There is Room for It All

Continuing on birth and death,here is the opening paragraph to a powerful post about miscarriage and afterward:

I am and am not a mother. I once believed motherhood to be a concrete state of being heralded by the birth of a child who would grow under my guidance and eventually move into the world on their own. I see now that the situation is more complicated than that. I see that motherhood is a state of mind rather than a biologically determined reality. Motherhood happens even when there is no baby to hold. I wish I didn’t know this, because the route to knowledge was rending and recovery is slow.

It's stories like this that tell me it's best to hang awhile with questions like "What is birth and death?" instead of grabbing for answers. I feel sad with along with the author, Andrea, but also happy for her because she seems to have tapped into a place beyond that which requires specific forms, like a baby. What a difficult learning though!

I've been noticing lately that a sense of having ease with the heart/mind's wrestling with the big questions of life. That thoughts and no thought can co-exist just fine. And that even intense body sensations or feelings that may or may not be connected with thoughts can also exist in the same space.

Andrea writes:

I should have been safely out of my third trimester by now, but instead I feel hollow and deeply sad. I was a mother for just over 10 weeks but my baby is gone and I have no way to prove that I once held a life within my body. And while my arms remain empty for the time being the change has been irrevocable. I was a mother for 10 weeks and I will remain a mother in some way, even if I never manage to bring a child into the world. It was the dream for the future that made me a mother, the hope and love for my unborn child. Nothing can take that away, not even death.

She's doing this work as well. I feel a profound respect for her, being able to hang with the pain and the ambiguity, and to offer others a glimpse into the process of working with it all. It's not just about acceptance, although acceptance of what is, breath by breath, is essential. I think we have to come to love not only the questions, and the often simple, beautiful answers our spiritual traditions offer, but also the flopping about, the intellectual curiosity, and the flailing in grief and bitterness.

There's room for it all.

Forms of Taking Responsibilty

Over at the blog Yoga Journeys, I came across the following in the current post:

Today it became obvious that someone has a problem with me. Now I think most people encounter difficult relationships (or difficult patches in good relationships) from time to time. My self-talk in these moments tends to oscillate between, This is totally not my fault. There's nothing I can do. This person has her own issues, and, I'm a horrible person. I've ruined another relationship. It's all my fault. If only I'd..., I could have prevented this. Most of the time (and probably in this case), it's somewhere in between the two extremes. But also, placing blame is beside the point.

Yep, this definitely describes my reactions to relationship difficulties, at least part of the time. In my case, when these extremes occur, it seems to be coming from a misguided sense of taking responsibility. I mean, we hear all the time in Buddhist teachings about various forms of taking responsibility, right? There's even that old koan about the Zen cook who, upon learning he left a snake head in the soup by mistake, promptly ate it. No bitching, no excuses. He just ate it.

One major difference, perhaps the only real difference, is that the misguided responsibility taking that appears in the Yoga Journey's post, as well as in my own life, is "self-focused." It's all about me. I'm right or I'm wrong.

The form of responsibility taking in that old koan appears to leap past who is right and who is wrong. It's not interested in assigning personal blame; it's about addressing the situation at hand. I'm learning how to do this more in my life, but definitely still leap towards the habitual form of taking responsibility, which just causes more trouble.

What's interesting about the whole "I've ruined the relationship" narrative described above is that, in my case anyway, I'm coming to see that I often over-estimate the impact of conflicts I have with others. There's no doubt that on certain issues, I am direct, outspoken, and clearly outside of the norm in my views. And this does ruffle some feathers. However, given a shift that I'd like to credit my Zen and yoga practices for, what seems to happen more often these days is that I experience the intensity of emotion tied to whatever issue I speaking about with someone, but what I actually say and how I say it doesn't seem to cause the kind of intensity I'm feeling. In other words, it feels like I'm saying something that could cause a major rift between myself and others, but the actual action doesn't do so.

On the flip side, the "This is totally not my fault." narrative is an underestimation of my general impact in an given situation. In fact, it comes up most fiercely when I actually do have some responsibility, but don't want to take it, or want the other person to step up first.

Both of these narratives play into, for me anyway, a larger story I have long held onto having to do with finality. I tend to lean towards clear resolution rather than ambiguity. This isn't too smart in a world full of ambiguity.

For example, I remember dating a woman a few years back who did a few odd things about three weeks after we started dating. Nothing awful, just things that caused question marks for me. However, instead of getting to know her a little better and seeing if these were regular patterns, or isolated incidents, I went for the jugular and ended the relationship. Now, this could have been for the best, but looking back, I see how that decision was mostly about protecting myself from the ambiguity of being with someone who might turn out to be "wrong for me" later. But isn't that true of every romantic relationship in the beginning? We don't really know, no matter how many sparks fly.

This isn't to say that every situation calls for hanging around, watching, and waiting with uncertainty. Some situations demand decisive action, and some relationships require clear and unambiguous yeas or nays. But that decisiveness needs to come from something much larger than "I or my," otherwise it ends up reinforcing the very separate sense of self that we practitioners hope to break down.

This might be a useful way to check in about any form of responsibility. Is it about protecting "me, myself, and I" in someway? Asking that question could be a way to let drop off those dramatic forms of claiming experiences in our lives that don't, at the end of the day, serve to awaken. Or, at the very least, it might help you pause, even if you can't determine if you are responding appropriately or not.