True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (23 page)

With forgiveness practices, it is common to judge ourselves for how well or fully we are able to do the meditation. Let go of any judgments you are carrying and honor the sincerity of your intention to open and free your heart. End the meditation by releasing all ideas of self and other. Simply rest in the experience of tender awareness. If a thought or feeling arises, sense the capacity to include this entire living dying world in the vast space of a forgiving heart.

As told in her book
Heart Politics,
social activist Fran Peavey was walking on the Stanford University campus one day when she happened upon a group of people carrying video equipment. They were crowding around a male chimp that was running loose and a female chimp that was on a long chain. The chimpanzees were apparently there for some research purposes, and the scientists and spectators (most of them men) were trying to get them to mate. The male didn't need much encouragement. He was grunting and tugging at the smaller chimp's chain, while she was whimpering and trying to avoid his advances. A feeling of empathy swept through Peavey. Then something happened that she would never forget:

Communion begins in our life before we have any words. Even after we've left the refuge of the womb, our development depends on a profoundly intimate relationship with our earliest caregivers. We immediately enter a dance of attunement: A mother senses her child's discomfort in a whimper or restless movement, and she responds by offering her breast, or a soft blanket or a dry diaper. The baby hears the affection in his mothers' voice, smells her familiar smell, feels her gentle touch, and relaxes with pleasure. From birth, we are wired to understand other humans' experience and to give and receive care.

This dance of attunement is our birthright. The degree to which our feelings of connectedness are damaged, sustained, or deepened is the most central predictor of our health and happiness throughout life. If our early bonds are severed by death or abandonment, inattention or abuse, we become haunted by our unmet needs to feel safe and loved. Take an infant monkey from its mother and it goes from anguished distress to acute anxiety to depressive collapse and possibly death. In contrast, caring contact is medicine for body and soul. If someone—even a stranger—holds your hand while you're frightened, the fear centers in your brain begin to quiet down. And when we're at the end of our lives, looking back, it's the moments of loving connection that shine most brightly. These are the times that give us meaning; the times when we are fully at home in the wholeness and tenderness of our being.

When I heard the story of the female chimp, I was touched by the sense of her consciousness. She seemed to perceive the empathetic responses of the nearby women, and she instinctively sought a way to affirm her belonging. The men in contrast treated the whole encounter as a sports event. They were seeking excitement, engagement, and affiliation, yet in a way that reinforced “us” and “them.” Seeing the chimps only as objects of entertainment, they were acting from and reinforcing the trance of separation.

Finding refuge in relationships begins with recognizing the ways we distance ourselves from other people. You might pause here and ask yourself a simple, honest question: “How, in my interactions with others today, have I created separation?” Take your time and be gentle—it's an important question.

Creating Separation: Self and Other

Cousin Victor was the “strange one” in my extended family. Oxygen deprived at birth and disabled throughout life, Victor was supported financially first by his mother, and then by my grandfather. My parents included Victor in every one of our big holiday meals, but inevitably my mother's distaste and embarrassment would leak out before all the other relatives and friends arrived. “Where should we seat him” she'd say, shaking her head. “Whoever's next to him will have to deal with the spittle when he speaks …” As the years passed, Victor lost his teeth. “He dribbles,” she'd mutter. “Those shirts with the stains, it's just awful.” We children didn't mind as much as my mom did, but we knew Victor wasn't “one of us.” We'd give him his yearly Christmas tie and be polite, but he was “other.”

Throughout our evolution, we humans have sought security and advantage by evaluating where we stand in relation to each other. We use race, sexual orientation, religion, education, looks, intelligence, health, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity as quick filters for assessment. Like other animals with pecking orders, we check to see who has more power, who is likely to meet our needs, who is posing a threat. Whenever we meet a new person, our genetic, cultural, and personal conditioning instantly generates countless judgments about how this person fits into our ongoing agenda for feeling secure and fulfilled.

These computations create what I call a trance of “unreal others.” Real humans feel hope and fear; their motives and moods are complex and shifting; their bodies keep changing. In contrast, “unreal others” are two dimensional. It's fairly easy to recognize our stereotypes—prostitute, crack addict, politician, movie star, dictator. Less obvious is how our insecurities and attachments affect our capacity to accurately “take in” our colleagues, friends, and family. Yet when we are feeling stressed and emotionally reactive, almost everyone becomes an “unreal other.”

Here you might pause again and bring to mind someone you want something from: approval, money, help, security, a job promotion. What comes up first? Do you focus on a particular visual image, a recent conversation, a mood? Now take a moment to look closer. Try to imagine this person's life from the inside: What does she love? Where does he fear falling short? What delights him? What makes her anxious? Imagine how this person might be touched by kindness—or hurt by criticism. Has anything shifted in your perspective?

Sometimes it comes as a shock to see the person behind the image we have created. I was reminded of this when I heard the following story at a church service one Christmas Eve.

Seeing Past the Mask

A woman was traveling with her husband and two children on Christmas day. It had been a long, grueling trip, and they finally stopped for lunch at a nearly empty diner.

As they waited for their meal, her one-year-old son began waving from his high chair and calling, “Hi there” to someone sitting across the restaurant. To the mother's dismay, it turned out to be a wreck of a man dressed in tattered, dirty clothes, unkempt and unwashed, obviously a homeless drunk. Now he was waving back at her boy and calling, “Hi there baby, hi there, big boy … I see ya, buster.”

She and her husband exchanged looks, and the few other patrons in the restaurant were raising eyebrows, shooting glances at one another. Nobody was amused by what was going on.

As they ate their meal, the disturbance continued. Now the old guy was shouting across the room. “Do ya know patty-cake? Atta boy … Do ya know peekaboo? … Hey look, he knows peekaboo.” The woman and her husband were cringing with embarrassment. Even their six-year-old couldn't understand why the old man was talking so loud.

She tried turning the one-year-old's high chair around, but he screamed and twisted to face his new buddy.

Not even waiting for his family to finish their meal, her husband got up to pay the bill and take their older son to the car. The woman lifted her baby in her arms and prayed to herself that she could pass by the old drunk without further commotion.

Clearly this was not meant to be. As she approached him, her young son reached out to his new friend with both arms—his “pick-me-up” signal—and she could see the man's eyes asking, “Please, would you let me hold your baby?”

There wasn't time to answer. Her boy propelled himself into the old man's arms.

She could see tears beneath the man's lashes as her son laid his head on his shoulder. He gently rocked and cradled the boy, and then he looked straight into her eyes. “You take care of this baby,” he said firmly.

When he reluctantly handed the baby back, it was as if he was tearing away his own heart. His final words to her: “God bless you, ma'am. You've given me my Christmas gift.”

She mumbled something in return and rushed out to the car, her own tears flowing freely. Her only thought was, “My God, my God, forgive me.”

After the minister finished telling this story, the entire congregation was absolutely still. In the quiet, I noticed that Paul, the fifteen-year-old seated next to me, was sobbing. His parents were good friends of mine, and I had known him since he was a young child. Over the past two years, Paul had struggled with ADHD, taken on Goth attire, withdrawn into a world of earphones and video games, and started using drugs. When I put my hand on his knee, he leaned over and whispered, “That was me, that was me.”

I too was crying. The words “How could I?” played over and over in my mind. How many people had I missed out on, separated myself from? Even this very evening, I had been creating separation. Here was my friends' son sitting by my side, and I had been pitying him from a distance. Yes, I knew he was troubled. Yet my mind had fixed on how that sweet fair-headed child I had read stories to was now dyeing his hair jet black and getting body piercings.

“Please,” I prayed during the closing candle-lighting ceremony, “please … may we remember the light that shines through each of us. May we love one another.”

The “Other” Is Part of Us

After my father's death, my mother became the primary person responsible for Victor's wellbeing. As he became more infirm, she was the one who found him the best available assisted living facility, visited him weekly, and handled his financial and medical matters. At first she did it out of duty, but Victor's gratitude, innocence, and growing affection began to soften her. She was like Santa Claus with her gifts of pizza and candy, puzzles and magazines, and his eyes would light up when she walked into the room.

Victor's big distress was the assisted living facility. He had lived in his own small apartment for decades, and this wasn't home. He wanted to leave, yet he had to stay—he was unable to care for himself. After one difficult visit my mother drove to a nearby park, stopped the car, and just sat quietly. She saw Victor in her mind's eye, pacing restlessly up and down his room, longing for somewhere else, and utterly helpless. A wave of sadness swept through her. He was a trapped child. Then she felt her heart gripped by an even deeper sorrow. He was
her
child—she had to love him. That was it. Realizing this, she told me later, flooded her with tenderness. “In those moments I liked myself better, I was more the person I want to be.”

Something fundamental had shifted in their relationship. She would still feel put upon, impatient, short at times. But she loved Victor and he could feel it. At the end of her next visit he reached out and touched her arm, as if to say “I want us together, don't leave.” And over the following year, he seemed to relax; he didn't need to complain so much. It was as though he was floating peacefully in her ocean, soothed by their connection.

When we feel compassion, the vulnerability of another person becomes part of us. My mother had stood in the fire of difficult feelings, staying present with Victor's fears and confusion, as well as her own suppressed aversion. In that presence, in paying attention, her heart had opened. Her pity for an “other” had become care for both of them. It was no longer Victor's problems they were dealing with—it was their shared predicament, their shared suffering. He had become part of her heart.

Victor's story ends sadly. Several years ago, when she was eighty-three, my mother decided to move down to Virginia and live with Jonathan and me on our property. She found kind people to visit Victor, but she still worried that he'd be bereft. And then, one week after she told him she was moving, Victor died. They had been holding hands, and he didn't want to go on without her.

When my mother called to tell me, she was grieving. “This was a person,” she said tearfully. “He had an intelligence, a gentleness, a good heart. But, it was so sad … others looked down on him. I did … until I got to know him.”

Compassion Can be Cultivated

The capacity for compassion is hardwired into our brain and body. Just as we are rigged to perceive differences, to feel separate, and to react with aversion, we are also designed to feel a connection with our fellow humans. Specialized “mirror neurons” attune us to another person's state—to their emotions and the intentions behind their movements—and re-create that state in our own brain. Our experience of them is not just a projection based on visible expressions like grimaces, narrowed eyes, or furrowed brows. Because of mirror neurons, and other structures in the prefrontal cortex that make up our compassion circuitry, we can actually “feel with” them.

Yet these compassion circuits are easily blocked when we're stressed and out of touch with our emotions and bodies. They can also become blocked when we buy into cultural stereotypes and when we're experiencing unexamined reactivity to the people in our life. Research shows that the less we identify with someone—the less they seem real to us—the less the mirror neuron system gets activated.