In a Facebook post on the Surfing Life, Tibetan Buddhist monk Anam Thubten wrote, "When I first came from Tibet, I found the ocean to be terrifying. There are no oceans in Tibet. In California, people want to take you to the beach. I thought, take me anywhere but there! The ocean was like a monster. But now I find walking on the beach is wonderful. You can have a moment of transcendence when you walk on the beach, because you forget all your problems for a while. I like to watch surfers – surfing is one of the real spiritual analogies on how to love life and how to dance with all the powerful storms and turbulence we may encounter. I think surfers have this attitude that they are going to make peace. They're going to learn how to dance with the ocean, and they're going to learn how to dance with all these wild, powerful storms. For most people, these wild storms are a great danger. But for skilled surfers, they are magic. It's a magical moment that they're waiting for out there on the ocean. And they know how to ride the wave when it arrives. So in our lives, I think we should meet these powerful circumstances, realizing we cannot actually conquer them. The only thing we can do is to learn how to dance with them, or sometimes to surrender to them."
Thubten didn't want to see the ocean, but when he actually saw it, he loved it. The thing he most didn't want to see -- "anywhere but there" -- he ended up loving. Saw the beauty in all of its chaos and turbulence, the need to make peace, to surrender. Like Thubten, there is so much I haven't wanted to see or been able to see in my life. Until now, I have ceded my eyesight to others: to society and its expectations of me, to my family and their expectations of me, to my little kid self who was trying to survive and still lives within me. My perspective is now shifting to my adult self, and that shift brings peace. I think surfing has helped with this. In an article about older women who start surfing, one woman said, "We were taught to accept the world as it sees us. Learning to surf in your 50s and 60s is not accepting the world as it sees you but accepting you for yourself."
In addition to the MMTCP class with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, I've recently taken an MBSR course: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. At the beginning of its six-hour silent retreat, my teacher, a former Tibetan monk, told us how to keep silence. He said we do not talk only with our mouths, but with our eyes. So we should not only not speak verbally, but also not nonverbally. He said we should look down, away from others, make no eye contact, in order to maintain a sense of privacy and stay within ourselves. He called it keeping "custody of the eyes." I love that phrase. Acceptance of myself happens through gaining custody of my eyes.
In Buddhism, there is the third eye of consciousness, key to enlightenment. There are the Eyes of the Buddha, the eyes of compassion. Custody means protective care or guardianship. Having custody of my eyes means I am caring for myself, taking full responsibility for my life, and seeing with compassion. My vision for my life is now becoming my own. I am embodying it, not avoiding or separating from it. I have witnessed the evolution of that custody in several ways over the past few months. First, I had to be willing to see. I had to be brave enough to paddle out into the turbulent seas. Second, I saw things through contrast. The loving company I'm keeping, my surf sangha, revealing everything unlike itself. Third, I am noticing how I embody my new sight every day. I'll share two examples from recent events with the Sisters that give me confidence that my eyes are now my own. And finally, I'm beginning to use this embodied sight to make the turn to figuring out who I want to be now. I'm beginning to look ahead to creating a life based on my own values and agency.
Willingness
The Buddhists -- and everyone else interested in spiritual or psychological healing or transformation -- believe that the way out of suffering is through it. Acceptance is simply the ability to see what happened, to take it in. I don't have to like it; I don't have to be happy about it; but I do have to see it. As Chairman Taylor Swift wrote in The Manuscript, "Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward."
Stephen Colbert had another interview recently in which he discussed grief. Colbert said he is glad that speaking about his experience has helped others navigate through grief. "Some people think that grief itself is contagious, so they don't want to hear it or even address it, when in fact it's sort of paradoxical how addressing it doesn't make it darker. It actually opens the light." He says, "I'm glad that my experience in some way is meaningful, and gives some hope that there is spiritual nourishment that can come from accepting your grief and the circumstances of your life. It can give you a way to look at it that doesn't undermine you but that gives you a foundation on which to build. That acceptance, that seeing the world for all its cruel and radiant beauty." See it all. Full custody.
In an interview, Toni Morrison talked about forgiving yourself after doing something terrible, an ongoing theme in her books. She said, "You have to go through the fire first to experience the full fall and the complete self-loathing in order to come around to something like the forgiving oneself.... [I]f you feel the real thing, the shame, hatred, humiliation, and self-loathing, that is the door. And if you get through that, then you can forgive yourself." She continued, "All of the characters in my books ... are pushed into that place where all of the definitions of themselves are suspicious. You have to be stripped down, made very lean by circumstances, to see who you are. Then you make peace. You arrive at this delicious place we call adulthood."
James Hollis, my favorite Jungian scholar, writes in his book Living an Examined Life, that we can adopt "attitudes, behaviors, and disciplines that move toward enlargement, toward enfolding our debilitating history into a journey more productive, more clearly our own." This is in an effort "to recover respect for what abides deeply within. As we do, we will not be spared disappointment or suffering, but we will know the depth and dignity of an authentic journey, of being a real player in our brief moment on the turning planet, and our life will become more interesting to us, taking us deeper than ever before. Only then are we on the journey of the soul." Hollis, conferring Jung's wisdom to us, says the only way to travel that journey of the soul is to look within, "The more conscious we become, the more we become aware of the unconscious influences working upon our daily choices....No longer does received authority...automatically govern." With every demon I face, every big wave of fearful emotion I ride out, I gain more autonomy, more power over my own choices. I gain custody of my eyes.
I have been willing to see the ways I have separated myself from the world, the walls I've built as defenses. In Opening to Oneness, Nancy Mujo Baker writes, "But I thought Zen was about letting go of ‘me,’ you might say. This is true, but we can’t let go of something until we know what it is we are hanging on to. Once we know what we’re hanging on to and are able to thoroughly welcome it—in fact, be it—it will let go of us instead of the other way around.” I'm finding this to be true. Through a Buddhist context, I've worked with the Brahmaviharas, Lojong phrases, and precepts. Through therapy, I have gone back into spaces from my past imaginatively to relive them. I have been a mess on many days, swallowed up by tumultuous emotions, most of the time I can't discern what's going on. But then there's a release. Just like Thubten thought the ocean was a monster before he really saw it, the more I enter the space of really facing my demons, they tend to turn into dark little Elmos: wee parts of myself who just need to be loved. Baker goes on, "It’s important to know ourselves if this practice is going to continue to deepen and to be truly about me, a requirement for the 'me' to start falling away. As Dogen famously said, 'To study the self is to forget the self.'"
Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I have really gotten to know the unique form of my unhappy family and how that unhappiness has shaped my ability to see. Like Lisa Delpit said, "We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs." I found old journals from twenty years ago recently. They were from around the time when I got divorced. I was aware then of many of the issues I am aware of today, but I didn't really get very far with them. Seeing the pain is only part of the journey. I needed to see another place to go -- have another vision of how it could be instead in order to really move toward individuation or wholeness. We can only see our beliefs when they stand in contrast to some other, contrary belief. And I found that here in the surf group and in sessions with BTG.
Love Reveals Everything Unlike Itself
Jessica Dore writes, “In Disorientation and Moral Life, philosopher Ami Harbin draws on the work of a number of feminist philosophers to suggest that the ways our experiences are interpreted by those around us have a profound impact not only on the meanings we make of those experiences, but what we actually go through.” What we actually go through. I have lived 56 years as though I had the good parents in comparison to those in my friend group. My physical needs were met and we lived in a nice house. No one was beating me or worse. I achieved a measure of success, earned a number of academic degrees, got a good job, made a nice life. Any feelings of dissatisfaction or unease were my own fault. Caretaking others, being a perfectionist, hypervigilance, anxiety, were all things that a little therapy could fix, and didn't indicate anything super wrong with my childhood -- just normal stuff. Nothing to see here. Other people had custody of my eyes. The only clues to my inner turmoil were physical ailments and a vague sense that something was missing, a melancholy I could not shake.
Children need to have their inner lives mirrored by the adults around them to know they exist and are worthy of love and belonging -- not because they accomplish something valuable, but because their very existence is valued. I missed out on that mirroring. Dad was largely checked out. I had put my mom on a pedestal because she was the one who was caring for us on a daily basis, but there was harm there, too, that was previously invisible to me. Harm and care came together. Childhood emotional neglect is a thing -- a serious thing. And I am feeling the effects of it every day. Physical trauma is hard, but there’s some thing to deal with -- an actual traumatic event to deal with. My childhood friends had actual traumatic events to deal with: desertion, physical and sexual abuse. Psychological trauma can only be dealt with when you can see it. Neglect is often hard to see, because there isn't a there there -- there is a lot of nothing to deal with. Something good didn't happen, so what was really wrong? It's vague. I've always had a feeling that something was missing, but I didn't know what it was.
While I've been processing lots of memories for over a year, some deep progress has been made since my dog, Lucy, died. When Lucy died, the surf group really rose up to support me in my grief. Their support was unlike anything I had experienced before. I realized how lovely it felt to be loved like that -- held when I cried. That care did three concrete things that formed the lynchpin of seeing more clearly. First, it helped me feel worthy of care. Growing up, I felt unworthy. Love was conditional. I had to achieve, do something, to get any recognition or feel like I belonged. Second, Sisterhood care and support gave me somewhere else to go. Growing up, maybe my house wasn't the greatest, but my friends' houses were worse. If I did think something was wrong with my parents, which I didn't, I didn't have anywhere else to go to get away from it. Frying pan or fire -- I'll stay in the frying pan and twist my mind to make it feel like a sauna. In my surf sangha, I left both the frying pan and fire and got into the water. I finally left the house and could look back from a wider perspective.
Third, experiencing what healthy care looked and felt like, I then saw how beautifully these women parent their children while simultaneously taking care of their own independent selves. Seeing that there was a different way to parent and be parented allowed me to see, and to really feel, that I am a separate person from my parents. I saw that it is possible to be in relationship with your children as unique and valuable little beings and moms can also be independent and valuable human beings -- that there is a mutual respect for personhood and a genuine joy in getting to know your kids and be a part of their lives and maturation, each person as their own self. My friends do not treat their children as a burden but as a deep and abiding joy. I was given a new set of beliefs.
Seeing how my friends interact with their kids challenged my expectations of how that relationship worked. It gave me space to see what was missing from my upbringing. I've been rereading my favorite book of all time, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. In it, one of the characters is an artist who began her mature artistic work with a mistake -- a drop of paint fell on one of her already finished paintings. Dribbling down, it created the appearance of a "crack" in the facade of the painting. She expanded that crack to show something else happening behind the scenes. All of her paintings after that showed similar images: a scene behind the scenes. She called it a "double exposure." That contrast, seeing my friends in relationship to their children as opposed to the kind of relationship I was used to, opened up my sight to what was happening behind the scenes in my own mind.
I've also had BTG, who has been an objective and benevolent interpreter of my experiences. Without accurate mirroring in a safe environment, I would still have distorted sight. BTG has been key to this process: kind, gentle, compassionate, and really stellar reframing. Dore writes, "When others bear adequate witness to us, interpreting what we are going through with a degree of accuracy or fidelity, such experiences can offer what Harbin calls 'toeholds.' The function of a toehold is not to re-orient us, but to make disorientations 'more livable.'" To be a toehold, she writes, is “to stay in relationship with a disoriented person, without the expectation that there ought to be reorientation, with a willingness to ask questions and offer help in ways that maintain the possibility of the disoriented person continuing in everyday life.” BTG and the surf girls have provided me with a new sense of safety, a consistent abiding, that allows me to go on in the midst of these big stormy waves and make a kind of peace with it. They have helped me to see in new ways. Yet, the more I am able to see, the more messed up I look. I worry that my conditioning has left me blind to the ways of healthy love.
Seeing My Selfing in Daily Life
I worry that I'm damaged in a way that cannot be repaired, that I'm too far gone. I saw this the other week in response to a Sisterhood tragedy. Our Surf Sister Toni has broken her ankle. She hopped off her board at the end of surfing a wave like she has done hundreds of times before, but this time, her ankle broke. I was so relieved that she was surfing with other people and they rose up to help her out. They got her to the hospital right away and stayed through the morning until we figured out how to get her home. I was able to join them later in the morning.
On my way to the hospital, I was very nervous. I didn't know if any of my previous strategies for helping people in this situation would work. With everything I'm realizing, I'm really worried that my normal reactions and behaviors will be wrong, unloving, or unskillful in a way that will cause harm. BTG said, "Family structures warp our relationship to goodness." How deep does the damage go? The last thing I wanted to do was cause more suffering, to not be able to support Toni in the way she needed to be supported. So I decided to be really quiet, ask a lot of questions, and see what she needed, what the situation required.
Fortunately, the Buddhists -- and everyone else interested in spiritual or psychological healing or transformation -- also believe that nothing can touch our basic goodness. Catholic priest and founder of Homeboy Industries, Father Boyle said in a recent interview, "It’s not about achieving goodness. It’s about recognizing that it’s always been there from day one." I had to trust that inner goodness to show up for Toni. Getting quiet, observing the situation, and then acting based on that observation is exactly what the Three Tenets is telling me to do. Know myself to understand what might get in the way and let it go. Bear witness to what is actually happening. And then make a decision on the next right thing to do based on those observations. Stay right in the moment and connect directly to life as it is happening, not what's in my head getting in the way. I ended up taking Toni home and I hope that I was able to support her in a positive (if imperfect) way. Hollis wrote, "Individuation is not about bold deeds on the large canvas of history....Individuation might actually be much more difficult than that. Individuation may be simply trying to show up as ourselves more days than not....show up as who we really are." I tested out my new vision and it seemed to go OK.
Facing all of these defense structures has been enormously disorienting. Walls have fallen. I often feel emptied out, off balance. My sense of self has been razed like never before; like Morrison said, I have been pushed into that "place where all of the definitions of [myself] are suspicious." Thanks to reframing from BTG, I can look at the health underlying all of my defenses. If I can see them, then I must have a new perspective. Seeing them might indicate that these harmful ways of being might not be mine and something else good might be under that rubble. Under the masks I've been wearing, a totally new person unencumbered by drama or trauma might exist -- or has always existed and I am excavating her from years of neglect. Father Boyle said in that interview, “What happens when you cherish people is you can you can watch them inhabit a sturdier being.” My eyes are now my own. I am a sturdier being now without walls than I was with them.
So how do I know that I am sturdier? In addition to the hospital visit, I have been noticing what belongs to me and what doesn't. The task of finding my new old self exists in the mundane daily decisions of my life. The Sisterhood recently had a swanky evening out at fancy restaurant and then went to the ballet. I got really anxious when I was getting ready. I felt so uncomfortable putting on make up, high heels, and a dress that probably showed more cleavage that what I'm presently comfortable with or feel is necessary. In even the simple act of getting ready to go out, I became aware that this person I'm dressing up as is not who I am anymore -- quite possibly someone I never was.
My eyes have been in the custody of heterosexual men, patriarchy, sexism. The clear mirroring I got from my mom was around achievement, so I became a perfectionist. I didn't get any mirroring from Dad. The only clear mirroring I once received from men was for physical beauty, objectification. When I was young, beauty was an asset for me. In a misguided quest to find that missing mirroring, I threw my body into spaces where it was abused. When I was getting ready the other night in the same way I used to get ready to go out, my sturdier self saw that I have been operating under a set of societal expectations that I no longer have to abide by and that I probably never wanted to live with. Expectations that women have to be sexy, have to wear a mask of cosmetics to improve their looks, have to wear heels, etc.
Perhaps the anxiety that arose while I was getting ready was a clue that I am separated from my true self. As a sturdier individual, I can feel that anxiety and see it as a healthy sign that I am out of alignment with my values instead of as a signal to a threatening environment. Hollis wrote, "Adaptive loyalty to what we have received from our environment may prove an unconscious subversion of the integrity of the soul." Now, integrity, wholeness, my true, individuating self is at the helm. I have a greater ability to choose my life, but the choosing is fraught and complicated. There's no checklist of "Things to Reevaluate on the Way to Transformation." In order to see my way to my new life, I have to pay attention to the daily details of my current life in a continual effort to figure things out. It's an ongoing practice. What do I wear now? What do I want to eat? Who do I actually want to be in this moment? And this part of the process is still new. I can see it happening, but it's not flowing yet. I'm very self-conscious about it all.
Jessica Dore, my favorite fellow traveler in grief, continues relating her insights in her weekly missives. One book she quotes from is Ratcliffe’s Grief Worlds. She says, “For Ratcliffe, grief is ‘inherently puzzling,’ involves ‘a profound alteration in the experience of self, world, and other people.’” Dore shares one of her favorite descriptions of “acute grief” from that book, “Sometimes, we face a situation where the paths are gone, where things lack the kinds of significance they previously had and no longer relate to one another in the ways they once did. With this, experienced situations cease to specify or guide actions… A nonlocalized sense of confidence or certainty regarding what is likely to happen and what one could and should do is replaced by a quite different anticipatory style: 'I feel like a rudderless boat in a stormy sea with endless time to endure it.'"
Yep. That's me right now. I can't even get ready to go out with friends without an existential crisis. Having custody of my eyes allows this reevaluation. It's a good thing. And. None of my old ways of being are working at the moment. Every decision is getting reevaluated. Navigating disorientation -- steering reorientation -- is exhausting.
Making the Turn
Seeing more clearly has meant that all my crap is right here, right now, very present. So having strategies is essential. I use better strategies to cope with anxiety. I use mindfulness and meditation to keep an eye on myself. I will continue to practice with the precepts, lojong phrases, and Brahmaviharas to find my values and continue digging for my True Self. And, I will continue to look for language from wise people to describe my experience and provide a way forward. Dore has written a lovely post about reclaiming your life and "dangerous memory," based on a book she's reading by Grace Jantzen called Becoming Divine. Dore quotes Jantzen, "...such a reclamation is itself subversive: the memory of those who have been silenced and made invisible is a dangerous memory. Moreover, reclaiming their memory in a way that does justice to their struggles and our own involves a 'creative actualization,' a rewriting and revisioning of a lost or distorted past in order to develop a just future." Reclaiming. Revisioning. Custody of the eyes in order to develop a better future. Hollis wrote, "Our life begins twice: the day we are born and the day we accept the radical existential fact that our life, for all its delimiting factors, is essentially ours to choose."
Of course none of this happens neatly. It's not like the defenses get shed, then the new life gets born. It's all a big churning mess right now, and I see no end to it. I'm trying to see the tumult as not just a cruel but also a radiant beauty that I can dance with. Just like surfing, I am currently moderately successful at this. While often tossed into the spin cycle, under water, I can stand up now and then and experience the joy of flowing with it all, not falling but flying through the air on my board, dancing with the energy of the waves. Peaceful. Grateful.
Dore writes so beautifully, "When I think about dangerous memory I see a gazillion small gestures. Acts of consideration when so much makes care an impossible task. I see reaching out when it’s hard, acknowledging harms caused, taking mercy upon ourselves and each other. I see working to not forget—and it does take work—how vulnerable we are with each other. Which is to say refusing to forget also, how powerful. Dangerous memories are not only hard ones. They also include the ten thousand tendernesses which amount to a knowledge of miracles. To a living relationship with grace, which is when gorgeous things happen that had no business happening. Dangerous memories include moments of being listened to so well you start thawing. Encounters with art works and stories that scaffold the chaos. Of witness which takes an account so precise that gravity’s called into question."
Thank goodness I've been lucky enough to find BTG and the girls who have listened so well that I have thawed, who have been that witness that has called gravity into question, who have created the conditions that have allowed me to see. Part of what I can rely on going forward is that living relationship with grace that produced these lovely people in my life; the knowledge that I am protected in this chaotic abyss. That I have been here before and made it through to something better, more just, and I can do it again.
The MBSR day-long retreat was six hours of mindfulness in silence. I felt quite peaceful and content that day to sit or walk in meditative silence, averting my gaze from other people, but watching very busy hummingbirds and flowering trees, mountains in the distance, covered with snow. That day, I kept custody of my eyes the entire time. When I was my self-contained self, I was delighted with non-doing. I didn't have to do anything or be anyone. Didn't have to earn my place in the world. I could just sit and look at mountains, sit and breathe or do a bit of yoga, simply sit. Content. Nowhere to go and nothing to do. BTG named that feeling as equanimity. It was amazing. A small taste of peacefulness along this journey that gives me hope for the future.
One thing I'm working on in surfing is to look up. Surf Sensei told me that I tend to look down when I pop up and I need to look where I'm going. I'm still surfing straight ahead into the beach. If I'm going to turn, surf down the line, I need to look up and see where I'm going. Right now, I cannot peel my eyes from my feet on the board. Looking down and remaining balanced is one skill; looking up while staying balanced is another one. I'm still self-consciously trying to surf. I have yet to embody the movement fully.
On Toni's last few waves, she turned right and surfed down the wave, turned her head to look where she was going. She was aware of the context. There are ethics in surfing -- you watch out for others in the line up, don't drop in on someone else's wave. Keep an eye out on the traffic, wait your turn. Look around to where you fit into the bigger context of the break. My girls are showing me the path ahead. Now that I've identified more of the stuff in my head that has prevented clear seeing, maybe I can peel my eyes off my own feet and look around. Where do I fit in the world? How do I want to be in it? Who do I want to be for others? I can look around in my immediate context and see what the next right thing to do will be.
I still have discoveries and decisions to make about what to wear, how I want to be seen, and how to see myself and the world differently. I forget that while this dissection of ego is happening, integration is also happening. I'm able to see my defenses because there is an inner wholeness, an inner health, that was never damaged. My inner self, True Self, is throwing off the things she never wanted, that don't fit anymore, that never actually fit, but she had no choice but to wear those heels, get those degrees, in an attempt to survive and be loved.
In "The Manuscript," the tortured poet Herself wrote these lyrics:
And the years passed
Like scenes of a show
The Professor said to write what you know
Lookin' backwards
Might be the only way to move forward
...
And at last
She knew what the agony had been for
The only thing that's left is the manuscript
One last souvenir from my trip to your shores
Now and then I reread the manuscript
But the story isn't mine anymore
The story from my childhood isn't mine anymore. My new self is writing the story now -- we are free of that narrative. I just don't entirely know that self yet. I'm still fascinated by the new view of my feet on a surfboard. My daily practice will be seeing: paying attention to what fits now and what doesn't. She's there, she's already there. Every old expectation I throw off gets me closer to her, to a life that is my own. Custody of my eyes belongs with my True Self.
I'm making the turn from grief to acceptance and then hopefully, I'll look down the line to joy. My favorite quote from my favorite book of all time is this: "Tereza leaned her head on Tomas's shoulder.... She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness.... The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of the sadness." There is a sadness that will never leave me. That vague melancholy is still present and forms the boundaries of my soul. Now, I'm finding the happiness within that form. Carving out a place of beauty, of love, of light. Making peace. The only thing I know for sure right now is that I’ll be at Blackies this weekend with my girls. Watching the cruel and radiant beauty of the ocean, dancing on the waves.
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