1/1/11: Looking Back in Anger

The first day of 2011, those ones so stiff and attentive. 1/1/11. I wondered if they meant anything? I can hear cross-country friend Lois snorting derisively, "Why should they mean anything?" "No reason," I say. "But, on the other hand, why shouldn't they? If no-one knows for sure and we have a choice in these things. Besides, they look like they should mean something."

So what would have been idle speculation in pre-internet days turned into a Google search. I chanced upon a website that informed me that meaningful number sequences are messages from our angels. I wouldn't put it like that, but okay, so what is the message of the "ones"? And I found the answer intriguing:

111 - Monitor your thoughts carefully, and be sure to only think about what you want, not what you don't want. This sequence is a sign that there is a gate of opportunity opening up, and your thoughts are manifesting into form at record speeds. The 111 is like the bright light of a flash bulb. It means the universe has just taken a snapshot of your thoughts and is manifesting them into form. Are you pleased with what thoughts the universe has captured? If not, correct your thoughts (ask your angels to help you with this if you have difficulty controlling or monitoring your thoughts).

( http://spiritlibrary.com/doreen-virtue/number-sequences-from-the-angels)

Intriguing, because what a portentous message for this particular New Year's Day. The universe is taking a snapshot of my thoughts and manifesting them into form? I'd better make darn sure then that my thoughts on this day are worth capturing and manifesting. Which explains why after a silence of some weeks, this blog is up and running again. "Start as you mean to go on." 

After Lois' blog, I took (am taking) a detour into the investigation of anger. I was surprised that what stood out in her blog, for me, was our incident on the drive to JFK, where I gave Lois the wrong directions, over-riding the GPS Lady, and Lois burst out in anger at me. We talked about it on the phone. I was sorry that all the hours and hours together in complete harmony had apparently gone out the window in a single angry eruption that lasted less than a minute. Lois pointed out, "But you brought it up!" 

And it was true - I was the one who had mentioned it in the original blog about our trip. "Yes, but...! I wasn't angry! I promise!" 

Lois said, very patiently, very soothingly, in that tone of voice used for pointing things out to a particularly slow child, "But Ali, think about it. Most people, when someone yells at them, yell right back. It's a normal reaction. Are you sure you weren't angry with me?"

I searched back to the moment. "No! Really not. Maybe I just threw it in there to make a better story?" 

"Hm," said Lois. She sounded unconvinced. 

I was so unsure about how I felt, I ran it by Victor, the day after Lois's blog was posted. I said, "Isn't it funny? She thinks I must have been angry when she yelled at me."

"I thought you were," said Victor, mildly. "When I read about it in your blog, I thought you were angry with Lois and that's why you wrote it."

"No!" I was horrified. "Why would I do that?" 

Victor, who in addition to being a meditation teacher is also a psychotherapist, just looked at me. "I don't think you are fully aware yet of the power of the unconscious. How many times did you get angry at boarding school?"

I shrugged. "Never?"

"There you go, " he said. "So that little girl who learned to stuff all her feelings down, how does she know what she feels? And when you sit on the cushion and you cry, where do those tears come from? Hm?"

I stared at him, speechless for once.

I went home and "happened" to open an email from Tricycle, the Buddhist publication, that chanced to offer practical advice for getting to the bottom of these ancient wounds - for healing.

"In his Tricycle Retreat, Gerry Shishin Wick, Roshi, has been introducing us to his teachings on "The Great Heart Way," which is a deep exploration of the contents of our consciousness and the habitual patterns that dominate our thinking.  In his week 1 talk, he tells us a story from his own life that illustrates both the origins of these teachings as well their profound reach into mental habits and conditioning.
In the practice of the Great Heart Way, we use our non-judgmental awareness to get in touch with our feelings and what's going on in our bodies without adding our narratives or dramas to it. We just see what comes up. 
Let me give you an example using myself. By most standards I've had a successful life. I've always been an overachiever. When I went through high school I got straight A's and was a valedictorian. I was athletic, a champion swimmer. I went to college and graduated with honors and then got a PhD in physics, studied with Nobel Laureates and other marvelous teachers, and so on. But all through this I had this gnawing underlying feeling that I wasn't good enough. No matter what, I wasn't quite adequate. Something wasn't complete. Even after I studied for 23 years with Maezumi Roshi and completed all my training with him I still had this feeling.
Master Hakuin, who was a great 18th century Japanese master said, "the most difficult part of our practice is dealing with our habit-ridden consciousness."  At first, I had no idea where this habit of not feeling good enough came from. But when I started to practice in the way that became the basis of "The Great Heart Way," I would just stay with those feelings.  It's only a thought that I'm not adequate. What is the bodily feeling of this inadequacy? What's actually going on inside me? It was a tightness, a sinking in the pit of my stomach.  When I would meditate I would just stay present with that feeling rather than try to go to a place of calm and emptiness.  I would just feel it, totally.  What happens when we do this is that images of our earlier feelings begin to arise. 
For me, I had a very clear memory of being in religious school when I was a young boy, probably six or seven.  I was raised in a Jewish family and in my religious school they would tell these Bible stories and I would always find them very frightening.  For example, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets and got angry at everyone for worshipping the golden calf, I found that frightening. With Noah and the Ark, I worried about all the people that were drowned. As I sat in meditation with this feeling, all those stories came up along with all my feelings around them. Then one became very vivid, it was the story of Abraham and Isaac.
In this story, Abraham was commanded by god to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in order to show his devotion. He took Isaac into the mountains under some pretext and put him on a stone and was going to sacrifice him until god intervened and gave him a ram to sacrifice instead. I vividly remember hearing that story and telling myself that Isaac was a good boy and look what they're doing to him! What will happen to somebody like me? I remember telling myself, you better be perfect or you will be killed. That thought, that I had then, stayed in my unconscious mind, in my shadow memory, for my whole life. 
Through meditation I was able to access this and I was able to heal it.  This is part of The Great Heart Way, how to heal these things.
-Gerry Shishin Wick, Roshi"
(http://www.tricycle.com/blog/non-judgmental-awareness)

Next, I took my bewildered child to the cushion. I went back to that day in the car. It was like watching a film in slow motion. Here is Lois, tense, we've just come off the Brooklyn Bridge. A gap in traffic, it doesn't look too tricky. I bend my head down to eject a CD from the player. The GPS lady says turn left. I say, without lifting my head, "No! That's not right. Keep going." I don't know why I said this. I wasn't looking! What was I thinking? I can't get back to that bit. What happened next was so fast - the thing that stops me now in the replay is Lois's utter faith in me. She didn't say, "Are you sure?" or question me in any way. She did what I said. Over the GPS Lady who we knew to be God, with maps for brains. So when almost instantly my mistake was made clear, and she exploded - what did I do? Was I angry? I sat and probed, which feels a little like sticking a finger in a wound and poking about. "Does this hurt? How about this?" And truly, my reaction was frozen. Meaning I was frozen. "The body doesn't lie", Wendy told us in a dharma talk recently. If you tune in to the sensations in the body, you will find the truth. I may have been struck dumb, unmoving, but my stomach was heaving in anxiety. And why was this oh so familiar? I sat there with the feelings: the frozen externals, the roiling internals, feeling profoundly unsafe as if I were about to be cast out. Where had I felt this before? 

And we're back at boarding school. My best friend Sue, who was my only friend, she having stayed down a year, me coming to the school a year late: we were the only two who weren't already in a group or a pair. Sue was desperately unhappy at Farnborough. Far worse than me. She kept her packed suitcase under her bed, prepared to leave at any moment. We shared a huge imagination and a love of stories, telling them and writing them. We were both so lonely. On good days we walked around the school grounds, arms looped around each other's necks, telling a single story as if we were a single story-teller. On bad days, Sue would wake up in that cold white and blue dormitory and not speak to me. I had never encountered anyone who did that before. And in that place where no adult could intervene or explain, because there was some sort of unwritten rule that we were to be stoic and not say anything to the nuns, I was lost. I didn't even tell my own sister. I think I was ashamed I was being shunned. Only, I had done nothing wrong. And no-one could tell me this had to do with Sue's demons, not mine. No-one could help either of us. I trailed her, a lost sheep, hoping that she would turn around and be my friend again. I remember feeling a fool. Hurt too. So that frozen feeling? I see me shadowing Sue, it's sometime in the morning, either before or between classes, and we're in the locker room, a huge high-ceilinged room of tiled floors, tall grey lockers, icy cold. And Sue - what happened there? Did she turn to me finally and speak? A leaping of the heart, she's talking to me again! Only to have hopes dashed at the words, "Leave me alone!" Unlike teenagers today who seem to be able to articulate anything, neither of us could say a word. "Why? What have I done?" remained unspoken, the answer a mystery.

Frozen. Literally. So bloody cold. And inside too. If I don't move, if I stay very still... and oh my goodness, where does this memory take me? I am five years old, and I'm hiding under the dining room table, the tablecloth hanging long on all sides around me. I am listening to my mother on the telephone, arguing for me to go to skip kindergarten and move up to first grade. I like kindergarten. I love our fat bottles of milk and three cookies, and heads down for storytime. I love coloring and making things and the gentleness of it all. Now I am to go to real school, because I can read. This seems like a punishment. And once again, I will start later than anyone else, when friendships have been made, and I will have to be especially winning because I'm already an outsider and friendless and a year younger. 

In between these two memories is another I can't feel at all. I know I was there, but my feelings are inaccessible. The kindergarten/first grade story took place in L.A.. My dad, the diplomat, was posted to Los Angeles when I was five. We lived there until I was nine. Then he was posted to Haiti as charge d'affaires. This during the time of Papa Doc and his scary henchmen, the Tons Tons Macoutes. Claude had already asked to be sent to boarding school so it was just Mum, Dad and I. My parents had the idea of my learning French at the local Catholic convent school. I wore a pink and white checked uniform. I was driven to school by the chauffeur, past the local cemetery where executions were held. He would tell me to close my eyes. Did I? I don't remember. But I heard the machine guns. I was put in a class of little girls far younger than I to learn the language. I was the only white girl in the school. Saving grace was Sister Leonard, an English nun who taught piano.  Every day I took my cheese sandwich and ate my lunch in her bungalow at the end of the school property. She had two grand pianos in that room and she taught me Chopin and Mozart. When I think of this time, I feel a softening in my heart for Sister Leonard. As to the rest, not a thing. Except for this: there was a moment in my little classroom when the teacher called on me and I said the wrong thing. She had a ruler in her hand, she used it to smack the palms of the little girls when they got the wrong answer. She advanced upon me, waving her ruler. I held out my palm. The whole class was watching, agog. Would she hit me? She drew the ruler back and whooshed it down, only to stop short a couple of inches from my hand. She roared with laughter. So did the others. What did I do? No idea. Perhaps I laughed too. Or burst into tears of relief. Was I hurt? Angry? Or, once again, frozen - waiting for the blow, uncomprehending.

Sitting on the cushion, these stories - and others - emerge. The trail of anger leads deep into the forest, to the gingerbread house of my mother (always the mother!): so sweet, loving and beloved, whose sweetness nevertheless contained roaring ovens ready to burst into flame and scorch me at unpredictable moments. In following the trail, I see that anger was something done to me. My own seems so completely stuffed, I have no recollection of it at all. Certainly not as a child. I've only been able to get angry - read, explode - with my sister and my daughter. Family. They can't leave me, therefore they're safe. Even my husband is off-limits: despite 32 years of marriage, he could potentially leave. Better not risk it. Better keep quiet. 

So besides the huge pools of sorrow lying within the little girl who was sent away, it appears there is also a lot of swallowed anger. How extraordinary to discover this now! Here it is in my burning stomach and my locked throat. In feeling again and writing down these particular stories, patterns emerge. My little girl understood somehow that getting ahead of the pack - like learning to read when you're only in kindergarten - puts you in a new and scary place. Then again, not knowing something, like French, also puts you in a new and scary place. And finally when you end up in the biggest and scariest place of all, boarding school, you daren't make waves or stick up for yourself. The grown-ups were alarming. When I complained to my Dad about Mrs. Anscombe the math teacher who made me cry because of my lack of math skills, he wrote to Mother Alexander, the headmistress, to complain in his turn. Alex then showed the letter to Mrs. Anscombe who cornered me in the hall between classes and hissed in my face, "Don't you ever write lies about me to your father again!" So I no longer told my parents anything important, nor any other adult, had there been one to tell. Who to trust? So then when my only friend suddenly wouldn't speak to me... 

The thing that links these stories of anger is the utter bewilderment on my part. What had I done? I was clueless. And felt victimized. You can get beaten, kicked, sent home, yelled at, humiliated and shunned, just for - what? Being? No wonder then, that 'being yourself', whoever that is, seemed a perilous business. Safer to scout the land and see what was needed and try to be that. Cheerful and happy at all costs seemed to please.

At our Long Beach Meditation New Year's Eve event, we shared poetry in between sitting and walking meditations. I chose two poems - I think it more accurate to say that my little girl chose two poems. About two ways to discipline a child. "One good, one bad," I said, "and I'll start with the bad." I'll share them with you now:

The Talk

by Sharon Olds

In the dark square wooden room at noon

the mother had a talk with her daughter.

The rudeness could not go on, the meanness

to her little brother, the selfishness.

The 8-year-old sat on the bed

in the corner of the room, her irises dark as

the last drops of something, her firm

face melting, reddening,

silver flashes in her eyes like distant 

bodies of water glimpsed through woods.

She took it and took it and broke crying out

I hate being a person! diving

into the mother

as if

into

a deep pond - and she cannot swim,

the child cannot swim.

accidents

by Marcia Popp

i broke a vase at my great-grandfather's house when i was five here 

come sit on my lap
he said don't feel bad about that vase i didn't like it anyway you helped 
me get rid of it i
knew better but let him comfort me while i felt secretly bad inside did 
you know that my
own mother said i was her worst boy no i said that can't be true oh yes 
he said and she was
right i made accidents happen all the time i didn't really mean to do 
bad things they just
came upon me when i wasn't paying attention when i was five my 
brother and i chased the
goose in the barnyard until it fell over dead we propped her up in the 
fence so she would
appear to be interested in the grass on the other side what happened 
my father noticed 
that the goose did not move all day we got spanked should i get 
spanked too for the vase
not in my house he said.

So what's the point of all this? Not to fashion a new persona of Alison as victim, 'poor me'. Rather, to unpack the bag. What bag? Says Robert Bly, the poet:

"Your parents make it clear there are certain parts of us they don't like, 'you're too noisy' ... One image is to say we take that part and put it into a bag. Our independence and feeling goes into the bag, the bag is getting heavy and two miles long."

“You could say we spend our life until we're twenty deciding what to put into the bag and we spend the rest of our life trying to get it out again." 


Following these trails deep into the woods is a fascinating exercise in 'connect the dots.' From this to this to this, oh my. Only memory isn't necessarily accurate. Certain things I don't remember - but I can invent. I have after all been telling myself stories all my life. So why bother with all this now? Because what is happening to me today is a direct result of those early experiences. However they happened, or I imagine they happened, affects how I react in my life today. 


The mind has a tremendous aversion to learning anything new, says my husband the teacher who has studied how we learn. What it does do extremely well is take that new information and attach it to old. I imagine it flipping through the data base of memory and pulling up similar situations, and with a flourish saying, "Here you go! This feels about right. Of course, it didn't work out so well then, but you never know, maybe it will be different this time. Anyway, it's all I've got." And when things happen at speed, and there is no time to be aware, let alone reflect, ancient patterns play out for better or worse. Usually worse. So that I am somehow at 56 reduced to a frozen blob when Lois swears at me, as if I were once again that child who cannot swim. But I can swim. That's the point of doing this. I can swim. I am 56, not 11, and this is my house, and in my house I am safe, I can stick up for myself, I have a voice, I can speak. I can let go of old patterns of behavior and meet the new situation and see it as it is. Old patterns no longer serve me, if they ever did. 


We trail our shadow bags behind us and the contents are ready to sabotage us at every turn. Short of total amnesia, the next best thing - probably the better thing - is awareness. Is connecting the dots and then. Then!! This is the thing, the point of it all. Not to remember and have a wallow, but to understand and let go. There is choice. Choice comes from awareness that there even is a pattern. And then deciding to play the hand differently. 


What would happen if we could stop the stories running repetitively through the loop of our minds? If we could sit with the feelings, stay with them and see where they come from? Examine whether they still serve us? Or have we simply accepted their lie that "This is how I am"? This is one story at least, on this first day of a new year, new decade, I would like to stop repeating. "I"! 


Imagine being like the Zen masters: "Just this!" It's all here, right now, for everything in creation, happy in their 'is-ness' - everything except us. Who are cursed with this ability to compare, contrast, judge, and find wanting. If we could wake up each day and see it as truly new. See ourselves as new. See the day as an unfolding of moments never before experienced. Because in fact they haven't.

One last note: this is about being frozen. Well, and what was my blog if not frozen these past weeks, while contemplating this subject. The external world mirrors the internal.  The snapshot I hope the universe is taking is this: I want to be open and aware, to unravel this ancient story of Alison, in order to set it aside and meet each moment simply, as it is, without baggage.  

                                                       The time? 11:11 p.m. on 1.1.11.