Self-Loathing OR Chaos is Good News

Sometimes I feel betrayed by my own mind.  Right now is one of those times.  Coming back from the wedding last weekend and this entire week, I’ve felt like I overcame some basic obstacle.  I felt energized, and doing the work that I needed to do felt like turning on a faucet.  In the places I’ve lived, it’s been a given that when you turn on the faucet water comes out.  And it’s drinkable.  When I’m full lost in doubt, I hesitate to even touch the knob for fear that maybe nothing will come out or maybe bad water will come out.  Last Friday one of the other instructors for our sitting group was giving the instruction and she began by asking people to describe in a few words how they were feeling at that very moment.  The words that I chose were ‘unobstructed aliveness’.  She then asked me how it felt in my body to which I said that it felt like substantial-ness in the core of my torso with a feeling of buzzing out in my limbs.  As I said it though there was a little hang up.  At the time it was pretty slight, just a little hitch in my chest.  As we meditated, I felt increasingly like a fraud, that I hadn’t honestly shared my experience but filtered it through rose-colored glasses instead.  Not just with respect to the group, but with respect to myself.  Leaving out the part about the hitch, the little bit of holding back, of not-completely-unobstructed felt like self-deception.  But that couldn’t be right.  I was free of the nebulous obstacle.  That’s why I’d felt so good earlier in the week and why I’d been able to do what needed doing while still feeling relaxed, not feeling used-up at the end of every day.  It’s now Sunday, and the hitch has grown to a glitch to very nearly a stitch or a clamp at the top of my back around my throat.  That’s why I feel betrayed by my own mind.  I did all the right things.  I exercised, ate well, cared for my indoor and outdoor household environment.  I even did a little bit of work yesterday, which was my way of honoring the quantity of what I need to accomplish in the next week without running myself into the ground.  It’s like I made a deal with myself and self didn’t hold up his end of the deal.  This kind of reasoning is really fishy and suspect to me.  I know that it comes around when I’m rejecting some part of my experience.  I’m just not sure what it is that I’m rejecting, and I’m a little afraid to look.

After writing that, I read it back to Maitri, and as I got to the end, I started to cry.  It was somewhere around “I did all the right things”.  Reflecting on it now, I did all the right things except allow myself to actually feel how I was feeling.  I was really trying to hold on to, solidify and prolong that feeling of having overcome an obstacle by ignoring anything that felt like it might mar that pleasurably flawless state of being.  Now it seems to me that that itself is the obstacle.  The fixating.  The trying to pick out the good parts and ignore the yucky or threatening ones.  I don’t seem to have all that much control over what comes into my experience, but I do get to pick how to relate to it.  I can get caught up into trying to monumentalize the good ones and banish the bad ones.  Or I can meet the ever-varied flux with the very openness and fluidity that it brings me.  Easy to say.  Takes a lot of practice (and failure) to do.  So what was the little hitch?  I think it was the micro-doubt of not beling able to accomplish what I needed to in the time allotted..no room for mistakes.  

I was just about to post this, but I came across a passage in The Shambhala Principle written by my teacher, Sakyong Mipham that seems like it might have been written in direct response to my pained words above (but it wasn’t).  

“Can we feel comfortable in our own minds and hearts?  Compassion is not simply a feeble response to hard times.  It is choosing not to pollute our own thoughts and our planet with the energy of aggression.”  

I definitely needed compassion for myself through this experience.  On some subtle level, I think I was equating compassion with weakness.  Not intentionally, but through habit and cultural osmosis.  Compassion arose when I began to cry, which was when the whole experience became un-stuck and pliable.  Then I was really able to see what was going on.  This is the very progression that Sakyong Mipham goes on to describe:

“We might even begin to welcome chaos as an opportunity to engage in patience, generosity, discipline, meditation, exertion, and their binding factor, prajna—wisdom rooted in seeing things as they are.”  

I am certainly not at the point of welcoming the kind of internal chaos I was experiencing when I began this post.  But maybe I can suppress chaos a little less often and practice seeing things as they are instead of how I want them to be.  I aspire to see chaos as the ground of possibility.