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I've been listening and reflecting, as part of my daily practice in the morning, to an interview Dan Harris did with Vinny Ferraro on his 10% Happier You Tube channel. I've recently shared this elsewhere on this blog. Ferraro is an American Buddhist teacher whose approach to practice I'm appreciating. In it he said the sentence above. Are we all too loyal to our suffering, do we take everything that happens to us far far too personally?
A friend of mine once stated that worldly reality was not malicious, vengeful or doing things deliberately to thwart and make you suffer. Worldly reality was actually indifferent to what we think about it, what you think you want from it, what you desire and wish for. Doesn't care one jot about any of that. And that is really what makes our suffering so existentially painful. It would be so much easier if we could believe it was a result of a God expressing their displeasure with us. But actually, out there, there are simply circumstances and conditions into which we step and throw in some of our own, and sometimes what happens is favourable, and at other times it is not.
Instead of this creating an ability in us to maintain some distance and perspective, we tend to become completely intoxicated with the tragic nature of our suffering. The words we surround our suffering with, like tragic, egregious, fatal, terminal, persistent, malignant, long suffering, degrading, decimating - all inform you of the narrative framework of hatred, aversion and resistance we place our suffering within. We don't like our suffering, obviously, but it is all ours nonetheless. As it becomes ever deeper entwined in the possessiveness of - I, Me & Mine.
Buddhist teachings usually suggests you find ways of learning to see the nature of reality as it is, rather than how you want it to be. It's not easy, by any means, as we can so quickly be swept away on the wings of our desires. The American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, would say that Buddhist meditation practice was all about cultivating a bigger container for our experience. Making us able to hold more of our experience without wanting to push or run away from it. That has to include our suffering, not just the nice stuff. There is a way of staying loyal to our suffering that isn't clinging and possessive, but is instructive and potentially liberating.
In June this year, it will be two years since my heart attack. And this was undoubtedly one helluva huge wake up call. Suddenly mortality was top of the agenda. I think about this in someway every day, it's not something you forget easily. But I am also aware of the experience now becoming part of the normal background noise of my life, and perhaps it is losing a bit of its cutting edge as a result. It's slowly drifting into the usual human pattern of fully experiencing the suffering, you survive it, you move on, and then slowly forget what it's taught you. You cease remaining loyal to your suffering as that potent reminder of your mortality, what that suffering has taught you, the moment your desire to totally move on from it closes the door too firmly behind you. Consigning it to the dungeon of the past.
And in a sense Buddhist practice itself, encourages you to avoid unhelpfully dwelling upon anything negative or unwholesome. It can in the name of not unhelpfully dwelling fall into a similar tendancy of moving on too quickly. To forget how a closer reflection on the state of suffering itself can be instructive. Meditation practice can certainly enable you to live through difficult experiences with a higher degree of calm or equanimity, yet leave the causes and symptoms, unexamined, And unexamined suffering if it becomes buried, can exist like an angry gremlin in the depths of your psycho-physical body.
I've been aware lately that there's a layer of life experience I'm reticent to look into. Though I've had friends, there is a lonely way of being within me that has its roots in childhood bullying, that formed a tendency to withdraw into a self contained mode whenever the outside world got too difficult or challenging. I think of myself now as being good at being alone with myself, and in the present day that is mostly true. But there was a time in the past where I was lonely and was less settled and at peace with who I am. And that experience still exists within me, I sense the shadow of it, emotionally tender, largely unexamined and unprocessed.
There is a way of staying loyal to the experience of suffering, that avoids becoming embroidered into the detailed fabric and design of your personal tapestry. The habitual way you think about and interpret your life experiences. Once the suffering experience has abated somewhat, it can be slightly easier to just observe the suffering in retrospect. Still in touch with what you have just been through, but less inclined to be totally taken in by it. But to do that effectively does require us to become that bigger container for our experience, able to hold the pain and suffering we encounter without becoming painfully embroiled in it all over again. To hold the suffering like an archeological artifact you've unearthed and make informed judgements about it's age and provenance, and how it fits into the framework of the internal story you tell about yourself. And in time, to see through the state of suffering itself, by loosening the ties to I Me & Mine we have previously forged.
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