True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (20 page)

At some point during the concert, he glanced at his wife and noticed her rapt attention, open and beautiful. The storm had passed. Back at home, late that evening, she snuggled against him in bed. “I know how hard you're trying,” she whispered. “I used to be so afraid of you exploding, but just knowing you're
aware
makes me feel safer.” For Sam, Jennie's words, and her understanding, were a healing balm. “I'll still blow it,” he told me, “but she trusts me more, and I'm beginning to trust myself. I'm learning to find some space between me and my anger, learning to relate to it … and that's when there are choices.”

The Urge to Make Amends

We are deeply imprinted by the suffering we have caused others. This imprint is sometimes felt as shame, guilt, or remorse, and it is our heart's sensitivity calling us to attention. In the Buddhist teachings, such sensitivity can be intelligent and healthy—it plays an important role in awakening and freeing our hearts. In contrast to our habit of beating up on ourselves, healthy shame is the signal that we have strayed from our deepest life values—it draws attention to a contracted, diminished sense of self—and it can energize us to realign with our hearts. Similarly, guilt focuses attention on our unskillful actions and can lead us to admitting our mistakes and making amends however we are able.

Self-forgiveness is often not even possible, and certainly cannot be complete, until we have in some way made amends to those we've injured. Making amends is not for the sake of satisfying an external standard of morality. Rather, it is an expression of our belonging to the world and to our own hearts. The urge to make amends arises when we have had the courage to face the reality of our impact on others. It arises when our hearts yearn to relieve their suffering or, like Sam, when we dedicate ourselves to not causing further suffering. Even if someone is no longer alive or an active part of our lives, it is possible to acknowledge the truth of his or her hurt and to offer him or her our wishes, prayers, and remorse. As we intentionally take responsibility for our actions, the harsh grip of self-aversion loosens, and we come home to a sense of connectedness, peace, and ease. This healing is very close to the Christian and Jewish process of atonement. By atoning for our errors, we make possible reconciliation—with God, with the injured other, and with our own heart and being.

I came upon a beautiful illustration of this healing process in the book
Offerings at the Wall
, which includes a selection of some of the ninety thousand letters and mementos that veterans and their loved ones have left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. In 1989, a worn photograph of a young Vietnamese man and a little girl was placed at the wall, along with the following letter:

The man who wrote the letter, Richard Luttrell, had faced the enormity of what it means to take a life, and the reality of how important life is to each of us. By letting himself feel the pain of his guilt, by looking again and again at his own fearful, reactive self—at the person who had been trained to kill—Richard had faced his own human frailty. In acknowledging this and asking for forgiveness, he was seeking to make amends and free his heart.

I shared this story many times with students, and then in 2009 I discovered that Luttrell's journey to forgiveness had not ended with this poignant note. Through a fellow vet, the picture had made its way back to him, and upon receiving it, he made a decision: He was going to find the daughter in the picture, and return the photo to her. Richard traveled to Vietnam, found her and her brother, and introduced himself through an interpreter. “Tell her this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him and I'm returning it.” With his voice breaking, he asked for her forgiveness. The young woman burst into tears and fell into Richard's arms, sobbing. Later her brother explained that he and his sister believed that their father's spirit lived on in Richard, and that on that day, it had returned to them.

For all of us, the starting place of healing is reconciliation with our own heart. Whether we are unable to forgive ourselves for what seems a major wrongdoing, or we have locked into chronic self-judgment, we are at war, cut off from our own tenderness, our own spirit. If we can see past our faults to our human vulnerability, we are on the path of reconciliation. Our self-compassion will naturally lead to caring about others, and perhaps, as for Richard, to an experience of love and connectedness we never imagined possible.

Guided Reflection: Self-Forgiveness Scan

Even when we are not overtly at war with ourselves, we often move through the day judging ourselves for the ways we feel we are falling short. This practice brings our self-judgments into awareness so they can be seen and released. It's an especially cleansing way to end the day. Try it when you are lying in bed before you go to sleep.

Take some moments to become still and to relax any obvious areas of tension. Then take a few long, slow breaths to help you arrive fully in your body.

Now ask yourself, “Is there anything between me and being at home with myself?” (Feel free to change the wording in any way that helps you identify the presence of self-blame.) Then pause and see what comes up in your body and mind. What stories of wrongdoing have you been telling yourself?—stories of letting others down, of performing poorly at work, of not meeting your standards as a parent, partner, friend, human being.

If something arises, simply acknowledge it and offer it forgiveness. You might gently place your hand on your heart and whisper “forgiven, forgiven” or “it's okay.” Recall your intention not to push yourself out of your own heart. Then inquire again—is there anything else you're holding against yourself? Continue in this way until you've identified whatever self-judgments you've been carrying. End the scan by offering yourself a prayer or blessing, a wish for your own peace of heart and mind.

Guided Reflection: Ending the War with Yourself

Often our deepest suffering is the sense that something we have done—something about us—is fundamentally wrong and unacceptable. Finding a way to make peace with our human imperfections is the ground of all healing.

Find a comfortable sitting position and take a few moments to relax obvious areas of tension in your body. Connect with your intention to open your heart to your own being. Then bring to mind some aspect of yourself that has felt unforgivable. Perhaps you can't forgive yourself for being a judgmental and controlling person, or for how you have hurt others. You might not be able to forgive how you are ruining your life with an addictive behavior. You might feel disgust for your mental obsession. What feels so wrong or bad about your unforgivable behavior, emotion, or way of thinking? Allow yourself to feel the aversion that you have toward yourself.

Now explore more deeply what is driving this unacceptable part of you. If you are addicted to food, nicotine, or alcohol, what needs are you trying to satisfy, what fears are you trying to soothe? When you are judging others, are you feeling fearful yourself? If you have wounded another person, did you act out of hurt and insecurity? Out of the need to feel powerful or safe? Look at yourself and your vulnerability as if through the eyes of the most understanding and loving friend, relative, or deity.

As you become aware of these underlying wants and fears, allow yourself to feel them directly in your body, heart, and mind. Even though you dislike the behaviors, try to hold this underlying vulnerability with compassion. Placing your hand on your heart, send a sincere message of self-compassion directly to the places of fear and unmet needs—to the pain that has given rise to what feels unforgivable. You might mentally whisper, “I see how I've caused myself suffering, and I forgive myself now.” Or you might simply offer yourself the words: “forgiven, forgiven.”

Meet whatever arises—fear or judgment, shame or grief—with the message of forgiveness. Even resistance to forgiving can be met with, “forgiven, forgiven.” You might call on the presence of someone you consider to be deeply loving and understanding, and feel his or her compassion flowing into you, supporting you. Discover what happens when you bring an unconditionally forgiving heart to the parts of you that are wounded and vulnerable.

When you feel unable to forgive yourself:
You might believe you don't deserve to be forgiven or fear that if you forgive yourself you'll just do the same thing again. Maybe you're afraid that if you really open yourself to forgiveness, you'll come face to face with some intolerable truth. If these doubts and fears arise, acknowledge and accept them with compassion. Then say to yourself, “It is my intention to forgive myself when I am able.” Your intention to forgive is the seed of forgiveness—this willingness will gradually relax and open your heart.

Hakuna, our very “alpha” eighty-five-pound standard poodle, hated the Akitas in our old neighborhood. If we went for a walk on a nearby trail when our neighbor was out with them, I'd have to wrap Hakuna's leash around a tree to hold steady as he lunged and barked ferociously. But after they passed, he would resume his cheerful trot through the woods. He was not ruminating about “those damned Akitas, think they own the hood … that stupid curled tail, fancy coat … next time I'm going to show them!” He was sniffing and enjoying the day.

When animals like Hakuna get angry, they bristle or bare their teeth, they pounce or slash or bite. After the encounter is over, they go back to homeostasis—a relatively relaxed state. We humans are different. Instead, we replay past outrages and anticipate how others might hurt, impede, or disrespect us in the future. This keeps the hormones of anger and fear circulating in our body, and the related thoughts of blame and vengeance spinning in our mind. The upshot? We become trapped in warrior mode, our heart armored, our mind narrowed. Unlike Hakuna, we are not free to enjoy the day.

Anger arises when someone or something obstructs our needs or desires. If you are on a highway and another car cuts you off, adrenaline pumps into your bloodstream. Your heart rate jumps. Your blood pressure surges. We respond to nonphysical threats the same way. If you find out that your partner has lied to you or your boss tells you you're fired, your body flips into the fight-flight-freeze response—an instantaneous physiological reaction to a perceived threat. You want to regain control, and the “fight” pathway tells you to “get even with” or harm whoever or whatever you perceive is causing you trouble.

Like all emotions, anger is an essential and intelligent part of our survival equipment. We need anger to let us know our boundaries have been violated so that we can respond appropriately. Anger lets us know when something is unfair, unjust, or threatening to our own well-being and that of others. It's essential that we listen to our anger, but we don't need to live with ongoing stories of blame and resentment in order to take good care. Unless we are very mindful, anger does not simply arise and dissipate; rather, it becomes a strongly entrenched habit, always hovering in the background, ready to ignite into aggressive thoughts and behaviors. When anger is a habit of the mind, it invariably causes conflict with even those we most love. It is bad for our health and heart; and as a species, it keeps us at war.

Which Wolf Will You Feed?

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, as many people feared an ongoing and vicious spiral of retaliation and global violence, a wonderful Cherokee legend went viral on the Internet:

It's easy to feed the fearful, angry wolf. Especially if we've experienced great wounding, the anger pathway can become deeply ingrained in our nervous system. When our old sense of injury or fear is triggered, the intolerable heat and pressure of anger instantly surges through us. Our attention gets riveted on the feelings and thoughts of violation and all we want is revenge. Often before we have any sense of choice, the nasty comeback is out of our mouth, we've slammed a door, hit send on an ill-advised e-mail, put someone down behind his back.

Yet we do have a choice. Meditations that train the heart and the mind directly deactivate the anger pathways that propel our habitual behaviors. While the limbic system acts almost instantaneously, we can develop a response from the frontal cortex—which includes the social centers involved with compassion—that interrupts and subdues the reaction. This is where cultivating mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is the “remembering” that helps us pause and recognize what is happening in the present moment. Once we have paused, we can call on the higher brain centers to open new possibilities. We can soothe ourselves, we can recall another person's difficulties and vulnerability, we can remember our own goodness and strength. No matter how painfully we are triggered by the world's violence and insensitivity, we can direct our attention in ways that carry us home to our intrinsic sanity and good-heartedness. This awakening is our evolutionary potential: For the sake of our own inner freedom and the well-being of others, we can intentionally feed the understanding, kind wolf.

Understanding Forgiveness

One evening after my Wednesday night meditation class, Amy, a member of our D.C. meditation community whom I've gotten to know quite well over the years, asked me if we might talk for a few minutes. She reminded me that she had been raised by a terrible mother, “a manipulative, narcissistic human.” This mother, of whom I'd heard several painful tales in the past, had recently been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As the only local offspring, Amy had become her mother's primary caretaker. So there she was, spending hours a day with a person she'd been avoiding for decades. “I've always resented the hell out of my mother,” she told me. Then, after a pause, she added more quietly, “Now I can't stand myself for having such a hard heart.”

I knew Amy had already worked hard to open her heart. She had spent years bitterly estranged from her ex-spouse, in constant battle with her eldest daughter, and at odds with her business partner. Then, at one of our residential retreats several years earlier, she had discovered how the practice of RAIN could help her bring a clear and kind attention to the conflicts in her life. Gradually, as she became more gentle and present with herself, she found she was more accepting in these important relationships.

But Amy's meditation practice didn't seem to have made a dent in her hostility toward her mother. “When I was a kid, Mom treated me like I was in the way or just there to help her out … another puppet in her life,” Amy said. “If I'm around her a lot, I'm afraid she'll just trample my adult self too. Even now that she's very sick, it feels impossible to stuff my anger and try to forgive her.”

We protect our wounds by armoring ourselves with hatred and blame. Forgiveness, which allows us to let go of this armor, becomes possible as we bring a full, compassionate presence to our underlying vulnerability. Such presence loosens our identification with the thoughts and feelings of anger, and uncovers a heart space that is naturally open, inclusive, and warm. But this seldom happens suddenly or irreversibly. If we are resentful and at odds with someone, it can take many rounds of intentional presence with our own hurt or fear until our self-compassion opens us to more acceptance and understanding. And when our grievance expresses as full-blown hatred, or when we feel deeply violated, as Amy did, forgiveness can seem out of reach or even impossible.

Forgiveness can also seem like a bad idea. Like Amy, we may be afraid that if we let go of blame, we are betraying our own emotions and setting ourselves up for further injury. We may feel that if we forgive, we are condoning a person's hurtful behavior and not honoring our right to be respectfully treated. Maybe we feel that if we forgive someone, we will be stuck feeling that we are the ones to blame. These fears are understandable and need to be recognized, but they are based on a misperception.

Forgiveness means letting go of aversive blame; it means that we stop feeding the fearful, angry wolf. It does
not
mean that we dismiss our intelligence about who might hurt us or that we stop taking actions to protect ourselves and others from harm. Amy did need to practice wise discernment; she did need to recognize her mother's inappropriate demands or hurtful remarks for what they were. We all need to be able to tell who might betray our confidences, take our money, misunderstand our intentions, and abuse us physically or mentally. And when someone threatens our own or others' well-being, we need to find effective ways to communicate our concerns, set boundaries, and determine consequences for harmful actions. We may divorce a spouse, ground a child, make rules for speaking with a friend, vote someone out of office, campaign relentlessly for social change. We can dedicate our lives to preventing harm, while still keeping our hearts free of aversive blame.

Forgiving means not pushing anyone, or any part of our own being, out of our heart.
By this I mean that even if we decide it is unhealthy to ever see a certain person again, we still find a way to hold him or her with goodwill. Taking this kind of refuge in unconditional love is courageous and challenging. Choosing to feed the compassionate wolf means stopping the war—the blaming thoughts and punishing actions—and opening directly to the pain of our vulnerability. This was the path in front of Amy. Rather than turning on her mother or herself, she needed to become intimate with the woundedness that fueled her anger. This would require profound self-compassion.

RAIN with Anger

Amy and I agreed to meet privately to explore how she might find more freedom in relating to her mother. At our first session, she talked about her childhood. Now that she was around her mother regularly, early memories were coming back to her. In the most potent of these memories, Amy was three years old. Her mom yelled upstairs that she had prepared a bath for her and she should get in the tub. But when Amy went into the bathroom, what she found waiting for her was a couple of inches of lukewarm water. As she recalled this pivotal moment, she vividly remembered the realization that had flashed through her three-year-old mind: “This is all I'm going to get. No one is taking care of me.” And that was close to true.

Her mom had always been preoccupied with her own dramas, perpetually reacting to perceived slights from friends, struggling against weight gain, and berating her husband for his shortcomings as a provider. Little attention was paid to the physical or emotional needs of Amy and her siblings.

After telling me this, Amy slumped back in the chair. “How am I supposed to care about this person who didn't have a maternal bone in her body? How am I supposed to be forgiving and kind? I hate the way she grimaces, her superior tone when she talks about others, the way whatever comes up is about her.” I suggested that she didn't need to try to care about her mother right now.

People often tell me stories of great betrayal and wounding and then ask, “How can I possibly forgive her after she had that affair?” “How can I forgive him for physically abusing me as a child?” When we try to forgive someone prematurely we usually succeed only in papering over our anger and underlying hurt. So I encourage a shift in focus: “This isn't the time for forgiving; it wouldn't be possible or real at this point,” I might say. “Right now, what needs attention is the place inside you that is hurting, that is afraid. This is the time for offering a compassionate presence to your own heart.” In Amy's case, the entry to this presence was through the mindfulness of RAIN.

I guided Amy by asking her what was most disturbing about her situation. She summed it up quickly. “She doesn't care about anyone except herself. She is a self-centered bitch.” Then she went on. “It really pisses me off … I got gypped out of having a mother, and now I'm here catering to her.” Her face hardened and she was barely breathing. I asked her what she was most aware of in this moment. After a long silence she said “There's so much rage that I can barely contain it.”

The beginning of RAIN is to recognize and allow whatever you're feeling, but that isn't always simple or easy. When I asked Amy, “Can you allow rage to be here?” she gave me a wary look. She had spent many years trying to manage her anger by submerging it, doing the opposite of “letting be.” She would then have sudden violent outbreaks. Amy looked at me and shook her head. “I'm afraid if I really make space for this rage, it will destroy every relationship I have. I've already hurt people I love.”

We usually respond to strong anger in one of two ways. We become possessed by the experience, acting out the emotional energy of our blaming stories. Or we push the anger away by judging it as bad, dissociating from bodily experience and redirecting our attention. Sam (in chapter 10) judged his anger harshly, but it was always lurking beneath the surface, easily triggered. In contrast, many people suppress their anger more fully, perhaps because they fear that it will overwhelm them and/or drive others away. But then, as so often happened for Amy, it builds up and can burst forth with a vengeance.

When anger is buried, the energy gets converted and expressed in different ways. A friend of mine who struggled with a weighty depression took an acting workshop and played the part of a belligerent, angry woman. The role put her in touch with a rage toward men that she had suppressed for decades, a rage that had been masked by a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. A client with irritable bowel syndrome discovered that he suffers from more stomach pain and indigestion when he's in disagreement with others. Now, if he can acknowledge the unrecognized anger and give the energy permission to be there, his gut relaxes. Anger is a survival energy and it wants our attention.

The “allow” in RAIN does not mean we let ourselves be possessed by anger. Allowing is not acting out. Rather, we allow when we acknowledge the stories of blame without believing them, and when we let the sensations of anger arise, without either acting them out or resisting them.