Nothingness and Richard Gere

...a reflection on confusions around 'non-self'

A few months ago I lay in bed watching Pretty Woman on my laptop. (Ok, ok...don’t laugh.  It’s a classic and besides, it has a Buddhist in the starring role so it’s practically the same as meditating). I’ve probably seen the movie five or six times, but for the first time I felt myself become teary as it drew to a close. 

You might remember the ending – a limousine driving through the grimy back streets of LA, with Richard Gere standing up through the sunroof waving a bunch of flowers.  He then conquers his fear of heights by climbing a fire-escape to fall into the arms of Julia Roberts.  Who wouldn’t cry?

But these tears were different. Reaching across to my tissues, I tried to articulate why.  I realised I was relating to Gere’s character - ‘He allowed himself to live,’ I thought. ‘He thought he was real.’ I sat on the side of my bed, crying, repeating over and over to myself - ‘He allowed himself to live.  It was about him.’

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what meditation can do to you.  It can have you blubbering at the end of a rom-com, muttering things to yourself that you only vaguely understand.  What did I mean that he allowed himself to live?  I didn’t really know, but it resounded throughout my body; ringing in my stomach and echoing down my legs.   After a while I laughed at the absurdity of having such a moment of insight – not sitting cross-legged on my cushion mindfully noting sensations in my fingernails - but watching a dated 80’s flick.

Over the next few days my meditation mantra became ‘this is real. I am real.’

Frustration. ‘Yes, this is real.’
Pain in my head. ‘Yes, this is real. I am real.’
Boredom. ‘Real...real.’

Day after day I repeated the same mantra and gradually I realised why I was doing it.  I’d fallen for what might be one of the biggest traps in Western Buddhism – confusing Anatta (non-self) with a type of self-hatred (not-self).  Just as resignation is a close evil cousin to acceptance, and numbness the same to equanimity, I saw that teachings of non-self can mesh with self-loathing and denial.

Anatta is one of the Buddha’s core teachings and is related closely to the teaching of impermanence.  All phenomena are in a constant state of flux; sensations arise and fall every second. In this sense, we don’t live for 50 or 70 years and then die, but are born, live, and die in each moment. So, what is this ‘I’ that I feel as I’m writing this?  It’s a conglomeration of thoughts, sensations, and emotions.

‘I’ is a thought about whether I’ve spelt ‘conglomeration’ correctly. ‘I’ is the feeling in my fingers as they type.  ‘I’ is a feeling of mild anxiety as I wonder who’ll read this piece and what they’ll think about ‘me’. Obviously, ‘I’ changes every second. Analysed like this, each second is empty of self – and this is anatta.

For me, anatta is a profound, head-wreck of a teaching - it makes my brain hurt just thinking about it. I can write the paragraph above, explaining the idea behind non-self, but I don’t have the experiential understanding of this concept (and maybe never will). Instead, as a beginner Buddhist, I latch onto it with my mind, interpret it through my own mental filters, and come up with a meaning that seems ‘logical’ to me.

For the first few years of practicing Buddhist meditation, anatta was interpreted through my particular filter of living with a debilitating illness, and blaming myself for having it. With no teacher to guide me, just a few books and meditation CD’s, I interpreted anatta negatively and judgementally.  It meant ‘get rid of yourself’ and ‘you don’t exist.’ It meant I should annihilate all thoughts and feelings...and then I might get well.

 I live with constant pain and fatigue, stemming from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a related sleep disorder. Having the energy to watch a movie like Pretty Woman meant I was having a ‘good-energy’ day. Most days, it’s a struggle just to get to sundown.  When I first got sick I thought I’d will myself to wellness through sheer determination and denial.  That was 14 years ago. Sheer determination didn’t work so well (I figured that out after...oh...just a decade), so now I’m onto meditation.

Of course, I’ve brought all my ‘determination and denial’ habits into meditation.  Circling around my illness, like buzzards over a corpse, are anger, blame, and shame.  When I bring attention to my pain there’s a constant diatribe in my mind, ‘Don’t focus on it, that’s just wallowing. If you were more spiritual this wouldn’t be here.’ It’s a constant mental drip-feed of negativity– and it all seems very justified.

With my very limited understanding of Buddhism, I interpreted anatta as an emphatic confirmation of that critical voice in my mind. ‘Ah HA!’ said the voice. ‘Even the Buddha said that you weren’t really real, that the pain isn’t real, that those feelings aren’t real.’  Like perfectly fitting jig-saw pieces, my habit of denial, and the concept of non-self, clicked together and locked.  Anatta became the external justification for my internal voice - it was spiritually santified self-hatred.

Buddhism then became yet another path where I was trying to work out what I should be like, and pouring myself into that mould.  It wasn’t about ‘me’; it was about being perfect, and perfection meant being empty.  The goal in watching my breath wasn’t to watch my breath, it was to jump over this shameful, ordinary, messy self into some pure ideal of non-existence. I was never sure of exactly how this would work; just that that’s what I was meant to be doing.

Every guided meditation I did that encouraged me to focus on discomfort as a cluster of sensations rather than a solid mass called ‘pain,’ was really saying, ‘see...this pain isn’t real!  It’s just sensation. You’re so weak for feeling this.’  Every dharma talk I listened to where teachers spoke about feelings and thoughts being ‘empty’ prompted a further anxiety, ‘Why do I keep thinking this illness is really happening, when these teachers I trust tell me it’s not?  Why can’t I get it?’ Any conversation with a fellow-practitioner about how they were ‘not getting into their stories’ resulted in me blaming myself for wallowing in my ongoing ‘story’ of suffering.

The pivotal shift came when I watched Richard Gere climb that rickety fire-escape.  ‘This is about me,’ I realised. ‘I am real.’  Over the next few days my mental constructs and my lived experience clashed.  My thoughts about what I should be doing on the spiritual path remained the same; I still believed that my thoughts, feelings and physical pain were ‘wrong’ and must be transcended.  But my experience watching the end of Pretty Woman gave me the visceral insight that somehow this journey was really all about me - and that it was imperative I search for  connection with my own ordinary, mundane life.

The clash between rigid beliefs and fragile experience was jarring.  My experience felt right, but my mind kept interjecting that my new little meditation mantra - ‘this is real’- was so very, very egoistic and self-absorbed.

Becoming aware of this inner conflict, I realised I couldn’t be the only person who had fallen into the trap of equating ‘non-self’ with ‘self-loathing.’  I couldn’t be the only one who had conflagrated shame and blame with anatta. Several months later I read the following from Jack Kornfield’s ‘A Path with Heart,’ and saw that this was true:

"Misconceptions about selflessness and emptiness abound, and such confusions undermine genuine spiritual development. Some people believe that they can come to selflessness by struggling to get rid of their ego-centered self...if we have a deficient sense of self, if we perennially negate ourselves, then we may easily confuse our inner poverty with selflessness and believe it to be sanctioned as the road to enlightenment.” (p. 203)

In a section titled ‘From no self to true self’ Kornfield goes on to say that the cultivation of a healthy, sound sense of self is essential on the spiritual path, and that “the development of self then leads to a more fundamental level, the discovery of true self.” (p.207) He says this progression isn’t necessarily linear; the development of self and the discovery of what lies beyond it can happen simultaneously.

It was such a relief to read this and realise that my growing sense that ‘this journey was about me’ wasn’t spiritually wrong, but was actually an essential part of the path.  Over the past few months I’ve realised that being 'a Buddhist' can be worlds away from being 'a Buddha’ - the latter being the lived, moment-to-moment experience of the concepts and teachings involved in the former. I still don’t intellectually ‘get’ anatta, or the four noble truths, but I’m less preoccupied with gaining any ‘getting’, and a little more concerned with living.

 
The voice of denial in my mind is still very strong, but I have more perspective on it. When I’m listening to discussions about ‘emptiness’ or ‘clinging to the ego’ I have some awareness of the clutch of tension in my stomach as I worry whether I’m too self-absorbed and attached to my physical pain.  Allowing these emotions and thoughts to  just be, rather than trying to annihilate them, still feels wrong but I can see this ‘wrongness’ with more clarity and believe it a little less. Overall, I’m more focused on my personal experience of meditation, rather than my mental understanding of abstract concepts. 

Now I’m just waiting for a day when I have enough energy to watch the latest big rom-com on DVD – Valentine’s Day.  Sure, it’s got Julia Roberts, but without Hollywood’s most famous Buddhist, could it possibly stand up to Pretty Woman?
   

Reflections on staying at the monastery

During January I posted a series of blog entries that were written while I was staying at the Santi Forest Monastery.  I thought for this post I'd write a short reflection on my time at the monastery, just to wrap things up.

One of the interesting things about having this blog is that I often sit down to write something with an idea of what I'm going to say, and it all ends up going in a completely different direction.  So, for this post, I deliberately haven't planned what I'll write - and I'm interested to see what direction my fingers take me!

Overall I'd describe my time at the monastery as - confronting, difficult, peaceful, slow, and sad. This is the third time I've stayed up there, usually for around three weeks at a time, and it is always a difficult time for me.  I get very envious of people who go on meditation retreats and say how rewarding or beautiful it was.  I sometimes think there's something wrong with me that I find it so very hard.

But, I try to remind myself that I have difficult things to deal with.  Because I've been living with this illness for well over a decade it's natural that in the first few years of really looking at my feelings and bodily sensations,  I'll find a lot of sadness and despair arising.  

Because I can't do normal, structured meditation, I've come up with my own structure for the day when I'm at the monastery. From whenever I wake up (usually around 8.30am) until 10.30am I lie in bed and either do a meditation, if I feel I can, or just drift in and out of an exhausted haze, trying to be with and recognise whatever sensations are there. 

At 10.30 I go up to have a shower in the communal bathroom, and then have lunch and help to clean up afterwards.  During this stay, I also had a little job, mopping the sala (hall) and setting up mats and bowls for the next day's lunch.  Then, from around 1pm until 6pm I go back to my caravan and either listen to dharma (Buddhist) talks, do some structured meditation, read a bit from Buddhist books, or rest.  

At 6pm, if I feel up to it, I go back up to the main house and have a cup of tea with the other residents. In the evening, I can do what I like - and I usually listen to an audiobook on my ipod (which has nothing whatsoever to do with Buddhism!)

So, that's my day when I'm at the monastery, and I do find it very confronting to be living so closely to my feelings, and my physical condition, without any distractions like TV, radio, family, friends, my mobile phone,  e-mail or the internet.

During this stay, I cried a lot, and felt a deep, dragging depression. It seemed like a heavy weight that I would carry with me everywhere.  There seemed to be no way to fight my way out from underneath the bleak despair.  I was really forced to feel it - day after day after day.  A couple of times, one of the monks at the monastery pulled me aside and said, 'What's up?'  He's a very perceptive person, and I suppose he could tell just by the way I looked that I was having a tough time. 

He spent quite a while talking to me, trying to get an exact feel for what I was struggling with.  He started off by saying, 'You know, it's good to try to just accept the pain, to allow it.'  I think I stopped myself before I actually rolled my eyes at him, but I'm sure I got my message across in what I said. 

'I know that! I know I'm meant to be accepting pain, moving towards it, allowing it...blah, blah, blah...all the books say it.  But, I can't do that, and that just makes me feel even worse, because I hate it so much.  All I feel is how much I don't want it to be there, and this terrible judgement for it being there.'

'Oh OK!' he said, 'So you already know that.  Well, then, what you need is  kindness and gentleness.  Forget all about meditation; forget about what everyone else is doing here.  That's not for you right now.  All you have to do is be gentle.  When you get up out of the chair think, 'Am I doing that gently?'  When you lie in bed, think 'Is this a gentle posture for my body?'  All you have to do is be kind to all of those feelings.'

He was a great support to me, and, after talking to him a few times I did feel like a lot of the fighting and resistance to what was happening subsided.  I was able to just allow the depression, sadness, and judgemental thoughts to be there, without fighting them so much or trying little 'techniques' to get rid of them.  It was  painful to allow these things to just exist.  

I laughed just then at writing 'it was  painful' - because this process is, unfortunately, not in the past - it is  painful.  And that's really what I've taken away from this stay at the monastery. I'm more able to allow difficult feelings to exist.

I got home and started to read a Stephen Levine book that I haven't picked up in about a year.  Stephen talks a lot about moving towards pain, and, since I've always had such trouble with that concept, I ended up putting the book down. I was judging myself too much (and feeling judged by Stephen!) for not being able to send my illness love, or accept it. 

But, after reading a few pages of this book after returning from the monastery, I burst into tears. I was reading a chapter about a  woman whose son had died.  Stephen talked about her including her grief in her heart, and all of a sudden I thought, 'I understand that, I know what he means.' And I had an awareness of how I was moving towards my pain - allowing it to tear my heart open.  I had a vision of me literally stepping into my illness.  

It was very sad, but also quite beautiful, because I had a realisation of how cutting myself off from my illness had cut me off to life.  Over the next few days I realised that although I think I'm 'getting no-where' with this meditation, and that my stays at the monastery are just a complete waste of time - things are slowly changing, and moving.

This is one of the more luxurious huts at the monastery

- I stayed in this one on my first visit.

The Church of Hard Knocks

This post was written in December 2009, when I was spending a month staying at a Buddhist monastery near Sydney, Australia.

13 December

I’ve been reading a book by Petrea King called ‘Sometimes Hearts Have to Break.’ Petrea is a well known Australian healer and counsellor who’s worked for years with people who have life-threatening conditions. In her book, Petrea tells her own story of recovery from leukemia, and the stories of some of her clients.

One of the stories was of a young, newly married couple who were members of a type of Christian Church where illness was believed to be caused by lack of faith.  Getting any treatment or using pain-relief to deal with an illness was seen as mere pandering to the devil; the person had to heal through faith alone.  If they didn’t heal, it was because their faith wasn’t strong enough.

Tough stuff – but could see how I run a particular branch of this church in my mind.  I have a strong belief that my illness was caused by something I did wrong.  This is how the thought pattern runs in my head: I’ve been kicked out into the wilderness of pain and illness by some spiritual or ethical flaw, and my task is to work as hard as I can to fix myself and be allowed back into the land of the well. These beliefs run very deep and are hard to see – and when I do see them they’re difficult to deal with.

In Petrea King’s story about her clients, the husband had been diagnosed with bowel cancer 6 months previously.  He’d had no treatment, and no pain relief.  Now, he was dying, and as well as having to deal with an early and difficult death, he felt an enormous sense of failure because his faith obviously wasn’t strong enough to save him. Petrea counselled the young couple and talked to them about the idea of a loving, compassionate, caring God – not just the judgemental God of the Old Testament. The man died the day after he saw Petrea – with less physical pain (because he accepted morphine), but also, with some freedom from the terrible burden of self-blame that he’d carried.

Here’s what Petrea wrote after telling his story:

‘Many people fall into the trap of trying to earn their recovery, believing if they only find the right combination of therapies they will be able to undo the cause of their disease.  This thinking is quite popular in our society at present and the worst misunderstanding of this philosophy is that we create our illnesses in order to learn some spiritual lesson from them....
This is a complex area and is often grossly simplified by proponents of this philosophy.  It can serve as a terrible judgement and certainly doesn’t facilitate the experience of deeply joining together in our humanity. There is often a hidden agenda which says, ‘If you eat the right foods, forgive the past, meditate for hours a day, drink your vegetable juices, take your vitamins, and only focus on the ‘positive’ , then you might not die of your disease.’

 It seems natural that we all search for certainties when the only constant in our world is change. Impermanence is scary. I can see that my mind struggles constantly to find reasons for things I can’t explain – why am I sick? Why are some babies born with AIDS? How can thousands of lives be snuffed out in a tsunami?

Sometimes this immense and incomprehensible suffering leads us to develop systems of judgement and blame – just so we can feel some small sense of control.  We can use these systems to assure ourselves that we can find a way out of our own pain (if we just meditate long enough/eat raw foods/buy enough crystals/fix our flaws). We can also use these systems to reassure ourselves that the terrible pain that’s happening to someone else won’t happen to us (she got cancer because she repressed her anger – but that won’t happen to me!)

 I can see the system of blame I’m running in my own mind, but I can’t change it. A constant thought stream buzzes through my head- if I just work harder at meditation, if I could just relax more, if I could just be more peaceful/less angry/more open-hearted – then I’d get well. Those demanding and critical thoughts run deep, and fighting them just seems to leave me more exhausted and entrenched in blame. I’m trying to close down the church branch in my mind – but it just doesn’t want to go! I try to remind myself that just witnessing it, just being aware of its existance, is an important first step.