Let's first focus on the absolute decadence of this surf sesh: clear blue sky, crystal clear cold water, the bright sun warming my wetsuit, and good green waves. A lunchtime surf on a Wednesday. A Wednesday. At lunch. I went surfing on a gorgeous day -- a Wednesday, at lunch. So luxurious, I can hardly believe this is my life. Because there were waves, it was crowded. Irritatingly crowded for a midweek lunch time, if I'm honest. Rather expected to have the place to myself and I was bummed that other people thought the same thing (lol).
As a beginner, my first assessment of the line up is to find an empty place -- where are there the fewest people in the lineup? (A sticker I recently purchased for my car says, "Please don't surf by me." I need that sentiment embroidered on my wetsuits.) A crowded break simply means I will catch fewer waves, so I go where other people aren't. My second assessment once I have paddled out is to see if I fit in with the people who are next to me. Are they on foamies or hardboards? Are they super skilled, advanced surfers, or beginners giving it a relaxed go like me? I found that I fit right in with the others in the line up where I was -- just a couple of people sitting in the ocean, relaxing on their boards, enjoying the day, occasionally grabbing a wave with middling level of ability. Perfect. I found my spot amidst others enjoying a perfect day, not terribly concerned with shredding every wave, but having a good time. I said to myself, "I fit right in here. I have just as much right to be here as anyone else."
Um, what?
"Just as much right to be here as anyone else," was a telling phrase. After lamenting the latest thing I had been lamenting in therapy, BTG said to me, "You have a right to be here. I don't think you know that you have a right to be here. To be loved for who you are." Words like medicine I will play on repeat in my mind until I believe them, but also not quite right. Do I have a right to be here? I ask myself. No, of course not. What insane framing. No one has a right to be here -- we find ourselves here, we squirt out of our mothers' wombs and land here, but a right to be here? How crazy. It's one of those BTG phrases that bends my brain and causes me to mutter around the house for several days. When that happens, I know he's strummed something, so I stick with it. Keep muttering until some truth arises. I asked myself repeatedly over several days, "How would my life be different if I believed I had a right to be here?" And then I went surfing and said to myself, "I have just as much right to be here as anyone else." Hmmm. If no one has a right to be here, then maybe I have just as much right to be here as anyone else.
(It is at these moments that I'm really grateful that BTG is a benevolent presence in my life, because he does have an outsized influence on my mind. Thank goodness for psychologists. They are all reparenting us one by one into healthier ways of seeing.)
And then another thing happened during that surf session that brought this idea home. I love being on a spiritual path, because I find it is a conversation. I put out a question, and if I'm paying attention, I get an answer. There is a saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." Teachers are available in every moment of our lives if we're paying attention, including a surf session on a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon. BTG and the surf group have been big teachers. The books I read, the wisdom I'm taking in -- all teachers. Headline of this lesson in the spiritual curriculum: I got snaked. I think.
"Getting snaked" means that someone paddled around me to get to the peak of the wave when I was already paddling for it. I was pretty close to the peak and when I started paddling, there was no one else on the wave, no one at all to my south, where the peak was. I looked both ways and even looked behind me to see how close the wave was -- no one was there. After the look, I paddled hard, because the wave was close: right, left, right, left, the wave lifted me, I went to pop up -- no more than 2 seconds -- and wham! There was another surfer on the wave in front of me. I apologized profusely, but was really confused. Where did this guy come from?
He had paddled around me but was still behind me when I looked. I didn't see him. In the 2 seconds it took me to paddle, he went closer to the peak and popped up on the wave. I felt terrible for about a minute, then I realized that I had seen him approaching the wave from the north when I turned the board to paddle for the wave. He was far away, definitely further away from the peak at that point than I was, and didn't appear to be going near the wave I was going for. He snuck in there though. So did I get snaked? He was closer to the peak. He got on the wave first. But he paddled around me to get there.
There are ethics in surfing: etiquette. Something every beginner needs to be aware of. While the first rule of surf etiquette says that the person nearest the peak has priority for the wave, there are also other rules that can influence whose turn it is to take a wave. Etiquette is about sharing the waves and safety. The worst thing you can do to someone is drop in on their wave, ruining their ride -- it's both unsafe and you've cut in line, so to speak. Some people think that back paddling, or snaking, is the worst thing you can do. Apparently, this is controversial. My Endless Sun surf instructor says one thing (see pictures below of Instagram conversation), and my Endless Summer surf instructors said another. Endless Summer gave us a whole lesson on etiquette and their most vociferous call to action was, "DON'T BE A SNAKE!"
So, was I snaked? I still don't know. Beach breaks are so difficult, because the peak is always in a slightly different place, and I'm still a beginner. In the moment, I apologized. That's the first thing that's important. The more important thing though is that I don't think I would have even seen this as snaking had I not just, minutes before, concluded that I have as much right to be here as anyone else. I got an answer to my question, "How would my life be different if I believed I had a right to be here?" The answer came to me, "I would get more waves." I would take more chances, have more confidence, go for it more often -- whatever "it" is. I would assert my place in the line up. I would belong more to myself and therefore have more confidence and a greater ability to serve the world in a positive and healthy way.
I have been getting to know the depth of my powerlessness lately -- really feeling it. My traumas, the events of my life, have conspired to teach me powerlessness and a lack of caring for others; forced my little self into a belief in selfishness and survival above all, that I don't matter. These beliefs are undermining my joyful and healthy existence, turning my gaze endlessly inward, protective, instead of outward, compassionate and loving. What do I do with this now that I can see it? I've been reading books by Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries lately. In Tattoos on the Heart, he writes, "The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives." I have believed this for too long: that my life matters less than other lives. The snake believed he had more right to that wave than I did. He had no trouble cutting me off and then telling me I was wrong for getting in his way. It is time to see shit like this clearly and think more about my own place in the world.
In a recent post from Tricycle for their Meditation Month program, they wrote, "Wisdom is seeing what’s really happening, what’s really here." In a previous life, literally weeks ago that's how fast change is happening in my head, I would have felt really bad about crashing into someone. It would have been all my fault. Boyle writes, “James Allison says, 'Sin is an addiction to being less than ourselves.' It still comes down to seeing. We are not willfully strangers to ourselves. Homies are stuck in the cave as a hiding place from a bombardment of hurt.” I've excavated a lot of my hurt in the past year. I've realized that I am a separate person from my mom, and recently, I think, I've also gotten some space from my various parts, my little inner children who have been running the show out of fear and rage. Feeling more True Self-contained and True Self-possessed, this independence from being under their influence gives me space to see things even more clearly and make different choices, think differently, about my life and agency. In the book On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, write, "... little by little, we withdraw our energy from the loss and begin to invest it in life." I'm taking these baby steps every day to invest in my life and I can feel the difference. Seeing the snake as a snake is but one example. Whether or not experts would judge that I actually got snaked is irrelevant to the recognition that I am an equal surfer out there. Worthy of that wave.
Father Boyle's words have been a balm recently -- when the student is ready, the teacher appears -- a lighthouse shining the route to a new way to feel, new ways to believe. Though I do not often frame my favorite learnings through the lens or language of God, Father Boyle's words create a soothing feeling within me. I envy the clarity of such people. Through his examples, I'm finding that, like one of his Homies, I can hear a new voice. "In this early morning call Cesar did not discover that he has a father. He discovered that he is a son worth having. The voice broke through the clouds of his terror and the crippling mess of his own history, and he felt himself beloved." My voice whispers, "I have a right to be here." Boyle writes so beautifully, "Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, says, 'How narrow is the gate that leads to life.' Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way. St. Hedwig writes, 'All is narrow for me, I feel so vast.' It’s about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son/daughter worth having.”
Whether or not I got that message from my upbringing, I can decide to know that for myself now. Boyle again, "'How many things have to happen to you,' Robert Frost writes, 'before something occurs to you?' Change awaits us. What is decisive is our deciding.” I decide, finally, that I am worthy. He goes on, "The poet Shelley writes, 'To love and bear, to hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.' How does one hang in there with folks, patiently taking from the wreck of a lifetime of internalized shame, a sense that God finds them (us) wholly acceptable?” I'm not so much worried about what God finds, but what I myself am now finding: my self, True Self in the language of Jung, wholly acceptable. (Perhaps God and my True Self are the same thing -- everything and everyone coming out of the Oneness the Buddhists describe.)
Father Boyle wrote, "The hidden wholeness seen and coaxed out of its hiding place. 'To those in darkness, show yourselves.'" In a new book called Cherished Belonging, Boyle describes the community he and his Homies have created at Homeboy. He describes "cherished belonging," "a community of tenderness," and says, "Homeboy shines a light that reminds us that a civilized people cares for each other." Compassion and "loving without measure" are the keys to healing. That's what has helped me get here. As I have described many times, the love and belonging of the Surfing Sisterhood has done the healing work for me, alongside the compassionate, consistent presence of BTG. I have felt myself beloved for nearly two years now and I might have finally internalized it.
Jack Kornfield wrote recently, "There grows with wisdom a sense of trust that we’re part of something bigger, as a famous Ojibwe saying goes, 'Sometimes I go about pitying myself when all the while I’m being carried by great winds across the sky.'" The snake didn't see himself as part of something bigger. I do. I have a place in the line up. But I don't want to be a snake. That's not a good model for how I want to be in the world. So another level of reflection around this was how to move differently in the world without being so selfish? I don't want to be a wave hog. It isn't about me, it's about how I can serve the world while remaining true to my values. A more narrow focus. In the "the long, hard (slow) work of returning to" myself, I will make different choices based on different models. The Sisterhood for one: generosity, inclusion, unrelenting support, joyful interactions, unconditional love. Every one is lifted by any one's success. We cheer each other on. We know there will always be more waves and even when there aren't waves, we have each other. Homeboy Industries has clear ethics: compassion for everyone, no matter what. Kinship. Boyle quotes Mother Theresa, "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." Everyone has a place in the line up.
I can choose which perspective to take in any given moment, choosing to see the whole line up from the broadest possible perspective. In Opening the Hand of Thought, one of the translators, Daitsu Tom Wright, writes about jiko. Jiko is the word for self in Buddhism. Remember that everything in Buddhism operates on two levels (at least): the everyday, relative, dual world, and the formless, absolute, nondual world. Self then also has (at least) two meanings; jiko is used for both of them. There is the individual self in our dual, everyday world, and the universal self or the original self, in the nondual, absolute world of oneness, "which is the self that is born with or inherently has a buddha nature. All sentient beings possess the seed of awakened or awakening being, so original self is universal." We are both. We are always both: our unique selves and an expression of the Absolute. Ourselves and Oneness. Jung and Freud said basically the same thing: ego and Self. Jiko.
So we practice meditation to cultivate a relationship with the universal and bring it into our personal life on the day-to-day. As Dogen teaches, "live the nonduality of duality." Meditation allows us to practice seeing our limiting beliefs as simply thoughts, the thinnest gossamer, and release them. From that Tricycle article, "Wisdom is seeing what’s really happening, what’s really here. In particular, we’ve been looking at what happens when we see thoughts as thoughts. This can be very powerful when we’re working with thoughts about ourselves, because one of the ways in which we experience suffering is by getting stuck in the story of ourselves. We frequently identify with thoughts about who we think we are instead of looking with wisdom and awareness to see what our actual experience is like." Uchiyama Roshi writes in Opening the Hand of Thought that “we have to forget or let go of all the narrow ideas we might have about who we are.” When Father Boyle calls us to share cherished belonging, to see that everyone is "unshakably good," and that we all belong to each other, he is asking us to do the same thing. Don't let our stories about people or ourselves limit us from what we can be, what we truly are. Jiko. Through consistent practice, we clarify ourselves, like a broth, in order to clearly see our inherent lovability and interconnectedness; filtering out the beliefs about ourselves and others that limit us, limit everyone.
Nancy Mujo Baker in Opening to Oneness writes of the process that happens when you begin to remove these veils of illusion, of separateness, and begin to see things just as they are, "...with more and more practice and experience, our world begins to change. We start 'living out of' our realization more and more, which means experiencing things, people, and precepts more often just as they are with no added stories, expectations, reactions, shoulds, preferences, or concepts. We start experiencing less separation, and at the same time a kind of spaciousness and freedom in our form-filled world. This is what Dogen calls 'coming from the side of Buddha' in the relative world of functioning.” Just like Boyle, the Buddhists believe that we all come from the same place and anything not loving is deluded. Uchiyama Roshi writes, "To concretize the eternal, that is the task before us." Jiko. Both. Always both.
As I kid, I was taught to deny my own voice, my own inner knowing, and accept authority's judgements, society's mandates for materialism and achievement -- stories I had no choice but to embrace, yet somewhere deep down I knew something was amiss. I believe we all do: we all have that inner knowing, that thought voiced by Doyle in Untamed, that "hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this." Now, as I continue to deny that denial that I was given, separate from these stories, the illusion of separateness, survival, and selfishness, I continue to move toward wholeness, individuation, and oneness. This is an ongoing practice, just like surfing itself. I get out there and go for waves. I pay attention and I paddle. At some point, it will get easier. The self-defeating habits of mind will be replaced by better ones; the beliefs that limit me will be replaced by more expansive ones, and finally perhaps simply an openness, a clarity. No self or non self. Not knowing toward an ever refining bearing witness. Joseph Goldstein said, "We come out of all the posturings of self and we actually engage in the activity of wisdom." I continue to practice meditation to simply see my beliefs. Get over myself. Uchiyama Roshi would call it "the most spiritually refined way to live."
Practice includes rest. I recently took a trip up to Spirit Rock, a meditation center north of San Francisco founded by my teacher from the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program. It was a different kind of decision for me, one that is more aligned with who I am becoming rather than who I have been. I've done a lot of work in the past year, taken out a lot of "load-bearing coping mechanisms." I was getting bogged down in the finding shit wrong with me, dissection of ego, memories of trauma, my damaged self and the fears that arose in acknowledging that damage. The integration effort needed some breathing room. I reconnected with the parts of myself that I value and love. I took a long road trip and got to know my beautiful new home, California: the groves of fruit trees and grapevines, the many, many mountain ranges, the slow coast from San Francisco to Monterey. I went to Muir Woods and Point Reyes, saw elephant seals, and hiked on cliff edges. I did two short silent retreats at Spirit Rock, and read many books. I contemplated my right to be here and how I want to be in the world moving forward. I find I'm much more solid after connecting with my own values. David Whyte writes in his poem The House of Belonging, "This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love." As Father Boyle writes, I can be "more faithful to loving" now that I feel more grounded in the real me.
(The real me, by the way, is entirely now a California hippie surfer chick. There I was on New Year's Eve, singing the metta chant at my meditation center in Northern California, under the compassionate eye of Quan Yin, floating on the good vibes, full of joy, wearing my Uggs and my beanie -- the person who left Chicago 20 years ago would not recognize me today. It was another out of body moment that filled me with laughter. This whole transformation thing just keeps getting better and better.)
From this stronger internal posture, I find I can be more open. Listening to Anderson Cooper's podcast All There Is, Cooper said, "I am finally admitting that I'm not ok." Yes. Thank you. This simple sentence allowed me to reframe the focus on all that is wrong with me. I am not ok. How freeing to admit that I am not ok. One of my load-bearing coping mechanisms is that "I'm the OK one." I am not ok. And somehow, I am more ok admitting my not-ok-ness than I ever was insisting that I was ok. Another veil falls, humility and compassion grow, and I am more free to be who I am. Claiming my place in the line up as me, as a version of me that is another step closer to the truest version of me. Worthy of being loved as I am. BTG talked of Opening the Hand of Thought and said it was about, "Creating a posture of wakefulness allowing everything to unfold in that posture. Creating a home for things to unfold in. Nothing to be resisted or held on to or generated - just allowing things to unfold within you." I will continue to practice with a deep curiosity toward watching how things unfold as I get closer to this truest version of myself, more grounded, more faithful to loving, more connected. Jiko. My house of belonging.
How would my life be different if I believed I had a right to be here? Believed that I was naturally good, inherently valuable, fabulous, divine, glorious? I mean really believed it? Felt it in my bones? Father Boyle talked about a Homie, writing, "He embraced this goodness -- his greatness -- and nothing was the same again." The loveliest lesson from Tattoos on the Heart is that people just decided. They decide things are going to be better, and then, by and large, they are. They actually get better. Their broken hearts are the key that opened the door to their journey.
I have been struggling with grief for only about a year, openly and honestly, really facing it. In the podcast All There Is, Anderson Cooper interviewed Andrew Garfield. In it, Garfield says many wise things, including, "We have to be in enough pain and enough longing to say Help Me. And only with collaborating in that way, with approaching the mystery with all of that vulnerability, confusion, and lostness, do we get any kind of answer." He allowed himself to "feel broken," to feel the "dislocation and humility it brings," and the cruelty of the world even as we remain in it.
And then beautifully, he said that as a result of this grief, "I feel like the same person. I just feel deeper in the same person, more expanded, more cracked open. It's like the heart breaks and breaks and breaks and lives by breaking in times of great loss. And you expand. Hopefully you become bigger, the heart becomes bigger, you become more confused and less certain of anything. And for me, what I want to be is more curious about what we're what we're all doing here. Rather than narrow and driven and certain. I want it to break me open. I want to be... I want to be lost. It feels healthier than to feel like you know where you are heading. It's scary and real. It's like the rest is illusion." James Hollis, in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, echoes this sentiment when he writes, "The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young." I'm ready for this now. That's a lineup I want to be in, even with the snakes.
Do I have a right to be here? No. Neither do you. Which means we both have as much right to be here as anyone else. We don't have a right, but I think if we do it right, we have a place. A place and a purpose in community, in kinship, if we are lucky enough to find it. Dropping my stories, my limiting beliefs about self and other, I hope to find that place and purpose, that kinship. Paraphrasing David Whyte, I can simply enter the conversation, pay attention, and find people who help me grow into my new life. It has already started. I will stop obeying my conditioning and start listening to wise people to help guide my way, like poet Mary Oliver, who houses the whole wisdom of the universe in her pen: Wild Geese.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Comments