Lessons Drawn from Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving/ Field Day, Death

I have been working on a blog for weeks now about a wonderful psycho-spiritual workshop called A Path with Heart that I attended. But I didn't get the words down quick enough and the following week I went on an All Day Silent Meditation Retreat and I wanted to include that because the workshop and the retreat seemed to go together, but this meant rewriting the workshop bit otherwise it would be too long (as if my blogs aren't long enough). Then life itself stepped in and gave what teachers call the 'culminating activity' of both workshop and retreat, the one that shows whether or not the student has learned the lesson. At which point I had to throw out everything already written, but then it was the long weekend of Thanksgiving and that was all about being with family and eating too much. The week after Thanksgiving, and I really did intend to get to the blog, only first I had to come up with a word game for a Field Day in my writing class ...

... detour to my writing class. It began life in a senior center, and the seniors so loved the teacher, they refused to let her go after her allotted number of weeks. That was a few years ago. The class has remained loyal and grown so that we have had to move to a larger venue in a church hall. While our teacher is barely 40, the rest of us are in our 50's, 60's, 70's. We even have an 84 year old, a lively woman with more energy than me most days, who has a paying job ("I'm their token senior") and inspires me no end. Actually all the ladies inspire me no end...

... and then I was back to the blog, all these good things to write about, one after another: Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving and Field Day - and then I came home last week from the Field Day to a terrible message on the answering machine and a new and tragic 'culminating activity': my husband's 28-year-old nephew had died in the night. No-one knew what had happened only that he wouldn't wake up. This the son of my husband's younger brother, who died suddenly of a heart attack two years ago. Too much sorrow! For the family, especially for his mother, his sister. For his grandfather, my husband's Dad, and his aunt, my husband's sister, who looked upon this boy as the son she never had.

All this is happening in Pennsylvania, on the other side of the country, in the big house in Bucks County where John's parents lived with his younger siblings, when we were married in 1978. There were six children; John is the second oldest. John's mother was the heart of the family, kindness itself. We spent every Sunday there in those early years, before we moved to California. In winter we'd go ice skating on the creek, or play Monopoly for hours with the younger brothers, while Mr Dad shouted at the football games on TV. Mrs Mom would provide hot chocolate with marshmallows, and all sorts of fattening treats throughout the day, as well as a blow-out dinner and heaping bowls of ice cream later on. This was the big easy uncomplicated family I had yearned for growing up. People with roots, who stayed put, who had built a house on land owned by a great grandfather. They were like a family out of a really good children's book.

Now the house is falling into disrepair, and only one of John's sisters remains with Mr Dad whom we now call Pop. Mrs Mom is dead, as are shockingly the two younger brothers. The nephew lived with them, grandfather and aunt, in a happy arrangement, three generations together. Now the survivors are reeling. Talking to Pop: "When you're 92 you think you've seen it all. And then this..."

How to put the pieces together? Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving/Field Day, Death... I've been trying to let it be. Trusting that the lesson will rise up. But being impatient to a fault, secretly worrying over the pieces like a jigsaw made of sky: you KNOW there's a pattern, you just can't see it. And then I received this quote by Malcolm Muggeridge in an email: "Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message." I believe that ours is not a random universe and that everyone's particular life is his or her own teacher. But sometimes the lessons are universal. If I didn't think that, I'd be writing all this in a diary. So here goes.

When I was first writing about Sasha's workshop, I was focused on myself and what I got out of it. But now as I have to keep working to fold each new event into my non-random universe, it's as though the camera has zoomed back to show the bigger picture. The lesson of the workshop was not simply about my own "core wound" - but more importantly, that we all have a core wound. It was about looking around that room at those strong women, and knowing - because each one 'fessed up - that every one of them has some deep buried hurt. Briefly, with the short-lived clarity of death, I saw us as the small children we once were, hiding behind our grown-up faces, doing the best we can.

The lesson of the All Day retreat was to slow down and fight against the robotic programming, the instant reaction, the thing inside us that is so quick to say "oh yes! this reminds me of that, this is that, therefore this is what we do next." No! Every situation is unique, just as every person is unique, and is changing moment by moment. Our wanting things to be this way, once and for all, is our attempt to control things that seem to make no sense. A 28 year old boy dying in his sleep makes no sense. My husband says, "28 is when I met you. My life up to that point was a bit of a disaster. It all turned around after 28. It began then." So there is deep sorrow that this boy will not have that same chance to make who knows what of his life. But even that thought is programming, is our clever minds, comparing and analyzing. Who can say about a person's life and judge it in any way?

For me, the immediate lesson to be drawn from that death, from all death, was simply this: to treat everyone in my life as if I could lose them tomorrow. Because one day I will. Either I go or they go. So at all times, make sure I am current with my friends, no smoldering resentments, nothing left unsaid, especially not the words of thanks or appreciation or love. We are all in this together, whistling past the graveyard, doing the best we can. Sometimes it is an act of supreme courage just to get out of bed in the morning. We need to recognize that in each other and be kind to one another. It is the very least we can do. It is about relentlessly living in the present, not carrying on grudges from long ago, but reaching out in dialogue, searching for truth always tempered by kindness. This was so obvious that first day. Less obvious now, when the pain the family is experiencing is so deep, it's hard not to get lost in it.

Since I heard this news, I have had an overwhelming urge to bake. I am not much of a cook, nor yet a baker, but this urge feels so right. I imagine a long long line of women stretching back into the mists of time, who when they hear some terrible news reach for the flour, the butter, the eggs. The instinctive urge to take measured heaps of raw ingredients, and by combining them just so, to create something sweet and nourishing out of one big mess. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up at the larger picture, which makes no sense from our limited view, but here in the smaller one, the one bound by a hot stove and mixing bowls and wooden spoons and cookie sheets, a tiny bit of goodness at least can prevail.

I think of my daughter and her friend, staying up till 4:30 in the morning on the day before Thanksgiving, baking pies, preparing the stuffing, putting in a huge amount of effort on their one day off just so we four could eat like kings. They had never cooked the traditional Thanksgiving feast before, and they wanted to do it right. They did, and the effort showed, and the whole thing was deeply touching in the way that things are, whenever people expend a enormous amount of energy on something that will not last. Acting as if it matters. According to the poet Linda McCarriston, it does matter. In a poem entitled "Thanksgiving," about why we bother with all the work of this big feast, she writes:

"Any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,
with an intent to make order, matters."

There is something else of course. All this jumble of stuff happening, the good, the bad, the ugly, and me trying to capture it on paper and then having to rewrite it because more stuff happens and like a turn of the kaleidoscope, there's a whole new picture, and how to make sense of that? Then I realize this. That my attempt to write this experience is an attempt to nail Life itself down and squeeze it into a box. To proclaim "and then this happened" as if there were only one this. And by fixing it with words, hope that it would remain this forever more. Then I find myself getting all hot under the collar because stuff keeps happening. Life does not go on a coffee break while you jot down what's happened up to now. It barrels along, and just when you think you know the plot and how the story ends, it throws a curve ball. Besides the big events I mentioned, in the last month a cousin of mine died unexpectedly; a friend of a friend committed suicide; I baked three batches of oatmeal raisin cookies and gave most of them away but not before I gained five pounds; I wrote a rude parody of Jingle Bells that I thought was hilarious and nobody else did, and so on. What a funny collection of events! Where's the coherent plot? Life is change, and because we want things to stay put (but only the good things, thank you!), we suffer, just like the Buddha said.

This wanting it to make sense is once again the work of our clever minds, ceaselessly looking for patterns. It is what it does, after all. It is what it is programmed to do. Take a bunch of raw data, flip through the giant rolodex in our heads that contains all of our memories of books, plays, events, people, and so on, looking for matches and extrapolating from that situation to this. Good basic survival skills. But the moment I try to fix what has happened on paper and say it was like this, something happens to throw that earlier event into a different light. It wasn't that what I had written was no longer true, but it was no longer the whole truth. It was limited, like the five blind men describing the elephant according to what part of the elephant they happened to be touching. This is probably one big yawn to everyone out there, but for me, who has been such a believer in black and white thinking all my life, it is a revelation to see in my bones that there is no such thing. Truth is changing moment by moment. Our little selves, yearning for security, try to make it otherwise by creating elaborate stories and getting it down quick before we forget. But it's not that we forget - it's that things change and what was once true is no longer wholly true. Only we don't want to believe it because it makes life utterly precarious and begs the question, "Who are we?"

So what if it's much simpler than we think? What if this ceaseless change is simply the way life is, and our task is to learn to ride it like a surfer, without falling into the troughs and drowning? What if we are much simpler than we think? What if we are not our thoughts at all? Or as Krishnamurti would say, what if we are only thought? There's an unsettling thought.

And in that case, perhaps what matters is immersing ourselves in the little things, moment by moment, as if they matter - because after all, what else is there but this very moment? Can we hold a philosophy in our hands or touch an idea? Can we get our heads around The Meaning of Life and Death, in important capitals? Do we have any answers? Perhaps a more useful question is: Why do we need answers? Why isn't it enough to be alive? I keep coming back to the Field Day in my writing class. It involved word games which we, the students, invented, covering everything we had learned over the past several months. We worked hard at our games ("Define ephrastic poetry"), played them with gusto. We brought prizes and props and good things to eat. Like my girls staying up till 4:30 a.m. to cook us a Thanksgiving feast, it is important to pay attention to the effort that went into that Field Day, because the effort is all there is. Each of these women, carrying terrible stories of their own of heartbreak and loss, understand the importance of putting story aside, of showing up and making an effort. The moment I got home and heard the message about my nephew, I got it too, that what we had shared that morning was not just a fun time. It was the stuff of life.

Here's this about the Dalai Lama by Jeffrey Hopkins : "...when the Dalai Lama went to Europe for the first time, he would arrive in a city and announce, “Everyone wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.” That's it, isn't it? What we have in common, animals, plants, human beings - all living things. So simple. So hard to grasp. I think it is brave to reach out to others, brave to make an effort, brave to enter cheerfully into the spirit of things, in a world where change, if not outright tragedy, can and does strike when you least expect it. I wrote to the writing class almost as soon as I heard the awful news:

"I wish I could hold each of your faces and tell you how dear you are to me. How touched I am for the effort that everyone put in to our Field Day. Ribbons and prizes and special paper and forfeits and so many good things to eat. I'm only sorry it takes a shock like death to wake us up and appreciate every single moment we're alive."

Me telling my Helen how dear she is

Whoever you are, reading this, I wish I could hold each of your faces too and tell you how dear you are, just for being alive.

I wrote this shortly after my nephew's death and meant it with all my heart. But time has passed (not even ten days!) and I am no longer that open and vulnerable. Now I just wish I were that good. And wonder sadly what it all means. And know that in a week I will read this and wonder what I was trying to say and why don't I feel it any longer - proving my very point that everything changes and nothing remains the same. Including this person I think is me.

All Day Silent Meditation Retreat

 I have been to so many of Long Beach Meditation's silent retreats in the past two years, I forget how daunting it was in the beginning, to sit and walk and eat mindfully and in complete silence for hours on end. Now I welcome the silence. I am such a busybody normally, as if someone appointed me Official Helper and my role is to be ever vigilant, leaping to the rescue - never mind whether the person wants to be saved or not. As Victor wrote to me, "But when one jumps in to "save" someone, who are they really trying to save.  So many times, we just cannot stand the pain someone else's suffering causes us.  It is like the story of the butterfly emerging from it chrysalis - if you try to help it, you injure it permanently." I understood then that I am eternally trying to save my mother, who suffered more than anyone I knew, and since I failed to "save" her, I keep trying (unconsciously) with others, and of course that doesn't work so well either. What it does do is reinforce those feelings of 'not good enough.' The past once more reaching out a ghostly hand to stir the pot of the unthinking present.

Zeeba in a box

We did discuss this, HH, my therapist and teacher of a different ilk, and I, the day before the retreat. I told him all about Sasha's workshop and the uncovering of 'not good enough' and all its sad consequences. He gave me homework, something to consider over the next fortnight: "Do I matter if I am not being helpful or cheering people up, and if so, how?" Good question. How do any of us earn our place in the world - and why must it even be earned? It is something that so strikes me with animals: my cat who balances on my shoulder, leans down and gently closes my nostril with her paw to wake me up in the morning, makes her demands known as a matter of course, and trusts that the people in her universe will provide. Such huge trust our pets show us, that of course they have a right to jump all over things and act as if they own the place and we will look after them just because. How did we lose that same sense of belonging? I suppose because our universe, unlike our pets', is unstructured and unsafe - anything can happen at any time. Of course that is also true in our pets' world too - there are earthquakes and house fires and accidents that we can't prevent - but the illusion is that we can keep these creatures entrusted to us safe, and since they don't know any better, they play along so we can all feel safe, at least until it inevitably comes crashing down. We put our pets in a box of our own design, and take care of them perhaps as we secretly wish someone would take care of us.

So the first thing on Saturday at the retreat was to bring the focus out of the head, out of thinking mind and into the present. The effort involved makes it abundantly clear, at least to me, that control is an illusion. It is enormously difficult to keep the attention on what is happening moment by moment. Victor described our minds as computers, whose job it is to learn a procedure as quickly as possible so that it becomes automatic. Obviously a useful survival skill. But now, the effect of that hard-won automaticity is that we rarely look out at the world with new eyes; everything is filtered through the totality of our experiences to date: from the general - gender, nationality, religion - to the specific - our upbringing, childhood, schools attended - to the minutiae of any given moment - hunger, fatigue, even the bloody weather. An overcast day gives rise to a completely different state of mind than a bright sunny one.

So we slow everything down in a retreat in order to look closely at the robotic programming and break the pattern. This is especially apparent in walking meditation. Since it is so difficult to sustain concentration (and I'm talking the sort of concentration that causes you to break out in a sweat), Victor suggested trying to hold the attention for short intervals - maybe five minutes at most - and concentrating on walking, by slowly, slowly raising the foot, lifting it in the air, moving it forward, setting it down. He demonstrated what this looked like. His movements were incredibly slow, the minutest increments, aware every second what was happening in the body. Meditators in other traditions tend to laugh at Vipassana meditators for creeping about like robots, but in fact what is happening in the mind is anything but robotic. That's the whole point. To be aware of the tiniest sensation throughout the body, as it engages in something as ordinary as walking.

Walking meditation

In the second walking meditation (having already zipped far too quickly through the first, intent on the restroom and a cup of coffee, nothing mindful about any of that except to hurry up before the bell signaled time was up), with Victor's challenge fresh in mind, I happened to stand up on my zabuton, the larger cushion upon which my meditation cushion was perched, rather than the floor itself. Some of our zabutons are a heavy foam rectangle but this one was more like a pillow shaped like a square, stuffed with down. Because it is uneven, it proved to be extraordinarily difficult to stand and walk on mindfully. I tried closing my eyes and almost fell over. Lifting one foot in tiny increments was easy - any larger movement done as slowly and I would have toppled for sure.

I felt like a baby learning to walk, weight listing from side to side, trying to find a centered place of balance. That moment when the foot absolutely must leave the ground felt as perilous as jumping out of an airplane not knowing if your parachute will open. I had to fight the urge not to get down on hands and knees and scuttle to safety. So creeping in this manner off my zabuton and over to the door of the hall on two wobbly legs took an intense amount of time. I barely made it to the door when the bell rang and it was time to turn around and creep right back again. Seated once more on the cushion, it was interesting to transfer that same level of concentration to keeping the mind on the belly breathing. At one point I could feel myself flush with the heat of the effort and my scalp prickle with sweat. Of course the moment I was aware of it ("Oh look! I'm concentrating so hard I'm sweating!"), it stopped. And I was reminded of Victor's analogy of the mind when it stills being like a forest pool, and all the little critters feeling safe enough to come out and show their faces. Some of the critters are so skittish, they dive back into the undergrowth the second they have been noticed. Who knew sweat could be skittish.

The day continued to unfold in its untethered way. One of the best things about a retreat is the putting down of the paraphernalia of time. One person is the designated bell ringer and rings a small handbell to signal a return to our seats. For the rest of us, we are able to let go the whole concept. Like not speaking, not watching the clock is tremendously liberating. A whole day in which to do nothing but watch your mind and get to know it a little better. If last week's workshop was all about what Sasha termed the 'descending' (psychological) work, this silent meditation retreat was all about the 'ascending' (spiritual) work. I realized they are two halves of the same coin and must be done together. To do the psychological without being grounded in meditation and the body keeps the work too much in the head, at the level of thought; to do the spiritual work without the corresponding psychological work can become a New-Agey exercise in spiritual bypassing (meaning you sweep the messy emotions under the rug because all is now supposed to be sweetness and light). Pema Chodrun writes:

"... it is helpful to understand that meditation is not just about feeling good. To think this is why we meditate is to set ourselves up for failure. We'll assume we are doing it wrong almost every time we sit down: even the most settled meditator experiences psychological and physical pain. Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple direct relationship with the way we are."

This was the aim of both weekends, to begin to establish that "simple direct relationship with the way we are." Workshop and retreat demanded an honest exploration of self: the one through inquiry into body sensations uncovering deep emotions, the other through sensation in the body developing concentration and mindfulness. Neither had anything to do with thought.

                    ******************************************************

I wrote a poem after an All Day Retreat, in January 2010. I understand what I wrote a whole lot better now, and for sure it is much harder than I imagined then! But here it is - it does capture a little of the spirit of the thing.


Singular Heart  by Alison Cameron

The beautiful quote that inspired the poem:
“The wise enshrine the miraculous bones of the ancients within
themselves.”

We converge in the early morning,
singular minds and sturdy bodies
settling on our separate mats,
clutching our complicated stories,
social smiles pasted on wary faces.
We shield our battered hearts and
hide our collective eye.

As watery sun inches across pellucid sky
we sit and walk
and walk and sit
with measured step and even breath
training monkey mind.

Slowly, imperceptibly,
the marrow of our ancestors
infuses our bones as
we show our soft underbelly
stretched out like the dead.

Trust, says our Teacher,
Turn the Light within.

Sitting tall at close of day
the barking dog is still.
The sweet song
of a singular bird
calls out with her small clear voice.
As if in response,
our singular selves rise up and merge
to fill the room with one singular mind
thrumming like a tuning fork
to the communion of sorrow shared in our silent world.
Our light shines -
no, blinds -
through the cracks in our vulnerable hearts.

I am undone.

A Path with Heart: Sasha Papovich

Sasha Papovich

First came the workshop, entitled The Path With Heart, an inquiry into yoga and meditation and psycho-spiritual work as taught by Sasha Papovich, my beloved teacher who first introduced me to yoga, meditation and Buddhism.

One of the best things about leaving teaching four years ago meant that I could take Sasha's Tuesday and Thursday morning yoga classes. Sasha has an intellectual curiosity and a bright mind as befits the daughter of college professors. Once I interviewed her for a writing assignment, which unfortunately I never completed. But she shared some of her fascinating story: the way one thing led inexorably to the next, calamities becoming blessings, always nudging her towards a life as a teacher and seeker of truth. For instance, a house fire which destroyed everything she owned meant she was free to up stakes on the East Coast and move to California - where she took up yoga; a serious back injury put an end to a very active, strength based yoga practice, leading her to meditation and restorative yin yoga.

Pigeon Pose

By the time I caught up with Sasha on those two weekday mornings, her main focus was yin yoga. Yin yoga means you hold a pose anywhere from three to five minutes in a specific sequence designed to open the meridians, the lines of chi, energy, running through the body, stimulating the deep connective tissue. In the beginning, a hip opener like Pigeon, held for five minutes, filled me with angry tears, not of pain, but of frustration. When we learned that emotion is held in the hips, and at that point I had so much that was blocked, the discomfort became something to grit your teeth through, turned tolerable and eventually disappeared. Sasha would talk us through the long poses: she would read us poems or excerpts from whatever book she was studying, or she would simply talk about how the practice was affecting her own life. Since she is a brilliant off the cuff speaker, her voice alone could hold you to the mat.

But something else she often repeated in those early days resonated with me. Occasionally a beginner would wander into Sasha's class, not knowing about having to hold the poses. Inevitably, they would wriggle and groan and sometimes even leave the room to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, but really to escape. Whenever that happened, Sasha would point out the parallels between the difficult yoga pose and life itself. She would ask us, "What do you do when life gets hard? Do you get yourself something to eat? Go watch a movie? Or ... can you stay with it?"

How do you distract yourself?

Staying with it. These are the words, the key instruction that is so hard to follow but is so vital. It has become an imperative in my life. We must stay present to our life, whatever it is throwing at us, if we are not to sleepwalk through it, doing the usual thing we do, have done for years,  to distract ourselves from paying any attention whatsoever to what is really happening. Pema Chodrun says, "The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?" (from The Pocket Pema Chodrun) Yoga practice turns out to be an excellent training ground for staying with it in the bigger picture.

Sasha's life turned another corner when she decided to pursue graduate studies in Integral Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. In the three months before she moved north, her Tuesday and Thursday morning classes became intense workshops in which she tried to pass on to us, her loyal students, everything she had learned so far, about yin, about Buddhism, about meditation. She urged us to find a place to meditate on a regular basis, that it was too hard to do alone, at least in the beginning. Which is how I found Long Beach Meditation and a very different sort of teacher in Victor Byrd.

It has now been a year and a half since Sasha moved to the Bay Area. Periodically she returns to Long Beach to gather her former students together and teach us whatever she is currently learning. Her passion is still there, stronger than ever, deepened now by her own experiences as a student. She lives and breathes this work and it shows.

And that is how we came to be together once again, on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon at the beginning of November, with Sasha guiding us as competently as ever. The workshop contained only a little yoga, just enough to stretch and open the channels between belly and heart and throat and head. Mostly we sat in guided meditation or worked individually or in pairs, looking deeply within.

To begin this work, Sasha had us think back to a recent time when we were upset. Not an 8 to 10 upset, because then we might get lost in the content and become upset all over again; but something around a 4 to a 6. When we had the upset in mind, the next step was to consider what was the underlying feeling that was so upsetting, and finally, what did we do to avoid feeling that underlying feeling. All this was done silently in our own heads, but then we went around the room and people shared the two feelings: the initial hurt, anger, fear, whatever, which they then covered up by distancing themselves, getting busy, being perfect or super happy, and so on. By the time it got to me, most everything had been said, so I grinned and said airily, "All of the above!" and everyone laughed and Sasha moved on. We had run out of time, another class was waiting to come in, and there was a flurry of activity getting out the door. On my way home, I started to laugh. I realized that what I had done was itself a perfect illustration of what I do when I am on the spot. I was feeling anxious, not having anything clever to add to the discussion, so I came up with a comment to make people laugh - and get me off the hook.

Sunday afternoon, we reconvened and we began where we had left off. I raised my hand and shared my revelation that I had used my coping strategy in the doing of the exercise itself. Sasha said, "Great! Now let's narrow it down. Let's get one word to describe what it was you wanted to avoid." I could feel my face start to crumple, and I raised my arms in a cross, as if warding off an inquisition. "Yes, we do have to go there," she said gently. And to the others, she said, "Can you see how Alison would not want to go there? She has spent a lifetime building up a defense precisely so she does not have to visit this core wound, this vulnerable place. But we must name it in order to move beyond it."

Rumpelstiltskin

Parenthetically, it has dawned on me that this is the meaning of the dreadful fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin. I have never understood it until now. The little man who so frightens the young miller's daughter turned Queen, demanding her new baby as payment for having helped her spin straw into gold, can only be vanquished when he is named. The naming causes him to lose all his power. Similarly, we can only be set free of our deepest fears when we have the courage to face them head on and name them. Exposed to the light of day and staying with the knowledge, means that every time it rears its head, we can (hopefully) recognize it as 'that thing we do.' We're not trying to get rid of it, we're not ashamed of it, we're just - staying with it. And in the staying with it, it loses a little more of its hold over us.
(For a funny illustration of this very serious point, check out the YouTube video, Mr. Ramesh).

So there I am, tearful, and getting quite lost in that small vulnerable self who can barely whisper the shameful feeling that lies at bottom of it all.
"Is it a deficiency or an insufficiency?" prompts Sasha. "Deficiency, meaning you don't have it at all, or insufficiency, meaning you don't have enough?"
"Insufficiency," I mumble. "Not good enough." And there you have it. Another piece of it, at any rate. (I do wonder how many pieces there are!) Three little words that contain a wealth of buried hurt.

There are several points Sasha stressed here. That this is not about blame. This is not pointing a finger at parents, especially mothers (poor mothers!), and accusing them of bad parenting. They did the best they could, being wounded themselves. We're all wounded! The point is, a human baby requires so much love, so much constant attention. Its needs are enormous, they cannot possibly be met and therefore no-one escapes this core wounding: it is the tragedy of the human condition. We are born into this human life beautiful and whole and complete in ourselves.  Only, as babies, we lack the self-knowledge to recognize who or what we are. Instead we take our cues from those around us. They hold up a distorted mirror in which we dimly see the way life is and who we are. We grow armor around those places where we are vulnerable. We have to! If we did not, we would die. A human baby needs to be loved above all.

Compelling research on this very topic has been carried out by British psychologists into children hospitalized for long periods during the Second World War. The prevailing wisdom of the time decreed that parents should drop their sick children off at the hospital entrance and not come visit, sometimes not for months on end, until the child was 'cured.' Too often the child would not get well, would die, supposedly of pneumonia or some such, but the doctors on duty knew better. They believed the child died of a broken heart.

The Hospital for Sick Children 1940

The problem is that the necessary armor we develop around the site of our hurt eventually imprisons us. We continue to hide behind it for the rest of our lives, believing this is who we are. We act and react in life on automatic pilot, based on those earliest impressions that once served us, but ultimately are flawed. What does a child understand of the world? Only that she must remain part of the tribe in order to survive. If I carry my own feeling of "not good enough" to its conclusion, this is how it plays out: if I feel I am not good enough, I will not be loved. If I am not loved, I will be cast out. If I am cast out, I will die. In the case of the small child, the fear is of literal death, I believe (think of those hospitalized children). Later on, the ego hijacks the child, and the death it fears is the death of self. Who am I without my burning coals? Even though they burn me, they are mine, they make me real. In fact, they do the opposite. They bolster an illusory self and make her seem three dimensional when in fact she is as real as a child's imaginary playmate. (This was the wonder and the relief of the Voice Dialogue work, experiencing for myself that the vulnerable selves and the primary selves are ultimately insubstantial; that there is a place of central awareness that is none of the above, that transcends all the various selves.)

The rest of the afternoon was spent in partner work, further exploring our core wounds and how they have affected our lives. For me, a glib "It feels uncomfortable" in the beginning turned to wracking sobs the more I opened to the sensations in the body: the anxiety in the pit of the stomach, the tight throat, so tight it was hard to speak, and the pained heart. I felt quite shattered to realize that in order to avoid feeling 'not good enough,' I have constructed elaborate defenses throughout my life. I have done things I didn't want to do, and not dared do things I did want to do, so much so that who I am and what I want has been so deeply buried I can't guess at the answers. 'Not good enough' translated too often into 'don't deserve better.' Of course! If I am not good enough, what can I expect? Not much. I cringe to remember a pompous so-called boyfriend telling me matter-of-factly in his upper crust English accent, "You do understand that we're not the same class? There can't be any real future for us?" - and me, smiling at him as if it was perfectly normal for someone to tell you you can never measure up, reassuring him brightly, "Of course!"  Ugh. No wonder I cried when my dear Australian cousin told me mildly to "Do what you want to do." What does that even look like, I wonder?

When we regrouped and talked about what it was like to do these exercises, I said how awful it was to realize how long I have believed this basic lie, that I am not good enough, and how shocking to note the significant impact it has had on my life. Something I took on board as a baby!!

Sasha nodded and looked sad. "I wish it could be otherwise," she said. "I wish I could turn the clock back for all of us. But this is the way it is. It seems to me we have only two choices in life. We can either do the work and try to wake up - or not. And knowing what you know, how can you not go on? What else can we do but go on?"

1 year old "Not good enough? " Alison

(Writing this weeks later, I realize it is not even that I have avoided the feeling - worse, it is that I was not remotely aware of it, yet it has run my life.)

Further exercises involved inquiring into what it might be like to accept this part of ourselves we have shunned for so long. Predictably, we moved through fear, distaste, disgust and tears, towards acceptance, spaciousness and calm. I say "towards" - I had only the briefest glimmer of what it might be like to enfold "not good enough" into myself. My partner, although she was not supposed to speak, whispered to me fiercely, "It is a part of you! It is what makes you lovely." And Sasha said later, "Listen to her. She tells the truth.

Yet again, the limitations of working a life within a narrow band of childish feeling are made clear. A child perceives in black and white - at least this child did! Things were either wholly good or wholly bad, no gray areas for me! But this is not only unrealistic with regards to other people, it is also dangerous. Who can live up to those impossible standards, including me? I would so love to see myself as wholly good and life as wholly good and other people as wholly good. The hardest thing for me is to stay with what is actually happening in the moment, especially if it is sad or painful. (Although for whom is this easy?)

So I will try to fold in this feeling of 'not good enough', because there is also this which is true: when we returned to the circle, I shared that for me the flip side of my earlier comment about feeling sad for all the lost time was the realization that I am no longer that small vulnerable child. I am 57 years old! I am old enough, strong enough, to bear what the child could not bear. Sasha added too that I am no longer alone, dealing with a critical mother. Instead I have tremendous support in my own beautiful, fantastic, amazing daughter; my strong, centered husband and so many good people, teachers all, who are also on a similar journey and who offer encouragement and love. Why do I - why do any of us - need to protect ourselves any longer? What was vulnerable in the child is no longer so in the adult - or at least not if the adult brings attention to it, as well as a whole lot of compassion to the child who once needed to erect this defense.

We finished the day with a metta (Pema's maitri) meditation, sending lovingkindness to ourselves and to the world. Sasha gave us a choice of phrases for us to repeat in our heads:
May I be peaceful. May all beings be peaceful.
May I be free from suffering. May all beings be free from suffering.
May I be healthy in body, mind and heart. May all beings be healthy in body, mind and heart.
May I be happy. May all beings be happy.

My favorite?

May I be loved, just as I am. May all beings be loved, just as they are.

We sat quietly in the gathering dusk, repeating our little prayer silently, sending metta first to our own little selves, then to everyone in the room, and beyond, to everyone in the world. Thank you for reading all the way to here. May you be loved, just as you are.

Circle of Women