"The wisdom of no escape" or how a jam tart saved me

So you might have noticed that December has been a hard month for me.  It hasn't all been bad.  There have been ups as well as downs.  And those ups have been pretty good while they lasted.  But I thought they would help make the downs suck less.  They don't.  Having ups even gave me a false sense of security.  Just when I thought I was getting through the worst of things, just when I thought I'd already hit my low point and was now coming out the other side, something happened to wallop me and make me see that there's always somewhere lower I could fall to.  It made me remember that quote I blogged about a few weeks ago - "Abandon any hope of fruition."  Not because I was feeling particularly morose and hopeless (ok, I was) but because there is a truth to it.

It may seem contrary to all your survival instincts and it hurts like hell, but when you are at that point when you feel there is nothing left to hold onto, when you feel there is no choice but to let go, when grasping and resisting and holding on - to anything - is so painful, you have to stop, that is the point at which things can start to turn around.  And the hardest part: there's nothing you can do about it.  Whether you resist it or welcome it - you can't make it happen.  All you can do is be through it.  Just be - when each minute feels like an hour and each hour feels like a year and each breath feels futile.  Resisting makes it worse.  I don't know what welcoming it does because I've never been able to do that.  But I imagine it could make it worse too - like the anticipation of an eagerly awaited visitor who is delayed, and delayed some more and delayed some more and you go from being angry at them to wondering what's happened to them to fearing the worst, to trying to bargain with whatever force you might suddenly decide to believe in just to make things ok again, until you reach the point where you give up because they're not coming and you wonder what you've done to deserve this.  And then they show up.

But life goes on.  And they leave and may not show up again and the whole cycle begins anew.  The only thing you have control over is trying not to escape.  The only thing you can do is to be there, wherever there is.

One of my low points this month was when a batch of jam tarts failed.  Go ahead, laugh.  Yes, I cannot bake without swearing, but this was monumental.  Things didn't actually turn out alright in the end.  I was making them for a community centre fundraiser.  I'd spent two hours making the damn things from scratch.  But I made a mistake and that mistake made itself clear all over my beautifully rolled out pastry.  I overfilled the tarts.  When I pulled them out of the oven, it looked like there had been a jam explosion.  I lost it. Obviously it wasn't just about the tarts.  But they tipped me over the edge.  I behaved just like a two-year old and had an almighty tantrum.  Afterwards, the tarts were still ruined and nothing had changed.

Something happened to me then.  Something in me cut off.  I didn't notice it straight away, but when I woke up the next morning, I realised that I felt numb.  Like there was a glass wall between me and the world.  I didn't feel anger or pain anymore, instead I just felt nothing.  A dull nothing.  That distressed me, but even that sense of distress was dulled.  I hadn't felt, or not-felt, this way for a long time.  Something sank in me.  I remember that the last time this happened, it went on for weeks.  I tried to prepare myself for it, to prepare myself for having to live like this.  All the things that seemed important, all the things I'd hoped to do, hoped to achieve, it all went out the window.  I knew I wouldn't have the energy to even try.  I knew that trying - to do anything at all - but especially to make me feel better - would only make it worse. 

I was standing in my kitchen.  Some of the ruined jam tarts from yesterday were still on a plate on the counter in front of me.  I went to throw them away and noticed that one of them was a lemon curd one.  I'd really wanted to try them, I hadn't had lemon curd for years.  So I took a bite.  The pastry still had a crunch to it, but also a buttery softness.  The sweet tangy lemon burst on my tongue.  The combination of the pastry and the lemon curd was exquisite.  For a few moments I forgot about everything but those tastes on my tongue.  Then I looked up and noticed the blueness of the sky and the outlines of the starlings on the roof opposite.  The sound of their calls hit my ears like I'd never heard them before.  Then I noticed that the glass barrier was gone, the dullness had lifted.  I'd been pulled into the present moment by my senses.  Nothing special, just tastebuds.  But I could feel again.  And I felt very fortunate. 

Of course things weren't all fine after that.  I've been sobbing for the Olympics for much of this week.  And each time, I felt better after.  But that's not the end of it.  Of course it's not going to be all bad.  But things will never be all fine either.  The point is there is no real escape.  So maybe, if you can let go and manage to be present, be mindful, pay attention, wherever you happen to be, maybe you'll find that there is also joy.  Even in the midst of all the crap.

"Abandon any hope of fruition"

I know I've been absent here lately.  Apologies.  I've also stopped writing small stones (I still don't know if this is a temporary hiatus or a more long-term one) and it appears I've also let my Stitch A Year project fall by the wayside.  But I have actually been writing, a lot.  On top of flashing here every week, I've also joined a local writer's group which has given me the incentive to edit all those weekly stories and even resurrect some poems I wrote years ago and had forgotten about.  I've also taken up a meditation practice which has sort of replaced the Stitch A Year project.  I just don't have the time to do it all and as ever, it's the truest things that remain. 

Alongside the meditation practice, I've been reading Pema Chodron's Start Where You Are.  The whole book is a revelation but the chapter entitled "Abandon any hope of fruition" is possibly the best thing I've ever read and I wanted to share it.  So I've pretty much typed out almost the whole chapter for you here:

"One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will.  As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.

One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not good enough.  We think back to the past a lot, which maybe was better than now, or perhaps worse.  We also think ahead quite a bit to the future - which we  may fear - always holding out hope that it might be a little bit better than now.  Even if now is going really well ... nevertheless there's a deep tendency to think about how it's going to be later.  We don't quite give ourselves full credit for who are in the present.  ...

In one of the first teachings I ever heard, the teacher said, "I don't know why you came here, but I want to tell you right now that the basis of this whole teaching is that you're never going to get everything together."  I felt a little like he had just slapped me in the face...but I've always remembered it.  There isn't going to be some precious future time when all the loose ends will be tied up.  Even though it was shocking to me, it rang true.  One of the things that keeps us unhappy is this continual searching for pleasure or security, searching for a little more comfortable situation, either at the domestic level or at the spiritual level or at the level of mental peace.

Nowadays, people go to a lot of different places trying to find what they're looking for.  There are 12-step programs...there are a lot of support groups and different therapy groups.  Many people feel wounded and are looking for something to heal them.  To me it seems that at the root of healing, at the root of feeling like a fully adult person, is the premise that you're not going to try to make anything go away, that what you have is worth appreciating.  But this is hard to swallow if what you have is pain. 

In Boston there's a stress-reduction clinic run on Buddhist principles.  It was started by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Buddhist practitioner and author of Full Catastrophe Living.  He says that the basic premise of his clinic - to which many people come with a lot of pain - is to give up any hope of fruition.  Otherwise the treatment won't work.  If there's some sense of wanting to change yourself, then it comes from a place of feeling that you're not good enough.  It comes from agression toward yourself, dislike of your present mind, speech, or body; there's something about yourself that you feel is not good enough.  People come to the clinic with addictions, abuse issues or stress from work - all kinds of issues.  Yet this simple ingredient of giving up hope is the most important ingredient for developing sanity and healing.

That's the main thing.  As long as you're wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or whatever it might be, somehow you're always going to be approaching your problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you're not good enough.  That's why the habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you're trying to improve, because you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that caused all the pain to start.

There's a life-affirming teaching in Buddhism, which is that Buddha, which means "awake," is not someone you worship.  Buddha is not someone you aspire to; Buddha is not somebody that was born more than two thousand years ago and was smarter than you'll ever be.  Buddha is our inherent nature - our buddha nature - and what that means is that if you're going to grow up fully, the way that it happens is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that you already have.  It's not like some intelligence that's going to be transplanted into you.  If you're going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need to protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh.  If you're going to be a grouwn-up - which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation - it's because you will allow something that's already in you to be nurtured.  You allow it to grow, you allow it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried.

Someone once told me, "When you feel afraid, that's 'fearful buddha.'"  That could be applied to whatever you feel.  Maybe anger is your thing.  You just go out of control and you see red, and the next thing you know you're yelling or throwing something or hitting someone.  At that time, begin to accept the fact that that's "enraged buddha."  If you feel jealous, that's "jealous buddha."  If you have indigestion, that's "buddha with heartburn."  If you're happy, "happy buddha"; if bored, "bored buddha."  In other words, anything that you can experience or think is worthy of compassion; anything you could think or feel is worthy of appreciation.   ... If one would enter into an unconditional relationship with oneself, one would be entering into an unconditional relationship with buddha.

This is why the slogan says, "Abandon any hope of fruition."  "Fruition" implies that at a future time you will feel good.  There is another word, which is open - to have an open heart and open mind.  This is oriented very much to the present.  If you enter into an unconditional relationship with yourself, that means sticking with the buddha right now on the spot as you find yourself. ...

Whether you get meditation instruction from the Theravada tradition or the Zen tradition or the Vajrayana tradition, the basic instruction is always about being awake in the present moment.  What they don't tell you is that the present moment can be you, this you about whom you sometimes don't feel very good.  That's what there is to wake up to.

When one of the emperors of China asked Bodhidharma (the Zen master who brought Zen from India to China) what enlightenment was, his answer was, "Lots of space, nothing holy."  Meditation is nothing holy.  Therefore there's nothing that you think or feel that somehow gets put in the category of "sin."  There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of "wrong."  It's all good juicy stuff - the manure of waking up, the manure of achieving enlightenment, the art of living in the present moment."

~

So this is what I've been living with lately.  I hope it is of some help or comfort to you.  It is to me.