In No Man Is an Island, Trappist monk Thomas Merton declared, “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
Bottom line: We have to know ourselves to know where we end and another person begins, and we have to develop the skills to navigate the space between us. Or else we will seek wholeness through false means that honor neither us nor those we love.
CHAPTER 14 PRACTICES
Balance is the answer
Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there’s no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension. And of course, navigating these questions is an ever-changing process.
What is a key ingredient in this process of navigation is balance or equanimity. Equanimity can be hard to talk about, as the idea of “balance” doesn’t feel that rich or vibrant, words we definitely think about when it comes to love (along with others like passion, fervor, desire). Some associate balance with a kind of apathy or withdrawal. The idea of feeling love for a person in a “balanced” way may even seem like an oxymoron. But the irony is that approaching love from this expansive state of wisdom and insight creates a more hospitable and sustainable environment within which real love can thrive.
Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people. Or we might give love to others because we think it’s what they want—and end up feeling self-judging as a result. Equanimity is the ingredient that brings us clarity and calm in relationship to navigating the space between, as we are able to release the idea of rejection and clinging as the only two possible modes of engaging in a loving relationship.
In this equanimity practice, we begin by thinking about a relationship in which space has come up as an issue.
1. Bring this person to mind. Perhaps it is a teacher upon whom you’ve become dependent for affirmation, and any space leaves you feeling insecure or lost. Perhaps it’s a lover who is far more interested in spending all of his time with you, and you are at a loss for how to articulate your need for space kindly.
2. Begin repeating honest phrases to yourself silently about the person you have in mind. Possible phrases could be: Things are as they are. I care about you, yet I know we are two different people. We are both the owners of our actions, and we are each whole unto ourselves. Both of our happiness depends on our individual actions.
3. Feel free to experiment with phrases that resonate for the particular questions you are encountering in your relationship. Keep the phrases simple and oriented around the practice of equanimity—accepting things as they are.
15
LETTING GO
Even as I hold you / I am letting go.
—ALICE WALKER
SOME YEARS AGO, A GOOD friend was in extreme psychological distress, punctuated by lengthy psychiatric hospitalizations. I wanted so badly to help him but felt powerless. I asked one of my Tibetan teachers for guidance. He advised me to “stop trying”—an extremely subtle teaching. He wasn’t suggesting that I withdraw or stop caring, but was telling me to just “be with” my friend, without needing to fix him. And that’s what I did.
I’d sit in his hospital room and see other friends offer advice. Just take fifteen drops of this tincture and you won’t be depressed anymore. Or see this healer or try that supplement and you’ll be cured. Their advice was given out of love, but my sense was that my friend felt somewhat pressured by it. What if I don’t take their advice? What if it doesn’t work? I could imagine him wondering. Will they stop showing up or caring about me?
When Ram Dass had a stroke, it took focused intention for me to apply my Tibetan teacher’s wisdom and simply be with my friend. We’d been close for decades, and I felt devastated. I could see the impulse to fix things arising in my mind; I wanted him to get better and recover fully. But then I’d visit and see his living room piled high with gifts from concerned friends. Just take this tincture—and so on.
It was genuinely beautiful that so many people cared, but I could tell that Ram Dass did feel pressured by it all. I wondered if he would be abandoned by those whose tinctures didn’t have him walking and talking fluently again. One day a package arrived while I was there, containing a bottle of Ganges water with a note assuring him that if he drank it, he would walk again. “Don’t drink that!” I said. “It will give you cholera!” That was one instance in which I couldn’t help but put in my two cents.
I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t offer our loved ones help in the spirit of generosity; of course we should—and it’s most loving if our offerings are made freely, without strings attached. Letting go is the opposite of clinging to our hopes or ideas about how things should be and allowing them to be just as they are.
For me, it was invaluable to see the difference between wanting to help out of my own need to make things better and simply being with. I came to understand that healing has its own rhythm, as does any life transition. Of course, it’s not easy to step back and let go; it’s human nature to want to seize control when the people we love are suffering. But trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.
THE ART OF RECEIVING
PARADOXICALLY, LETTING GO sometimes means allowing ourselves to receive the love and care of others. Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we’re interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including—with a bow to Tennessee Williams—strangers.
When Sebene was diagnosed with breast cancer at age thirty-four, she recalls that she was fortunate to be surrounded by many loving friends and family members who were ready to support her. But, she says, “I didn’t think I needed much. I was already a meditator with a healthy self-care routine. Although friends played a big part in supporting me emotionally, there was a way in which I kept people (and myself) distant from my experience of fear, sadness, and despair. I spent a lot of my time with people showing them just how very together I was.”
She adds that it wasn’t until things started falling apart that she began to be able to take in the love that was offered to her. “No one knew exactly what was wrong with me, but I ended up extremely sick,” she explains. “I was totally dependent on my friends for everything: walking the dog, doing my laundry, filling prescriptions, preparing food, drying my tears. And in a sense, that’s when everything became easier. Letting go of control (or having it ripped away) helped me open to the love all around me. The late Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck said, ‘Joy is exactly what’s happening, minus our opinion of it.’
“When I ended up in the hospital with kidney failure, weak and in pain, with tubes down my nose, I got into a hysterical laughing fit with my dear friend Ahmad,” she continues. “I dropped my opinion about the situation, which I disliked, and found a moment of pure laughter, of joy, in the absurdity of it all. I think love and joy come from the same place—the ability to be with what is happening with an open heart and mind. So if joy is whatever is happening minus our opinion of it, maybe love is whatever is happening minus our attempt to control it.
“I realize now how much I resisted opening to what was happening to me, mostly because I didn’t want to feel the pain and fear or burden others with it,” she reflects. “But in trying to control what was happening, I couldn’t be in any moment wholeheartedly. I couldn’t open to the joy and love that were already there, waiting to be received.”
FREEING OURSELVES FROM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
SO MANY RELATIONSHIPS are built on the hope that the unconditional love of another will somehow, magically, heal our wounds and restore us to wholeness. Even when our rati
onal selves recognize that this is a fantasy, we may continue to nurture it, if only in our unconscious. In his book The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, Jungian psychologist James Hollis writes that the “great false idea that drives humankind is the fantasy of the Magical Other, the notion that there is one person out there who is right for us, will make our lives work, a soul mate who will repair the ravages of our personal history; one who will be there for us, who will read our minds, know what we want and meet those deepest needs; a good parent who will protect us from suffering and, if we are lucky, spare us the perilous journey of individuation.” Hollis adds that the paradigm for our relationships is formed from our earliest experiences and is actually hardwired into our neurological and emotional network.
Although on the one hand we may be terribly disappointed to discover that the Magical Other we’ve been seeking is a phantom, this awareness can also usher in relief. By recognizing that each of us is in charge of our own wholeness, we pave the way for satisfying and reciprocal relationships. But that takes awareness and the intention to let go of our fantasies of the one who will set us free.
In a blog post on the Greater Good Web site, psychologist Christine Carter wrote: “I’ve found that releasing my fantasies around my relationship requires acknowledging a loss, and then grieving it. I really, really, really wanted to be with someone who was deeply romantic, in that poetry-writing and song-singing kind of way. But realizing that my romantic fantasies were created by the film industry (and perhaps the flower industry, and the greeting card industry—not to mention the diamond industry) and not by any actual needs of my own helped me release those fantasies. I felt saddened by the loss of my fairytale hopes for a little while. If you’re sad, grieve,” she advises, “but then move on.”
For Julia and her husband, accepting that neither of them can give to the other what only they, as individuals, can give to themselves has been a central theme of their marriage.
“I’m married to a good and kind man,” Julia says. “We love and care about one another. He’s emotional and sensitive, and so am I. We’re both wounded and we can acknowledge that.” Yet, she adds, they each struggle with their own shenpa—a Tibetan word that literally means “attachment,” but also suggests a state in which old triggers get activated and make people feel uneasy, then cause them to seek relief. In her relationship with her husband, Julia explains, “He wants so much to feel that I hold him in high regard so that he can feel good and confident about himself. I want so much to feel protected, that he has my back in the way I feel no one ever has. This is our edge.”
However, in a recent couples therapy session, she reports, “Our counselor told us that my husband can give this regard to himself and doesn’t need to wrest it from me on all occasions. He also told me that I no longer need to be protected because I can protect myself just fine.”
Julia is clear that her longing for protection has its roots in her relationship with her father, an authoritarian man prone to violent outbursts. In particular, she recalls a night when he exploded, pinned her down, and hit her in the head. Yet even knowing this, she says she’s still primed to be disappointed when her “sweet and caring husband fails to be protective in the way I long for, a way, in his world of experience, he doesn’t even see or recognize.”
As Julia learned, there are fissures and cracks in each of us, carved from our early experiences. And there may always be a gap between what we yearn to find in another and what’s actually available. But when we let go of our hope that someone will come along to close the gap, we see that it’s just waiting to be filled with love and compassion for ourselves.
TAKING REFUGE IN YOURSELF
JUSTIN, A SOCIAL worker, tells the story of making a pilgrimage to see a Hindu teacher whom many people view to be an incarnation of divine love. A number of Justin’s friends had already visited the ashram where she teaches and described the experience of spending time with her as ecstatic, life-changing, and profoundly healing. Justin, who describes himself as wired for anxiety, had high hopes that when this teacher looked into his eyes and saw his pain, she would immediately relieve him of his suffering. He believed that his friends’ transformations were genuine and prayed for the same for himself.
In fact, he became convinced this would happen the night before his first group meeting with her, when he had his worst recurring nightmare, of being suffocated to death. “I believed the nightmare, which left me feeling panicky, was an auspicious sign,” Justin says now. “When I woke up, my terror was so raw and exposed, I was certain that she would recognize the depth of my pain and, with her infinite love, free me from my fears once and for all.”
But when it was his turn to be with her, Justin felt absolutely nothing, and after the encounter, he experienced the same level of discomfort as before. He was devastated.
“I felt unseen, alone, rejected, and trapped inside my own pain,” he says. “It was as if my suffering was too much even for this magnanimous and loving teacher. I was hurt beyond description.”
It took time to unpack his experience, but a few years later, Justin realized that what at first he had perceived as abandonment was in fact a gift, a hard but essential lesson. “I see now that regardless of my friends’ experiences, what I needed was to take refuge in myself and learn to trust my own capacity to heal. When I finally met my own fear with compassion, I was able to let go of the fantasy that some all-wise, all-knowing being would swoop down and save me.”
Letting go of the belief that we’re powerless to help relieve our own suffering not only enhances our ability to heal but also to genuinely love and receive the love of others, whether they’re spiritual teachers or partners or beloved friends.
BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN
ALTHOUGH I’M NOT a parent, it’s easy to see how the letting go that life asks of parents toward their children as they gain independence is profound, poignant, and one of the greatest movements of real love. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote in Animal Dreams: “It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.”
The balancing act between taking charge and letting go starts early for parents, the day their toddler takes her first step away from them and out into the world. The path shoots off from there, through adolescence into young adulthood and beyond. Fortunately, in most families, the trajectory follows a fairly standard course. There are growing pains for both parents and children, followed by tender, bittersweet, but inevitable separations. Letting go—then more letting go.
But for parents whose children are diagnosed with mental or physical illness, the course is rockier and studded with unimagined twists and turns. For these parents, letting go of preconceived ideas about their child’s health, behavior, or future can be immensely challenging and is often stymied by a hefty dose of self-blame.
Jack, a filmmaker I met through a friend, describes his journey after his son began hearing voices five years ago. “One night when he was thirty years old, Noah told me that he was hearing strange, angry voices,” Jack says. “They were telling him what to do, and he was hearing them all the time.” Over the next few weeks Noah, who was then in law school, became increasingly paranoid, anxious, and out of control. Though there were periods when he was better and the voices diminished, he was in and out of psychiatric units for the next two years.
“It was a living hell for me as well as for Noah,” says Jack. In fact, he was so distraught he felt as if Noah’s experience was happening to him, too. When Noah was confined, Jack visited him every day and felt as if he couldn’t live his own life as long as his son was suffering. “I tried to reassure him, talk him down, just love him, but nothing helped,” he says. “I kept thinking that if only I did this or that, he would get better. I felt so responsible, it literally made me sick.”
Jack wound up with a blocked artery in his heart. “If I hadn’t stopped trying to take on Noah’s pain, it probably would have killed me,” he says. “It was the biggest letting g
o I’ve ever had to do. I was too entangled, and I had to separate myself from him. I had to remind myself that this was happening to Noah, not to me. It wasn’t doing him any good for me to be a wreck.” Jack’s strong bond with his wife, Cathy, helped him through, as did his meditation practice and the loving support of his Zen community.
Things have improved for Noah, too. As of this writing, he hasn’t been hospitalized in three years and is living in a studio apartment on his parents’ property. Working with his psychiatrist, after much trial and error he’s found the right medication to help quiet the voices. What’s more, he’s been able to hold down a job for the past year. Noah may not be the human rights attorney he’d hoped to become, but he seems to have made peace with his “new normal.” And though Jack and Cathy, too, have had to let go of their once-cherished dreams for their son’s future, by meeting him where he is, they’ve been able to reclaim their own lives and help him reclaim his.
With mindfulness, lovingkindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be. Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves. But at times, as we’ll see in the next chapter, our commitment to living mindfully may also require us to take direct action in our relationships with others.
CHAPTER 15 PRACTICES
Looking back, letting go
In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation. We expect things from the people we love, we expect them to expect things from us. We expect things from the feeling of love itself. And while these expectations differ from person to person, there is a sentiment common among most of us when it comes to love—letting go can feel scary.
Real Love Page 14
