In under two weeks I will be heading down to New York City to meet up with my parents. I will be away a total of five days but two of those days (one going and one coming back) will be me sitting for six hours a stretch on a bus. I used to like to travel, but now I don't. I have become a homebody who gets anxious whenever I have to leave home. But I haven't been to NYC in several years and whenever I go I find myself wishing that I could live in the City again. This trip I want to continue with my meditation practice and that's going to be quite a challenge in itself. I'm not sure if I can pull it off, but if I can I think I will be calmer and more awake for the experience, happier.
More important than visiting NYC is seeing my parents. I only get to see them 2-3 times a year. They are in their 80s now and I will worry about them wandering around the City. I will probably spend a chunk of my time with them visiting museums and maybe going to the ballet. Being around them I will practice getting in touch with love and compassion, which is, according to Buddhists, a ripe time for cultivating bodhichitta or the awakened heart. In the coursebooks I'm reading getting in touch with your heart is stressed as a vital part of meditation. One of the reasons I'm drawn to Tibetan Buddhism is that I recognize that my heart is still numb, still partially frozen and the practice is about warming the heart and making it sensitive and responsive again. Pema Chodron has said many times that we all have this what she calls "soft spot" inside ourselves which I think is bodhichitta. It is open, tender, compassionate, wise. She also says that all the suffering in the world stems from people trying to protect their soft spot. In armoring our hearts we lose sensitivity and we become deadened or callous or cruel even.
Each time I was abused by Brendan, my heart began shutting down. What took it's place was intense distorting fear and suppressed anger. I had to deaden myself both to get through the relationship and to get out of it, but at what a cost! I haven't had a heart wrenching cry since before I left Brendan over 15 years ago. I associated that kind of crying with bodhichitta. When Brendan wasn't around and I got a chance to cry, I felt like a 4 year old kid who has been betrayed somehow for the first time by a loved one. My heart felt so young and pliable, so wide open, so innocent and rather beautiful and at the same time so very unhappy. Look at a young child crying deeply, he or she is absorbed, intense yet so open. I've been like that and you've been like that, just letting loose all the sadness in a shocked way. Like "How can this be happening to me?!"
It's what happens afterwards that is very important. After all that crying has settled down and your eyes are puffy and your nose is stuffed and you feel weak. That's the point where you are just existing with your tender heart, your awakened heart bodhichitta. So what do you do? You've been deeply hurt. You can either be accepting of it, soften, learn, open, start to grow up or you can get hard, angry, bottled up again, even revengeful. With Brendan I got hard and I got angry and I got numb. I blamed him instead of taking on my responsibility for helping to create the situation that I was in. It just was not all his fault and the fault he should have taken on and acknowledged but didn't gave me the excuse to lay all blame on him. I was abused, yes and he was in the wrong, but I played my part often out of ignorance and misery.
Anyway, my heart was scarred and I scarred my heart by shutting so far down. After I left Brendan I was still shut down and then I became deeply ill and shut down even more. But as I learned to take care of myself with therapy and medication and creativity I have been moving back in the direction of my heart. Now I can look at my wounded heart and say "What's up?" and "What can I do to help?" The pain that I feel, the suffering that comes up, is connected to bodhichitta, the soft spot and I am beginning to see this as true. Normally, I see pain as the enemy, but now I see pain as part of having a sensitive heart. Sensitivity can hurt, but it also can open up the world, rule out pain and you might be ruling out joy as well. And that's what I'm finding, that everything is intertwined rather than separate. That's what makes things so wonderful sometimes and so confusing.
We live in a culture of good guys and bad guys often ignoring that the so called "good" guys often act as immorally and as aggressively as the "bad" guys. The fact that good guys can act like bad guys and bad guys can act like good guys shows that life is not black and white. All of us, without exception, are a mixture of positive and negative impulses. The problem is we want to see ourselves as only positive and none of the negative. Even when we see and feel our negative qualities we want to deny them somehow, make less of them. And in some ways we should, should stop making such a big deal out of ourselves. But in other ways it is important to acknowledge that we have failings and limitations, not just acknowledge it but repeat it to others to let them know that they are not alone, that we are all in the same boat.
Too often I feel very separate from others and that's part of why I stay numb. I won't acknowledge that there are millions of people, maybe more, who feel what I feel. I've been trying to practice a little bit of the tonglen meditation which has you breath in pain and breath out healing or give away healing and pleasure. First you start with your own pain and then extend it to include the people you love, the people you feel neutral about and then the people you dislike or even hate. Ultimately you breath in everyones pain and breath out everyones healing, so you make that connection between your seemingly isolated pain and the pain of everyone else. In making that connection you build and deepen compassion.
I have a high mountain to climb and I'm somewhere near the bottom of it. The goal is to exchange my limited view of myself for a big view of everyone else and to be of some help to some of those others. But first I must gradually climb the mountain, pace myself, strengthen my heart.
2 comments:
Kate~
I think it's very healthy that you are really facing your old pain from the abusive person who affected your life so much. I know that it is easier, sometimes, to bottle things up than to face them head-on, which takes more courage and self-awareness. I don't know very much about Buddhism, but from what I have read about it, it seems to be very focused on self-awareness, which is a great tool, particularly for people who have psychiatric disabilities. Insight can make life so much easier! I admire you for being so self-disciplined with this program you are following and all of the reading you are doing. I think some of what you do on your own is probably just as helpful for you as therapy with a therapist is for some people (not that you haven't also had therapy). I admire that self-discipline and working on yourself.
Have FUN in NYC, as it is the place everyone on earth seems to want to be at, and I have loved it on the short visits I've had there, so I am very jealous!
How many people are currently focusing on improving their ability to be compassionate? Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone cared whether or not they had a strong ability to be compassionate? The world would be transformed.
When it was hardest for me to live, when I was actively suicidal, I remember writing that my "heart was shriveled and dried up hanging by a thread in my chest". It just did not feel like I had any heart left in me. When I felt so bad that I wished to die, the condition of my heart was certainly sick. As I was sick.
It appears to me that the Buddhist insistence on the central existence of the heart in consciousness is very healthy, and will help you to become more healthy too.
There is a divide between illness and self. Sometimes the illness affects the self, but what happens the most with me is the self stands by and watches the illness affect my mind. I am often divided and made unwilling witness to my sick condition. Of course there are also times when my self is defeated, when the self is rolled over and rolled under by the illness. I can get overwhelmed. What is fascinating, and might I add, probably very non-Western medical in perspective, is when the self rolls the illness. That the mind can take control over the illness is a fact that is avoided by most medical practitioners I've met - they are afraid that you will try to defeat the illness without medication. They are afraid that if you think the mind can be triumphant over the illness this will lead you to reduce or stop the drugs. But in your writing there is not a single mention of trying to alter your medication regimen by adopting a Buddhist mindset. I think this prudent. Reduction of mental suffering while on the drugs is probably your goal. It would be my goal too. But do you harbor any secret hopes that changing the way your mind works will lead to a reduction or stoppage of medication? Just a question.
I am starting to believe more and more that attitude alone can make living with the illness more comfortable. In my case I can't stop the drugs, probably ever, because the illness is too strong. This is a realistic view, not a defeated view. I believe that while taking drugs there is enormous room for the mind to change and grow in health. Drugs do not stop or confine a sick mind, in my experience they only strengthen its perception of reality.
What you are writing is a testimony, a statement of interior life as you experience it, as fact. I am grateful for your testimony and the hope it brings me that there are avenues of healing that are as yet undiscovered by me, but within reach. I don't want to have a heart that is sick, on top of having a mental illness. You tempt me, as you write, to follow your path. What jewels does Buddhism and meditation have to offer me, as it has offered you?
Thank you for sharing your inner life with us on your blog.
Your friend,
Karen Sorensen
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