The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [67]
I can’t offer you a finite list of things to do, nor can I tell you exactly how you can smile at fear. I’m working with turning up the edges of my mouth when I feel anxious. The advice I give myself is: Don’t avoid the opportunity to grin back at fear. And if you can dive into that empty feeling in the pit of your stomach, well, that would be excellent! We each have to find our own inner grin.
The time where rock meets bone turns out to be the time we are always living in, although we don’t always acknowledge that raw mark of our existence. To do so is to meet the moment where neither past nor future exist and where we cannot hold on to the present for security. In that moment, the closing bell of the stock market is no different from the bell that calls us to the shrine room. In that moment, our dharmic ancestors will all applaud our fearless smile.
Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World
Mary Pipher
It takes courage to fully acknowledge and experience our pain, shame, and self-doubt, but only in that way can we experience spiritual progress, for denial is a permanent stop sign on the path. Mary Pipher, the author of the best-seller Raising Ophelia, found such courage as she began her practice of meditation. You’ll see that she is far from the worst Buddhist in the world.
Despair is the subjective state we experience when our inner and outer resources are insufficient to cope with the situation at hand. At core it involves a breakdown in our trust of ourselves and the universe. It is a 911 call from deep within, warning us that we must make changes if we are to survive psychically.
Of course, my understanding of despair is more theoretical. Many of my family members have battled addictions and struggled with emotional disorders. Both my parents and my husband’s parents died slow, painful deaths. I’ve worked for thirty years as a therapist, listening to people share their darkest and saddest stories, and I have interviewed refugees about Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. I feel qualified to write about what humans do with despair. I think all of us are qualified.
While I can’t compare myself to Job, my anguish has carried me to many dark and lonely places. My suffering helps me connect to others who are coping with much darker scenarios. As I write this today, a young teacher I know lies in a nearby hospital dying of cancer. Most likely, someone reading this has lost a child in Iraq or is married to a person with Alzheimer’s. Other readers stagger under money and health worries. Some are fighting foreclosure, prejudice, or uncaring employers, while others are holding on to their sanity for dear life. I am no Job, but the world is full of people suffering as he did. For many people, facing the day requires extraordinary courage and self-discipline.
Most of the time we humans keep our suffering to ourselves. We are polite people who don’t want to inflict our burdens on others. We are proud people who don’t want to be pitied. Some of the time we keep our despair from ourselves.
One of the saddest things about despair is our attempt to deny it. To move toward our pain requires us to buck a well-tuned system of defenses. We repress, somatize, rationalize, and avoid our own despair. Too often we give our deepest pain orders to march off a cliff, forgetting that this pain is our psyche’s way of encouraging us to take it easy and offer ourselves some