T
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
This is powerful, Helene. Thank you for your thoughtful words. The tenderness you bring into your language really shows the caring you bring to the practice.
When I first starting having medical problems, my mobility was limited and I was exhausted, but I was so hopped up on steroids that I could never sleep. If I hadn’t already had a long-standing, stable meditation practice, the combination of pain, jitteriness, having a massive identity crisis, etc could have been disastrous. But it wasn’t because I spent hours a day meditating.
Or, at least, trying to meditate. I am certainly no meditation guru, and much of the time I spent practicing involved a great deal of fidgeting, crying, getting up and sitting back down. I wasn’t comfortable in any position for very long. So I did sitting meditations, lying down meditations, standing against the wall meditations, walking meditations.
My ability to stay with the breath was extremely unpredictable. I did a lot of satipatthana (body awareness) meditations and energy body meditations. Clearly, I am obsessive. But I was really feeling the precarity of my existence and I knew that I needed to stay clear and nimble minded because I really thought that at any moment, I could be in the bardos. I didn’t want to die asleep to reality. Or something.
My feelings were all over the place. Most of the time, I couldn’t pick out one dominant feeling, except maybe fear. I got to know fear so well, where it hides in my heart, in my limbs, in my nervous system. I tried to make friends with it. I saw the ways my fear tries to keep me safe. I felt grateful for my fear.
I am in no way saying that I always feel friendly towards fear now. I certainly do not. I would say I spend an average of 75% of my time feeling fearful and about 5% of that time I am able to feel friendly towards that fear. But that tiny percentage of time gives me a lot of clarity about how it is possible to relate to my feelings, even if I don’t do it all the time.
Ann,
I really relate to this. Both situationally and also because 12 step has often helped me find my feelings. I love the end, may we all learn other ways.
T
Jenn,
Wow, this is powerful. I love how much compassion you bring to, not just the people involved, but even your language. Beautiful.
T
I am a person who cries a lot. This hasn’t always been the case. For most of my life, I kind of was the stoic badass that most people assume me to be. In case you haven’t met me: I’m covered in tattoos and have a distinctly rebellious approach to basically everything that I have a tendency to be vocal about. The latter are real aspects of my personality and appearance, but I was only hard the first, oh, forty or so years of my life because I just really didn’t know how to get through life otherwise.
And then my wife left me. I was forty and gay and newly sober from alcohol. I was a full time yoga teacher and part time writer and I only got to be those things because I shared a home and resources with my wife. And I was still in love with her and I didn’t want to be divorced. And, and, and.
I taught a yoga class the morning my wife left. Seriously. She left at two and I taught at ten. I had a friend drop me off at a church near the studio so I could, well, I’m not sure what I thought I’d do. I ended up falling asleep for a few minutes in front of a giant stained glass window. And then I got up, dusted myself off, and went to teach.
I started out by telling the class that my wife and I were separating and that I had come to teach because I believe in showing up. So hard. For ten days, I did everything. I woke up at six to run, I subbed everyone’s classes, I did whatever whenever. Sure, I cried sometimes and inside I felt like maybe I would just fall apart, but I always got up in the morning and did what needed to be done.
And then, when all the things were too much and I didn’t know what to do, I called a friend, Dewitt. Dewitt asked me if I wanted to go on a retreat with him In Colorado. The teacher was a person named Susan Piver, who I hadn’t heard of at the time. I said yes. And then I googled Susan and I realized that I was going on retreat with a person who had written a book called, “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart.” Obviously.
I listened to Susan’s book on the plane and I loved it. I loved her vulnerability and her relatability. I say I read her book, but I kind of assumed that I had done most of the tender being open to the world stuff she was talking about and that I could now move on to easeful detachment. I thought that if I went on meditation retreat, I could, like meditate out of heartbreak.
I probably don’t need to say that’s not what happened. I cried every waking moment of that retreat. I cried eating and meditating and doing yoga. Dewitt told me that I was even crying in my sleep. “I can’t stop crying,” I told Susan. “Of course you can’t,” she said. I didn’t know how to explain that I am, like, just not the kind of person who cries all the time. I’m disciplined. I am serious. I’m in control.
Except that I was crying all the time and I couldn’t stop and at some point on day whatever, I realized that I actually have no control. I have no control over my heartbreak, my crying, my feelings, my wife. I have no control. And despite the fact that I felt terrible and was sure I would never love again, the sun kept rising and the retreat kept happening.
As I started to get to know other folks in the sangha, I realized that I was not the only one going through some kind of personal hell. No one goes on retreat as a vacation, it turns out. And no one seemed to be judging me. All my crying was freaking out no one but me. I got the tiniest inkling that maybe it was okay to cry and okay not to be in control and okay to show up messy and tender.
Year have passed and there have been times that I thought I might harden back up. But I can’t. I mean, I’m sure that i can act like I’m not soft, but the flip side of experiencing the depth of my own sadness is that it opened me up to experience both more subtle kinds of joy and also a quieter kind of contentment than I knew previously. I allowed, as Susan suggests in her book and teachings and all the smartest people reiterate constantly, the tenderness of my heart to be touched by the world.
So now I can’t go back and I don’t really want to, but sometimes I don’t really want to have all the feelings and I really really really wish I could be in charge of just a few things. And it’s not like I’ve become preternaturally emotionally intelligent or anything resembling serene, but I have great compassion for the person I was that was trying so hard to open and close at the same time.
Ah, I love the idea of including your therapist! I have not thought of this, although my own therapist is frequently a source of profound wisdom. Fabulous idea.
I love the inclusion of both your great grandparents and your daughter. So many generations. This inspires me to contemplate my own disability lineage, those who have come before me to light my way. Beautiful.
when i imagine my lineages, i see as the background a cosmos of stars that form an elaborate constellation. these are my artistic muses: gertrude stein, june jordan, audre lorde, frida khalo, wangechi mutu, cy twombly, marina abrabovich, countless stars. sometimes one or many flicker into brightness and sometimes they are dimmer, but form a part of the whole nonetheless. in the foreground are two shooting stars, their arcs perfectly visible. these are my buddhist and yoga lineages and each can be traced back to an original source. this vibrant tapestry is the fabric of my lineage.
when i think of this, i feel devotion. so much to live up to. so much wisdom. so much cosmos. so much for me to lean on when i am lonely or afraid. so many beings sent to transmit the teachings that guide my life. i sometimes long for a north star, a guru, but my path is well illuminated and i am grateful.
these are the beings who taught me to practice. to practice meditation, to practice art, to practice poetry. and so they guide my daily practices with every breath, although i do not always think of them. contemplating this, i am overcome with such gratitude that i know i must add a new practice of acknowledging my lineage every day. thank you.
Betsy,
It is so very hard to pick just one kind of suffering. Although we are differently aged, I identify with you. It’s hard to resist trying to cram everything into one incarnation.
En solidaridad,
TI am sick. I am sick and it is impossible for me to escape the truth of suffering. The truth of suffering wakes me up hot in the middle of the night and with cold, sharp pains in the morning. And yet, there is also the cessation.
In some way, I might argue that sometimes what wakes me up at night is suffering and sometimes it is simply pain. I don’t think that before my recent medical adventures I had ever truly experienced pain, not because my life has been without pain, but because suffering has been my dominant experience.
I know, I know, it is a cliche to say that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. I’m not sure that optional is the right word choice, but pain itself holds a malleability that suffering does not. Suffering itself seems to me a kind of resistance. The suffering is greatest when I resist the fact of pain, when I try to escape the reality of illness, when I fantasize about the pain-free past. These are the clingings, the attachments that for me transform what is simply pain into suffering.
And so what if I don’t resist? What if I allow for the pain, nestle into it, make it familiar? Well, it does not go away, but it does become friendlier, or I become friendlier towards it and then it seems less woe is me how I have been forsaken and more just another fact of my experience. There are other facts of my experience: Love, Community, Care, Beauty. Pain and suffering do not have to be central.
I’m not trying to gaslight myself and I am no kind of brightsider. My physical pain is real and the suffering that arises is also real and also what is real is always determined by where I am seeing from. Sometimes I am better at choosing a perspective and sometimes not. Sometimes it feels chosen for me, maybe by karma, maybe by psychological patterning (if there even is a difference between the two).
I want to say something grand like Oh I have faith that letting go of attachment will relieve me of suffering. I don’t know that I am capable of such surrender, but my real, lived, felt experience is that the less I resist reality, the more I enjoy it, whatever the circumstances, whatever the suffering.
