The Hard Part: Recognizing Our Good Qualities

Our spiritual study group is slowly making its way through the great theologian, Karen Armstrong’s book, Twelve Steps To The Compassionate Life.

We are on Step Four: Compassion For Yourself. I have scribbled above the chapter title, “the hard part.”

Armstrong writes that in studying the Biblical commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” she had always focused on the first part of that injunction.  I think that is true of most of us. We are happy to show up with the chicken soup for someone else but rarely create it or its equivalent for ourselves when we are in need of comfort or tender loving care.

“The Golden Rule,” Armstrong writes, “requires self knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others.” Treating ourselves harshly, with quick, slicing judgment means that, in all likelihood, we will treat others in the same fashion.

“So,” she goes on to say,” we need to acquire a healthier and more balanced knowledge of our strengths as well as our weaknesses” and then she suggests that we begin by making  a list of our good qualities, talents and achievements.

Sounds good? Maybe. One of our group members had written in her book margin, “a good idea.” But, she confessed, that she hadn’t done it. It was too hard. We all agreed. Writing down our good qualities would be really difficult. Discussion ensued. Should we do it anyway and then go even further and share our lists with each other?

“Oh God!" a member exclaimed. "I can just hear my mother now!” You are boasting! How can you possibly think so well of yourself?

Another: “I’d much rather make a list of my shortcomings. So much easier!

Still another: “How can I write the things that I think are good about me and read it to all of you? What if you think I’m not that good?”

We all made faces.

Constructing a list of one’s good qualities, talents and achievements only sounds easy. Obviously it is not. Especially if you plan to share it with people who know you pretty well.

Couldn’t we just move on to the next part of the exercise: writing down our “egotistically driven fears” that make us act uncharitably and without compassion toward others? The group was tempted.

 But bravery and compliance with the process won out. We decided to take on the hard part. We will open our hearts to ourselves and to each other, creating and sharing our good quality lists.

Will you join us in this endeavor?  Will you shine the light of your awareness onto your critical voice for long enough to soften it sufficiently for the task? Are you willing to make a list of your good qualities, talents and achievements?

I will let you know how our group fares with this and I hope some of you will do the same by sharing your comments on this blog.   

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                                           ***
But first:

On Saturday I went to a talk given by a 43 year-old Buddhist named Will Duncan. Will, who has been studying Buddhism since he was sixteen, returned in July from a 3-year solitary meditation retreat where he lived in a hut in the desert of Arizona.

He was amazing!  As he imparts wisdom, Will already exudes that wonderful combination of mental discipline and humorous lightheartedness that I have come to associate with the very best Tibetan teachers.

Check out his website for Will's speaking schedule, audio talks and pictures of the Arizona valley where he spent those isolated three years. You don't need to be a Buddhist to benefit from what Will has to say about living mindfully. If you are anywhere near where Will is speaking, I urge you to get there!

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Welcome to Life Opening Up: Taiwan and Iraq.

Dream On!

Do you pay attention to your dreams? I hope you do.  In graduate school I had to keep a dream journal for a year and I discovered what a wild and deep source of information our dreams could be.

“Dreams,” my Jungian analyst told me, “love to be stroked.” By that he meant that the more we pay attention to our dreams the more available they become to us. Dreams are the means by which the unconscious mind makes itself known to us.

In the past week I have dreamt about two houses I have loved and left: two different lives went with those houses in two very different countries. What those small houses did have in common was water. Both were very near or on water.

 In the first dream I was in my English cottage—the closing on the sale of it is scheduled for October 17--- with lots of my friends and we were all dressed up. The cottage was crowded with people. In the dream I thought we were having a party but, as I moved slowly through the crowd, I understood that the gathering was actually a funeral. I woke up with a start and filled with sadness as I realized that the funeral was for the loss—the death, if you will--of my cottage and of my summertime English village life of twenty- seven years.

 Could be I’m not so on top of this change in my life as I thought, if a house funeral is what my unconscious is serving up.

 In the second dream I was walking toward my little cedar house at the end of the dirt road leading into the marsh at the bottom of Sagaponack Pond in Bridgehampton, NY. I spent fourteen years living there on the edge of Sagg pond overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I bought that house before the Hamptons became The Hamptons, otherwise it could never have been mine.

In the dream I walked down that familiar dirt road edged by phragmites and rose rugose in the company of a contractor, someone who was a friend. I think I was going to try and fix the house up, to get back into it. But when we got there, its dilapidation was evident; it was crumbling. The contractor gently pointed out the disintegration of the roof, the windows and the floors. He told me I would do better to tear it down and build a new house. Build a new house: the metaphorical message of the dream.

To that beautiful spot in Bridgehampton, clearly, there is no going back.

Sometimes the bits and pieces of the lives we have left behind cling to us like pills on a sweater, belonging, nonetheless separated. Occasionally our unconscious mind revisits places or people where or with whom we have left traces of ourselves. These two dreams  made it clear that no matter how much I had loved them, both houses were irredeemable and something new must be created.

Have you ever left a house and a life within it the sense of which  has burrowed so deeply into your psyche that it pops up in your dreams now and then?  I'm sure that you have. 

All I need now is for my unconscious mind, its wisdom so much more in tune with God and the Greater Reality than I, to reveal to me the nature of the home that I continue to seek. Then I will be on my way.

The sages write that the true home I seek is within me. Clearly I am not there yet.

***

Check out Unleash Potential, offering personal growth groups in Fairfield on the first Thursday of the month. Caroline J. Temple and Lisa Jacoby are the compassionate leaders and dream followers of Unleash Potential and my companions on this journey of reflection and self-discovery. Click here for more: http://www.unleashpotential.us/events/

Be Where You Are!

Having traveled mostly on my own for 34 years you would think I would have it down. But I don’t. Certainly not since 9/11. I did better before the World Trade Center came crashing down and changed our lives forever, especially our traveling life.

I can remember driving up to the airport in Toledo, O, and saying “hi” to the porter whom I knew by name. I would follow him into the building toward the desk, where, after handing my ticket to the agent, “Mrs. Stranahan” would be headed toward her plane.

When I moved to Long Island most of my departures were from New York, and, although there were thousands more people and longer lines, the moves were essentially the same: Check in: go to gate. No long roped queues; no removal of clothes, no X ray machines, no plastic bins. We just got on the plane. It’s a memory I want to hang on to. I don’t much care about remembering how life was before television—we didn’t miss it; we had radio--or automatic gear shifting or push-button car windows. I do want to remember how life was when I walked alone into an airport, full of easy, relaxed confidence and  excitement about flying somewhere.

 Nowadays when the driver drops me off at JFK, I turn toward the multi-entranced building with a kind of dread. I have a feeling of abandonment, severe disconnect, as if I were suddenly unplugged from home base and left dangling. A sense of jeopardy, like a grey fog, wraps itself around me.

In defense against this debilitating vulnerability, I pull way into myself. I realize how strange that sounds but it’s true. Entering the bustling, teeming building, I tuck so far inside myself--exactly the way a snail pulls into its shell when you poke at it--that I end up feeling numb, shadow-like, not quite real. It is in this numbed-out, not-there state that I maneuver myself through the layers of roped queues.

A year ago, on a trip I made from JFK to Florida, standing in the line, I had dropped sufficiently into my blurred-out condition that I failed to notice a security man signaling to me to come to his station. The woman behind me gave me a nudge and I moved forward toward his waving hand. I stopped in front of him and handed him my passport, something I find easier to deal with than my driver’s license.

He was African American and well into his sixties. Glasses worn slightly down his nose, a greying mustache. He opened my passport, looked at it, then looked up at me—as they do to see if you really are you—and looked down again.

“Cecily,” he said, looking up again right into my eyes and smiling, “We don’t get many of those.”

 He had seen me? He had said my name? 

The fog around me lifted as if a fresh spring breeze had blown through the airport. Suddenly I was awake. The TSA officer had catapulted me into what the Buddhists call, “the pure land of the present moment.”  Grateful, I smiled back at him, looking straight into his twinkling brown eyes.

“Wake up!” My Buddhist teacher used to shout. “Be where you are!”

***

Speaking of Being Here Now, on Saturday night I was totally in the present moment at the Klein Memorial Auditorium, held, in fact, in thrall by the Greater Bridgeport Symphony and its brilliant and completely engaging new Musical Director and Conductor, Eric Jacobsen. I have seen Jacobsen conduct before when he led The Knights, a group that the New York Times described as a  “consistently inventive, infectiously engaged indie ensemble.”

I wasn't going to miss Jacobsen's debut with the Greater Bridgeport Symphony and I was thrilled. Jacobsen demanded much from the musicians in particular in the playing of Rimsky-Korsakov’s, Scheherazade, and they gave him everything that he asked for. At the close of the concert the audience was on its feet cheering.

If you are dreading the drear of the long winter, may I suggest that you open your life up to some music magic and click on this link, http://www.gbs.org/ to purchase tickets for the remaining concerts of the season. I promise that you will not be disappointed.

Easier Said Than Done

My brother is really sick. He has been fighting cancer for three years and, although following his latest chemo drug, the scans have revealed miniscule lesion growth; his feet, ankles and legs are so swollen that he can no longer walk without fear of falling. And he does fall. Often. This summer while staying at their summer place, he fell on the dock face down and could not get up. Eventually his wife found him.

His immune system is radically compromised. He suffers from raging thrush in his throat and mouth, a split in his jaw, and neuropathy in his hands. He now has what is rather hideously referred to as “chemo brain” which means that he can’t remember things and his brilliant, funny, creative mind is fuzzy and blurred.

Never mind that the side effects have become the main effects. The doctors are pleased with the test results. Their job is to see that the cancer doesn’t kill him.

Well, fine.

“Life is difficult.” That is the opening sentence of M. Scott Peck’s penetrating book, The Road Less Traveled. Fr. Richard Rohr writes in his profound work, Falling Upward, “Life is tragic.” The Buddhists teach us that all life is suffering. And every spiritual teacher tells us that we intensify our suffering by trying to avoid the pain that is fundamental to human existence. Carl Jung insists that our neuroses arise out of our attempt to escape normal human suffering.

Well, fine.

 None of the above stops me from grieving for my brother’s suffering. I want to fix it, fight it, hold him in my arms as I did on the day when I was three and Mom brought him home, tiny and pink and swathed in a blue blanket. “May I hold him?’ I asked her, stretching my arms toward the most beautiful being I had ever seen. “Sit down,” she said. I did and she handed him to me. From that day forward he was, in some sense, mine to raise.

So today at Yoga, my heart so heavy that I could barely stay in the room and with the teaching of Peck, Rohr and the Buddha in mind, I sought the balance point: that delicate and elusive place between acceptance, pain and grief. I sought it in my body, dedicating the balancing poses to my brother. I stood as tall and straight as I could on one leg while the other was bent and pressed firmly into my thigh, executing the Tree pose and wobbling some as I focused on finding that essential still point.

  For Eagle pose I wrapped my lifted bent leg around my bent standing leg, once again breathing and, wobbling a bit less, I allowed my body to steady itself into the center of the pose. My body does this far better than my mind. Always.

Suffering is. My brother’s and mine for him, are different, but in life’s Big Picture, it is all one suffering: his, mine and yours as well. Our natural response is to resist grief, loneliness and despair; we so much prefer joy. But in order to hold in our hearts equally the inescapable sadness of life and the constant joy, we must find a way to embrace the fact that, in the words of Fr. Richard Rohr, “everything belongs.”

Easier said than done.

Watercolor by my brother, Brandon