Making peace with our own damage

“Although garbage stinks, although garbage is not pleasant to hold in your hand, if you know how to take care of the garbage, you will transform it back into flowers” —Thich Nhat Hanh

During the years I shared with a photojournalist whom I loved, sometimes I had to remind myself: “She runs toward the disaster, not away from it.” Whether it was an industrial fire, a tornado, or a hundred-car pileup on the interstate, when I got her out-of-breath call, I knew that, as I sat reading quietly in my professor’s office, I should simply thank her for letting me know and wish her good luck. Things grew more intense in the years in and around 9/11, including when we were living together in Madrid during the 2004 bombings. As almost everyone else hunkered indoors, avoiding the metro lines and city spaces, this person I loved gathered her cameras and looped her press i.d. lanyard around her neck. She headed towards the smoke and mayhem, towards the sirens and the screams. Then, too, I repeated my mantra: “She runs toward the disaster and not away from it.” It’s not that this was ever especially soothing to me, but it did keep me from clinging to her on those late nights when she pulled herself from our warm bed and headed out to bear witness to god-knows-what. All I could ever think to do was to remind myself, again and again, that it was her choice, her life and livelihood, to seek out the very experiences that most of the rest of us were trying to avoid.

Long after she and I went our separate ways, and even now, years later, I repeat a version of that mantra to myself, except that now I have in mind, not my brave, brilliant photojournalist, but myself: “I move toward disaster, not away from it,” I say. To be clear, I haven’t taken on dangerous work. If fact, I’ve never been anything but a professor—specifically, a philosopher—and a campus activist. The risks I take, then, are relatively mild, mostly intellectual, emotional, and social. But as part of my journey toward spiritual expansion and personal growth, at some point I was struck by a teacher’s advice that I’d have to stop running away from what frightened me if I ever wanted to get unstuck. Her hauntingly simple recommendation was to stop, to sit in the full, open presence of whatever appeared to my conscious awareness. What she had in mind was a radical, full stop, one in which, not only would there be no escape into physical busyness, but nor would I retreat into intellectualized, psychologized, or sentimentalized stories. My teacher knew what the Buddha knew: that when our feelings and bodily sensations are fully encountered, openly encountered, without resistance or rationalization, without the mediating influence of any story whatsoever, they are unmasked. The roaring lion is revealed to be a purring pussycat who will, if you are patient and still, climb into your lap and fall asleep.

There have, of course, been gaps between my hearing this advice and my ability to fully internalize it, a simple consequence of being human, I think. In fact, while it may be a pop-psych truism that we should confront our own damage and interior darkness, it’s not clear that most people actually do it. Once an uncomfortable sensation of shame, rejection, self-hatred, or grief arises, as soon as an actual wave of pain washes over our toes, most of us retreat. Usually this means we become very busy, internally, externally, or both—often with the problems and lives of other people—to avoid the descent into our own imagined darkness. Indeed, supporting such avoidance seems to be one of the main purposes of Western, neo-Capitalist society. Busyness and self-distraction are not so much a byproduct of the contemporary Western lifestyle, then, but a primary goal and driver of it. So long as we are all desperate to flee from the imagined monsters under our bed—including the fear of death itself—we will agree to be worked to death by our employers and also be reliable consumers of the myriad activities and substances designed to feed our insatiable desire to avoid ourselves.

This would be sort of okay, I guess, if it worked, if it really were ultimately satisfying. Unfortunately, over time, many of us—especially, perhaps, the most sensitive among us—must resort to increasingly intense avoidance strategies. And so we pile addiction upon addiction, become busier and busier, and more and more invested in the lives of others—including politicians or TV characters—than in our own lives. If we’re especially earnest, then at some point we may even become very busy with “self-improvement” projects and “spiritual” practices. The obvious attraction of these is that we may feel spiritually virtuous even as the goals of “self-care” and “self-improvement” spawn ever more excuses to keep us from stopping and actually looking at an interior reality that feels increasingly unacceptable, if not horrifying. To be clear, this seems to be a pretty normal path for a human being, so we definitely shouldn’t point to this to further justify our sense of inadequacy or self-hatred.

The life of a spiritually rich person, though, like that of the photojournalist, demands overcoming some of our “normal” impulses, our reflexive inclinations, to flee from or fight against what frightens us or what we find unacceptable. In a way, then, the spiritual journey requires us to make peace with the nervous, reactive energy of our own animal nature and to grow beyond self-protective habits that may, at one point, have been adaptive. To reassure our body and mind—perhaps with the support of counseling, meditation, or other practices—and stand our ground when we hear the unfamiliar noise we imagine to be a hungry bear. This process would probably be straightforward except that the loudest voice in our head—the one that purports to keep us safe from disaster—is likely to keep escalating the drama about why it’s not safe for us to stop. Not yet. Maybe later. Maybe after I get a better job. Or once I am healed from my wounds. Maybe after my kids are grown. After I retire. And on and on. This loud voice is always coming up with reasons for why it won’t work, why now is not the right time, for why it’s not safe, for why I should wait and wait and wait, almost as if being a damaged human itself were an obstacle to spiritual growth.

But the human body and life circumstances—including the discomfort intrinsic to it and that which is associated with abuse—is not an impediment to awakening. To the contrary, our tottering, fragile, resilient human experience is the very ground for such realization, just as it is from the mud and darkness that the lotus flower arises and opens to the sun. The uncomfortable sensations we experience as the kind of creatures we are, then, are not meant to be corrected or avoided by way of spirituality or anything else. They are, rather, visitors to be welcomed to the table regardless of the costume they may wear, guests who will reveal their true nature only when they are fully countenanced and embraced. We do not make progress on the spiritual path by transcending our humanity, then, far from it. We do so, rather, by bearing faithful witness to our imperfect, sloppy, painful, damaged, messy selves.

I think this may be at the root of a story I’ve always loved, the one where Mara, a demonic personification of suffering and temptation, demands that the Buddha justify his right to enlightenment. The witness the Buddha calls upon on his own behalf is not the sterility of the heavens or some notion of his own abstract purity. Instead, he touches the earth that he sits upon as the true witness to all he has endured. The earth that has given rise both to his own imperfect body, with its pains and longings and compulsions, as well as to the gnarled bodhi tree that shades him. After years of trying to bracket off and run from his humanity—first through pleasure and distraction, and then through esoteric spiritual practices and asceticism—the Buddha reaches out, and with his scarred and trembling hand, he touches the earth.

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