When Work is Resistance

I’ve thought a lot about resistance over the past year.  Read Stephen Pressfield’s book, been inspired and shaken by the rallying cry to recognise the insidious forms resistance takes.  For me this meant getting on with my work; with writing; no matter what it took.  The results were powerful, and productive.  I realised I did have it in me to do this thing.  To finish the thesis I have been working on for years.  To move on.  To use other forms of writing to take the pressure off the dissertation, to allow it to be what it is (an academic training exercise) rather than the bearer of all my memories and experience.

I’m handing it in in two weeks.  And the pressure is on to keep working.  To keep up the momentum and get it done.  And I’ve been there at the coal face.  Everyday, writing, editing, crafting.  Releasing the need for it to be perfect (it isn’t).  Releasing the need to know everything (I don’t).

So what’s gone wrong?

I got an inkling of it when my daughter fractured her arm in the playground last week and the first thought that flashed into my head was , “But what about my work?”

Then a dear friend extended an invitation to come to a surprise birthday celebration for her husband.  First response?  “But what about my work?”

Well, what about my work?  In pursuing it so single mindedly I have begun to exclude other daily practices that give my work life and purpose.  In the aftermath of the resistance to engage with what is happening elsewhere in my life, my work has begun to congeal.  I find that though I turn up everyday, progress is slow, the creative spark that was transforming the text vanished.  Resistance came in by the back door.  Not because I wasn’t turning up for work, but because I wasn’t turning off the work.

I see that Resistance is also about not participating fully in my own life.  That the single minded pursuit of work, when it is at the cost of a balanced Wheel, drains the life blood of what sustains the work in the first place.

The Love that keeps you turning up.

The Love that lets you leave when it’s time to.

Untangling the threads of these final weeks, I see that my challenge is not to simply turn up for work.  It is also to blur the boundary of work and play, to make work a long term satisfying practice that I return to, restoring the meaningfulness of work as part of my Life, rather than a crash diet I go on every now and again.

Pause to keep going.  Funny that.

Scripting the Entrance to the North

I’ve been at the gates of the North for a while.  There have been many diversions, things to attend to, resistance to unravel.

Our circle didn’t meet for a good few weeks as these threads of new jobs, relocations, changed plans and shadow dancing were worked through. Are worked through.  Process is always unfolding. I get this. When our circle finally met, it was sweet, a reminder of the value of a cohort rooted in mutual commitment to truth, and the diversity of how truth manifests.  What was clear in our meeting was my resistance to scripting a new story.  Like I wasn’t wanting to let go of the old one yet, or needed more information to make a new one.   Can’t say I’m fully out the woods of these fears, and holding on stubbornly to the old storylines.  But damn, I’m noticing them playing out.  I can see the trees even as I tremble beneath them.  She moves through, anyway.

There’s an agreement here that I break when I move on. The one that says I need to know everything.  Gulp.
Finally I do. Move on. Into the entrance of the North. I call on helpers because when I break the agreement named above, I can open up to assistance. For me right now, this is the support and insight of the circle, the strong home-girl compassion of the deities who speak to me, retreat into time alone and consultation with a fresh version of the I Ching (a dear old friend and guiding hand through many turning points).

I script.

This week I move with a light and slow touch. I perform my roles as mother, worker, partner, sister, friend, daughter, writer and thesis reviser with care, attention and a  joyfully playful mind.

I notice when I compare myself with others. Even little things; the seemingly inconsequential. I note the effect this has on how I do the  things that matter to me.  What forms of censorship I impose. What is suppressed.  What I do instead. I write down these observations as I go about my business, do my work.

I do this to identify what my truth is.

This practice assists me in locating and living by this truth, inhabiting it rather than being led by speculation about the ‘truth’ I think others may expect from me.

I live and respond and take action from this still point. I stay watchful. Keeping meticulous notes frequently helps me in this, because any kind of research is assisted by reflective record keeping on the job.

I travel with pen and paper.

I awaken my light.

I discover my truth.

Bring on the week….  looking North.

Echidna

Echidna calls!

Unexpected totem, coming up from the Underground

Clinging to this excavation of truth

Protecting the fragile shoots

Of new creation’s completion

She, being a home-girl and fully grounded

Focuses on detail, unafraid

Scrutinising

A sepia-tinted Bree St, Fordsburg side

Washed up on the River, Southside

She knows that these flows must be sifted systematically

Stubbornly

Till the stability of the patterns emerge

Anchored in the harbour

Warm burrow in the storm

Sweet and fierce warrior

Lover of Home

Keep On Moving: Postponement as Troublemaker in the North West

keep moving (Photo credit: Wrote)

Our circle’s experience of symbolically entering the North of the Wheel in Denmark was so liberating and powerful, the feeling of freedom and flight that followed so wonderful, that there had to be a crash at some point!  And so it goes.  Peak experiences are brilliant – I love and live for them!  But they have their shadow aspect, which manifests as a belief that somehow this is an arrival point, a finishing line moment.  So when the insights of the peak experience have to navigate their way through the more mundane spaces of everyday life, it can be hard to adjust to the ordinary; to the application of insight.  Jack Kornfield wrote a whole book on it, ‘After the Ecstasy, The Laundry’.

It is in these post-peak spaces that Troublemakers really show up.  And as Julie Tallard Johnson discusses in the Wheel of Initiation, these Troublemakers are ways in which our attachment to habitual ways of doing and being in the world can be identified.  They offer us the opportunity to liberate ourselves from them when they show up.  The more you practice, the more you can spot a Troublemaker when it comes up.  A bit like that scene in The Matrix when Neo plucks bullets out the air as if they were apples on a tree and tosses them aside.  Practice strips troublemakers of their power to damage you unthinkingly.  However, where I’m at is more like the start of the Matrix, where Neo flails about and is generally nearly cut down by said bullets!  Awareness of Troublemakers, and shifting the energy patterns that hold you captive to the beliefs that surround your responses to them (what our Circle focused on in Denmark),  is only the beginning!

The day after getting back from Denmark, still on a high, I received an email from Julie about Dealbreakers.  As the week progressed, and things got tougher, I really felt the resonance of her communication.

At times, it is an all-out civil war between our habitual selves (that often sustain our pain stories) and our more authentic nature (and our intentions). Deal breakers finally break the deal with some agreement that is keeping us hostage to our pain stories. (Wherever we are suffering there is an agreement to a pain story).  When a Deal Breaker arises a choice is usually involved. My indifference would say to me: “This doesn’t matter.”  “This doesn’t count.” My authentic self knows on a very basic level that everything counts. In fact sometimes the smallest choice opens us up to an new paradigm, and the briefest comment reveals the deepest truth. It all matters (but this doesn’t mean it is heavy or somber). Every decision, as Joseph Campbell would say is a Destiny Decision. Within the Buddhist philosophy we recognize that everything contributes to causes and conditions and everything has a consequence. So when we break an agreement, and invoke the Deal Breaker there may be blood, but more importantly there will be LIGHT. 

I realised that our Circle was probably more in between than our big leap forward had suggested.  Located somewhere North West if you will. Though we have symbolically moved into the North of The Wheel, in many ways we are still embroiled in the business of the West.  The clearing out of pain stoires, identification of the habitual, recognition of troublemakers and looking out for Dealbreakers.  This is movement in the Wheel.  When I stop and take a breath , I feel how I love and am energised by the dynamism and gathering momentum  of the Wheel!  It is a beautiful thing.

In our Circle we have been negotiating reforming our meeting schedule as new jobs, country moves and change occur around us.  This has been challenging, but also an opportunity to approach our work together in ways that are responsive to what our circumstances actually are (as opposed to imposing a vision of how it ‘should’ be on the process). The point, sometimes, is not to achieve perfection, but to keep turning up. Keep moving.

To finish, I am sharing some of my Circle partner Maia’s writing around something that both of us have identified as a powerful agreement to ‘Postpone our Lives’ or ‘Not Participate’.  These are dealbreakers for real.  I love her writing because it is so raw, and honest.  It elucidates the fragile jaggedness that comes up in this kind of work: it articulates the captivating Siren charm of Resistance (she points out that the will to postpone and resist starting comes up as much in work that she does like to do as work that she doesn’t).

I am in major procrastination mode.  Came to the library to work because it just wasn’t going to happen at home.  Those days when you just don’t want to start.  Probably/maybe when I start it will be much easier.  Been thinking how much this is linked to my deal breaker – not wanting to participate in life, or feeling helpless in my non-participation. I’m that girl  looking at the playground roundabout, thinking that is the world and I am not on it. It was this feeling of being separate and alienated, this numbed off state, of being unable to move beyond the separateness and part of the movement of life.  

Whether I like the work I have to do or not, it brings me face to face with that state again. There are two Osho tarot cards that came to mind this morning.  The one is of a woman looking through window.  She’s all grey and the world outside is full of colour. The card is called Postponement. The other card is called the Outsider.  It shows a child looking through a gate longing to be outside.  The child doesn’t realise the gate is not locked.  

I have always disliked getting these cards, especially the postponement one, which asks you to put aside the desire to delay and act.  I don’t like the card because I like putting stuff off for tomorrow. It’s comfortable, I have gotten used to it.  As much as I have longed for action, to live my life as a bird in full flight, delaying – putting off and slipping into that numbed off, nothing is really happening state is what I know.  It’s really very comfortable. I  also got tired of hating myself for it.  But it’s all been changing for me. The Wheel of Initiation has helped  a lot with it.  Swept me up more than I anticipated.  I now see the possibility of not choosing to follow the narrative.  I see that I am actually a bird in full flight who thinks she’s a postponing woman.  I see the power I have to re-write the narrative to shift and transform and ease out of these heavy habits.  Yes it’s difficult.  I have to meet the troublemakers again and again.  This is my deal breaker.  

I was thinking of an intention that works with this – I participate fully in my life.  It’s what I read Toni Morrison said in an interview.  She just wants to feel whatever she’s feeling whether it’s good or bad.  To really be there.  So here’s the practice.  The call to come alive in whatever I am doing. To not put myself off.  

The feeling I encounter when I do step up to participate is that I can’t do it, that I’m not good enough. That’s the Outsider card.  The gate is open but I don’t step out because I believe I am not good enough. I am that thee year old girl, getting frustrated, crying I can’t do it.  Giving up.  As soon as I start to write there’s a voice crying, I can’t do it, it’s too hard.  That’s the voice I have to look at and say thank you and then turn back to the feeling that I can. 

When I delay or don’t do something that I must, I end up feeling more powerless, paralysed, heavy – it’s circular and then there is no way out.   That’s the mess I create.  I have to keep moving, even though it feels heavy.  Keeeeeep moving.  It’s lighter ahead.   

Maia Marie 2012

 

What am I postponing?

How would it feel to do it?

What happens when I finish?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wheel-Initiation-Practices-Releasing-Inner/dp/1591431115/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347454034&sr=8-1

http://www.julietallardjohnson.com/

http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=magazine&Sub1Menu=tarot&Sub2Menu=oshozentarot

http://www.jackkornfield.com/

Pain Stories? Let’s Head North!

Arrived in Denmark tonight…  heading northwards.  I realise that Denmark is not that much more North than London, where I have come from, but that’s about right.  We are still very much on the edges of the West of the Wheel.  So this is a creep northwards, an inching towards the next direction.  As it is!  The West is a demanding place, where we face all kinds of difficulties.  The stuff that makes us want to turn back.  The pain stories.

I’m all disorientated…. arriving at night… no knowledge of the language.  But that’s cool….  being out of the orientation of what is familiar is a good way to be.  Sometimes.  Anyway, my circle partner tells me everyone speaks English here anyway.  And hey!  Even the word ‘English’ comes from the word ‘Angle’ which was the name for those Danish invaders all those centuries ago, who along with their Saxon bredren, gave us that infamous moniker ‘Anglo-Saxon’.  It’s all connected!

So, this is something my writing and circle partner wrote all about Pain Stories.  We are moving, ever so slightly, northwards.  And her reflection is pretty cool.  So here it is.  Enjoy.

Pain Stories

What a dramatic ring it has. We have been talking about pain stories for a while, sharing them, circling around their meaning in our lives. I have been thinking recently about staying too long. Like the Dionne Farris song “I stayed just a little long and now it’s time for me to move on”. I am always/often staying too long. Past the point where I know I should get up and move, I am still sitting there, wallowing, paralysed with indecision or just plainly not wanting to let go – a little kid screaming mine mine long after the toy’s left your hands. Where’s that step between knowing you have been holding onto this truth for too long and actually letting it go? As Pema Chrodron said somewhere letting go is not something you can actually practise it kind of happens like magic when the ground is set for it. What you can practise she says is gentleness and precision. Precision as in focus, concentration seeing things for what they are. Gentleness for each mis step, inability to move, the meandering route we are likely to take.

So where does that leave us now? We haven’t finished thrashing out our complicated life stories, configuring the various threads to our pain stories. But we have shared a lot. We have been sharing a lot for years. And we know the things that press us down. So much of what we have shared over the past year has been about seeing them more clearly owning up and loosening those ties. It’s a process possibly there’ll always be more to undo and unhem from ourselves and we’ll keep coming back in different forms until we’re light enough to float up into the atmosphere. And along the way there are lots of opportunities for letting go, or for setting the ground for letting go. Intentions, rituals, marking moments all have a role in this…But we also need lightness that’s part of what helps the magic happen. There’s a deep mystery to all of this – which our rational minds can’t quite grasp. Coming from a culture of words – Words to map, words to express, words to limit and free we sometimes forget the power beyond words and store too much faith in the act of saying, as if saying it is enough…
Cause really you have a sense of why you build a certain path, follow a route, but not really where it will go. There’s a balancing act there – focus and openness. Precision. Gentleness. Letting go.

You must know the person you are “or a pattern that others made may prevail in the world” A lot of our writing has explored this. How we have channelled our energy into serving forces that suppress us – for acceptance, for recognition. We want to reclaim this energy for ourselves. Ignite that fierce compassion which guards our hearts and takes back what’s ours.

“The medicine for the wound is right next to wound”
I am not certain what this means. When i think of my pain stories they are just painful. But i can feel that in seeing them for what they are there is healing. Perhaps it’s the old story – when we run from the hurt it just gets worse. When you stop and face it, you find how to heal it…I had a dream recently
I was at the drill hall but it was a different looking building, and I had just had my Danish class there. I was walking around with the guys. The building was doing this weird thing to us, the rooms and passages kept on changing. We were walking around with a torch following strange noises, like the scuttling of creatures. Doors would suddenly shut closing off our way. It was dark and creepy but I wanted to go further, see more. Then all of sudden the passages disappeared and instead there was a smart modern shop – something that the outsiders would be able to see. Nomonde was next me now and told me that the building is actually always the same. It’s my fear that makes it change. I could see that now, it was this organic mass shifting in response to my fear. I could see the possibility of facing it without the fear but told her it’s hard to be there without being scared….
It’s like that one step forward one step back, touch my power and run away. So we continue, giving each courage in the dance.

“People are disturbed not by the events but by the meanings they make of them”
We don’t just experience things, we develop narratives around them and then we repeat these narratives. I have been noting that in myself recently. Like with this decision not to do my Phd. That impulse is there to feel like a failure – it doesn’t work out because it’s me, because there’s something wrong. Then there’s the – what will people think of me, I look like a loser – parcel. But that impulse is not as strong. It’s there but not a truth as it used to be. I choose to not acknowledge the pain story as truth, even as it runs through me…There’re there as ghosts, as I turn more and more to finding my own truth, defining who I am on my own terms.
As Julie writes it:
“It is the strength of the ego that holds on to the agreements of pain. It says to you: ‘This pain speaks the truth’; ‘If you give up this agreement, you will be destroyed’; ‘This is who I am.’ The ego doesn’t want you to listen to your wisdom heart and follow a true god home. Rather it wants you to stay lost and focused on false god rooted in the pain of the past”.

Sometimes it feels that my ego holds me on a leash, I can get some space but too much and it pulls me back, roughly. Then I feel lost.

In the West

Purification, release, recapitulation
Most important is holding in one’s heart-mind a wish for purification, a wish for freedom.

by Maia Marie 2012

The Bats of Tropical London AKA Reading the Natural Life of the City

There’s a mini heat-wave, and London becomes the tropical city of my dreams.  There are long sun filled days at the ReUnion.  My five year old splashes in the pool, golden, beads she made in the play project round her neck, performing songs with her friends while I have a cheeky half with their mum.  Icy cold London Lager from the micro brewery, sipped under the railway arches.  I follow my baby son, now toddling, as he pads along the deck, walking with Sara, a member of the collective of artists who made this space, interpreting her dreams.  These whisper of a steady,careful surrender to a great and transformative Unknown; and the tensions of how humans exist with, and make, built environments.

Lucky me, I think, brought to this place of freedom and Life: easy, joyful, gently/firmly disciplined, grounded, ephemeral.  Wide open.  Most of all, playful!  When I come to a place like the ReUnion, I am grateful for the sense of play; both internal and external.  There are other families here too from the local flats.  All of us benefit from the openness offered by the ReUnion.  The sharp edges our children develop in defense against crowded living conditions and the materialistic city, visibly melt as they begin to play.  Or make banana crumble.  Or sit wide eyed watching a group of feminist protest artists practice a topless intervention.  I love how afterwards these serious and focused women bend down to answer the questions from the children.  Only here.  In the gap between building sites, luxury apartments, council flats and the overhead trains.

In the sultry tropical evening, I go for a walk with my Beloved.  Rainbow Olympic lights on the River, the Tate changing colour.  When London gets hot, even the local parks gets a sweet and heady feeling in the golden pink hazy light of dusk.  Our meander takes us through our local park.  The grass has become lush and electric green.  A bat flies over our heads.  I am surprised and delighted.  It is so rare to see bats in the heart of a built up metropolis like ours.  But if my dreams and practice of the last year have shown me anything, it is that the city has a natural, wild-life all of its own, woven into the concrete and the high rises.  The pocket woods in-between.  Animal teachers do appear, and they bring messages and lessons.

On that day, Bat spoke to the tension and dance of what had come up for in my weekly Circle meeting with my writing partner, and in the dreams I had interpreted for Sara at the ReUnion.  What happens when we try to control and dominate what we create?  What happens when we are responsive to the environment we create in (both the inner and outer worlds), surrendering to the rhythm of what is and building  from that point?  It’s a dance because there is always the opportunity to take a step away from a stance that is too dominating; to be rescued from the plotting of our egos.  The soft landing of Hay Bales.

Dancing between domination and surrender in the West as I write the Life Story, I notice how when I try to force the story (I want it to be finished quickly….), it gets stuck.  When I write from a free and open point (within a gentle discipline), it flows.  It is almost like magic, the way it shifts and unburdens my mind set as I read it out loud.  The same goes for listening to the stories my writing and circle partner shares.   Bat brings me a live message about death and initiation:

“Shaman death is the symbolic death of the initiate to the old ways of life and personal identity.  The initiation that brings the rights to heal and be called a Shaman is necessarily preceded by ritual death”

The ritual death that I am being asked to undergo by my practice isn’t about being buried alive or placed in the woods alone.  It’s about releasing the hold of what has gone and being reborn without the ego that clings to the pain stories of the past as my primary identifier of Self – and all too frequently, my sub-concious saboteur.

I wondered today about what I would say, or what I could say, when my daughter asks why we aren’t rich or live in a big house.  What are the reasons?  My initial thought was how I could tell her about the hardships I went through as a youngster when we first moved to the UK, when our family lost all our money and our home, and fractured rather than pulling together through crisis.   How this set me back so I couldn’t recover economically as an adult – there was both the lack of financial help for getting started, and the pain of traumatic rupture I carried around too.  Then I remembered the story my father told me as a child: about how he gave up his place at University so his sister could study because his father couldn’t afford to educate them both.  And the subsequent loss of all of his family’s property and money when Mozambique became independent.  This is a pain story about sacrifice, martyrdom, holding onto regret and being self-made against the odds that has been passed down.  I listened in awe to it then, and now I’m ready to pass it down again as the primary answer to a question that actually deserves far more nuance and consideration in its reply.  Not least in questioning the very basis of what we consider wealth to be!  How dangerous.  That’s why I’m going through the Wheel.  To stop passing down the pain stories.  And it’s hard.  Sometimes I stagnate.  And it scares me.  The idea that I won’t make it.

“The basic idea of ancient initiations was to break down all the former notions of self that were held by the shaman-to-be”

That’s what telling the Life Story, and identifying the pain, does.  It breaks down all former notions of ‘self’ and ‘past’ as intact, absolute, inevitable.  Allowing the old self and beliefs to be broken down and die, is to allow it to be transposed into a newborn being.  Again, this is the message from the Bat in Mint St:

“Hanging upside down is a symbol for learning to transpose your former self into a newborn being”

I have to keep going.  Surrendering to the writing of the Life Story as it comes, and moving into the North of the Wheel.  This is what I learnt from giving birth too.  The more I resist what is, or try to impose my will on it,  the longer and harder the labour.  The labours for both my children were fast, easy and exhilirating because I practised surrender to the pain, the fear and the Power that was greater than ‘me’.* I joke that if I was as good at writing PhD’s as I am at giving birth I would have several by now!  And the same goes for the stuckness I get to in the Initiation practices of The Wheel.  It’s all about Resistance – letting it run things and dictate the pace.  The less resistance to what actually is, the easier the birth of whatever it is we are labouring to deliver.  Or the faster the death of whatever it is that no longer serves us.  Which is the final message from contrary Bat:

“Some people think themselves into a corner with obstacles that are illusionary.  By the time they decide what to do, the opportunities are gone and old age is upon them.  Use your mind, courage and strength to insure an easy labour and quick  delivery into your new state of understanding and growth.  Surrender to the new life you have created from thought.”

Tuning in to the natural life of the city on a hot summer’s night.  Now that’s how I like to live!

*Giving birth in this magnificent way also involved pooing on myself (both times) and making some very far out noises.   Just so there are no misconceptions about what ‘easy’ means in the context of birthing!

With thanks to the following sources:

http://the-reunion.org.uk/

http://www.medicinecards.com/

http://www.julietallardjohnson.com/wheel-of-initiation

Earned the Right to Take Rest?

I press Stop.

Some friends who follow this blog have commented to me recently that it seems like I am perpetually tired and fighting to go on. My writing reflects this struggle with fatigue. They have a point. Young families, social housing, PhD’s and deep spiritual excavations can take it out of a woman! Never mind the entropy of domestic life. You clean it up, and it just gets messy again. Round and round we go.

I notice as part of my Wheel practice, that my initial response to the observation is denial and defensiveness. I am not tired! Or so what if I am! I can handle it all! It’s hard to admit sometimes that I am not as in control as I like to think I am.

It’s OK to press stop.

It’s OK to let my family know that tonight I’d like to go to bed early and be alone for a little while.

It’s definitely OK to do this without a drama. When we give ourselves permission to rest when we need to, it’s easy to let the people close to us know that we are doing so. No big deal. When our need to take a break is tainted with judgements about worthiness and the need to state that we have earned this rest, well, we can act up in all kinds of silly and destructive ways.

Sometimes I need a rest and in the eyes of my inner critic, I didn’t really do anything to justify it. So the lists of ‘all that I do’ come out, the whiny voice of self-justification. I feel compelled to share these reasons with those around me. I teach my children that rest must be earned. Really? And who calculates what counts as work? Was I at that meeting? What kind of cultural belief am I agreeing to when I refuse to allow my knackered body an early night because I didn’t earn it? How much time do I waste by not resting when I need to, in the name of a false belief in what counts as productivity, that is sanctioned by a wider consumer-material culture? The flip side of a cultural belief in needing to ‘earn a rest’ is the equally damaging response of taking too much rest, too much leisure, too much reward. I earned this!

I sat with a friend today watching my son walking. He mastered it about three weeks ago. And he’s really good now. Because every day he practices: he gets up and starts trying to walk. We were reflecting on how babies just get on with stuff, not because they have to or someone tells them to, but because of the sheer joy of it. They haven’t got those moral filters on. They never get tired of their work – to keep walking, to keep making sounds. Except, actually they do!  They walk and walk and walk, and then they get tired. Or hungry. Or they make a big old dump. And if we are wise carers with gently flexible schedules, we let them sleep. Or eat. Or clean them up. And when the business of rest or sustenance or discomfort is done, they carry on, from that pure place of single minded Joy. I am mindful when I follow this formula. Walk when I need to. Eat when I need to. Rest when I need to.

I’ll keep walking towards it! And tonight, I press Stop. Early bedtime, with a hot water bottle and a good film to watch in bed. I begin ten days of recapitulation exercises tomorrow, as I slowly exit from the West of the Wheel.  Visiting my Circle Partner in Denmark in 10 days time. Literally heading North!  Work I choose to do. And when I don’t stress about whether this counts as the kind of work that earns me a rest, then everything is cool in the world.

Night night xx