The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [68]
We may banish despair from our consciousness, but it doesn’t disappear. The stress hormones keep on pumping. Tightness in our chest, tension in our shoulders, and a feeling of heat on our faces—all of these are attempts by our bodies to urge us to pay attention. The body signals us constantly about our inner and outer situations. It is our personal GPS, and we ignore it at our peril.
Our biggest problems come from our cover-ups. While facing anguish is difficult, not facing it is even harder. Our daily headlines tell stories of deflected despair. The unemployed father is arrested for road rage. A bullied teenager shoots his classmates. Shame and humiliation have motivated many a terrorist. Bars and nightclubs are full of people who cannot face pain.
After a life of running from my own pain, I realized I couldn’t do it any longer. Full of fear and uncertainty, I embarked on a journey of self-exploration. I wanted to stop inflicting pain on myself and, instead, find my strengths and my goodness. Especially at first, I trudged though a pretty hellish set of discoveries—that I was a mess, that I had glossed over my childhood suffering, and that I was emotionally tapped out with nothing left to give away.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I first looked deeply into myself, I felt crummy. I knew from experience that therapy clients often feel worse before they feel better. In their beginning sessions, they discuss their traumas and they cry or rage. They flail at themselves or others for weakness. Only later do they begin to see positives and discover strengths. People who meditate often talk about feeling crazy or uniquely weird during their first sits. Many describe sobbing and falling apart as they face their fears and sorrows. The journey toward a more examined life nearly always begins with pain.
Certain parts of my past were “no-fly zones.” I remembered only a few of the many times my father had been angry. When we lived in the trailer in Ozarks, Dad lost control a few times when he was punishing me. He didn’t injure me physically, but his fury scared me. I had an almost dreamlike memory of a night in Beaver City when he threw a skillet across the kitchen toward my mother. Aunt Margaret told me about an incident at a lake when my cousin forgot to put the plug in the boat and it filled with water. My father was so angry that my uncles had to stop him from physically injuring my cousin. I was there, but I don’t remember that.
Even if I could recall certain events, I felt no emotions about them. I could describe what happened, but I described it as if I were reading from a dictionary. My head remembered, but my body felt dead. One treatment for chronic pain is to literally freeze nerve endings with liquid nitrogen. I felt as if I had frozen the nerve endings that connected me to memories of my deepest sorrows. “No pain for me, thank you.”
As I meditated on my childhood, I reexperienced some of these sorrows. I would recall a traumatic event and my stomach would ache. My jaw would clench. My heart would feel hard and cold. Sometimes I could cry; other times I felt as if I were locked in a block of ice. Afterward, I would be dazed for a few hours.
Gradually, I became more clear-eyed about my parents. I didn’t love them less, but I did acknowledge that their actions had enormous consequences on the lives of my siblings and myself. Since I viewed myself as accountable, I had to hold my parents to some standards as well. This realization was incredibly painful. When I considered the effects of my parents’ choices, I felt a stab of separation and disconnection. My chest hurt and my breathing became ragged. Still, I stayed with these feelings. Over time, I learned I could be more realistic about my parents’ failings and still love them.
My discomfort with anger has always been pronounced. I have never been able to watch violent movies or television, or to read about domestic violence or child abuse. Sometimes I feel other people’s pain in ways I do not feel my own. In Sunday school I had learned “Love