Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  Follow the Dalai Lama’s example: If you make a trivial but embarrassing mistake, admit it cheerfully and move on.

  6

  BECOMING EMBODIED

  IN HIS SHORT STORY “A Painful Case,” James Joyce introduces us to a Mr. Duffy, who “lived at a little distance from his body.” So, too, do most of us, and at times we may even feel we’re dragging a hostile stranger around. There is something profoundly healing about reengaging with our bodies, remembering and rejoining who we are. Just as we need to integrate our emotions in order to love ourselves more fully, so, too, do we need to be reunited with our bodies. The Ben Harper song “You Found Another Lover (I Lost Another Friend)” talks about how the heart never lies to us. I often think about how, for so many of us, the body never lies. Our stomachs are called our second brains for a reason, and there is a growing amount of research on the mind-body connection. How can we feel a genuine connection to the world if we do not feel our own bodies?

  The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything about our bodies (or our personalities, for that matter). But it does mean stepping away from conventional obsessions about everything we have been told is wrong with us by parents, partners, our social group, the media, or the mean girls in high school. If we can feel and appreciate our bodies from within, we are not in bondage to the messages coming from without. When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

  REFLECTION

  Appreciating your aliveness

  This reflection is adapted from the teaching of one of my colleagues, Kate Lila Wheeler.

  We get only one body in this life, the one we are each endowed with right this moment. Please begin by giving yours the respect it deserves. Did you realize every atom in it is 14.5 billion years old? All bodies are part of matter, created at the big bang, 10 billion years before the earth appeared. Yes, your overall body is composed of about 7 octillion venerable atoms (that’s a 7 with twenty-seven zeros after it), mostly produced by exploding stars. You are literally stardust; so is everything around you.

  The water in this body seems to flow into your mouth from a fountain or a glass, then out again through pores and orifices. But like all the waters of the earth, no one knows where it came from. Perhaps a comet’s tail, it’s said. And if you have gold fillings, your teeth carry a share of all the gold that exists in the universe, for the number of gold molecules is finite.

  Your body is not just mineral and elemental. No, it’s vividly alive, as anyone knows who’s ever danced, had a sore throat, made love, or stubbed a toe.

  Try to sense the skin around your body. Feel how alive it is! For this, you can thank a single-celled creature. All the baroque variety of life on earth is considered to come from a common tiny ancestor who appeared about 4 billion years ago (again, no one knows quite how). And still today, on a cellular level, basic functions like respiration look similar in plants and animals. So does our DNA—we humans share about half our genetic information with plants. We truly aren’t very far away from anything.

  Our salty blood remembers oceanic origins; the structure of our spines and ribs was first developed by fish. Population geneticists agree that all of us are literally one human family. What would our world be like if everyone acted on this truth?

  Yet as connected as we are, there is astonishing diversity even within being human. Each person is utterly distinct. Our fingerprints, toeprints, and tongueprints will never be reproduced.

  But surely it is the brain that is our most fabulous body part. Scientists believe the human brain is the most complex object in the universe, capable of making one hundred trillion neural connections. Lay all your neurons end to end, and they’ll reach to the moon and back. Awake, asleep, or dreaming, your brain is active night and day, a magic lantern. Its neurons interact in constantly shifting patterns of electrical energy and are deeply attuned to others and the outside world. Not only that, but your brain is capable of self-awareness.

  Brain and body are inseparable collaborators, producing the symphony that fully absorbs us. This is the wonder of a life. How amazing that we can even be amazed.

  CHAPTER 6 PRACTICES

  Meditation: Lovingkindness for your body

  I learned this meditation from a Sri Lankan monk who came to visit us at the Insight Meditation Society in the early 1990s. At age ninety-four, the Venerable Ananda Maitreya seemed to have more energy than the rest of us put together, and he was learning to use a computer, something I was struggling with at the time. How much of his vigor came from his repeatedly offering love to his body?

  Focusing on different parts of the body in sequence, he had us repeat silently, “May my head be happy. May it be peaceful,” or “May my eyes be happy. May they be peaceful.” And on through the whole body.

  We repeated this with our shoulders, our backs, our stomachs, parts we might normally term “bad,” as in the case of a sore knee we call a “bad” knee, those parts we would love to hide more than anything if clothing manufacturers could only get more inventive, those parts we are usually neatly distanced from. Ending with, “May my toes be happy. May they be peaceful.” Try it.

  * * *

  I met Phil at a daylong seminar I was teaching in the Midwest. At one of the breaks, he approached me, eager to describe how he had recently started to practice meditation when a friend gave him a book that offered a guided meditation on the body, moving attention from the top of your head slowly down to your toes.

  Phil told me that the guided meditation was not calming him down. The focus on the body made him restless, and his inner critic filled up the space with abuse. When he felt a twinge in his ankle, he lectured himself that this would not be a problem if he’d just get off his ass once in a while and take a walk, just down the street. He had to start somewhere. He was wasting his life. When he dwelled on his knees, he noticed some tenderness there. Hadn’t Grandma had both of her knees replaced when she was about his age? That would be terrible if he was laid up for weeks. When he focused his attention on his body with judgment, he wanted to jump out of his skin!

  We can let go of the judgments or at least put them to one side as we continue to awaken awareness of our bodies, and we can also actively work with offering lovingkindness to whatever we discover.

  Since Ananda Maitreya’s visit, I have taught this meditation to many with serious diseases, with scars or injuries, with chronic pain, and with deep-seated hatred toward their bodies. It has been wonderful to see how feeling badly betrayed by one’s body, and the alienation and humiliation born of that, can transform into a sense of alliance. A newly minted friendship with our bodies brings genuine peace to us, laced through with love.

  7

  MOVING BEYOND SHAME

  THE STIMULUS FOR SHAME IS something we did, or failed to do, and all too often about things over which we had no control—like a parent’s behavior or our family’s economic status. Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them.

  The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame. In its powerful grip, our ability to feel love for ourselves shrivels, too.

  Clara writes, “When I’m ashamed, my stomach gets tight, queasy, and cold, but the rest of my body burns. I’m told my cheeks flame with a brighter intensity than a blush. Of the fight, flight, and freeze options, many times I just get frozen. I hope against hope no one notices, but just in case, I start looking for the exit. I want to disappear, but in a moment of deep shame it can be difficult for me to move at all.”

  The root meaning of the word shame is “to cover,” which suggests our longing to hide—even from ourselves. To avoid the excruciating feeling of shame, we may start acting in compulsive and harmful ways. Shame can make us eat too much, shop to excess, drink or use drugs inappropriately, often in a deliberate effort to quiet the
turmoil within. Shame is usually out of proportion to the thing we’re ashamed of. Small defects and minor lapses, barely noticeable by others, can generate overwhelming feelings of shame.

  A difference becomes us. An illness becomes us. A blemish becomes us. A mistake becomes us. Our mentally ill parent becomes us.

  Maria writes: “When my father thought that I had a weak teacher, he would go to the school and make such a fuss that I would always be moved. I was embarrassed, of course, and didn’t feel that I deserved the place in the better class. When I wanted to get a summer job—maybe scooping ice cream like all the other kids—my father insisted it was beneath me. I was a great painter, he said, and I should spend my time painting and selling my paintings. I was a kid trying to fit in and learn kid things, like how to make a living. I have always been unrealistic in my choices of livelihood, and I blame (yes, blame) this on my father’s unwillingness to let me be ordinary.

  “I understand better now why he aspired to be larger than life, important, successful, rich, and always right. By most people’s definition, he was handsome, wealthy, and successful, but in his own mind he was a failure and never good enough.

  “I remember:

  —my father screaming at my mother and hitting her in front of my brother and me

  —my father driving head-on into another car because it was in his way

  —my father stepping on a parking attendant’s hands so that he would release a key

  —my father having lovers and not really trying to hide them

  —my father telling me, ‘Don’t fall in love. Just have sex.’

  —my father on a trip with me, being delighted that people thought we were a couple and continuing to laugh about it no matter how enraged I became.”

  There is much glib celebration in pop culture of those who go their own paths: the dreamers, the mavericks. For many, feeling so distinct from those around them is not a comfortable place to rest. And if this sense of distinction arises from a parent we cannot govern or subdue, there is a huge potential for shame to fortify the walls of isolation.

  Many children raised in dysfunctional homes carry with them the feeling that if they had been better people, their parents would have been better parents. Patty says, “I was raised by drunks and believed if others knew, they would shun me or bully me. I didn’t invite schoolmates home because I was frightened that those friends would see how we really lived and spread that shameful secret to others at school. My secret became the most alive thing about me. Everything else went into a kind of death spiral.

  “While I was a good student and loyal friend, I absorbed my parents’ shame, as well as my own feeling of worthlessness, as central to my identity.”

  Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value. Comedian and activist Margaret Cho describes its effect: “When you don’t have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise … you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against … You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.”

  Lost in shame, we withdraw from the world and those who might love and support us. If we want to hide, we cannot easily feel or receive love. And it is increasingly hard to remember that we deserve to.

  SHAME ABOUT ILLNESS

  I WORRY ABOUT friends and students who seem to take on responsibility for absolutely everything, as though their thoughts could control the universe. I’ve known people who even feel ashamed that they have cancer or an autoimmune disease because they believe they brought it upon themselves by not living a sufficiently pure life.

  While I think we’re right to acknowledge the power of our minds to affect our bodies, it’s an illusion to imagine we have total control. To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves. If you get cancer and all you can think of is that your thoughts caused it, it’s your entire fault, you are to blame, I would first check out if you live near a toxic waste dump or maybe had a genetic predisposition.

  Or perhaps a clear, direct cause might remain unknown. Not everyone with lung cancer smoked, for example, and not everyone who feels stressed has a heart attack. Can we acknowledge and nurture the power of our minds without turning that into a cudgel to beat ourselves up with? There may well be lessons to be learned in an illness; maybe we should consider that last spare rib we ate to be the last for this lifetime or recognize we’d do better physically if we learned to manage our anger better. But if we think we will be able to dominate the streaming rapids of life through our efforts at control, we are destined to fail, and we will be ashamed at our failure. If we add shame to what is already massively challenging, we can become cut off and isolated when we most need to feel connected, and when we most need to deepen our love for ourselves, just as we are.

  SHAME ABOUT SUFFERING

  IN MY BOOK Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, I wrote about the suffering of my own childhood and my years of feeling isolated and unhappy. When he read it, my friend Bob Thurman said to me, “You should never be ashamed of the suffering you’ve been through.” His comment really surprised me. In that moment, I realized how much subtle shame I had been carrying without realizing it.

  Bob was passing along a message he’d received many years earlier, after he lost his left eye in an accident. His teacher at the time, a Mongolian monk named Geshe Wangyal, had told him, “Never be ashamed of what happened to you. You have lost one eye but gained a thousand eyes of wisdom.”

  I do think it’s too simplistic to say that such awful experiences should be considered gifts. But acknowledging that a gift can emerge from pain does not mock the pain itself. It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and that we can get past the shame we carry. Bob still lost an eye. I still had a really unhappy childhood. Patty’s parents were still alcoholics, and Maria’s father was still disconnected and hurtful. But if we use our experiences to care for and love ourselves more, and if we use them to connect more deeply with others, then losing an eye can indeed lead to a thousand eyes of wisdom.

  REFLECTION

  Exploring shame with RAIN

  Once you acknowledge a difficult emotion, inquire whether shame is one of the feelings that is appearing. Explore what happens in your body when you are caught up in feelings of shame.

  Embracing what is

  We’re conditioned to believe that painful feelings are “bad” and that pleasurable ones are “good.” It’s often easier—though not healthier—for us to avoid grief and sorrow, while only embracing sensations like happiness, confidence, and love.

  But by accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.

  Of course this is difficult and requires practice. The following meditation is an invitation to experiment with what it feels like to meditate with an uncomfortable feeling or experience as the object of your attention, rather than just your breath, an anchoring phrase, or a mantra. So often we assume meditation is exclusively meant to be a tool for relaxation, stress relief, clearing the mind. And it often is. But this exercise shows that we can actually use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts:

  1. Sit comfortably with your back straight but not strained. You may choose to close your eyes or settle a soft gaze on the floor in front of you.

  2. Bring to mind a painful conversation, situation, experience, or distinct feeling you have experienced. Call to mind what the emotion felt like in your body. As you tap into a more visceral experience of the discomfort, begin to deepen your natural inhales and exhales.<
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  3. With each inhale, envision opening up to all of the discomfort and pain associated with the experience you’ve brought to mind.

  4. With each exhale, release any pressure you may feel to react to the pain in a particular way.

  5. Other thoughts, memories, and experiences may come up, drawing you away from the original anchor of your meditation. As different thoughts emerge, take the opportunity to be mindful of each one. This is a practice of embracing what is in each moment.

  8

  TAKING A STAND ON HAPPINESS

  GEORGIA IS A FREELANCE WRITER who works at home in a two-story loft space with tall windows that let in beautiful light. Some time ago, she was under tremendous financial pressure and took on too much work to compensate. With deadlines for projects following one right after the other, she started to slump.

  Georgia is a good cook, but when the pressure hit, she began eating only junk. She didn’t feel like exercising, so her life became confined to her four walls, where her dark mood closed in. Her housekeeping fell off, and of course, so did her meditation practice. She’d pledge to meditate forty-five minutes under the covers while in bed, but would then promptly fall asleep. And she began drinking more than she had at any other time in her life.

  Georgia was devoting all her waking hours (and much of her sleep time) to the goals and demands of others. Her motivation was partially self-protective, as she needed the money. But the way she acted on it was not, and she burned out. She felt disconnected from her body and from everything that nourished her. And the way she spoke to herself became quite self-punishing.

  For a while, Georgia couldn’t see a way out of this downward spiral. And then, in a moment of awareness, she did. “I wasn’t taking a stand on my right to be happy,” she told me later. “I realized I had to do that in order to find a way back to self-love.”