Relationships
This is a picture of my teacher and I. It’s an interesting thing to think of myself as so intimately connected to one person. There is something healing and nurturing about my relationship with Haller Roshi, and yet it is just like all human interactions. We have had our share of falling outs and miscommunications, and difficulties, but instead of my usual responses to the ups and downs, Paul and I continue to sit with each other amidst it all. This has taught me much about the world according to me in regards to relationships.
IN 1995 when I started to practice, I didn’t want a teacher. I didn’t trust anyone to be sure, but it also was very clear that all I wanted was to understand and study the dharma, and you didn’t need “a teacher” to do that. Books, and sitting, occasional retreats, and lectures would be all the teacher I needed. I had been a bit burned by my religious history so I might have had a bit of a delusion going on at that time. The thing is, that I did follow that path for a long time. It was in 2003 that I met Paul and I slowly was able to recover. Eventually I started to allow myself to enter the sangha at San Francisco Zen Center, and that’s how I ended up here. Paul didn’t try to force the issue, he just kept inviting me to sit down and study what was going on. It’s really all he does now. It’s all he ever really does actually.
When my Step-father was dying, someone I thought of as my best friend hurt me deeply. Her treatment of my feelings at a time I was extremely vulnerable was damaging to say the least. What’s interesting is that I can sit here and say I have no resentment. I certainly am not inviting her into my life, but I don’t feel any animosity about it. I don’t feel thrown off my seat by it. I am not finding myself shutting down to love or relationships or friendships. This is growth for me.
The family I was born into isn’t particularly close. Partly because of my inability to be what they expected, and their not knowing how to relate to what they got in the person I call me, and partly because of my inability for a long time to just let them be who they were, and relate to that instead of what I wanted them to be. We spent a lot of years looking at each other from opposite sides of a vast divide. Sometimes it feels like that hasn’t changed much, except in reality it has changed enormously. My family gets to be who they are more than I ever imagined possible. I try very hard not to demand they conform to my idea about how they should be, although I have clear boundaries in regards to acceptable treatment of me. They get to be who they are, so when my mother de-friends me on Facebook, I don’t have to get upset (okay it hurt for a bit at first) but instead I get to realize my Mother and I have very different lives, and mine might be a bit upsetting to her. It can’t be easy being the Mother of a loud, opinionated, queer activist, Buddhist Monk. Especially if you are a quiet, conservative republican. She tries, and I try and for me, that makes all the difference. I can honestly say with a full heart I adore and respect my Mother beyond words, and think she is an amazing woman in so many ways. I am proud to say some of the best of who I am comes from her inspiration. I can also admit that wasn’t always the case for me. I wanted her to be something else, I demanded she shape herself into some vision I had of how a “mother” should be. As I am sure you can imagine, this didn’t work so well.
Relationships are difficult, but what I learn from all of them is to sit quietly amidst the bustling chaos that is their normal course. The ups and downs and all arounds that is the natural way when two people interact is normal, and it’s nothing I need to get so worked up over. For the longest time it “meant something”. The course of relationships and interactions gave me permission to write some kind of story, and this in turn verified some old tape in my head, which then got reified into “the world according to me”. What’s interesting is that “the world according to me” left me either the villain or the victim, and never anything else.
By sitting down, and watching this process hundreds of thousands of times, I still can’t always catch it before it starts, but the good news is that those moments, those stories don’t last nearly as long. I have lots of dear friends who help me find my way out of them, and help me see that each moment is just an experience, neither good nor bad, neither victim nor villain, and that there is no reason to allow all that mash to solidify into some kind of “self”.
Perhaps that’s the key. To sit there in it, and see what happens. To stop the story long enough to really examine what is going on here, and then to respond to the actual situation instead of my story about it.