Victor, My Mother, My Shadow and Me

In response to last week's blog, I received an interesting email from one of my online writing friends. She reminded me of an incident I had completely forgotten about. Two years ago, a few of us from the writing group spent a long weekend at our teacher's summer house in Oregon. There, our teacher announced she was planning a course on writing about the shadow.
 
I was uncharacteristically furious with her for even suggesting such a thing. I thought it was a dangerous thing to do without proper support and said so, loudly. Now I know who was upset: Happy Ali, who has made a career of shoving all negativity firmly under the rug. My writing friend pointed out that in the years since then, I seem to have surrounded myself with a "tremendous support system" and now I am "free to take that deep dive."

I look around and realize to my surprise that yes, I have collected around myself an inordinate number of warm loving people who are on some sort of spiritual path, many of them therapists, besides HH, my 'real' therapist. And then there is Victor, who is the key. Why is that? Because besides being my meditation teacher and a psychotherapist (not mine), this tall thin man from Tennessee astonishingly wears the face of my tiny French mother.

Goenka tells a story during his ten day meditation retreat, about an artist who paints a portrait of a beautiful woman and promptly falls in love with it. His friends laugh at him, telling him, "It's only a painting!" But he doesn't listen. Next he paints a terrifying face, only to give himself nightmares; again his friends tease him. The point is, we do this all the time. We are that deluded artist. We paint a picture of who we imagine someone to be and tack it up over their face and then we react to our own painting, ignoring the real person underneath.

So it has been with Victor. What is brilliant is that we both know he is my mother - or not actually my mother of course, but the signpost to her. It has taken a while - years! Two things had to happen: first, he had to be impervious to Happy Ali's easy charm. It seems I have spent a lifetime getting people to like me. Victor understood that early on, in an off-the-cuff remark, saying, "You can't bear anyone thinking you're not wonderful." I remember staring at him, blank with incomprehension: what was he talking about? Then HH asked me over a year ago, "How many people don't like you?" Another blank lasting several minutes. He said, "Wow. You've really worked hard at this." That was my first clue that this is apparently not normal. Doesn't everyone work tirelessly to be liked? Until last weekend's Voice Dialogue exercise, I had no idea how vested I was in being completely lovable.

(Victor did recognize things like my intelligence, which I've consistently undervalued, if not actively dismissed. How could I be cute puppy-dog and also quick-witted and bright? If you're intelligent, you have to take responsibility for yourself. Guess which one feels a whole lot safer and easier to be?).

Determined to breach that wall!

The second thing that had to happen was that I had to be repeatedly hurt. This caused us both quite a bit of distress. He would set up boundaries, I would apologize and try to comply, yet within days I'd be once again throwing myself over the wall. He had no recourse but to rebuff me, sometimes gently, sometimes harshly - and while I would see dimly that I was behaving in a way I would not dream of behaving towards any other teacher in my life, it didn't change a thing. Victor the psychotherapist understood this was something I could not control and that therefore "something profoundly psychological" was going on. He urged me to seek a therapist. I found HH and all three of us uncovered my mother. Through Victor, with HH's support, I can revisit grief so buried I had no idea it existed.

The old Chinese Zen teachers speak of "ripping off your face." They are deliberately rude or hurtful, intending to provoke a reaction that shocks their student enough to look into themselves and wonder, "WHO is hurt?" Their aim is to rip off your false face. This is also Victor's aim. He has written, "What you are trying to do is utterly courageous - you are trying to heal the small self while working with a meditation teacher whose job one is to help strip you of the delusion of self." The work for me has been to take that hurt and inquire within, asking myself WHY this is hurting me so badly? What is triggering this sorrow and where is it coming from? 

This is especially true right now. Things are in a bit of a turmoil within Long Beach Meditation, the upshot being that Victor is taking himself away to spend a week at a time in Ojai, a small town approximately two hours away from Long Beach. He speaks of renting a room there and coming back to Long Beach only on the weekends to teach and hold the Sunday sits. This has devastated me out of all proportion to what he is actually proposing, a sure sign that this is not Victor who is doing the devastating, but rather something stuffed down that is rising to the surface at last. Why is it surfacing now? Because I reckon at 57 I am finally able to handle the grief I literally could not bear as a child. And I have to plough through that grief to get to the other side. We all know this, don't we? When someone dies, you have to mourn them. There are no short-cuts.

At first I thought the grief was pointing to boarding school, only this time, instead of the child being banished, sent into exile, here it is Victor, wearing a parent face, voluntarily sending himself into exile. The similarity in both cases is the sense of powerlessness: there is nothing I can do, then or now, to fix anything. It is utterly awful. And then I uncovered that it's not just boarding school. That was the big finale, the cannons and fireworks at the end of the 1812 Overture. Quiet sorrow, unremarked for the most part, existed well before that. We don't tend to think children feel things. Not really. What I am experiencing is testimony to how wrong that idea is. Children feel, all right. But if nobody is there to help them understand what is happening, the sorrow goes underground. And we get stuck. Victor again, "I think - I really think that growing up hurts even the strongest of the children, let alone the ones who had no one to help them with it."

And unless some shocking thing happens in a life that makes us wake up from, as Victor calls it, "finding a comfortable nest," we will "settle down and live out patterns laid down so long ago." Do I really want to respond to Victor as a three year old, or an eleven year old, or a bolshy teenager towards her mother? Of course not! Yet I have done all three, powerless to be otherwise because I was unconscious of the triggers that were setting me off. Where's the choice? the awareness? It's all rather excruciating. But I wanted to share with you why I suddenly have this compulsion to go ferreting about in the past. My sister has said, not recently, thank God, "But Ali! It's over now! We had a very happy childhood and anyway, what's the point of looking back?" The thing is, the past colors the present. It is affecting my life in the present. I can't just skip over it and pretend everything is fine.

Amma, India's Hugging Saint

Something I need to tell you. In June, Amma, India's Hugging Saint, visited L.A.. I have been for the last four years, I wouldn't miss it. It is such an extraordinary experience: the giant ballroom of the LAX airport Hilton hotel transformed into an Indian bazaar, with kirtan music all night long, booths and stalls selling items to raise money for Amma's charities, Amma herself sitting raised on a stage hugging people hour after hour without a break, eternally smiling, loving, completely immersed in the person now held in her arms. The people leave her embrace transfigured with tears, usually smiling, deeply moved. I love to watch. Anyway, on this occasion, while waiting for my hug, I went to see a Vedic astrologer who travels with Amma's entourage. I had seen her twice before so my information is stored in their computer and no time was wasted sorting out time and place of birth. I had a question about Victor, because just the day before we had had a particularly painful meeting and I was feeling unsure about his continued role in my life. The astrologer told me in this life I have good spiritual teachers. The thing that made me sit up and take notice was when she said my teacher falls under Saturn - and "Saturn does not do well in this world" - virtually the exact words Victor used once in a letter to me. She said he was a good teacher for me. She said Saturn is all about breaking attachments to the world in what appears to be a harsh manner, in order to deepen one's spiritual practice. She reminded me that nothing in this world is real. "You want to wake up, don't you?" she said. "He has more to teach you." And it is going to be very hard on me, but necessary. It seems I am in a phase of bringing up deep buried sorrow from many previous lifetimes, not just this one. I have to cry. And Victor is the key.

The idea of staying with grief. We don't do this, we're not taught the necessity of doing this. My sister tells me that she cried every time she left home for a good week at a stretch, from when she was 11 until she was 17 and probably older. She was known as the "sensitive one" when we were growing up, while I was the "independent one". Now we are old and the roles are reversed. Her early tears have made her strong, like the English side of my family; whereas my independence was just a sham, a wallpapering over the cracks.

I always thought the black widow's weeds and black armbands of olden times were to let the world know you were in mourning, a visual cue to treat you carefully. Now I think perhaps another purpose was to remind you, the mourner, that you were in mourning. A quick glance down at all that black would keep you focused, I imagine.
Victor is currently leading a Beginner's Course, in which we have explored the differences between shamata (concentration) and Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation. I discovered I am very good at shamata, I can hone in on the breath, or last week's empty stage, or a vision of the mind as a bowl filled with water and stay perfectly still in order not to spill a drop. Then it dawned on me, no wonder it's so easy. I've been doing it for years! I perfected this skill at boarding school: any negative thought and it's as if a steel wall drops down, smooth, shiny, impossible to penetrate. That's how I could "decide" I would never be homesick again, and by God, I wasn't. This new-found grief is like the cracking of the ice floes: the sheet of steel is coming down  and me - "Happy Ali" - with it.

I have always wanted to write. Ever since I was five years old, dictating "The Mystery of the Grand Piano" to our neighbor next door. But I never felt I was old enough to do the kind of writing I wanted to do, whatever that might be. For now, at least, it is this, examining a life. My life! You have to have enough life under your belt before you can look backwards and make sense of it. I write, like a lot of people do, to make sense of my life. I was blocked for months after Goenka, thinking what on earth did I imagine I had to say?  We are, after all, painted portraits, even - perhaps especially - to ourselves. But when I think of friends who have dealt with "real" sorrow as children, parents divorcing, a mother dying, alcoholic fathers, physical abuse, I feel ashamed that my little grief in the scheme of things is just that - little. But this is Happy Ali talk, it is my father's voice in my head telling my mother to "pull yourself together, Maryse!" It is my mother, impatient with her "lack of stamina." She would often quote that line about God only giving you what sorrow you can handle, and she would say that God must think her very feeble, because her sorrows were so slight in comparison to practically everyone else, and here she could barely bear it. We - her robust English family - tended to agree with her. And now look at me, turns out I'm more like her than any of us ever guessed. But I think now that there are probably many people like me, who didn't endure huge sorrows, who led what was to outside eyes a happy or privileged or entitled childhood, but who suffered nonetheless. And perhaps my little part in all this is to sound a note of warning, not to judge, not to go by appearances. Be kind.

I sent last week's blog to my writing teacher, the one who wanted to create that course on the shadow. I apologized, saying I finally understood why I was so angry about it and hoped she would now understand. She wrote back, "I read your blog entry. Fascinating, and I’m so pleased that you’re moving forward into the darkness because that’s where you’ll find the light."

Next week - into the darkness! Or at least a loiter around the entrance...