Unknown's avatar

even if there’s no buddha statue in the room…

by

…there’s always a buddha statue in the room.

This I was heard to have said.

In a discussion late one evening about the aversion we have to religion icons and rituals, I made this comment as a parry to the arguments around the ridiculous ends we go to when we feel the need to deny the obvious.  I did however have to agree that Zen is particularly rife with these doubly-negating aphorisms.  In this case, it went something like this: The buddha statue in the room is not really a Buddha statue; it’s simply a mirror of all your assumptions and preconceptions of what it means to have a buddha statue in the room.

Now, I’ve drunk enough of the Kool-Aid that, in my sugar-addled stupor, I often believe this.  And I can, in my more sober moments, feel the embarrassment of the nonsensical statement – not to mention the bad grammar and syntax!  But it’s really not about the statue in the room as much as it is about our relationship to a pattern of thinking and a treasured set of schema.  So, I’ve taken a different tack to the problem of the ever-present buddha statue in the room.

There’s a statue in room.
It’s of the Buddha.

You may not like it for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to find another room.

You may like it for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to stay in the room.

Either way, there’s something you’re practicing.

You may not like that practice for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to find another practice.

You may like that practice for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to stay with the practice. 

Either way, this is something.

In your room.

Unknown's avatar

the options offered by suffering

by

Last week, John Briere was in town giving a lecture on Mindfulness & Trauma.  He was quite entertaining, insightful, and very well-versed in the pain of trauma.  I appreciated his transparency in talking about his own trauma – just enough for us to know he’d walked the talk for many miles but not so much that he became a caricature of “heal thyself.”

At one point he challenged the now-trite phrase “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”  I won’t go into all of his argument on whether suffering is truly optional.  Suffice to say he made irrefutable points backed with solid data.  It did however remind me that I prefer to say, “Pain is inevitable; suffering offers options.”  I shared this with Briere at one of the breaks and we discussed the paradox of pain – that without pain we may not know our true suffering; without suffering we cannot know our true nature.  And that perhaps, our practice of sitting with that suffering burns way the multiple layers of assumptions and false logic we are heir to.

There were also parts of his talk that affected me deeply and so I sat with it over the days that followed.  I noticed that the suffering I felt gave me options large and small.  I had the option to tuck back into my autopilot ways of facing pain.  I had the option to turn towards it tentatively, ever ready to duck back under the covers of my favourite delusion, numbness.  I had the option to face it head on, engage it fully, and burn away the protective shell of stories in one firestorm.  I had the option to dance with it.

What was not an option however was the knowledge of being in pain.  We often hear that pain is the body/mind’s way of saying it needs something, that it is trying to adapt to a shift in demands and resources.  I wonder now if suffering is the body/mind’s way of saying we need to look closer to what is going on, to locate what is awry, and meet it with compassion.