flashback

you are a sinner

little girls have pretty curls

I love Oreos

guilt and shame

you wanted to me to

be the manifestation

of your Barbie Doll

‘No Big Deal Dharma: Notice, Relax & Let Go”

Growing up in an abusive home, I learned to skillfully abate pain and fear.  I simply disassociated.  If my father came into my room at night, which he did with some regularity, I closed my eyes and imagined myself elsewhere, anywhere away from the present moment.  When my father beat up my grandmother, I hid under the bed and refused to come out.  Determined to pretend it never happened, I closed my eyes and decided never to look back.  I only remembered the event after years of a reoccurring dream in which I saw myself in my bedroom cowering under the box springs.  With the help of hypnosis,  I relieved the that terrible night and in so doing we freed of another repressed past event.

In adolescents and early adult hood, I used sex, food, cigarettes and alcohol as strategies to avoid painful experiences and memories.  I stayed away from home as much as possible and finally moved to another city to get away from war-torn house in which I grew up.  Marrying at 21 seemed like a good idea.  What would be better than having someone to take care of me?  Well that did not work.  My first husband and I fought incessantly.  We drank to excess and smoked a lot of pot.  He was a good man.  I was a ticking  time bomb  waiting to detonate.

I left him and found another man, sexier, more exciting, dapper, and almost famous.  We lived the bohemian lifestyle, a ratty roach infested apartment, parties every night, sex, drugs and rock and roll.  We married but decided not to be monogamous.  Our motto was, If it feels good, do it.  After out first child, born at home, we bought a house. I got a real job at a law firm and we set about the business of growing up.  I never could get the hang of it.  Insecure, jealous, depressed, ridden with guilt and shame, I never believed that he loved me.  I was ill suited to be a parent and desperately wanted to die.  So I had multiple affairs, drank myself in to a stupor every night and blamed him for my woes.  He was never to blame.  The ghosts from my past were gaining on me.

I stopped drinking in 1990.  Something deep inside told me, “You must get sober if you ever hope to sort this out.”  I did.  I went to treatment for co-dependency, a real buzz word in the 90’s and for bulimia.  I left my second husband in 1997 for the fourth and last time.  We have both since remarried and are good friends.  We celebrate holidays together with our two children, present day spouses, our grand baby and another one on the way.  Life is good.

So what have I learned?  Go toward pain and suffering.  Do not attempt to run away from it.  You cannot hide from the past.  It will find you and f_ _ k you up until you deal with it.  “Wherever you go, there you are,” bigger than life, day in and day out.  This is it.  Why use all the resources we have to repress memories and hide from our fears? There is another way.  Joan Halifax Roshi explains:

In opening to living and dying without defending ourselves, we liberate a tremendous amount of energy. When we let go of our reference points, we open ourselves to a new way of being and perceiving. This is the realm of not-knowing. Although it can be frightening to be this transparent to life, we now have the resources with which to welcome fear, to be present for it, and to transform it through our awareness. In this way we break the habitual patterns that we have used to defend ourselves against feeling fear. This is how we heal.

Simplicity and directness are doorways to this open state. Rather than continuing to use concepts to distance and protect ourselves from our experience, we relax into the present moment.

She calls this ordinary state, “no big deal dharma.” It is simply everyday life. With no need to edit our reality, we can relax and sit with things just as they are, not good or bad.  We notice, relax and let go.  How, you say, can I do that?  Meditation.  Meditation teaches us to notice what is right in front of us.  We learn, as we sit, the longer we sit, to relax into the present moment whatever it brings. As we cultivate the ability to sit and see, we learn to relax into what is called, “not knowing.” Se begin to understand there is nothing special to realize.  We just are in this present moment. “There is nothing lacking, nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing extra.”  This moment and every moment is unique.  Wow.  So powerful and yet so simple.

January 31- One Year, One Day at a Time -Hot Bod

Hot bod.  You know that commercial with the Arian man and his south american counter part running up and down the bleachers?  Young, hot girls are watching, starry-eyed, swooning because the two young men have such great bodies.  Really?  I have a hot body for a 62-year-old woman.  Okay is that arrogant, or am I giving you the facts?  Why do I even want to write about this?  Why, because tonight at dinner when the 3 other people we were with talked about procuring second homes, selling and buying condos and the like, I thought, what am I doing with my life?   Writing, teaching yoga, counseling, doing life coaching and ….I have a hot bod.  I just snickered.  This is really quite funny coming from the girl who, in eighth grade heard the gym teacher tell her, “You are weak and terribly over weight.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  You need to lose weight.”  She was so angry all because I could not pull myself up a climbing rope.

And so I was for years to come.   That was a turning point for me. I immediately started dieting, starving myself in hopes of attaining my goal, the perfect weight, 110 pounds.  I only weighed 120 to start.  Was I even overweight, or had my body not quite caught up with my….What am I talking about.  I was at one time heavier than I am now.  Embarrassed about my weight I dieted, took pills, used enemas and tried my best not to eat at all.  If I did eat and especially when I overate,  I took laxatives.  No one, no one was ever going to discover my sordid secret.  I ate and ate more to escape feelings for which i had no explanation.

Today, I do not eat or drink to cover up or hide from who I am.  I do not drink or eat too much to escape my feelings. I enjoy food and alcohol to the extent that i am having fun with friends. Over consumption of food and alcohol does not erase the past.  We each must do that for ourselves. Learning not to be a victim of the past does take time and effort.  No matter who you are, the past does effect you.  Samscaras, our perceptions of what has happened, the scars those experiences created are a sticky spider web waiting to ensnare us.  We cannot change the past but we can kill the spider, that part of ourselves that works feverishly to weave a web of self-made obstacles, false ideas of who we are, illusions of reality, avidya, a film that covers our eyes and hearts obscuring the truth, misapprehending, creating confusion and fear.

Ha, I have to laugh.  My perception of myself, me seeing me as having at hot bod for a 62-year-old grandmother may well be just another filament in the spider web I am trying to escape.

I am falling asleep sitting up in bed.  I must to go to sleep.  I will be back in touch tomorrow.

Why I Write

I write for myself and for my friends.  I write to say things to my family I cannot speak aloud, to clear the clouds of misfortune.  I write to elevate my own thoughts and the minds of those around me.  I write to speak the truth.  I write to proclaim that each and every one of us has a right to be heard. I write because I want to be honest and clear.  I write with earnestness and joy knowing that sometimes, often, I do not make sense.  When I write I know I am alive. If I do not write, I feel like a failure.  I write so that I can hold a candle to the world as I see it and not as others depict it.  I write for my grandmother, who could not or would not speak.  I write to play.  I write for fun because it is like frolicking in a flower festooned valley.  I write because I dream and I know there is more.   I write when I don’t take my anti-depressant, out of fear and desperation.  I write to make sense of the world and to illuminate my world.  I write as if I were playing a fine violin, bowing my way across the pages of time and space.  I write to tell my story so that others may live.  I write of wonder and pain and fear and joy and confusion.  I write, when I write, because I believe it is what I have always been meant to do.  I write for all the survivors of sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, cancer and the like.  I write my pain in hopes of touching yours.  Writing is like playing with fire knowing that any moment I could go up in smoke. When I write I walk the tight rope between what I know to be real and what the world tells me is real.  Will I fall?  Is that why I do not write?  I write to love others and myself.  I write to express anger, hatred, revenge and loneliness. I write to become a dagger that will pierce my father’s heart. I write, screaming at my mother, demanding she tell me what really happened.  I write pleading for understanding and reconciliation. I write so that I will not forget that my son died and yet he lives.  I write to bring chaos into the world in hopes of restoring it to sanity.  I write to cry and laugh and joke.  I write to pretend I am someone who I am not and to be more of who I am.  I write for God, for the Divine mother in me and for the women of the world.   I write to spin a yarn.  I write like a wolf howling in the night hungry for love and companionship.  I write to be alone but not lonely.  I write because I am a writer and that is what we do.  It is our language.  It is my connection to my soul and to the universe.  Writing is my life.

Guilt and Shame

Meditation is not a panecea.  More often than not sitting still, watching my breath is like being locked in Pandora’s Box.

“Let me out.  I need to move.  Anything but sitting here watching the guilt and shame flash across my mind.  My fault.  My fault.  My mother did not love me because I was flawed, deeply flawed from birth.  I lacked compassion.  I did not love and respect her.  She needed me and I pushed her away.  Sane mind intervenes.  Wrong, you are not to blame.  Okay, but what about my family?  I abandoned them.  I left them high and dry.  My brother living on the street, another one prematurely dead.  Two more under employed, self- medicating to stay alive.  A sister who will not return my calls.  I am to blame.  I am selfish.  I use people.  Damn.  I just want to sit for 30 minutes and find some peace.  My addictive personality is constantly looking for the click.  I see the years I spent over-eating, drinking, doing drugs, being promiscuous, as me looking for a break from all the guilt and shame.   I hear Pema Chodron’s words, “Always meditate on what provokes resentment.”  What does she mean?  Sit with the pain?  Observe it?  “Acknowledging that we are all churned up is the first and most difficult step in any practice.”  Instead of reaching for a drink, a cigarette, chocolate, or the telephone, ask, “How can I practice now, right on this painful spot, and transform this into the path of awakening?”

“In essence the practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.  Then we feel the bodily sensation completely.  One way of doing this is to breathe into our heart.  By acknowledging the emotion, dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves about it, and feeling the energy of the moment, we cultivate compassion for ourselves. “

I am not to blame.  It is not my fault my mother abandoned me.  I am not to blame for my father sexually abusing me.  I did not force my brother to become crazy, to live isolated on the streets.  Nor am I responsible for my youngest brother’s death.  He smoked the cigarettes that killed him.  I can recognize how I feel and know there are millions of others who feel this same pain.  When I can see my confusion, fear, loneliness, my addictions, my strategies to avoid with compassion for myself, I can extend compassion to others who, like me, want to escape the incessant pain.  Then, Instead of being alone, frail, feeling worthless and desperate, I feel joy, because I am practicing vulnerability.  I am opening my heart to the pain of the world and in so doing I gain wisdom and courage.  If I can practice in the midst of pain and confusion, I remember that this is my path.

Pema writes, “Our patterns are well established, seductive and comforting.  Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn’t enough.  Awareness is the key.  So we see the stories we tell ourselves and question their validity?”  When we are distracted by a strong emotion, do we remember that is our path?  Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.”

This is how our desire to help not only ourselves, but all others will expand.  “Don’t try to be the fastest,” “Abandon any hope of fruition,” and “Don’t expect applause.”  This is my life.  I want to live it loving myself and others, not working for constant validation.  The forgiveness I desire is an inside job.  The longing I have to be connected to others is my path.  My pain is the solution to all I seek.  May the warrior in me refuse to retreat.  When I practice, when I train to be loving and compassionate, I can only hope to:

“…see that we’re (I am) rarely able to relax into the present moment….to  see that we’ve (I have) fabricated all kinds of strategies to avoid staying present, particularly when we’re (I am) afraid that whatever’s happening will hurt…also to see our (my) strong belief that if only we (I) could do everything right, we’d (I would) be able to find a safe, comfortable, and secure place to spend the rest of our (my) lives.”

This illusion, the illusion that constant joy, happiness, and freedom, is just an attitude adjustment away is the source of all suffering.  Sitting with the stories, the pain, the attempts to avoid life, the fears, the injustices…resting in awareness is the cure.  Practice, practice, practice with compassion and loving kindness.  Chodron states, “Staying with pain, without loving-kindness is just warfare” and we all know what that looks like.  Heal yourself.  Heal the world.  Sit.  Breathe into your heart.  Be brave.  Be kind.  Do not run away from yourself.  You are the answer we have all been waiting for.