As I drove to work this morning with tears in my eyes, I remembered that coming home to ourselves is not always an easy, pleasant, or feel good experience. Mindfulness, Buddhism, and spiritual practice in general are not phenomena geared toward helping us feel good all of the time. They exist to help us touch life and the present moment more deeply. The two most reputed Buddhist teachers alive today live in exile from their homes. For the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh to come home to themselves, it means coming home to the reality of the suffering in their lives. Not evading it, but going more deeply into it and learning to transform it. I suppose that this is the great lesson. Even suffering is impermanent. But it still hurts. To quote Andrea Gibson, "The sky didn't fill with color the night I convinced myself veins are kite strings you can only cut free..." It's not always easy to come home to ourselves. To inhabit our lives. It's sometimes so much easier to be off somewhere... over there... preoccupied. And, as I wandered through the weekend vaguely (and then with increasing acuteness) discontent, confused, and aimless, I found numerous reasons for why I was feeling what I was feeling. But I wasn't actually coming home to be with myself. I was off - over there somewhere - trying to "fix" these issues I thought were out of place in my life. "Need to meditate, need to send this text, need to pay this bill, need to....." until finally I went home last night and tried to be with myself. Of course it felt like I failed, because I couldn't see what was going on. I think that's the hardest part sometimes with this practice - not being able to see what is going on... not being able to fix it. And then I realized that my lens was flawed from the start because I had set out looking for fixable problems. I wasn't looking to see what is. I was searching for something I could address, rectify, which would then disappear into an easy, cheap happiness.
An easy, cheap happiness.
And there are sources in my life that can give me an easy cheap happiness. If that's what I want. That's where myriad addictions, codependent relationships, and fear-based patterns of consumption come from. That desire for cheap, right-now happiness, rather than a deep, costly experience of the present moment - the reality of now. And so I gave up. There were no fixable problems. Or I had fixed them all and I still felt massively fucked up. Even though I had had a great weekend. Sure I got a 175 dollar ticket for sitting in the wrong part of a river, but in the end, who cares?
Then this morning I sat with an unfixable problem. Something that just hurts. There are several of those in my life, but most of them I've had time to be with, to embrace, to rail against, to fight, and to accept. I don't like to accept unfixable problems. "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change" is not a prayer I always like to pray. And there are also things in this world that I find unacceptable. But then I have to remember that acceptance is not the same as acquiescence. I can accept that there is torture in the world, but I cannot acquiesce in it. In this way, I both accept and do not accept something. I accept that something is, but not that it must be. In other situations, I accept both that something is, and that it must be, and it hurts.
So then what? No one ever told me - or I never listened - that there are times when the most spiritual thing you can do is hurt. Feel the loss. Feel the ache. No. Someone did tell me that once. A priest at my church. She said "let it wash over you." "All of the truly transformed people I have known have been people who have let the grief (or pain) wash over them."
Wash over me. Let it.
Some days we do not sit to feel calm, or happy, or at ease. We sit to feel the pain. But not in an accidental sloppy sort of way. We sit to hurt - on purpose. We don't sit to be transformed, but we are transformed. By having the courage to be here, now, with all of the anguish and confusion. And that is where I am. And I am there because there are people in my life who are much moreso here than I. Sitting in the pain. Unable to run. Unable to fix. And there are those situations in our lives. Over and over again. We cannot fix them. We cannot control them. We can only be present to them - with great imperfection.
I think that truthfully acknowledging pain is the beginning of release. Otherwise the Buddha would have just pretended the sick person, the old man, and the dead body he saw on the road didn't hurt. He would never have left the palace. But sometimes we have to leave the palace in order to find our nirvana. Because nirvana actually means extinction. Extinction of the self, the falsehood, the bullshit. And there's a depth of freedom that only comes through the muck. Not around it. Because there is no around. We only transcend - if we do transcend - from within.
And to those with whom I sit together in this... I love you. With all the love I have found in life thus far.
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