I enter my therapist's office (come on, we've already talked about this) and kick off my shoes as is my habit. We go through the formalities of him offering coffee and me refusing as I settle onto his sagging leather couch in sukhasana (easy crossed leg pose). I take a deep breath.
"Hmm. I'm feeling anxious," I share. "That's interesting."
"Why do you think that is?" T asks. He's well practiced at his role.
"I think it's a conditioned response to this environment." My gesture takes in the painting of the muddy mountain river, the stuffed gorillas on the empty chair, the plastic statue of Freud next to the horrible decades-old brass lamp. "Plus there's the whole context of therapy, isn't there?" I pause and think. "I spend so much of my time in other contexts, like studying yoga, that this one feels very different."
I elaborate, "Therapy presupposes a lot, doesn't it? Just by walking in the door, it supposes that I have problems and that you have answers. I'm deficient somehow, or flawed, and you will give me what I need to be fixed. Also there's whole cultural concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, knowledge and ignorance. It invokes hierarchy, patriarchy, and authority. It stirs the part of me that wants to get the "right" answers, the A on the test, and win approval."
"Are you doing that?" he asks.
"No." I'm quite sure. "If I were trying to win at therapy, we would have begun very differently. I could easily be taking us down the road of here-was-my-problem-this-week. " I sigh. "But I just don't have enough pathology for that do I? We're doing something quite different, more relational, less fixed."
I pause and smile at T, acknowledging that most clients don't begin at this level. "Isn't this a great start? We're taking apart the whole structure of what you do with your life within the first five minutes. Didn't you miss me over vacation?"
******
During his holiday visit, my beloved brother offered a concerned observation. "You know, Sis, you're clearly unhappy."
I went through all the same reactions you would. First I was in denial. What does he mean I'm not happy? I AM happy. Then I got defensive. Well, how does he know? Is he the happiness expert? He shouldn't judge my life.
Then I went with his assessment and the panic set in. Oh my God. I'm not happy. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with my life? I must fix it immediately!
Of course, all of this occurred in split seconds while our outward conversation moved to some other topic.
It stayed with me though, niggling in my mind. Only about two days later did realization slowly creep over me, like the sun sliding through a morning window.
Who says that we should be happy? What's wrong with being unhappy?
In my case this particularly makes sense. I've had some horribly difficult experiences over the last few years. My life holds the possibility for tremendous tumult. Why should I expect myself to feel happy at all? Being unhappy is probably the only sane response actually.
Of course, the moment you give yourself permission to be unhappy and stop striving so hard for happiness, you relax. Then you notice that actually you're happy some of the time. In my case, a lot of the time. Just not all the time. My brother caught me in the frantic throes of holiday-guest-family interactions in an unhappy moment.
So what?
I mention this because an opportunity for this sort of acceptance arose again this afternoon.
Arriving home from errands, I stepped out onto my driveway and glanced up. The sun was streaming through the blue sky. The trees were perfect tree-green and waving in a breeze. This absolute gorgeousness stopped me in my tracks and convinced me to sit down on the brick retaining wall to soak it in.
I'm so blessed in this moment, I thought as contentment washed over me. Today I am happy. I'm feeling strong and determined. I'm feeling hopeful and loving. I feel good. Everything feels like it's heading towards balance and positive energy.
Instantly, I got clingy. How can I keep things stable like this?
Then I caught myself. Who says things need to be stable? I don't have to stay happy. I don't always have to be strong and content. I can simply be whatever I am in that moment. Life will cycle. It is inevitable; fighting that by trying to hold on to any emotional state is as ridiculous as trying to stop the sun from moving.
Pema Chodroen, a Buddhist teacher, explains that each moment is fresh, an awakening of realization. Even after decades of meditation practice, she still is learning to accept the awakening of each moment.
The state of life is flow and change. When we try to "create ground", to find something firm to hold on to all we do is create tremendous suffering. I think we all know this, but still we fight it. For some reason, the flow of reality terrifies us all, even those among us who are more familiar with it.
My happiness today comes from my willingness to be accepting - of my true self, of my desires, of my values, of others, and of the nature of life.
Yoga class today ended with my favorite benediction:
May our hearts crack open with love
May we be awakened to our true natures
May we be healed
May we be a source of healing to all beings
Namaste
5 comments:
I used to have a lot of guilt when I was not happy. I have no answers, just saying I know what you are feeling right now.
You are on a journey familiar to my own, it sounds.
What I learned over a period of (sometimes excruciating) time was that there are two types of happy and all of us tend to confuse them.
There is day-to-day happiness: a child's first steps, a job well done at work, someone saying hello with a smile.
Then there is the overarching, LIFE happiness.
I was happy day to day. Mostly. Underneath it, though, I was struggling. I was not achieving what I wanted out of life. I wasn't giving myself the time or the space to be me. That's the overarching happy. I didn't have it. And I focused on the small day to day stuff and (deliberately) assigned it as overall happiness.
It's a forest and trees analysis. The trees representing the days. You see them and you say "I have a good life. I'm healthy. My kids love me. I'm happy." but you step back and spot the foreboding forest and see that it is ablaze and you are ill-equipped to douse it.
My point: taking stock in the beauty of the sunlight, or the smile on your child's face, or your husband's touch is a good thing. It's when you look at the much bigger picture (i.e., Is This What I Want to Be/Have/Do?) you will begin to see what you need to do to get there.
And it's usually a drastic step.
Dear Bridge -
So nice to hear from you.
Thanks for the empathy. In general, I think guilt is a fairly useless emotion. Like anger and fear, it does serve the purpose of prodding us into different actions, but I think most of us have WAY too much of it.
Especially we twenty-first century women who expect and are expected to do everything, and to do it well. And also to be beautiful! :)
Have a lovely day!
M
Dear Andrew -
Thanks for the comment.
I'm not sure I agree with you. Actually those moments of sunlight or smiles may be all the happiness that is. We think we will find overarching happiness, but I'm not sure that can exist.
I do believe in overarching contentment and even Bliss - which is the ultimate goal of many religious teachings- but I think happiness is by its nature short-lived.
This is what the Buddhists mean by trying to find ground. We sense that the nature of life is transitional and unfixed. That terrifies us, so we spend all our time and energy trying to establish and hold on to some long-term, stable emotional and even physical state. But that's not possible. And so we suffer.
Our beliefs and our expectations create our dissatisfaction because we are so enamoured with what we think we should be and have that
we are unable to see what is.
It reminds me of the last stanza of the poem Richard Cory -
"So on we worked
And waited for the light
And went without the meat
And cursed the bread..."
They're so busy working towards a distant future and thinking of what they don't have, that they are cursing the blessings that they do.
There's a lot more to this we could discuss.
In any case, I appreciate your sharing and I sense that your own path is much better for you now. The more I read of Surfacing, the more eager I am to read your next novel!!
Good writing today (and hi to C and co.),
Marie
How does your brother know happiness, to be able to define your lack?
I know. If you have all the toys then you're happy? NAH.
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