Self-Compassionate or Comfortably Numb
As I lay in self-healing meditation this morning, Jack Kornfield’s words guiding me, I felt or recognised why it is that I can feel what’s the point in trying. Deep down there is a core belief that no matter what I say or do I won’t be able to accept or change that it’s not my fault in some way.
There is that feeling of being damned if I do and damned if I don’t follow my own path in life. The only trouble is there are often so many it’s hard to know if the one I’m on is leading to or away from my heart.
The other night as Linn and I were walking home with the dogs I thought I saw my sister who had written and then texted me a few days before asking me to sort out her online payment for her mobile phone. She had fallen out with her partner yet again and he was no longer willing to do it for her. I tried but wasn’t able to and I wasn’t going to add yet another monthly direct debit charge to my bank account for her, as well as my mother and myself. I felt upset about being asked yet again to resolve the problems she gets herself in by not learning to take care of these things herself but leaving it to others. I feel compassion for her and my mother but I am tired of enabling their sense of helplessness and yet feel guilty.
Hardly a day goes by that my mother doesn’t call asking me to do some errand, which in general I’m willing to do but there are times when she gets confused or forgets what she wants and I end up going to the chemist three times in a week due to mix up with prescriptions. Then there’s bills to pay or envelopes to hand in to offices that are closed at the moment and all this is eating into the time I have to try and discipline myself to practice meditation, write, take care of my own affairs and relationships.
I end up spending a lot of time trying to maintain boundaries and yet be a responsible and compassionate citizen towards our global community and not just my intimate circle.
There is confusion about where my loyalties lie at times, which makes me seek silence and isolation from others when I find it hard to cope with the noise in my head.
This is where the practice of Mindfulness and writing comes in handy. Rather than have to avoid the persons whose own anxieties and uncertainties are being offloaded on me I can for a time silence all chatter, all thoughts or at least to some extent untangle them, instead of feeling overwhelmed or worried that my inaction is the cause of their suffering, whereas acting on behalf of them leads to my own suffering.
Come the evening time, after mindfulness classes or other meetings and dinner are over I desire something to motivate me to go on creating content that I believe is socially beneficial. So I often turn to stories of redemption:
According to Robert McKee the author of Story redemption revolves around a moral change within the protagonists from bad to good
Auto-ethnographical or autobiographical ‘stories often lack the very virtue they promise: self-knowledge. For while it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s also the case that the unlived life isn’t worth examining.’(Mckee, 1997)
Despite my self-analysis and the detailed examination of my life I sometimes wonder if all I’m doing is adding to the complexity of my labyrinth rather than just cutting strings with past events that keeps reeling me back in to a story I keep hoping will end with my redemption and have a happy enough ending for everybody.
However, that may not be possible because we can’t go on covering over the inherent cracks in our socio-economic system hoping they won’t show up again in our life-time.
I think this is what we try to do rather than rebuild. we think it’s too hard or too late to change the past but we have to be willing to face our communal disease responsibly and with a courageous self-compassion that can admit we were ignorant and selfish and made some terrible mistakes but we can through the mercy of those we hurt change.
The thing I most needed to change was to trust in love again and yet it was the one thing I was most afraid to do. Having felt time and time again betrayed by love, by the people with whom I was intimate, when people whom I trusted as parents, partners, friends, had let me down in ways that led me to believe I wasn’t worthy of their love or didn’t know how to love, that there was something inherently flawed in me. I didn’t know what to believe or trust me because I started to believe their thoughts and stories that the fault lied in me. That I was the one who was crazy, weird, an oddity.
The words of Krishnamurti come to mind: ‘It is no measure of health to be a well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’
