It began at a recent family dinner - you know the kind - good food, good wine, laughs, family time. We were accidentally all home at the same time, and we all had the idea of some quality time together before our Fall plans take us in different directions...
Then, unexpectedly for me, wham, someone makes a pointed comment. I'm hurt. All the fun goes out of the evening. I retreat, start cleaning up. I feel the pain and think about Ven. Eshu's teaching, about Joshua's blog about pain and suffering. Where is the pain? in my chest. Who is feeling it? just for a moment the pain goes away. There's just space.
Then the pain is back, a tight ache in my chest that reaches up and pulls down the corners of my mouth, makes my eyes water. I retreat into a familiar set of responses, don't want to talk, feel hurt and right and self justified and very confused. The pain is familiar, the behaviour familiar, the goal to hurt back.
I think: just break the pattern.
I'm conscious that the Pain is in my chest and the Suffering is everything else: feelling inadequate as a parent, berating myself for being so stupid, wanting to niggle away at the pain like picking at a scab. I finish cleaning up, and start writing to try to gain some insight or at least perspective...
I realize that for this dinner I had an agenda of pure family fun and I also had mountains of unconscious baggage. The thing of it is that I'm not conscious of my unconscious baggage. I can feel it leading me by the nose, but don't have any kind of grip on it. In this case it took the form of a totally unrealistic ideal of family life.
This experience though somewhat brutal at the time has given me some clarity on a particular habit pattern, and a great incentive to sit sit sit!
Thanks for this post Soshin! It is really helpful to hear about what other people are experiencing in terms of practice and day to day life. Isn't it amazing how the momentum of habit patterns can be so strong and difficult to break even when you can see it for what it is?
ReplyDeleteYes. There's a lot of power in the patterns - perhaps we can match it with the power of play.
ReplyDeleteI'm in a canoe, surfing the wake of an unlit ferry on a dark and stormy night. As I struggle lonely in my canoe I notice other canoeists likewise bobbing in the wake. Then in the dim light of a winter dawn our features slowly shift - faces elongate into long snouts, hands morph into fins - we're a school of dolphins leaping joyfully through the waves. -soshin