When peace and tranquility, bliss even, begins to fill most every moment, healing feels complete. These past few weeks, I’ve been feeling a lasting connection with something ineffable and loving, a luminosity that has graced my life many times during the past three years. Things that had bothered me were no longer bothering me.
I thought my pain was behind me, but last night, it came back. Two things triggered its return. Two little things that should have evoked no reaction at all. I accidentally stumbled upon photos of former friends at a social event cuddling together in a “puppy pile.” I felt acutely left out from something I never became a part of. Moments later, I received an email from my son’s school principal wondering why they have no emergency contact listed and relating my son’s account of his father’s departure from the country, which I found heartbreaking (see Warmth in the Cold). I had asked one of my former friends (in the puppy pile) to be an emergency contact, which is what prompted her to be clear that she was no longer a friend.
All the pain I’d felt before slammed into me as if it had never left. I just leaned back, reeling, thinking, “What the hell?” I cursed at it, fought it, but it took hold of me like one of those alien entities in a horror movie. “How can I be in this stupid prison YET AGAIN?!?!?”
Clearly, I was dealing with conditioning, and this was my chance to move through it, to dip down into it once more and allow heaven to shift it the way tectonic forces move boulders from their precarious positions to settle into valleys.
But there was a deeper purpose to this return, an understanding I needed to come to.
Eventually, I just put my head on my meditation cushion and prayed for help. “In with a whirl, out with a swirl,” I reminded myself. Within moments, the pain was replaced with a very thick, pervasive peace and contentment.
“It is the eyes that make the world: that create it, literally. The world independent of being seen and interpreted can barely be said to exist, in any way that is meaningful to human life.”
~ Jan Frazier in When Fear Falls Away
Again, feelings of resentment crept in, but I know full well that they are undeserved. I don’t understand why I feel such a deep connection with my former friends when, looking back, I spent relatively little time with them. It is strange to feel such a deep connection on the inside and see them so far away on the outside. I think this is part of what hurts so much, the contradiction between what I sense with my heart and what I see on the outside.
These feelings are not really about them, I told myself. Yet, they stuck to my insides like leeches.
“Help me to forgive,” I prayed. “Make forgiveness happen in me. Fill my whole body with it.”
At 4 a.m., I awoke from a nightmare… and the answer to my prayer.
In my dream, I was standing in a room with my dear friend, the budding neuroscientist I fell in love with, a Buddhist who committed to a lifelong friendship with me. He is, by far, the most forgiving and tender-hearted person I know. Despite anything we’ve been through, I love him more than words can say. He knows this.
In my dream, however, he is standing across from me, and he is furious.
“YOU WOULD JUST LEAVE ME LYING IN A DITCH!” he screams, suggesting that I would stand by and let him suffer, unwilling to help. I am so hurt I cannot speak. I have no shirt on. My breasts are bare, as if I am ready to nurse. To nourish. To nurture. (Which reminds me of my coincidental encounters with stories about breast cancer earlier this week; see When Things Get Ripped Apart.)
He does not notice. He is disappearing. He storms away, full of rage and disgust, disenchanted with me, believing that I have no love for him at all. Believing that I’ve abandoned him.
I cannot fully describe the pain it evoked. I lay in bed awake for some time, curled up in a knot, hurting. My whole body was full of intense anguish, like burning acid. I felt burning worry for him. Anxiety, terrible grief and sadness, frustration, a shaky feeling of having failed without doing anything wrong, being made responsible for something I had no way of helping.
As he was disappearing, convinced that I’d abandoned him, I was in effect losing him. He was making his own worst fear come true.
Is this what it feels like on the other end? My god.
My karma. I was comforted by the post I wrote to my future self, Karma is Love. I knew it would come in handy, ha!
In addition, I felt deeply insulted in a way I can’t fully articulate. He pointed the finger at my heart as if there was something wrong with it. I felt a mixture of helplessness, frustration, and indignation. He was gravely threatening something very dear to me, my own capacity to love. Hmm, breast cancer.
The weird thing is that I have been feeling this sense of helplessness and frustration regarding the capacity to send love to others for about six weeks, but it makes more sense that such feelings would be coming at me, not out from me. Which makes me wonder.
All this energy and effort I’ve put towards being more loving, and all the while I’ve paid no attention to receiving love or trusting in its presence. They must be two sides of the same coin. I know how to love… I don’t know how to know that I am loved. I can’t make myself believe it. I can’t. Seriously, I’m at a loss. Here, I have categories on “Cultivating Compassion” and “Acts of Love,” but I have no category on receiving love or trusting in it.
This is my mistake. I went to bed praying to forgive, and I woke up praying for forgiveness.
The problem is that I know, in a way that is extremely visceral and real, that the universe, this whatever-it-is that my consciousness is in, or of, is pure love. There are no words for it, and there is no denying it. I know that I am loved… by the cosmos.
But by my fellow human beings? Are they not also of the same cosmic-consciousness stuff? When I deny their love for me, I deny them of their own divinity. I fail in seeing their Buddha nature. Is there any greater responsibility than that we see one another’s divine nature?
Who cares about stupid emergency contact information! Argh, I’m so sick of this protracted grief. I pray for it to be over already. My children will be just fine. If I get into an accident, there are surely officials in the county who can care for them until their father finds a flight back from Europe. The part of that thought that makes my heart ache so badly is the disbelief that some county official would have any love for my children. Ironic. I should know by now… there are angels everywhere. Buddhas, bodhisattvas, divine beings all of us.
