Last night was my first night back at the UU Sangha after five weeks away. It was pleasant to see everyone again, and to feel myself getting back into a routine. My mind was kind of chattery when I got there, but the very familiarity of the place and ritual was settling.
In our Dharma study, we are still reading Pema Chödrön's
book, How to Meditate; and she has a remark at the end of chapter 13
that I really don't understand. She
writes:
If you don't reject [your] emotions,
they actually become your friends. They
become your support. Your rage becomes
your support for stabilizing, for returning the mind to its natural, open
state. Emotions become your support for
being fully awake and present, for being conscious rather than unconscious, for
being present rather than distracted.
That which has been an ogre in your life has the ability to just sweep
you away – or it can become your actual friend, your support. It's a whole different way of living, a whole
different way of looking at the same old stuff.
Say what?
I commented during our discussion
that I flat-out did not understand this.
Afterwards, the Sangha leader said she wasn't completely sure she did
either, but she had just an inkling of what it might be about. When her daughter was little she was very
sick for a long time with something … I'm not clear what. Anyway it put her in terrible pain for a long
time, so that she refused all food. Only
this went on long enough that her mother – now our Sangha leader – had to feed
her something to keep her alive. Well,
she said, she went through all sorts of terrible emotions up and down while her
daughter suffered through these fits. And
of course the emotional turmoil accomplished nothing. But very gradually she found that there would
be a certain point where there was a break in her daughter's suffering, and
that she (the mother) could use this break to feed her. How could she identify this break? By using her own emotions as a barometer, so
she could feel when her daughter had hit such-and-such a point.
And suddenly I thought of the
times that Wife would rage for hours on end, when her mental illnesses would
pull her clear away from any kind of common reality. (I don't mean that she was ever psychotic … just
that her neuroses got so bad that she might as well have been, for all the
connection that her speech had with the world the rest of us live in.) The thing is that sometimes I could talk her
through this state to a more stable place, usually to a level of calm that
would allow her to take her medications and go to bed. (And after a long sleep she'd be better in
the morning.) I couldn't always do it. I never got cocky about it – never thought it
was mechanical, or a sure thing. I
always felt it was a little bit of a miracle when it worked. But I got to where it did work, more
often than not. And I couldn't begin to
say how I did it, except that I just paid total attention to her – her words,
her gestures, her feelings – and looked for every little angle that I could use
to edge her toward more solid ground. I
entered into the world of her emotions almost completely, forgetting whatever
else was going on and letting the pain and fear wash over me … just so long as
I could look around and get my bearings, to see where we were.
I'm describing this all in
metaphor, and I don't know how else to describe it. I don't know how to tell someone else to do
what I did. If I had tried to talk to
myself two decades earlier, through some kind of time machine, I couldn't have
said what to do. But I think that
somehow, maybe just a little bit, it's the kind of thing our Sangha leader was
telling me about. I only wonder if
either of us has a real clue what Pema
Chödrön meant. Oh well, maybe ….
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