A while ago I was reading through the comments to a post by John Michael Greer, and one of them struck me. You can find the full comment here, from a reader who goes by the sobriquet Northwind Grandma, but the gist of it is as follows:
... Several readers have asked “how can I help during the decline?” Start with one’s intention. If one wants to “help the world,” breathe in the bad and breathe out the good. Close the eyes, and do this twenty minutes a day for the rest of your life.... It is not a meditative practice for the weak. It may sound easy. It is a practice that makes or breaks a world, not to mention what it can do to a person.
Northwind, if that works for you, by all means, but I emphatically don’t recommend this for anyone at all. I know people whose lives went straight down the crapper when they did this, without doing any measurable good for anybody else.
Then there was some additional discussion, for example in this comment here and this one here.
What struck me so hard about this discussion is that I used to do the exact same thing with Wife, or almost. I didn't think of it as a meditation practice, and so I didn't go through all the formal steps that, for example, Pema Chödrön outlines in her article above. In my mind I called it "swallowing bitterness," and I wondered if it might be a practice someone could apply pragmatically in, say, political re-education camps, or perhaps Hell.
"Swallowing bitterness," as I practiced it, started when Wife would go on a rant. These rants were not uncommon. She would bewail the unfairness of life, the cruelty of other people, and in particular the malice or fecklessness of me. And they would build. I could watch her develop a head of steam, and work herself into a real fit. And for the first, oh, several years of our marriage I would try to stop her. I would point out where she had her facts wrong; I would explain that whatever I had done wasn't really cruel or unfair if only you looked at it the right way; I would remind her that the World is what it is, and that complaining about Fate or random chance doesn't change anything.
None of these objections ever worked. After a few years, I slowly came to realize that they probably made matters worse. And after a while longer, I began to think that if everything I said just made matters worse, maybe I should try saying nothing at all. This was very hard. The urge to jump up and defend myself against what felt like an unjust attack was almost overpowering. The urge to try somehow to force her physically to look at the bright side of things was almost as strong, notwithstanding that I understood there was no way to do it.
And so I just sat. She would rant and curse and scream and cry ... and I just sat. And stared at the floor. And listened to her. When she would pause for a breath and it sounded like she expected me to say something, I restricted my remarks to the simplest and least offensive ones I could think of. "I'm sorry. "I'm so sorry." "That's terrible." "I'm so very sorry." "That really sucks." But mostly I wouldn't say even that. Mostly I would sit quietly, stare at the floor, and listen. And I tried to train myself simply to swallow it all. Not to respond. Not to defend. Not to deflect. Not even to try to solve anything. And especially not to come back at her with the same bitterness she was throwing so violently at me.
Just to swallow it.
Swallowing bitterness.
Of course it was a practice of some kind, though I only halfway ever thought of it like that. That is, I recognized the behavior as common enough that I had a name for it. But it was a private name, useful only in talking to myself. And if anyone had ever asked me, "What systematic practices do you use to remain mindful in your marriage?" I wouldn't even have understood what the question meant. I certainly wouldn't have had an answer. So in that sense I guess I didn't think of it as a meditation practice, or a spiritual one. It was just something I did, ... that I had learned to do, ... that I had to do.
Now that I find myself writing about it, I wonder if it ever "helped." There's no way to know. The most I can say for sure is that it probably didn't make anything worse. But there were many years when "not making things worse" was plenty of recommendation as far as I was concerned.
Maybe it wasn't quite the same thing as tonglen, but I think it was close.
__________
Update: I realize that this is related to my post about "Making friends with difficult emotions?" Come to think of it, there's also a connection with my post "But anxiety is normal, dammit, part 2." Apparently I've written about this more than I realized. That happens when you drag out the same blog over years and years, I guess. You can compare and contrast them if you like.
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