In meditation, seeking refuge, I seem to find it most when I start to wonder, from what am I actually seeking refuge? I don’t even know!
This morning, I told my seven year old that he would need to pay “the trouble jar” five cents for saying something inappropriate. A few minutes later, he said, “Mom, I would like to buy an inappropriate word.” Had I the money, I would have purchased a handfull this weekend. My two little boys were far beyond the coping ability of the most patient saint, but that is not me talking.
A patient saint. I have been called that on many occassions by friends and family, and on the one hand, it’s comforting when someone recognizes the inner strength necessary to face a situation, but on the other hand, their very comment creates a perspective on the situation–or for that matter, the situation itself–that I did not have in the first place. In the moment they congratulate me on staying calm and collected in the face of my self-asserting tasmanian devils, the situation shifts like an optical illusion. I begin to see a power struggle. Mother against child. Order against chaos. Child wants to explore and destroy. Mother wants to contain and preserve. The patience is the self-discipline of the mother sustained when her efforts are failing.
I think, “Wow, I really am patient. How am I doing that?”
In the days that follow, days in which I have adopted the order against chaos view, my children begin to aggravate me. They are not doing what I want, or they aren’t doing what I think they should be doing. Will I remain patient? Will I counter their disrespect and manic frivolity with the forceful rage of a leader? Aggravation becomes frustration, anger, stress. I watch the emotions being born.
I experimented. I let anger unfold and blossom as freely and as beautifully as it wanted to. I let myself lose patience and move to enforce my schemes, wondering what would happen. I played. I played with keeping order! How ironic.
On Saturday afternoon, I was trying to get ready for a date while my boys ran through the house. After several hours of veritable drunken revelry, my boys found a basket of my things, spilled them on the floor from one end of the living room to the other, and broke each and every item. I walked into the kitchen to find them cutting into one item with a knife to see what was inside.
I thought, “This means that I am not maintaining control. They are doing something they should not do. They are disrespecting this house and everything in it, and nothing is countering that,” and I opened to embodying an opposing force. I became furious! I yelled as loudly as I could and told them to put everything back. My fury was almost comical, like someone attempting to curse for the first time. The more I thought of the situation as a power struggle, the more my fury grew roots in me and took on a life of its own, siphening will from my body into its rapidly expanding form and engorging on my energy.
My boys sat at the kitchen table before picking everything up. I stormed up to them, yelled again, and grabbed the first thing I saw on the table, a tupperware container holding all of my oldest son’s money. I chucked it into the kitchen. The container cracked when it hit the floor, and hundreds of coins flew across the tile.
Flustered and stumped, I directed my boys to sit on the couch until further notice. I went into another room to reflect. “That did not go well,” I thought, and guilt welled up inside. Are those the actions of someone who is awake? I sincerely wondered. In such a situation, one might ask, “What would Jesus do?” The image of the coins flying from the table to the floor flashed in my mind. He might have tossed the coins. I laughed. Adyashanti speaks of getting angry. Awakening uses all of the available emotions, he says. Anger in itself is neither awakened nor deluded.
If awakening is not a particular emotional state or the eradication of certain emotions, what then does it mean to be awake?
The next day, my children continued to aggravate me. I could not win with them! The more they lost control, the angrier I became, and the angrier I became, the more they went wild! I wanted to go back to the way things were before I paid heed to other views, back to that state in which harmony seemed to prevail, but it was hard. At that point, all I wanted was to be free of the stress.
I sat in meditation and concentrated on finding refuge. In some practices, one takes refuge in the Buddha or whatever other thought form or spiritual entity embodies for the meditator the peaceful space of the conditionless. An image of refuge came to mind, and I imagined moving towards it. Before I could take two steps, however, it hit me.
From what am I taking refuge?
In that moment, I felt… or remembered… remembered with my body… those moments in which the remarks of others made my relationship with my children look like a power struggle. I could see the shift happening in slow motion, everything transforming so completely in perception that even the reference point is consumed, like one of those scenes in Star Trek when a time paradox causes the whole scene to change, but no one remembers the old one.
There was no power struggle, no opposition of forces, not even two separate entities attempting to co-exist. No opposition was necessary, because I valued the exploration and curiosity that my children brought into my world. Whatever they brought, I valued it. They are little teachers in disguise. Their destructive nature reminds me of the impermanence of all things. This does not mean I necessarily let them run loose. I don’t withhold my guidance, when I have it, when it comes, because I bring balancing forces into their lives, but the goal is not to make every situation conform to my will. The goal is to dance, and dancing is about responsivity, not reactivity. I react to make the situation be what I want. I respond to participate, to play in the flowing stream of existence. Anger can be a reaction, and anger can be a response.
Where in such a dance is patience even an issue?
People can say things about your life, and without even realizing it, they are handing you a dream. Unconsciously, you might take that dream and make it your own. The dream, you take to be reality. The dream seems so true that you forget what reality looked like before you took the dream. You forget that it ever looked any differently at all!
If you could discard them all, every dream that has been handed to you since the beginning of time, and revert back to the way you originally saw reality, you would be utterly free.
