Years ago, I was in my car driving somewhere that took me on the freeway. I turned onto the entrance ramp from the south and another car, which has been heading north, turned onto the ramp at the same time I did. It was an entrance near my house, I'd been through it countless times and I knew there were two lanes for a good distance before the road turned into a single lane.
A woman was driving the other car. It had a sun roof and she was illuminated by the light. She was well-dressed, her hair in a bun, wearing a light colored jacket that probably was part of a suit. She looked like she was going to work. But all that registered later because when I looked at her, I saw her face was completely distorted by rage. I realized instantly that she thought I was cutting her off. Within a few moments, she must have seen the two lanes; needless to say, when they turned into one I let her go first.
As I drove onto the freeway, I myself was jittery - it was disturbing to be the cause of so much anger. I lost her in traffic, but my internal camera had taken a snapshot of her enraged flushed face and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I could feel in my body what I think she felt - the heart suddenly racing, a sudden clench in her belly and chest, intense agitation. I wondered how many miles she had to go before she came down and could get on with the rest of her day.
All this happened a long time ago, but I've thought of her, seen her face, many times since. I thought I recognized what it takes for someone to get that angry over thinking a car was cutting in. I spun out a story of a woman stifled at home or at work, someone who isn't getting what she thinks she deserves. Or someone whose husband just said he wants a divorce or someone who can't abide any kind of slight - can't you see me here and that I'm first?- and my driving onto the ramp at the same time as she was the simply more than she could take. Or maybe she was a person who was angry all the time.
Even that day on the freeway, I knew I never wanted my face to look like like hers had; I never wanted my body to feel the adrenaline rush of anger. But I had felt anger many times. How could I know what my face looked like when I felt it? Felt something close to pure rage at the many areas in my life that weren't going my way? If I didn't want my face ever to look like that woman's, I had to find some way to bring anger down to a very small part of everything inside me.
When did I become the person who rarely takes offense? Who says, "you want to cut in, be my guest." Who says when a car passes me on the right, then gets into my lane and drives at a snail's pace, "Okay, I guess I'll look at the scenery." When did I become the person who knows that taking offense is to take a step into a power struggle - with other people in cars or on line in the supermarket where no one moves fast enough for me or in any of the many places I go through the day where people don't do what I want in the way that I want it at the pace that I think it should be. Demanding that the whole world run around me is no longer an option for me. I can't afford to get caught in any power struggles, to let my impatience get the better of me. I can't let my equanimity to be tied to what anyone else does or doesn't do.
None of this came easily. Everything in the world was an object of my ego and I was in a power struggle with it all. When you secretly fear that you're puny and unlovable, you need every scrap of power you can get. But that kind of power is as distorted as that woman's face and there will never be enough of it unless things inside change.
It's another kind of power I've searched for and found, a force whose only expression rests in a calmness of mind, an ability to see the human being standing in front of me, an ongoing desire to keep walking toward as much liberation as I can know. It's a power greater than myself and I know now I can trust it. I started out as someone who thought only the accumulation of power in the world would make me whole. Somewhere along the line I learned that the only power I will ever have is power over myself and my attitudes and that's the power that will set me free.
My mother was an envious woman. I can see her face as she looked at another woman's clothes or diamond ring or larger house - she raised her chin and took quick glances and shifted her shoulders as if she was puffing herself up. It was a look I recognized all through my childhood; I knew even when I was very young that she was measuring what she had against what she saw and she always wanted more.
It took me a long time to realize how much of her envy I had absorbed. It took me so long because I knew envy was an ugly emotion and I didn't want to have it. But I did. I envied people who had more success than me, were better looking, more flamboyant, all those who seemed to glide through the world with ease and were recognized as special -- all those who had what I wanted and I wanted everything.
Once I admitted I was often envious, I began to recognize a certain feeling in my body, the place that got activated when envy claimed me. A sudden twist in my belly, a rawness in my throat, and other signs - when I felt them I could focus on them, focus on envy on the level of the body, and practice easing tension wherever it gathered. I began to understand that envy, like so many of the other feelings that made me suffer, was ephemeral, insubstantial and I didn't have to take it on.
The biggest realization for me was how close envy is to self-pity. When I looked at how much everyone else had, I felt sorry for myself, who didn't have something someone else did. They had this and that and this, I didn't and never would. It was the "never would" that left me undone - not through anxiety or doubt - but through feeling sorry for myself. I can remember so many times I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, working my way along the edges of a moebius strip of everyone has but I don't. There must be a fatal flaw in me that puts me in and keeps me in the muck. Poor girl, it will never change, you're not strong enough to change it. Poor poor girl. In fact nothing could change as long as I felt sorry for myself. There's nowhere to go with self-pity; it's a retreat from action and hope and any thought of change.
As I go along, I feel less and less envy. I've learned there isn't a finite amount of success or any of the good things in life. Other people's having takes nothing away from me. The world is an abundant place and there's more than enough to go round. I've also seen how worthless it is to compare myself and my life to anyone else. Given who I am, if I'm comparing, I'm finding myself less than, and that's become something I can't afford.
Self-pity is more of a struggle. It works in subtle ways inside me and is often in disguise. I'll be cleaning the kitchen counters and suddenly think about kitchen counters I've seen in a magazine - so much newer and better than mine. I don't have to go further with the thought, but I know what it is, a prelude to self-pity. Kitchen counters may seem like a ridiculous example, but as I move through the day I carry with me all the patterns and habits of my negative mind. They're in the small and the large things, so present I don't even notice them, don't latch on to any one of them. They're simply the air I breathe. But now that I know I have them, I more often do come awake, notice envy or self-pity or any of the thoughts and emotions that hold me back, and try to put space between me and them. I can create the space because there are so many levels to consciousness that I can be my mind observing my mind. That space is where change happens. Nothing goes all at once but every letting go brings the things I want to change further down to size.
I used to think that allowing myself to see that I suffered from things like envy or self-pity would destroy me. But the opposite has turned out to be true. Freedom comes with insight and insight comes with having the courage to look.
It's almost impossible to see myself as I was, but every once in a while I get a glimpse of myself in the past. I hear something I said and can only shake my head at how misguided or arrogant or self-serving. Oh, sister, you have a lot to learn. I don't mind these recollections, in fact I treasure them because they show me how far I've come. I may still have buckets of arrogance and judgment inside, but I know for a fact that I can say - without pride! with all humility! - that there's much less of it. And I like to see that, because it's so easy to say that I haven't changed, that I'm fighting the same old battles, trying to break free of the same old chains.
The fact is I'm not the young woman who was full of pride and thought she was right about everything. Life has done to me what it does to everyone - it's brought times of suffering, and the need to find a way out of suffering made me willing to admit I couldn't change circumstances outside me and I couldn't fix me. I began to understand that the particulars of the challenges I face usually aren't as important as the fact that I face them. I began to understand that if I was open to a wider meaning than the needs and wants of my own little ego I could think of my experience as grist for the mill of my liberation. Spiritual freedom became the goal and suffering was a means to that end. My belief in spiritual freedom brought suffering down to size. The desire to learn how to navigate my way through pain and how to let go of all the things that blocked me was greater, larger than my suffering. There was now a purpose to my pain; the lessons of pain, learning how to surrender it, helped me toward freedom.
When your life has a purpose, a meaning deeper than surface thoughts, actions and feelings, you can bear whatever life brings. You can't escape pain but you can see its uses. You can let it teach you all it has to offer.
Sometimes, when I'm out and about, in the market or on the street, I see a mother and child who bring me to a stop. The mother is gazing directly into the eyes of her child and smiling, the child is doing the same and they're both happy. It's a completely ordinary moment, a mother and child sharing an intimate gaze, the look of security and mutual pleasure.
I don't remember my mother ever looking at me like that - gazing directly at me with pleasure and encouragement, making me for a moment the focus of her gaze. Maybe there were times when she did look at me that way, but I'll never know that objective truth. What I know is the truth I feel inside me, the image I have of her distracted by anxiety, always worried something is wrong and something bad will happen.
Years ago, I saw a documentary about a clinic in Toronto that works with mothers and babies who have attachment problems. They showed the first session of a mother and her toddler; during the whole session the mother ignored the child who didn't stop climbing all over her trying to get her attention. Over the course of a few sessions, the therapists very gently pointed out certain behaviors to the mother and suggested different ways for her to act. In a surprisingly short time, at the last session, the mother was paying close attention to the child, and the child was calm, resting contentedly next to her. It made me cry, that such a small consistent change in behavior could make such an enormous difference to the child. Why hadn't there been someone to show my mother how to make a difference for me?
In the coming days, I was as low as I've ever been. I was bereft, desolate, feeling the knife of despair for what I had never had - the sense that someone loved me unconditionally, acknowledged me, took delight in my existence. Added to that was not only the abyss of loss but also a great shame, as if the lack of my mother's gaze was my fault. It was classic, the way I had taken in the blame - and was still feeling it - even though I knew the problem was my mother's and not mine.
I saw very clearly what the absence of that gaze had done to the many aspects of my life, and I realized how my shame had imprisoned me in the very sense of loss I wanted so much to transcend. I had no part in my mother's inability to see me completely but I did very much have a part in the blame and shame I had laid upon myself. As long as they controlled me, I wouldn't be able to leave that very early wound behind. I wouldn't be able to heal.
I wish I could say that the realization of my imprisoning shame turned on the light and brought the changes I sought. But in fact, the hard work was all ahead. I had to find a way to accept the loss of what every child needs, and to neutralize my shame at being the one who wasn't loved. The search for psychological insight was useful but ultimately words and concepts only kept me at a distance. I needed to find the courage to feel what was under all my ideas, to let go and feel the whole constellation of rage, despair, shame and hopelessness that was always flowing like lava beneath the surface. I needed to find faith that if I let all of that out, I wouldn't be annihilated, wouldn't melt away like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz until there was nothing left but my hat of shame.
Staying on the path to courage and faith has become the main commitment in my life. To go on when progress is minute and slow, to keep on in the face of fear - to feel the certainty of a refuge inside me and the belief that I'm not walking this path alone - that is at once the source and the result of any change I've found. I'm freer than I've ever been and knowing what more freedom feels like, I want to keep walking, to find even more.
There are many risks that I have a hard time taking. They're mostly internal and involve making myself visible in some way - doing my work and sending it out in the world, going to a big party alone. There are others but they all raise up in me a resistance because I don't want to be evaluated - because I automatically assume I will be found wanting.
I've waged many battles with my resistance and the default certainty of rejection. I've learned all about them, their psychogenesis, their repercussions. I know what resistance feels like in my body and I know to shake hands with the negative voices in my head and then act despite them.
But it's one of the mysteries of my life that I can know the symptoms and what I should do to overcome them, and still not be able to do it. You don't want to go out? Well, that's the resistance - just work past it. Those voices in your head? You know they're ephemeral, thoughts just passing through, with no importance other than what you give them. Act despite them! Other people have the same fears and negativity but they act anyway. Why not you? Get a grip!
My resistance to change and taking a risk by walking fully into the world isn't a solid wall stopping me. It's amorphous, viscous, a thick swamp to slog my way though. Many times I make it, but sometimes I don't and, when I don't, I can feel the depression that is more powerful than my desire to act. And I can feel the depression deepening because one more time I have failed myself.
There is hope. I can't think my way past my resistance but I can acknowledge that I'm powerless over it. I can stop fighting to figure things out. I can let myself see the truth, that resistance and negativity have no solid reality. They are only products of my insecure ego. I can focus on the moment and reach for that field beyond my ego where stillness silences my mind. Above all, I can let compassion come flooding in, hold myself gently, and feel love for all my struggles, for my very human desire to be better, to do better, to free myself from all the obstacles I put in my own way. And I can fully embrace the fact that I will have to make this struggle again and again. Each time I do, I will be a little stronger, more able to push past the things that block me.
I choose to believe that is the truth for me. I choose to believe my faith in that truth will make it so.
I'm fascinated by stories of people who find spiritual freedom in the most unfree of circumstances. For a while, I read everything I could find - books by concentration camp survivors, prison memoirs, stories of people who had survived the imprisonment of poverty and disease. I was looking for examples of survival; I needed to know that it's always possible to emerge out of despair into a sense of freedom My actual circumstances were nowhere near as dire as those of the men and women I was reading about. I had food and shelter and freedom of motion. But I felt myself imprisoned by fear and self-loathing and the particular kind of hopelessness that told me nothing good could ever come.
I needed to know that there is always the possibility of getting. I was desperate to feel that possibility, to believe there was something that would help me leave depression and fear behind. I wanted to believe that my human spirit, like the spirits of the people I read about, could transcend suffering and let go of fear.
I know now from direct experience what that letting go feels like. When suffering cuts deep enough, the body and the spirit must make a choice - either to go under and face annihilation, or to let loose the survival instinct that's in all of us. It's that instinct which finds a way out of suffering and moves us toward the solace we seek, even if we don't understand it and have no faith at all. Spirit wants expansion and freedom. It wants to be set on fire. Strike a match and watch the light grow. Survive.
As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field- glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.
Those are the opening lines of "Walking to Sleep," a poem by Richard Wilbur. They remind me of when I was in graduate school and had paper after paper to write. With experience, I realized that even when I felt overwhelmed by the reading or was certain I had nothing of interest to say, if I sat in front of the computer - stayed in the chair - something would come to me and lead me on from there. As if obeying an order from the Red Queen in "Alice In Wonderland," I would start at the beginning, work through the middle and stop when I came to the end. I developed some faith that if I focused, something would come.
There is a deeper meaning to those lines; faith is the real topic Wilbur writes about. "Step off assuredly..." Step off - not merely face, but step off into the blankness, give yourself up to it, let yourself be submerged in that still, clear pool, that cloud of unknowing. And be assured, step gingerly, with confidence, in faith. Free yourself...and something will come.
In fact, we are all stepping off from moment to moment; we step off into what we don't know and can't see; we are always risking going forward into the unknown. I may do it with confidence or I may do it with fear, but confidence and fear are two sides of an ancient coin that comes from the past. I want to leave both of them behind, to face the future with the freedom of the blank, free of opinions and ideas that can only narrow my view. Faith is the ledge I step off from. Without it, I would be paralyzed, unable to take a step at all, and then I would miss the world as it reveals itself to me. I would miss all that might, undoubtedly shall come to me.
There are "frameworks" and "contexts" which are the opposite of what interests me. Many contexts grow out of rigid ideas - the orthodoxies of organized religion, political ideologies, conspiracy theories. These are closed systems and their main characteristic - and failing - is that they don't allow for new information and ideas. Everything that might be "new" is made to fit a locked world view, interpreted as further evidence of the rightness of the particular set of beliefs. These systems constrict rather than expand, limit rather than increase.
All beliefs - those that constrict and those that expand - are just that, beliefs. For a long time, I believed every negative thought the voices in my head shouted at me, believed that I wasn't good enough and was doomed to frustration and unhappiness. I thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, some flaw I couldn't see. And because it's hard to act against that tidal wave of fear and doubt, the facts of my life lived out those thoughts. I was frustrated and unhappy, felt alien and isolated; I censored myself over and over again because, since I was doomed to failure, what was the point of even trying to achieve and connect? These self-loathing, self-lacerating beliefs ruled me and turned me into an emotional anorexic; I was starving for connection and purpose but I couldn't feed myself. I was living in a closed system of negative beliefs and everything that happened was proof of the rightness of those beliefs. How could it be otherwise when I myself was the main witness for the prosecution?
Then something inside me began to shift, and the closed narrow ideology of my self-loathing and fear slowly, very slowly showed enough cracks so that the light of hope, at first a despairing kind of hope, could come in. A flicker of possibility, the merest shadow and I grabbed on to it. I didn't know it then, but I had come a great distance in order to begin, to climb out of the bushes and step on to the path.
Questions worth asking:
If belief, meaning and value are conferred by us through our interpreting consciousness, how do we know what's True with a capital T? Does Truth even exist?
How can we create a new context through which to judge our experience, transform a context that constricts into one that expands?
How do we move toward freedom?
I take it as a given that it is we humans who confer meaning and value to our experience. We don't discover a meaning and value out beyond our consciousness. Experience comes to us through our senses and we interpret it, we give it meaning, we assess its truth. When Victor Frankl says that no matter what our experience is, we are always free to change our attitude, to create new meaning, he is pointing to the greatest freedom we have, the great gift consciousness confers, which is the ability to interpret, to choose, what our experience means.
We may suffer but out of our consciousness and our spirit we are able to find a larger context for that suffering, a framework to discover the deeper meaning and purpose of our experience. That search for context, for the deeper meaning, is what I intend to write about here. I especially intend to write about the freedom that search confers.
