It was a rough weekend. And the roughness started on Thursday night. It's the kind of experience that I look back on and parts seem foolish and so blown out of proportion, but in the moment, or the MANY moments of actually experiencing the horrible storm of emotions, there didn't seem to be another way. I felt like my brain was half functional. The side of me that felt like I needed to get a hold of myself, that decided to do yoga to move myself through the emotions and release some energy, versus the side of me that just kept spiraling and looping with negative thoughts and anger and hurt. For hours. And I woke up the next morning and the storm was right there waiting for me. I thought I'd gotten to the other side and sent what seemed like a reasonable text to David outlining my complaint. I had no idea the can of worms it would open. After a long, rough day with lots of exchanged texts, lots of thought, and finally some face to face conversation, and then MORE conversation the next night, I finally came to true clarity about the situation and my own culpability in how things went down. It was painful to see how effectively I had shielded myself from the truth of where I was at, and how expertly I'd wielded the tools of deflection and blame to get myself off the hook. It's almost like I'd had decades of practice doing just that....sigh.
Saturday I was reading from Thich Nhat Hanh's book No Mud, No Lotus and I read the part where he goes through the six mantras. The fourth mantra is "I suffer. Please help." It hit me that if I'd paused on Thursday night to try and really be honest about what was going on, I might have been able to realize this: I was suffering. I could (should!) ask for help. This mantra and this idea have so much vulnerability in them. Most of us would rather act like we are stronger than the hurt but this leads to withdrawing from the person or people or retaliating in some way. After the fact, I could see that the suffering I was feeling was tied to a Core Fear so doing anything seemed better than going to that place of vulnerability, face to face with the Fear.
Monday I pulled a rune from my box and it was Wunjo, the rune of joy. In the description in the little guidebook I have was this line, "If you hide from truth, you hide from happiness." And we are probably mostly familiar with the passage from the New Testament, "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." The truth we need to not hide from, the truth that will set us free, is the truth about ourselves. Ram Dass said, "The simple rules of this game are being honest with ourselves about where we’re at, and learning to listen, to be able to hear how it all is." (For a lovely read on accepting and allowing ourselves to be human, click here: https://www.ramdass.org/our-own-beauty/)
Many Sundays I attend my local Buddhist sangha, and at the end we have Dharma share, which is when people can share how the teachings (Dharma) are benefiting their lives. I felt like I had awareness of how the Dharma could have helped me avoid all of the mess of the weekend, but didn't. So I shared it as an example of not living the dharma. But even with the regret and heartache, I felt encouraged by the way I was able to eventually get to honesty, and that David and I were able to work through the problems together and reach back towards each other to reconnect. But damn, it was exhausting.
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