This blog entry, or blog entry endeavor, is going to be a difficult one, but I feel I need to own it and confess it, so to speak. I say endeavor because that's all it may be, an attempt, without an end, without conclusion. But isn't that part of the human experience? It's beautiful to view events and experiences as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe it's just NOT the end we wanted, or the beginning, or middle, or the whole package, for that matter. I got so totally caught up in my own anger and frustration the other day that I couldn't find any passage out of it. I just stayed there, stuck, in that pretty awful place the whole day. Angry, frustrated, stuck, knowing what was going on, even being aware that it would eventually end, but feeling totally helpless, totally unable to snap my fingers, or chant a mantra, and say okay, that's enough, I'm out of this shit hole. It didn't happen that way. Perhaps my ego, or some inner injury that got triggered, decided that I was going to be stuck all day long, and be pretty miserable the whole time. I felt embarrassed, humiliated, and immature. I felt small, like a child having a temper tantrum. Something failed, something collapsed, something came falling down, and until the tears finally came, and until I sat down with it and began reading passages from an inspired text was I able to sail out of the maelstrom and into a sea of calm. I lost touch with myself for most of the day. Or did I? I just love it when Pema Chodran tells us to stay with our stuckness, feel it to it's fullest, try to find peace with feeling really uncomfortable with what's going on, try to learn to be able to use that experience to go deeper. For me, when I'm in it, there's little peace or learning going on that I'm aware of--it comes afterwards, IF I put in the work. Like right now. I'm feeling pretty okay about it all. I suppose we are going to have visitations from our emotional selves that we'd just as soon slam the door on and say please, not now, not today, not ever!! Then we beat ourselves up for thinking we have not succeeded in working our program, or we have failed to reach into that healing part of ourselves that we've worked so hard to cultivate. In The Guesthouse, Rumi not only tells us to invite all these things inside, but to welcome them openly and with love. Pema writes:
"When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance."
"Stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion." For me I think that's a key. I can get all tangled up in struggling with distress to the point that I feel I like I'm tied into a thousand little knots.
One of my triggers centers around being told or asked to do something that I don't want to do. Really, it can be that simple. And I don't feel okay saying no. Or maybe more accurately, it's the whole concept of being told to do something when I don't know how to do it, and kind of want to. I think that happened to me over and over again as a child, in countless ways, and when I sense it happening again that very frightened little kid in me wants to shut down, wants to scream out please teach me how and I will do it, please show me how, please be with me and let's do it together, can we let it be a fun and loving learning experience? It's part of my history that I have to process and accept and learn from. Over and over I come back to the events of my childhood. Undealt with, these fearful experiences that are part of our history "take purchase of our souls" (James Hollis). As a child I was painfully shy, withdrawn, had very little supervision, no discipline, no structure, and an environment often shaking to its foundation with chaos, craziness, and at times a violence that can be difficult to revisit. When you watch someone you love getting beat up repeatedly and you can't do anything about it, and you really want to, it's quite a burden to carry, for anyone, especially a little child who thinks his mother will probably be killed. The scene plays out again and again. The child is called upon to be the adult, and of course he can't. He becomes hyper-vigilant, trying to become the protector, the keeper of peace, the one who soothes. He gets chastised and criticized for not knowing how to do something he's never been taught how to do. He wants to give up and simply be a kid. But there are times when that is not allowed.
So I conclude that the root of anger and frustration is fear. So what's the fear? For me, and for many others, the bottom line, the core, the center of the fear is fear of not being loved. Fear of not being worthy of love. It gets me every time, and it hurts like hell. You sort of hang your head in the most humble of ways and say I am afraid that no one loves me because I'm not worthy of love. Pema calls this buying into the old storyline, the old storyline that is not true, the old storyline that never was true. We were taught so many falsehoods, it can take a lifetime to unlearn them.
Noah Levine writes: "Aversion isn't the enemy; it is just the normal reaction of the mind and body to pain. Whatever the hurt we feel, our biological survival mechanism tries to get rid of it. The problem is that we don't actually have the ability to escape from all the painful experiences in life. It can't be done. Thus the revolutionary's practice is to learn to break the habitual reactive tendency of aversion and to replace it with a compassionate response. The good news is that although aversion or anger toward pain is common but unhelpful, compassion is a response that decreases suffering and brings about an internal and external experience of safety and well-being." "A compassionate response can, at times, be as simple as seeing clearly the pain we are meeting with anger or aversion, and just letting go of the attempt to push it away and relaxing into the experience itself with mercy and care."
Pema Chodran writes: "Befriending emotions or developing compassion for those embarrassing aspects of ourselves, the ones that we think of as sinful, or bad, becomes the raw material, the juicy stuff with which we can work to awaken ourselves."
A lot to think about, to ponder on, to work on, to process. It isn't easy and sometimes the going gets pretty rough, but if we can recall that if we stop and try to connect with the feeling of compassion that resides in our heart, and sometimes most especially self-compassion, it will help make riding the waves of anger, pain and aversion to those feelings a bit smoother.
