For this issue of IOP, we asked some Sangha members to respond to the
question: "What are you currently looking at in your practice?"
What I am looking at right now is the relationship between self-hatred and embarrassment/shame in conditioning’s campaign to keep my heart locked away inside a small dark space.
When I try something new or something that feels bigger-hearted than my conditioning believes me to be, it pitches in with lots of irrelevant and unhelpful advice, accompanied by name-calling, “constructive” criticism, and internal eye-rolling and head-shaking. A story with a familiar bleak ending is told in a loop over and over again in my head and in my body in what has become a well-worn track.
If I am not paying close attention, I believe all of the lies and stay stuck in the rut of that track. I re-live the experience of a very small child who doesn’t know what she has done wrong but can tell by a bigger person’s tone of voice and body language that something is definitely not right and somebody (most likely she) is going to get into a lot of trouble. Identified with this small child's fear, I choose unconsciousness over and over again in an effort to leave the suffering, and while I am away, this dear little person is trying the very best she can to take care of situations and decisions she knows nothing about.
Then during all the heartache and confusion experienced by this little person, I am jolted back into my body, whereupon shame comes in to finish the job that self-hatred had begun. I feel my heart contracting and deadening in response to the overwhelming feelings of having abandoned myself once again.
And yet here in this very darkness is the miracle of seeing the partnership of self-hatred and shame: if I have been fooled and lulled to sleep by self-hatred, the feeling of shame that follows offers me another blessed opportunity to practice compassion for myself. The very thing that conditioning would have me believe will destroy me will actually save me. Another opportunity for healing and salvation. Another chance to rescue someone who is so very dear and who tries so very hard. Another chance to choose freedom, spaciousness, and light.
There is nothing whatsoever of any assistance to me in believing the voices of self-hatred or in feeling shameful or bad. Nothing. Ever. Self-hatred and shame exist only in the realm of conditioning, exist only to keep my heart, and therefore my life, small and dark.
So my practice is to rescue myself again and again, to welcome myself back home and into the space and light. To draw a bigger and bigger circle with my heart until I remember yet again that my heart is as big as the world. I practice coming back again and again to center, disidentifying from the stories, not trying to get rid of anything or anyone, but rather, taking it all in--seeing everything--yes, everything--my big heart sees and holds everything.
With deepest gratitude to my role model--the big heart of the Monastery.
Gassho.
