True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (27 page)

And so we start bargaining with God or with fate. We promise to give up bad foods, to exercise, to be generous with others, to pray regularly. “I'll never again lash out angrily at anyone, if only you'll protect me from another heart attack.” “I'll stop drinking for good, if only you'll bring her back to me.” And even if none of this works, even in the face of death, we may strive to be seen (by ourselves as well as others) as good, heroic, or enlightened.

You might wonder why this is a false refuge. Is it so bad to try to improve ourselves, or to want others to think well of us? Is it even bad to want to feel good about ourselves? The problem is that in managing life, we aren't living it fully. By expending all our energy on meeting our “good person” standards, we risk missing out on the comfort and intimacy we might have shared.

Julia was a dear friend in our meditation community. When she discovered that her breast cancer had returned, she resolved to bring her spiritual practice to whatever might unfold, and she and I agreed to regular meetings as a way of supporting her through her treatment. Although she took a leave of absence from her social work job, Julia insisted on continuing to volunteer for our community. I remember seeing her one afternoon, leaning against a wall, her bald head covered with a brightly colored scarf. She was giving warm encouragement to one of our newer members. During a break I asked her if it was a good idea for her to be using her energy in this way. “I feel better about myself when I'm helping,” she told me. Then with a smile, “God knows, I need a break from thinking about
moi
.” Only later did Julia admit that she had arrived home “exhausted beyond words.”

Julia lived near the hospital and often walked to her chemo treatments, refusing company or rides. Her friends were concerned about her stubborn independence, her determination not to rely on others. “Her cancer's metastasized, she probably won't get better. When is she going to let us help?” one person wondered.

Julia and I met soon afterward, and she confided, “When I'm hurting, I want everyone to go away so I can just handle it myself.”

“How is that for you,” I asked, “spending time by yourself in great pain?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “I don't want anyone around but … as the hours go by, I end up feeling horribly alone. I have this image of the world … everything I can imagine … receding into a distant blur. And me, locked in a cancerous body.”

“What would happen,” I asked, “if at those times someone was with you?”

Julia sat silently for a minute. “I don't see why anyone would want to be around me,” she said quietly. “It's hard to admit, even to you, but … my world has gotten pretty small. Sometimes I'm just trying to sip water without retching. There's not much mindfulness. Mostly I'm feeling sorry for myself and grimly trying to make it through.”

She stopped talking, sank back tiredly on the couch, and gazed down at the floor.

“Julia, I'm glad you're telling me,” I said. “I want to know what's happening. I want to be in this with you as well as I can.”

She took a deep breath and looked at me. “My friends want to see the brave, positive Julia, the spiritual Julia.… not the one who feels beaten down … who's not sure if there is a reason to keep on living.” She paused again and gave me a weary look. “There are times when any trust I ever had—in meditating, in the spiritual path—is gone. I'm just scared and lonely. That's not what I want others to see. That's not how I want to be.”

Face-to-Face with the Controller

At the same time that Julia was struggling with her illness, another friend who was undergoing chemotherapy wrote to me: “I'm discovering that cancer—and perhaps its treatment even more—is a continual stripping away of each part of you that you valued, piece by piece, each part of who you thought you were. Yesterday it was shaving off what remained of my hair. It's an accelerated course in letting go, in humility and humiliation.”

Getting sick, getting closer to death, can unravel our identity as a good person, a worthy person, a dignified person, a spiritual person. It also puts us face-to-face with the core identity of the space-suit self that I call “the controller.” The controller is the ego's executive director, the self that we believe is responsible for making decisions and directing the course of our lives. It obsessively plans and worries, trying to make things safe and okay, and it can give us at least a temporary sense of self-efficacy and self-trust. But great loss unseats the controller. We couldn't change ourselves (or our partner) enough to keep the marriage together. We couldn't protect our father from feeling the loss of dignity in his illness. We couldn't prevent our daughter from becoming anorexic, our adult son from losing custody of his children. We couldn't make our boss value us enough to keep our job. Or, like Julia, we couldn't go through the darkest phases of our illness and sustain our faith.

When the fabric of our self-protection tears open, we are intensely fragile and vulnerable. Sometimes we scramble to resurrect the controller—getting busy, blaming others, blaming ourselves, trying to fix things. But if we are willing to let there be a gap, if we can live in presence without controlling, healing becomes possible.

Deepening Surrender

My controller can hold loss at bay for months at a time. If I can keep doing things—teaching, serving our community, counseling others—the ground stays firm under my feet. But some years ago, right before our winter meditation retreat, my body crashed. I landed in the hospital, unable to teach, or for that matter to read, walk around, or go to the bathroom without trailing an IV.

I remember lying on the hospital bed that first night, unable to sleep. At around 3 a.m., an elderly nurse came in to take my vitals and look at my chart. Seeing me watching her, she leaned over and patted me gently on the shoulder. “Oh dear,” she whispered kindly, “you're feeling poorly, aren't you?”

As she walked out tears started streaming down my face. Kindness had opened the door to how vulnerable I felt. How much worse would it get? What if I wasn't well enough to teach? Should I get off our meditation community's board? Would I even be able to sit in front of a computer to write? There was nothing about the future I could count on.

Then a verse from Rumi came to mind:

I began to reflect on this, repeating, “There's nothing ahead, there's nothing ahead.” All my ideas about the future receded. In their place was the squeeze of raw fear, the clutching in my heart I had been running from. As I allowed the fear—attended to it, breathed with it—I could feel a deep, cutting grief. “Just be here,” I told myself. “Open to
this
.” The pain was tugging, tearing at my heart. I sobbed silently (not wanting to disturb my roommate), wracked by surge after surge of grief. The house was burning and this human self was face to face with its fragility, its temporariness, with the inevitability of loss.

Yet as my crying subsided, a sense of relief set in. It wasn't quite peace—I was still afraid of being sick and sidelined from life—but the burden of being the controller, of thinking I could manage the future or fight against loss, was gone for the moment. It was clear that my life was out of my hands.

Those six days at the hospital were a humbling lesson in surrender. A pulse that wouldn't go above forty-five; doctors who couldn't figure out what was wrong; food I couldn't eat; release date extended. Yet what was most amazing to watch was how the controller struggled to remain in charge.

On the third day I was walking around the perimeter of the cardiac unit, jarred by how weak I felt, how uncertain about my future. Then, for the ten thousandth time, my mind lurched forward, anticipating how I might reconfigure my life, what I'd have to cancel, how I could manage this deteriorating body. When I saw that the controller was back in action I returned to my room and wearily collapsed on the raised hospital bed. As I lay there, the circling thoughts collapsed too, and I sank below the surface, into pain.

Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa taught that the essence of a liberating spiritual practice is to “meet our edge and soften.” My edge was right here: the acute loneliness, the despair about the future, the grip of fear. I knew I needed to soften, to open. I tried to keep my attention on where the pain was most acute, but the controller was still there, holding back. It was as if I'd fall into a black hole of grief and die. Gently, tentatively, I started encouraging myself to feel what was there and soften. The more painful the edge of grief was, the more tender my inner voice became. At some point I placed my hand on my heart and said, “Sweetheart, just soften … let go, it's okay.” And as I dropped into that aching hole of grief, I entered a space filled with the tenderness of pure love. It surrounded me, held me, suffused my being. Meeting my edge and softening was a dying into timeless loving presence.

In some ways, the hospital was a great place to practice. So little control, so many hours alone, so many rounds of vulnerability. In the remaining days, I repeated to myself again and again: “Sweetheart, just soften.” Whenever I recognized that I had tightened in anxious planning and worry, I noted it as “my edge.” Then I'd invite myself to soften. I found that kindness made all the difference. When I returned home, the stories and fears about the future were still there. The controller would come and go. But I had deeper trust that I could meet my life with an open and present heart.

Ungrieved Loss

If you have grieved deeply, you know about surrender. Such grieving is healthy, cleansing, and intelligent. It allows us to metabolize the pain of loss and continue living. It lets us open to love. Yet for many people, the controller does not vacate its post sufficiently for full grieving to unfold. And so we may carry a hidden grief for years. The premature loss of childhood, the sexual abuse, the parent lost to divorce, the years lost to addiction, the passing of a close friend—any of these may be still there, sealed away in our body and mind.

There's a price to ungrieved loss: It prevents us from fully engaging with the life we love. The result may be a kind of numbness; we may find ourselves untouched by beauty or by the dearness of others; we may react to events in a mechanical or anxious or angry way. When the next great loss comes along, as it inevitably does, our compulsion to false refuges spikes; we intuit the lurking ocean of grief and resist being swept away. But these fresh losses also present us with a precious opportunity.

A few months after Justin and I had our first phone consultation, his seventy-five-year-old mother had a stroke. His voice filled with agitation as he told me about the wall he had hit when he tried to communicate with her insurance company. They couldn't seem to understand that her recovery depended on more comprehensive rehab. “There's nothing I can do to reach this goddamned, heartless bureaucracy … nothing … nothing!”

Justin was once again living in the shadow of loss, and gripped in reactivity. We both agreed that this was an opportunity to bring the mindfulness of RAIN to his immediate experience. He began by quickly identifying what he called “pure, righteous anger” and then pausing, allowing it to be there. Then, after a several rounds of investigation, he came upon something else.

“My chest. It's like there is a gripping there, like a big claw that's just frozen in place. And I'm afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” I asked gently.

After a long pause, Justin spoke in a low voice. “She'll probably come through this fine, but a part of me is afraid I'm going to lose her too.”

We stayed on the phone together as Justin breathed with his fear, feeling its frozen grip on his chest. Then he asked if he could call me back later in the week. “This is a deep pain,” he said. “I need to spend time with it.”

“Something cracked open, Tara,” he told me a few days later. “Being worried about my mom is all mixed up with Donna dying. It's like Donna just died yesterday and I'm all broken up. Something in me is dying all over again …” Justin had to wait a few moments before continuing. “I wasn't done grieving. I never let myself feel how part of me died with her.” He could barely get out the words, and then he began weeping deeply.

Whenever the controller gets unseated, there's an opening to be with what is. My controller was out of a job when I landed in the hospital. Now Justin's was decommissioned, and this time he was willing to be with the loss he'd never fully grieved. Instead of rushing into a new cause, he spent the next couple of months focused on caring for his mom. He also spent hours alone shooting hoops, or hitting tennis balls against a wall. Sometimes he'd walk into his empty house and feel like he had just lost Donna all over again. It was that raw.

But grief has its own timing. As Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue tells us:

Justin had opened to the presence that could release his hill of tears. Six months later, during our last consultation, he told me that he was back in action. “I'm in the thick of diversity work again, and probably more effective. Makes sense … According to my sister, I'm no longer at war with the world.”

Grieving loss consciously is at the center of the spiritual path. In small and great ways, each of our losses links us to what we love. It is natural that we will seek to manage the pain of separation in whatever way we can. Yet as we awaken, we can allow our sorrow to remain faithful to itself. We can willingly surrender into the grieving. By honoring what has passed away, we are free to love the life that is here.