Removing the Bandage

It was my most precious memory from that whole year.  The dusk was falling on a summer afternoon under the tall oaks.  We sat on the front step, friends giving children piggy-back rides.  He had his arm round me.  Everyone was laughing.  I took a child on my back and felt powerful enough to lift the world.  I had longed for months for this moment, for a lifetime.  And then it was gone.  Just weeks later, I woke in his arms feeling a leaden sense of dread.  What had I done?  I was never meant to lie with this man!  I only wanted to hold his hand.  But my thoughts had gathered the momentum of their own agenda and swept me away into a deluded fantasy of enduring comfort that was soon flooded by a sea of painful separation.  This has been the tedious and exhausting story of my life.

Obsession.  A compulsion of the mind.  A reaction to circumstances that hijacks our ability to respond with clarity and intention.  Every time I feel raw, I look for someone to crawl inside for safety, but I also know this leaves me vulnerable and unfulfilled.  So I counteract this tendency by controlling what I can in an effort to feel free, self-sufficient, and mature.  My first reaction to anything outside my plan is “no”.  I shy away from commitment because I don’t want to be constricted.  I am most comfortable with everything at arm’s length – close enough to grab if I need it, but far enough away not to impede my dance.  When times of loneliness and isolation come, I long to recreate the moments I have felt most alive and connected – lost in an embrace, in a cause, in a moment of beauty or even in the agony of grief.  But the circumstances I mistake for presence are not my salvation.

When we become even slightly more aware, a separation appears between our compulsion and the watchful self, allowing for a small space of presence, and then everything changes.  Suddenly, this moment matters.  Not just the moment of laughter and embrace under the oaks, but every moment I wasted longing for something else, willing it to happen.  Freedom transforms from an action focused on creating a future experience of fulfillment to the act of embracing who I am and what is here, already complete and whole in this moment.  Even if it’s binging.  Even if it’s complaining or attacking.  Even if it’s choosing to let go of the one thing I’ve finally gotten within my grasp.  The sense of connection I seek doesn’t come from this person or thing or experience, but from full participation, full acceptance of now, full surrender to having no idea what’s coming next but somehow sensing it will be radiant and generous.

Michael Brown tells us we have three paths for interfacing with our emotional lives: control, sedation, or integration.  When you come to an ashram, the most popular means of sedation are signed away on your contract – no romance, no drugs, no alcohol, no late night revelry.  And in such an environment, comparably tame behaviors like disordered eating, mindless internet searching, and general fantasizing gradually reveal themselves as more and more detrimental to our ultimate well-being.  Any efforts to control the routine, to control others, and to even control your own behavior increasingly break down under the exposure of constant closeness and the demands of ever-shifting, unavoidable, contradictory realities.  As a new intern beautifully articulated, living here is like having the bandage torn off.  Everything we have spent our lives doing to control the bleeding or to mask our rawness is removed, and we are left gazing at our weeping wound, wondering what in the world to do with it now.

Then there is the concept of integration.  I am finally open to the idea that the people and situations that trigger my suppressed and unresolved wounding are merely benevolent messengers telling me I am ready to embrace what I have previously avoided.  After all the minor slips of the tongue and subtle glances from others that have gouged me daily for nearly 40 years, I realize they aren’t doing anything to hurt me.  I practice taking my attention off of what they did, why they did it, and what I or they should do differently next time, and simply sitting in stillness with what in myself they have brought to my awareness.  Regarding it without judgment, without disgust or shame or anger, I allow each moment to unlock the feelings I am now safe and strong enough to face.  I let the sobbing erupt, the nausea twist, the convulsions roll, until they are done with me.  I follow that thread of sensation, of amorphous imagery, of forms lodged and shape-shifting in my core back down and as deeply inward as they go.

As I begin to let go of the victim mentality convinced of my own fragility, I discover a deeply entrenched belief that I must be strong enough to deserve love, and that developing the endurance to withstand all this pain on my own will enable me to keep my suffering from driving people away.  Sitting with my pain makes me feel lovable and self-sufficient because it is weaning me of the need to seek comfort or validation.  But at a deeper level, I know this isn’t about my relationship with anyone but myself.  After decades of needing others to help me recognize my strength and value and light, I no longer need that reflection.  To rest in someone else’s arms, to bask under their praise, is to limit myself by letting them do for me what I am now able to do for myself.

It isn’t a punishment to carry a tantruming child from a noisy restaurant.  It is simply a loving act of mercy for the child who cannot cope.  If I am to live anything but a dull and narrow life, repeating the same old tired dramas time and time again, I must sit with myself until the storm of previously unattended feeling passes so that I can see things as they are, and respond with clarity and compassion in my own best interest instead of reacting in self-defense.  I carry myself to safety, into a place I know without a doubt can nourish me, where I can hold every sensation with the gentle care it never received and rest in the spacious relief that follows finally filled in an enduring way I have never felt before.

The more people I meet who have been drawn to Laurelwood, the more gratitude and awe I feel for the ways life prepares us to embrace what’s coming next.  This is not a place one comes to begin their spiritual journey.  It is a place requiring tremendous fortitude that one levels up to when they are ready.  I intuitively sense I have plateaued to a point of no return.  I cannot go back to being the person in all those journey entries who pined, and sobbed, and sold herself cheaply for one glance of acknowledgement.  Old habits die hard.  Shadows still whisper.  My focus and endurance are still developing.  But there is nothing now I am afraid to feel.  And I am not lonely anymore.  The emptiness that once terrified me is now my nourishment.  The gifts of presence I have received have transformed my inner terrain into a far more loving and safer place than it has ever been, and given me faith to dive deeper.  I am finally coming to thank my addictive behaviors because each occurrence is a neon sign showing me the door to something that I have hidden away, something longing for freedom, something I am now ready to embrace.

Nancy

“Freedom from obsession is not about what you do; it’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you.  What you love and what you think you love because you can’t have it.” – Geneen Roth