Eleven years ago, I attended a
series of workshops that altered the course of my life. At my emotional core, I
was full of pain and sadness. I did not know how to let go or forgive. New to
my spiritual path, I didn’t yet understand the nature of faith. I know it now as
a thing that religion has no ownership of. Faith exists without the need for temples,
books, and miracles.
The woman leading the workshops, named
Whispering Deer, walked us through the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness,
also known as Metta. I was looking
for that inner Zen, that place of peace inside me that hippies and yogis seemed
to discover by sitting cross-legged with their hands on their knees and
repeatedly humming to themselves- that was the only cultural visual I had to
represent what I was looking for.
It’s amazing the stereotypes we
create about things we simply don’t understand. These images act as resistance-barriers
standing between us and the things we desire most. I wanted peace and
compassion and yet I did not believe I deserved it. So I made fun of that idea
of tranquility, as if to say, why would I
want something so silly? Thus insuring I wouldn’t try for it… and fail.
Again.
That weekend, listening to
Whispering Deer’s story of transformation and seeing the person she had become standing
before me, I finally believed that goal was possible for myself. And I wanted
it more than I had wanted anything else in my life. I determined that if I
could not find it inside myself, I would create it.
A new path bloomed before me.
The loving-kindness work I embarked
on was a series of meditations to teach myself to have compassion. The side
effect of the repetitive practice was the alteration in how I perceived events
that happened around me. I had been stuck inside my own experience, and saw
everything that happened as happening to
me. It’s a nuanced line, and a change in inflection changes the meaning, but
when you experience everything as happening to
you, you cease to be in control of your world. You give that power up to the
universe and put yourself at the mercy of its whims, like a ship adrift at sea.
You become a victim of the world around you.
What I wanted was to be a part of
the world with my hands firmly on the wheel. I wanted to be part of what was
happening, of creating my own experiences. I dove into the lessons on
compassion, spending 20 minutes in meditation every night, at the end of my
day, just before bed. One of the things Whispering Deer told us was that the
simplest Buddhist level of having compassion for oneself, was the hardest one
for Westerners to master. She wasn’t wrong.
Embracing loving-kindness as a
philosophy, requires you to build an awareness of how you respond to the events
that occur in your life, and then to push into that awareness to understand
those reactions. It’s a way of unlearning the way you have been taught to
respond and discover your own intuitive way of walking through the world- which
also requires that you be open to how different a path that might be.
If I step back and observe the
world around me as a larger web, removing any personal attachments I have to
how things work, I can see the pattern of emotional dialogue that plays out. We
feel an emotion in our bodies and we react to it, at other people, without
understanding where it came from or why we felt it in the first place. As a
culture we lack awareness of our emotional bodies. How many times have you heard
someone say, I don’t know why I feel the
way I feel, I just do?
When we lash out against others
because we feel a strong emotion, and we do it without seeking clarification,
we commit acts of violence. Being angry/ frustrated/ irritated/ mad at anyone else is like sending out a
tidal wave whiplash of your bad attitude. Others will feel it. Others will be
hurt by it. I’m guilty of it. Whether you intended that hurt or not, you still
have to own the responsibility for the effects of it. It’s why this path became
so important to me. It’s why being a better version of myself became necessary.
This is a hard world we live in and
it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the traumas, hurts, losses and failures we
collect on our journeys. It’s no excuse for being careless with the people
around us. Our world moves so fast and so quickly that, often, we feel like all
we can do is tread water to keep from getting swept away or left behind.
Even our news headlines are
sensationalized to best catch our attention and we’ve had to learn to accept
exaggerations and misleading implications as truth. No wonder we get depressed
by the world around us. This is a hard world, when everyone is only thinking of
themselves. But it is a beautiful world, too, where people do work together and
help each other out. In order to experience that, you have to be part of it.
You have to participate in it.
We all have to be gentle with each
other. We can afford to. We need to remember that we are not just individuals
having a personal experience in this world. We need to remember that the face
we put out into the world is how the world perceives us. We have to treat
people the way we want to be treated. When faced with hard times and hard
people, patience, compassion and gentleness are a better choice for the health
of your own heart.
[Originally published August 31, 2011.]
Wow! I'm sorry to have to admit this is the fjrst I've looked at your blog. My loss. Your writing is profound, and helpful to me as someone who is stumbling, thrashing and blundering it blundering my way toward mindfulness. Thank you! I really enjoy reading your writing and look forward to doing more of it.
ReplyDeleteHappycat
That means so much to me! I would hardly say you're blundering your way to mindfulness- you are one of the most thoughtful people I know. We love you!
DeleteWow! I'm sorry to have to admit this is the fjrst I've looked at your blog. My loss. Your writing is profound, and helpful to me as someone who is stumbling, thrashing and blundering it blundering my way toward mindfulness. Thank you! I really enjoy reading your writing and look forward to doing more of it.
ReplyDeleteHappycat