas; it would be necessary to go out the front door and around the side. This felt bad to me. I imagined a trapped feeling. I thought the house would feel constipated. As soon as I moved in, I arranged for someone to build French doors from the kitchen to a new back deck, which would then lead down to the back yard. After this was completed, I asked the previous home owners if they'd ever thought about doing this. They said that it hadn't crossed their minds and that they'd felt completely satisfied with the previous arrangement.

Reflecting on the images of flow through the house, another image arises: that of blood cells coursing through blood vessels, occasionally eddying and churning around corners and obstacles. Curiously, another word for blood cell is corpuscle, deriving from the Latin corpus for body.

Long before I bought the west house, I'd had dreams of buying the west house. And always, a core element of my dream was to take down the fence between the two backyards, allowing folks to move freely between the two houses and also to pass through to get from the street the west house faces to the street the east house faces. The houses are both in the center of a block that's 1/4 mile long, so normally it's a 7 minute walk to get from house to house. It brought me immense satisfaction to take down the fence and create a path between the two houses that allowed us to shorten that walk from 7 minutes to one minute. My fantasy extended to opening up the pathway to everyone in the neighborhood, but in real life I decided this would lead to litter and noise issues I'd rather avoid.

Last month we had a house guest whose daughter and son-in-law were living on the streets in a town a half hour north of here. They were using heroin. A friend helped our guest locate the two and bring them back to Seattle; our guest texted me and asked if the two could stay in our house with us. I brought this up with Z and E and said, "The answer is No. We can't have heroin users in the house. They may steal our stuff." We discussed it a bit more but decided in the end that they couldn't stay with us. Although I gave an emphatic No at the beginning, I was in part saying No to my own self, who longed to say Yes. Yes to every part of everybody.

My identity as a polyamorous person arises from the same desires and fears. I want to be able to say Yes to everybody. And I am afraid to be alone with one person, to feel trapped.

Inquiry into desire and ill will

Last couple weeks I've been working on breaking the Ten Fetters using the technique of a fellow named Satyadana as shared in the Liberation Unleashed forum and facebook group. (Although anyone can go to the forum-- and I highly recommend you do if you're curious-- the material on breaking the Ten Fetters is only available to you after you've gone through their process of seeing through the illusion of self-- again, highly recommended.)

Was reading a thread wherein a student was being guided to look at desire for chocolate. The guide instructed them to see what the initial sensation is when first seeing chocolate. I thought I knew what the initial sensation was for me: an uncomfortable conglomeration of tensions in the body that I call craving. But when I looked more closely-- when I first looked at a blank wall, then looked at the chocolate, alert to the initial sensations-- I saw that before the conglomeration there is a neutral sensation in the back of the mouth/top of the throat. Exciting to see that!

Now I am supposed to stay with that initial sensation, notice the nascent reaction (the conglomeration of sensation and thought I call craving) without yielding to it, and inquire: what links the two? This inquiry is called "staying in the gap".

If I can stay in the gap-- and I can-- clearly the reaction does not necessarily have to happen. Supposedly, seeing this really clearly can weaken and even break craving and ill will across the board, for all objects. Super exciting!

For me, the link seems to be a thought chain: first, "here is a food I especially enjoy". Then, "I should try to consume it because it is productive to obtain and consume delightful things; it builds up the Terry entity".

This second thought I know to be false. Even the first is suspect.

What makes those thoughts arise? Clearly they don't have to. I suppose it's habit.

I intend to do this exercise some more and see if craving in general diminishes.

Somanautics - last day

I enjoyed day 6, the final day, of my cadaver dissection class, doing a variety of things. I spent another couple of hours with the shoulder, really trying to understand the bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. I enjoyed dissecting a testicle; this is something I've had the urge to do for decades, perhaps due to some latent misandry. The teaching assistant showed me how to remove the fatty tissue of the mesentery, leaving behind a delicate lacey network of blood vessels and nerves. I did that for a little while but found I didn't have patience and interest to do the whole thing. I visited another table and saw a classmate doing similarly with a kidney.

I worked with my teammates to reveal Zinc's spine from the rear. I was amazed to see how tough the material is protecting the posterior portion of the spine. I'd thought it would be easy to take away everything but the bone, but we didn't even get close to that. Likewise, I saw on a different form that the vertebrae and intervertebral disks were covered in very tough material; the disks seemed as hard as the vertebrae. I felt reassured to learn that my own spinal column was so well protected.

My teammates and I then turned Zinc over onto his back so we could dissect the thorax, where we saw that the lungs were quite damaged from Zinc's COPD, and the heart was enlarged. I was surprised to see that the heart was encased in a thick fatty layer and I enjoyed removing that layer to reveal the pericardium (membrane surrounding the heart).

Gil gave us a fascinating detailed dissection demonstration of Zinc's pelvic organs: genitals, prostate, urinary bladder, and rectum. He also did a dissection demonstration of the brain of another form; I only half paid attention to that as I was absorbed with my shoulder dissection, but it was easy to see what he was doing because he had someone train a video camera on the dissection and this was connected to several very large monitors around the room.

As the end of the day drew near, we worked with more abandon, cutting up organs just to see what was inside. In the end, our form, Zinc, was quite dismembered.

I found the whole day fascinating as one body part after another was revealed to me in more detail than I had understood before.

We spent the last 45 minutes putting the remains of each form into a sort of body bag, and the bag into a cardboard coffin that would be transported to a crematorium. We had saved all the tissue we'd dissected away throughout the week in separate bags for each form so that all the tissue could be reunited in the end. We then put all the dissection tables into a star formation, as they had been when we'd arrived on day 1, with flowers and tea candles on each one, and we once again thanked the donors and their families, and one another.

I highly recommend this class for anyone keen to dissect a human cadaver.

Somanautics - days 3, 4, and 5

I wrote this at the end of day 5:

On Day 3 we removed the deep fascia from the muscles and differentiated the muscles from one another. On Day 4, yesterday, we opened the abdominal cavity and began examining the viscera (internal organs). Today, we continued our exploration of both muscles and viscera from the back of the form.

Tomorrow is our last day. Leaving class today, I felt sad that tomorrow we'll be saying good-bye to Zinc, our team's cadaver form. It's like a second death for him; nobody will ever be with his body again. Over the past few days we've learned things about him that he never knew about himself. His body was massive in every respect, and although he died at age 70 of COPD, every part of his body we've observed so far has been in surprisingly magnificent condition. (We haven't looked at his heart and lungs yet.) I feel connected to him and grateful to him and his family for donating his body for study.

Throughout the class, my attention has been drawn to parts of the body that have particularly interested me in myself. There is a spot on my lower right abdomen that is peculiarly sensitive, and that desires deep massage. I strove to see what was inside the abdomen at that spot that could create this phenomenon. After exploring and also consulting G, the professional in massaging the viscera, I could not find a conclusive answer for this. Deep in that spot is the psoas muscle, but it doesn't feel to me that this spot is that deep. More shallow is the mesentery and the intestines, and, in particular, the appendix and the spot where the small intestine joins the large intestine. A body worker once remarked to me that perhaps I was feeling that junction. Finally, G suggested I could be feeling adhesions that formed early in my life as a response to trauma.

I've also been drawn to exploring the rotator cuff, since a year ago I developed inflammation in that area after doing some house painting and the pain has not gone away. Over the past three days I've spent several hours dissecting the left shoulder of the form. I now feel that I understand the rotator cuff. It is composed of four distinct muscles: the teres minor, the subscapularis, the superspinatus, and the infraspinatus. One of the tendons of the superspinatus passes under the little hook that protrudes from the top of the scapula before inserting into the head of the humerus; perhaps this is the spot that still hurts when I lift my arm overhead or use my arm to move something from the side of my body to the front.

I also opened up the joint of the great toe, because I have arthritis there. I felt envious of this 70 year old man who had no arthritis in that joint.

Out of 29 students, 25 are women. I really like that. Not only do I not have to worry about muscling my way to the dissecting table, I am forced to learn from and rely on the expertise of other women.

Somanautics after day 2

Last night I was exhausted at the end of class. My thought was that if I hadn't already paid $2500 for the class, I'd probably not come back. We'd spent the second half of the day, nearly four hours, removing skin from the forms (Gil calls the cadavers "forms"). It was hard physical work, especially for the 6-person team I'm on: our form was well over 6 feet tall, quite broad and heavy, with thick, inflexible skin. We named him Zinc, after a white residue we could see on his skin. I had the idea that we needed to remove all the skin yesterday, so I was working hard to do that, and my focus was on getting it done rather than satisfying my curiosity. It was fun at first, novel, and I enjoyed trying to develop my skill with the scalpel in cutting right at the border between skin and superficial fascia (a.k.a. the adipose layer). But the novelty wore off and I felt exhausted well before the 5:00 quitting time.

At the end of the day, Gil advised us to have a complete change of pace for the evening (he called it a "state change"). He also advised us to spend several minutes gazing intently at a natural form that is different from what we'd been staring at all day, a flower or a tree. I followed both pieces of advice. I found that gazing intently at a flower was very refreshing; I could feel something relax inside me as I did it. It reminded me of the relaxation I felt during the nature scenes that Gil inserted periodically into his dissection videos. As far as state change, I took a shower as soon as I got home, then prepared a spread of wine, cheese, and crackers for me and Z in the patio, where we spent the whole evening.

Today we spent a couple hours debriefing from yesterday and listening to Gil's semi-spontaneous philosophical and anatomical musings, including stuff about how the superficial fascia has a bad rap in our culture to the point where people undergo damaging home "remedies" to reduce it and/or redistribute it. Then we dove into removing the superficial fascia from our form. I enjoyed this more than yesterday's task. It was physically much easier. And it was interesting to try to discover where the superficial fascia ended and the deep fascia (the very thin layer covering the muscles) began. I felt more playful today and less worried about making a mistake.

In the middle of the afternoon, Gil came to our table and did a nearly hour-long lecture/demo on male genitalia, including lengthy remarks about how circumcision just doesn't make any sense at all. It was fascinating to watch the dissection. The lecture, complete with ribald jokes, was a little uncomfortable for me, so I made myself comfortable by continuing to remove fascia from one of the legs while Gil spoke (manual work generally soothes me when I need to listen to anybody at length).

Before Gil's demo, I sliced into the scrotum myself and pulled away the tissue until I'd exposed one of the testicles. This is something I'd always vaguely wanted to do when handling the scrotum of a living human.

Gil then wanted to do a lecture/demo on female genitalia, but, sadly, the two female forms in the room had already had their genitalia accidentally mangled to the point where an exposition of the clitoris was not possible.

I am noticing that my knowledge of what the body looks like on the inside is gradually growing, and this is what I came to the workshop for. I feel happy about that.

My fears about the teamwork being uncomfortable or challenging have not come to fruition. The teamwork is very easy and harmonious. I am enjoying all my classmates. Camaraderie is growing. I've been interacting most with G, an Israeli manual therapist who focuses on the abdomen, and T, a mathematician, ballet dancer, and Pilates teacher from Singapore.

Somanautics, day 1, morning

I'm on lunch break. Our Workshop is being held inside a dental school near the Moscone Convention Center. This morning, we introduced ourselves to one another, then to our cadavers. There are 29 students in the class and five cadavers. The students are mostly white and mostly women, but a range of Ages, from maybe late twenties to Mid sixties.

We feel like we already know our teacher, Gil Hedley, because we all had to watch many hours of video of him doing dissections. He's quite a character, and I like him so far. He has a very, very holistic approach. He's interested in the body as a whole, and interested in our relationships with the cadavers. He encourages us to take care of ourselves.

This morning we spent time with the cadavers in their intact state. They've been embalmed, and are several months old, typically. The color of the skin, the texture of the body, even the shape of the body, when embalmed, is quite different from when it's in its natural state. I was quite engaged at first, then found myself fatigued and Restless. I took Gil's invitation to self-care seriously, and wandered around the room while he was talking. Tuning in on and off. At lunch time, we covered the cadavers with the white cloths they had been covered with when we arrived, and I felt a sense of relief. I wonder what it is that is stressful for me about being with the cadavers? Or maybe I was just ready for lunch.

While some people had trepidation about seeing the cadavers, my initial trepidation was about needing to work together with people I did not know. However, after this morning, that trepidation has passed. We have a team of six working on one cadaver, a tall and broad older male we have named Zinc.

Somanautics: before the workshop

Tomorrow will be Day 1 of my six day human cadaver dissection course in San Francisco with Gil Hedley. He calls the topic of the course somanautics, and we students are somanauts.

I heard about Hedley's courses several years ago. I think it was Fall 2012. I was talking to an acquaintance I met at a meditation retreat (I think), and, I'm not sure, but I said something like, "I've always wanted to dissect a human cadaver, but you have to be a medical student to do that." And this person said, "Oh, no, actually there is this guy who offers these courses that anybody can take." I got very excited and looked up the courses, and wanted to sign up right away for the April course in San Francisco, but somehow it didn't fit into my schedule at the time.

And every autumn since then I've considered signing up for Hedley's San Francisco course the following April, but always decided it wasn't the right time. Until this past autumn. It's funny because although I clearly remember the excitement with which I wanted to sign up back in 2012, now that I'm on the threshold of the course, I no longer feel that excitement. Just a quiet, hopeful anticipation, and some anxiety that I will find it physically, mentally, and/or socially draining.

It's a requirement that we all watch 7.5 hours of dissection video before the course starts. It's in eight segments, and I'm watching segment 7 right now. By my side is an exquisite text lent me by my friend Joan, Grant's Atlas of Anatomy, Fifth Edition, 1962. The segment I'm watching is an examination of the intact viscera (internal organs). I'm finding myself unexpectedly enthralled, going back and forth between the video and the text and thrilled to see the correspondence between the cadaver and the hand drawn illustrations. Here are a few things I've been excited to learn:

• The small intestines are all connected by a planar piece of tissue called the mesentery! You can see it illustrated here. And I guess I've seen illustrations like this before, but there is nothing like seeing someone handle the mesentery and follow the entire 6 meters of the small intestine. The mesentery and intestine together are like a Chihuly glass flower, with the intestine at the outer edge of the flower-- except there is a lot more folding in the mesentery in order to have an edge 6 meters long. According to Time magazine, the mesentery is a newly discovered organ. They must mean that it is newly considered to be an organ, since it is illustrated in the 1962 text I am using.
• The liver is massive! And the nutrients and toxins gleaned from food in the small intestines travel through blood vessels through the mesentery to the mesentery root and then directly to the liver.
• The diaphragm is not a thick, dome-shaped muscle, but more like a thin, drapable sheath covering the liver and stomach. I see now that every time I breath, the diaphragm is gently rocking and massaging those organs!
• Incredibly, covering the lower abominal organs like an apron is an intricate layer of tissue I'd never heard of called the greater omentum. Apparently this tissue can be removed without major side effects, but according to Wikipedia it is involved in "infection and wound isolation" and "can often be found wrapped around areas of infection and trauma". In fact, in one of the cadavers in the dissection video, when the abdomen was opened the greater omentum was not covering the organs like an apron but was "snuggled" (Gil Hedley's word) up below the stomach. So it's a large piece of tissue that somehow travels around and helps heal whatever needs healing!

One good thing about watching these videos is that it's gotten me accustomed to seeing a human body being cut into. When the first cut was made in the first video, it was a bit shocking.

Someone suggested I keep a journal of my experience during the class. If I do, it will be here.