I keep noticing, these days, how easy it is to use our spiritual practices in a defensive way. To defend and protect ourselves from unresolved and difficult feelings. In a moment, I can escape, move away from, or ignore what is arising in the field of my experience, right now.
I wish I wasn’t so aware of all this. I wish that I had found a spiritual practice that allowed me to feel everything I was feeling, to open to the depths of my humanity. I wish that my practice had allowed me to inhabit my body, with love and clarity. But it didn’t work that way, not for me, and not for thousands of other people who wanted to awaken and evolve.
It didn’t work that way because I was using meditation, inquiry, contemplation, devotion, study, yoga—you name it—to feel better. My motivation wasn’t clear or strong enough. I didn’t understand what it means to be whole.
Now that I am discovering what intimacy really is, what transparency really is, I can see how I organized my whole spiritual life around not feeling certain emotions. And of course, it’s not only spiritual practitioners who do this. Our whole culture, it often seems to me, is engaged in a mad dash away from intense and disturbing feelings.
My commitment to deepening my relationships, not only with my partner, but with my friends, colleagues, and the people I work with, has pushed me up against some vivid and disturbing realizations.
When I was on the meditation cushion, on the yoga mat, when I was in satsang, when I was praying and chanting, I didn’t see these things. It has only been the up-close and personal reality of intimacy with other human beings that has showed me what I am seeing right now.
And what I am seeing is not what I hoped for at all. It’s the realization that if I allow myself to open, in a real way, in an embodied way, to the experience of intimacy with another, I may be subject to disturbing feelings, intense sensations, and terribly raw and edgy experiences. This is what happens in the interpersonal field, in a moment. ‘The places that scare you,’ as Pema Chodron calls them, are everywhere.
And no matter how hard I practice, there is no guarantee that they will go away. So what am I going to do, even as I know, in the core of my being, that these feelings do not define who I am—they are not my essential nature?
Clearly, there is an opportunity here for a much deeper embrace. If there is really nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, then basic sanity asks me to enter into my heart, my body, my energy, and open directly, again and again, to what is here. Whether I like it or not.
Chogyam Trungpa, Pema Chodron’s teacher, used to talk about this a lot. He called it being the tender-hearted warrior. Warriorship is so tender, without skin, without tissue, naked and raw. It is soft and gentle. You have renounced putting on a new suit of armor. You have renounced growing a thick, hard skin. You are willing to expose naked flesh, bone, and marrow to the world.
What this requires of me, of anyone who reaches this point, is a lot. It requires courage, curiosity and persistence. It requires awareness, clarity and presence. But most of all, it seems to me, it requires kindness. This way of being present, to myself, to life, to everything, is asking for a depth of kindness that changes my whole relationship with life. It calls forth a willingness to show up, regardless of how I am feeling. It’s a recognition of something so precious, so valuable, in simply being here, that it doesn’t depend on anything I am feeling or not feeling.
I had no idea that a lifetime of practice would deliver me to this place of raw and tender vulnerability. Life really is very unpredictable. What it wants for me is quite different than what I wanted for myself. I’m grateful for that. Grateful to be in touch with the deep and wild intelligence of life, so much greater than my own.
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
~ Stanley Kunitz ~
with love,
Shayla
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