Only once you have become mindful of what you do can you
move forward to equanimity through acceptance. Accepting what is reality in
every moment is the path to real liberation.
Fear is your biggest hurdle to creating true connections; it
is the friend of isolation and the enemy of vulnerability. Many of us have let fear control our lives.
We let fear determine what we do, how we do it, who we love and how much we
love them. As someone who lived in fear and really didn’t realize it, I look
back now and see everything I let it rob me of. I allowed myself to drift along
without relying on anyone. I kept others
at a distance for fear of being hurt and disappointed.
Not only does fear assist and allow us to perpetuate our own
self-deprecating isolation, it can cause us to try to control things which are
far beyond our control. This self-imposed volition to control anything and
everything to avoid any type of pain or suffering is again (like judging) a
doubly harmful action to ourselves. Our
attempt to control as much as possible robs us of the opportunity to
spontaneously deal with reality as it is, since we impose preconceived expectations
rather than allowing ourselves to watch what will naturally unfold. This in
itself is painful. Think of a situation where you’ve had expectations about the
outcome. Now the outcome is different then you expected. You become angry,
maybe sad. We begin to resist reality,
thinking that it should have been the way we imagined. All the energy you spent
on mentally creating the future you wanted to see, replaying the story
repeatedly in your head and you still ended up in pain. The other harmful
aspect of attempting to control things is that it is simply impossible. We are
setting ourselves up for even more pain because we are attempting to accomplish
something which cannot be done. Our own
fear, in working to avoid pain, drives us to cause ourselves pain, doesn’t that
sound a little insane?
So how do we get to this place of acceptance? I would argue
that it isn’t a place, it is an ongoing journey, one that I suspect will take a
lifetime, which began for me in Dec 2009 when my grandmother died. Watching
someone you love deteriorate before your very eyes can have a profound effect
on you. To me it was the lack of control, the idea that regardless of how much
you loved someone, how exactly we live our life, how much stuff we have, we are
all subject to the same universal laws. Annica, impermanence, is one of the
characteristics of all things in life.
I very distinctly remember going through my grandma’s
apartment after her death with my family to clean it out. There was stuff
crammed in every feasible corner, and I was going through VCR tapes (she never
fully migrated over to DVD lol) to sort out family videos when I stopped. I looked
around at the chaos of the apartment, family sorting through items, her friends
coming to claim items, when a thought came over me. All these things she held
onto in her life, things she cherished, things that brought her comfort, could
do absolutely nothing for her in the end. Not even the love of our family could
stop it. I know intellectually you might be saying “duuuh” but when you
experience this for yourself, you begin to see life from a different
perspective. This was my first glimpse
at the truth that all that arises must pass. I say glimpse, because life has
continued to shove this concept in my face in hopes that one day I will truly
understand it. This experience spawned a new sense of urgency into my life and
started me on my journey to acceptance.
Countless books, internet research, discussions, documentaries,
dharma talks, jobs, boyfriends and months later, I finally came to a point in
which I could rearrange my life to make room for some serious discovery. My
first serious piece of work, and the most difficult thing I had to do was metta
practice, which is loving-kindness. I say it was the most difficult project I’d
ever had because metta always starts with- what’s supposed to be considered
easiest- loving-kindness towards yourself. The structure then has you offering
genuine loving-kindness to loved ones, then neutral persons, then enemies. The
phrases my teacher/therapist/friend (to whom I will always be grateful to and
remember in my Metta) gave me, which there are variations on everywhere were:
May I be happy.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be free from suffering.
May I be filled with loving-kindness.
At first, I thought it would be easy. I would sit on my
mediation cushion in my living room, and robotically repeat these phrases over
and over again to myself for about a half hour twice a day. I didn’t feel the
love so to speak. I did this for weeks before I met with my teacher again, and
I confessed that I was having difficulty. He suggested a book to me, Radical
Acceptance, which forever changed my life. As I read this book, it was as if
the author had decided to spend time in my head to do her research. She phrased
things in a way that I connected with and gave situational examples that struck
me. It was through reading the author’s
challenges and challenges of her patients (she’s a psychologist and a Buddhist)
I began to recognize the fear in me. I could hear its voice as thoughts in my
head telling me “Maybe he won’t love you anymore”, “You’re too this”, and “you’re
not enough that”. I could also feel myself retreating, a so-called negative
emotion would arise and I would retreat into my own head talking myself out of
it, whatever it was anger, jealousy or vulnerability. It was through this process of taking a good
hard look in the proverbial mirror that I finally began to understand the cause
and effect relationships between how I hurt myself and others.
It’s funny, as people when we are happy, we hoard it. We
want to keep it for ourselves and protect it so no one can affect it. When we
are hurt, our immediate response is to lash out and hurt others. I remember
seeing this cycle in my own behaviours. My sense of self would be offended, and
my first response was to make whoever I viewed as the perpetrator to be just as
hurt. That is the human condition. We all want to be happy, we all want to be
free from suffering but we are also the perpetrators of our own unhappiness.
How ironic.
One of my major hurdles was dealing with unfelt anger. Anger
that I had numbed for one reason or another finally needed to be released. I
certainly did not wake up one day knowing “Hey this is the day I feel it all”
but thanks to a perfect storm of events and a mental-emotional fortitude (which
I wasn’t aware of, I had been crying like baby for a month basically), it
finally came to fruition. I became
angry, seriously angry. At first I was angry about the current situation (I was
annoyed with my boyfriend’s behavior) but then I quickly realized as a
particular phrase ran through my head that this was anger from long ago. When I
say I was angry, I feel like this is the understatement of my life. I cannot
describe the anger I felt in any other way except for black. I’d heard the
phrase “red with anger” but I was BEYOND that. Internally I felt like I was
standing on the edge of an abyss of this black anger, I had a choice I could
either jump into this black abyss and act like a crazed lunatic or I could
stand on the edge and feel it. Boy, did I feel it. I had thoughts and phrases
run through my head that thinking about now makes me laugh. I particularly
remember at one point wanting to just scream. Just scream out in pain and
anger. I was convinced in my head though, that if I did, it wouldn’t sound
human. I just had this primeval, animalistic howl in my head and I knew if I
screamed that’s what would come out.
The anger rocked through me, and what I realized afterwards while
crying in my kitchen, was that anger was the armor I had used for my pain.
Underneath all that anger was the hurt. Accepting the anger, the hurt and the fact
that many of my actions unconsciously hurt others was the most difficult part
of my journey, but the most important. Only once we can accept ourselves, and
see our own motivations behind our actions can we begin to accept others and
reality as they are. When we recognize
ourselves in others is when true compassion and equanimity can develop. We are
all motivated by the same general principles, we want to be happy and we don’t
want to suffer.
So in a blatant attempt to be vulnerable, I would like to
share a kind-of poem I wrote of my angry experience right after it. To be
honest, I debated whether to share it or not because it was so deeply personal
and because I’m afraid of judgments, but I’m making the conscious effort to be
vulnerable, so enjoy!
Anger
Deep, black
worm hole
Pulling,
calling, begging.
Teetering on
the edge.
I want to
scream.
I want to
smash**
Pressure in
my chest,
Pushing its
way out.
Just fucking
go!!
Galvanized,
thick armor
protecting the
softness.
Must feel
the way through,
don’t give
in,
don’t get
lost,
just feel.
Then comes
the pain.
I care about
this suffering.
** the dishes on my counter, not like the hulk...or actually ya maybe like the hulk.
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