The Gold Standard of Pity Parties

I can be the Martha Stewart of pity parties and I know how to throw a good one. From early childhood I struggled with depression and I've made some very bad choices over the course of my life. Listing them would take too much time, be overwhelming, and as well, it would be pointless. The important thing is that as I've grown personally and healed and I've been willing to confront my dark side. One of the hors d'oeuvres I've always liked to serve at my pity parties is the "what-might-have-been" recipe. It's been a frequent favorite.

This past week I was watching an episode of Oprah that focused on the incidence of sexual abuse of boys. During the show, the issue of forgiveness came up, and for me, one of the pearls from that show was a comment that Oprah made that part of the forgiveness process includes the task to "give" up our wishful thinking that the past might have been different. This struck a chord with me. I've always been aware that we have to let go of the "what-might-have-been" thinking, but I've never before associated it with the forgiveness process.

What I realized at that "aha" moment was that the person I've most had difficulty forgiving was myself and my bad choices. During way too many decades of my life I have run away from myself even down to the simplest decision not to major in English in college when literature was my deepest passion. For way too long I focused on trying to be what I thought others needed me to be. Indeed there have been many people in my life who were quite happy to encourage me to try to march goose-step with their pictures of who I should be, and thus I certainly have known betrayal.

However, the biggest betrayal was self-inflicted, and anytime I spend wishing I had done this or that differently is simply another form of self-betrayal. The truth is that I did not do things differently. And what if I had? Which of the many, many blessings would I have missed, and do I really think I'm so smart that I could do a more perfected life if given a do-over? I don't think so. If there is anything I've learned in life, it's that it really is true that at each moment we all do the best we can. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle, "We do doodily do, what we must muddily must."

I have written before of The Mother's instruction to be simply goodwilled and to do the best that one can (August 18 blog). Perhaps once we have been willing to look at and acknowledge our dark side, the person to whom we should most afford our goodwill is ourselves and to make a space for the light within that is our true Self. Self-reproach should not be confused with self-evaluation. Indeed, self-reproach is just another hors d'oeuvre at a Martha Stewart pity party. The real task is to keep on turning toward that which is our truest and best self. Recognize the tar baby (Sept. 30 blog) and keep on moving!

Sick of Summer

I've been irritable lately and not feeling very well. Someone commented recently that I didn't look like I felt very well and I replied, "No, I haven't been feeling well...maybe I'm just sick of summer!" She laughed. However, this time every year I'm truly fed up with the oppressive heat. I am so hot natured that whenever I'm in a group and someone asks me whether I think it's too cold, my response is always, "I'm the wrong person to ask." If it's too cold for me, then it is likely that everyone else in the group has died from hypothermia.

I can get down on myself when I'm so bitchy and I wish I weren't. However, the reality is, at least at present, that I'm a good deal away from perfect or serene or whatever the illusive state of being is that I seek, and I am all too frequently confronted with the reality of me. During my life I have often watched, with some wonder, people who seem to be so utterly sure of themselves and their own reality. I so constantly question my own assumptions about myself and my perceptions of the world that the older I grow the dumber I feel.

My only comfort is that in terms of spiritual growth, which is utimately what is meant by personal growth, that knowing ourselves is the greatest confrontation and task. Even as a young child I remember asking my mother how one knows when God is commanding one to do something. I had been told the story of Abraham being instructed to kill his son and, I reasonably asked, "What if God tells me to kill someone?" A very legitimate question. My mother, who I know now was but a youth in her own right, was disconcerted and admonished me that God would never tell me to do such a thing.

I was not then assuaged and I am not now. Even a cursory following of the news rapidly reveals how many of us humans in the name of our respective religions vow that we are only doing God's will. I've never been certain about how I can separate my own human egoistic aspirations from that of the purity of God's will. I'm not that trusting of my ego. I am even sometimes jealous of others' seeming certitude.

Yet I must join The Mother in her jest of such human frailty when she shared a joke about the same subject:

"You know the story of the irritable elephant, his mahout and the man who would not make way for the elephant. Standing in the middle of the road, the man said to the mahout, "The divine Will is in me and the divine Will wants me not to move." The driver, a man of some wit, answered, "But the divine Will in the elephant wants you to move!" (March 14, 1951, The Mother, Questions and Answers 1950-1951, Volume 4, page 208)

I'm continuing to try to get out of the way of the Divine Will and life goes on.

Becoming who you already are...

"It is so good to be simple, simply goodwilled, to do the best one can, and in the best way possible; not to build anything very considerable but only to aspire for progress, for light, a peace full of goodwill, and let That which knows in the world decide for you what you will become and what you will have to do." The Mother, July 21, 1954, from The Mother, Collected Works, Vol. 6 Questions and Answers 1954, p.248.

We have all heard the dictum "become who you already are." Once the question was put to me, "why don't you let people see who you really are?" That was decades ago. I was flummoxed by the question then, but knowing what I know now, I would have answered, "because I don't know who I am."

Becoming who we already are seems simple on the face of it, yet the recognition of that "who" requires, at least for most of us, a lifetime of relentless self-evaluations, assessments and recognitions. The above quote from The Mother is on my refrigerator because I recognized in her words something profound that I needed to come to terms with. Particularly, I wrestled with the words, ..."let That which knows in the world decide for you what you will become and what you will have to do."

How could that surrender be accomplished? Didn't I have to do something by way of collaboration? These questions brought out the executive in me. Where's the plan, the strategy, the goals, and the to-do list? I've travelled down a million rabbit paths, some of them so bizarre as to boggle the mind. I've longed for a deeply spiritual, connected life, and it has usually seemed to me that to live in this material world is to live entirely contrary to what I longed for. I've resented the material world and all its demands and I've rebelled against it.

Then there was a period of simply letting go of all my executive plans and there was an effort to "just be" - be goodwilled, do the best I could and in the best way possible. After some time of these efforts, what began to emerge was a growing awareness that the one part of the being that I had actively and fiercely rejected was the passion for reading and writing.

Even with this growing awareness, however, there was the desire to "take control, to make a plan." Finally, I simply began to read and write again, without struggle and without any desire to "build anything very great." I just did it with an intense awareness that for whatever reason, these things are a core part of my heart and soul and who I am. There has been a peace that has descended, a peace that I have never known before, and the writing happens without rancour or struggle. There is a becoming of who I already am.

There are no answers to questions of why, or what does the future hold. There is only this moment, which by the Grace of the Divine feels deeply connected.

Namaste.

Passion as Being

I did not write yesterday. Didn't feel like it. Rather, I enjoyed my morning tea, reading the newspaper, and working the crossword puzzle before heading out to work. It was lovely, peaceful, and I felt guilty as hell for the rest of the day!

In the previous blog, I quoted Sri Aurobindo's admonition about wandering at the call of one's Soul and this morning I woke thinking about a quote from his collaborator, The Mother, born Mirra Alfassa in Paris to an Egyptian mother and a Turkish father, "When you do anything with a sense of compression of one's being, you can be sure you are doing it in the wrong way." This teaching brought an awareness that passion is about being and not about being driven. A passion that primarily has a driven force behind it easily looses sight of itself. A passion that is the driving force finds its fullest and most complete expression. Discipline is required in either case. Driven discipline causes the spirit of passion to become dry, depleted. Lived passion waters and nourishes the Spirit and being and doing are merged. Its opposite is what, to me, is meant by the "sense of a compression of one's being."

Like most writers, I too, have had my vision of the great work of fiction that would stand alongside War and Peace. I'm quite certain that is not to be, because despite my love of great fiction, I have been painfully aware of my own pathetic attempts at it. I am meant to write differently.

The Mother also instructs:

"The first thing to do then is to find out what it is that you are meant to realise, what is the role you have to play, your particular mission, and the capacity or quality you have to express. You have to discover that and also the thing or things that oppose and do not allow it to flower or come to full manifestation. In other words, you have to know yourself, recognise your soul or psychic being." (from the Collected Works of The Mother - Centenary Edition,Volume 15, page. 257, copyright Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pres, Pondicherry, India, 1978)

I have always had the fantastical illusion that somehow the expression of my passion would be an event. I understand now that it is not an event. Rather, it is a process of removing those things that oppose it. If constancy to the process is maintained, being and doing will gradually merge and be manifested by effortless discipline, and hesitancy will disappear.

Namaste.