Category Archives: reflections

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the small of fear

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One of the gifts of resentment is how it opens us to our fearfulness, our turning away time and again from what will enlarge our heart.   We can see how it weakens us so we can only cling to what keeps us small.

One of my longtime friends suggested that guilt and resentment are opposite sides of the same coin.  I added that guilt is the difference we project between our ideal and real selves.  It’s another measure of how I don’t measure up.  In situation A, I wanted to respond “this” way yet I responded “that” way!  Fear, shame, and blame arise as a consequence of that mismeasure of my worth.  Of course, it’s not always about flagellation over my mis-steps.  As I get older, I also begin to reflect on my life and how I’ve filled it and it’s a tricky balance between reflection and recrimination.

Luckily, I remember being 56 years old as if it was just a few days ago; it was a day of sati – re-collecting all the ways I create meaning.  And spiritual practice is a container in which I cultivate meaning.  As a gift to myself and encouraged by my blogger pal, Luke, to do what scares me, I went ahead with an application to a 7-day retreat at a center on the East Coast.  The application form was one of those “fill in the essay blocks with all you’ve done as a meditator.”  What a koan!  How to sell myself to get into a a container to be with no-self?  I did my best and a few days later  I got an email reply.  I had been assessed as lacking in sufficient meditation training.

I was crushed.  The if-onlies kicked in: if only I had spun my experience, if-only I had expressed my undying wish to be enlightened.  Then the what-if’s entered stage left: what-if I really don’t have any recognizable training as a meditator; what-if I’ve been a fake all this time.  The shoulda’s syncophated: I shoulda started earlier in my life; I shoulda spent less time in a wasted youth; I shoulda published that novel – It woulda been a Winner!

And then resentment kicked the doors down: what the heck do they know!  Elitist Buddhism!  Time to join the Secular Buddhist!  Seriously though, I noticed the edge of resentment.  Just a little bubble.  I asked myself, Perhaps it’s OK for you to feel rejected?  Perhaps something in this is true?  Not about your lack – or theirs – but about differences in perspective.

No one likes to be told they don’t measure up.  (To give the organization credit, they did tell my how I could meet their standards; unfortunately I don’t have the years to do it in – just yet.)  So I asked myself another life-turning question: What might happen if I treat the resentment as a bell that calls me to awareness of fear?  I noticed a few things in the days that followed.  Things I don’t do because I don’t want to risk rejection.  Things I don’t ask for because I may not get what I want.  Times I draw the shadows around me because it’s just safer than speaking my truth.  Places, people, and opportunities I avoid because I don’t know what will unfold.

Life can get very small when we live this way.

What might happen if we turn away from this smallness to the possibility of something different?

What might happen if I come to the edge between safe and sorry, an edge that vibrates with fear yet filled with possibility?

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hidden promises

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Sunday’s post announced that Zen teacher Joko Beck was in hospice care.  Scouting around the bloggosphere, I’m touched by how deeply this teacher drew so many of us onto the path of practice – and service.  I read Joko’s book Everyday Zen decades ago, wandering across it as I struggled with the role Buddhism played in my life.  I was in graduate school, mangling relationships and getting mangled in turn by the zeitgeist in Psychology that had yet to understand the concept of empathy.  We were a good match. 

In the turmoil of egos and crazy-making interactions, Joko Beck’s writings were a clean straight arrow shot into the air.  The tempo of a cognitive psychological stance resonated with my studies.  It’s not the intention of her teachings to activate the left brain but it is skillful means if the brain at hand is tilted so.  Whatever it was, I learned and grew from her books.  Nothing special, simply unfolding breath by breath, in my life as it was at that time – and it is now.

When I read the news of her dying, I lit a stick of incense. 

May you journey safely to the other shore, Joko. 

May you finally be free of carrying us, one-by-one, word-by-word, to our transformation. 

May you rest now, trusting in the labor of all of us who take your teachings into heart and plant them into ground. 

May you find your promise kept and no longer need to practice disappointment.

These are some of my favourite readings from Nothing Special:

The problem is that nothing actually works.  We begin to discover that the promise we hold out to ourselves – that somehow, somewhere, our thirst will be quenched – is never kept.  I don’t mean that we never enjoy life.  Much in life can be greatly enjoyed: certain relationships, certain work, certain activities.  But what we want is something absolute.  We want to quench our thirst permanently, so that we have all the water we want, all the time.  That promise of complete satisfaction is never kept.  It can’t be kept.  The minute we get something we have desired, we are momentarily satisfied – and then our dissatisfaction rises again.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment.  We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us.  This discovery is our teacher.

The promise that is never kept is based on belief systems, personally centered thoughts that keep us stuck and thirsty.

It’s useful to review our belief systems…because there’s always one that we don’t see.  In each belief system we hide a promise.