Orienting Toward Love

This piece is from my column in Chonogram called, Flowers Fall, July 01, 2012 .

Azalea was six.

Which means I was a six year old mom.

Amazing to see how much and how little has changed.

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This summer I will put my girl on a bus for pony camp. And though this will be a new level of distance, I do have some experience with this separation business.

All year long our beloved friend and neighbor drove her to kindergarten every day, and off she went. And every day, there was something eerie about watching my baby’s head, motionless, moving away from me, with no thrashing struggle to stay close.

Sometimes I could see that her head was turned slightly toward her friend, or I imagined (hoped for) little ripples of laughter. Any way I looked at it, however, she was in another car. Even though we share the essential unity of all things, not to mention a lot of DNA, it is also true that her body exists in another world.

And I have some feelings about that.

T and I have been talking a lot about the idea of orienting toward pleasure, a concept he came across in his work with Somatic Experiencing, a body-based approach to trauma [shout out to Thayer, one of the S.E. O.G.’s!]

Does “orienting toward pleasure” mean just doing what feels good and avoiding what doesn’t? This happens to be the Buddha’s definition of suffering—that continuous search for the perfect moment, perfect life, meal to end all meals, the seamless relationship—otherwise known as samsara, otherwise known as hell.

So…maybe pleasure means just making my house prettier? Appreciating what I have? Stopping to smell the roses? Looing on the bright side?

Sort of, but optimism is kind of toxic.

And replacing one set of conditioned responses with a knee-jerk other is not exactly the liberation I have in mind.

And so, when I see my girl moving away from me, and I have that thought: There she goes, and my body falls into its familiar groove of melancholy, which often results in feelings of loss, or sadness (or guilty relief!), or some form of self-doubt or even, on a really dark and stormy day, self-hatred (as in, Look at how you’ve squandered this, that, and the other!), what can I do?

To orient toward pleasure, I first have to notice my habitual tendencies (see above). And wait. Take a gulp of not-knowing, allow a few beats of nothingness to arise. Using my senses, instead of my head, I can listen to the wind in the trees, feel my skirt against my legs, smell spring rising from the dirt.

I ought to be able to orient my self-habits in a new direction, toward open-heartedness, see what else is possible. I mean, my god, the universe is vast. There must be ways of being other than the handful of reactions I ricochet between. Even my more pleasant pings and pongs are reactive, in some way, seeking another dose of familiar comfort, which always leads to more familiar desire.

But allowing myself to rest in the genuine experience of being alive, even in the face of real sadness or disappointment or loss—that’s the orientation I am going for.

After all, the best way to get out of any bad situation, even a bucket of shit, frankly, is to totally, completely, utterly—wholeheartedly—make a decisive move.

Spazzing out will most definitely make matters much worse.

Let’s call that acting out of clarity.

But it’s more difficult than it appears to act out of clarity. Because we have to be clear!

That’s where this trap called “spiritual bypass,” a term coined by a guy named John Welwood, comes in:

Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I will call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an “occupational hazard” of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

Bypassing comes in all flavors, not just Buddhist ones. Who wants to face the mess when we don’t have to? The problem is, we really do have to. Or the mess ends up facing us—in the mirror, across the table, or in the lining of our gut.

And yet.

The belief that I have to face the music all the time, that tendency to be hypervigilant, on guard against denial lest I get embroiled even deeper in some unresolved mishegas is my “karmic situation,” and it is rooted in fear. It’s compulsive, habitual, some deal I made with the devil long ago, with the idea that if I kept myself spinning I would be safe from anyone else being able to turn me around in circles.

The thing is, it’s a lie. I can be turned, affected, let down, hurt. Bigtime. There is nowhere to hide.

And that’s the beauty of it all.

This morning A went to her last day of school with a tummy ache, not interested in her smoothie or cheese, just sad. So I let her munch on a piece of nutty chocolate as we moved through the morning routine, wanting to give her a little sweetness and some energy.

As I stood behind her, braiding her hair, cleaning her brand-new earrings, I listened to her little mouth munching, one of my favorite sounds in the whole world. I asked her if it tasted good, and she softly nodded. When I asked if it went down okay, like felt good in her tummy, she shrugged. When she was all tidied, I reached down, she turned around, her arms flew up, and she did her little jump into my body, squeezing me like a tree with her strong legs. My little monkey.

God help me just love this love.