This Messy Magnificent Life

by Geneen Roth

  Being in therapy certainly had its bright moments. Sometimes it was like having a dream mother, like being transported from frozen tundra to a balmy tropical island. Sometimes when I was working with the trauma of physical and sexual abuse, it was horribly painful. It was also lifesaving and mostly effective (except for the therapist who charged me when I went on vacation because she said she was sitting in her chair and thinking about me). In therapy I learned that “no” and “I don’t want to” are complete sentences, that being nice is overrated, and that no feeling is intolerable. I learned that when I feel hurt or angry, it’s always because one of my top three tunes is playing in the background of my mind: I’m a victim, I’m unworthy, and there’s never enough.

  I thought therapy would delete those songs. It hasn’t. Every time an old part is triggered (which, admittedly, happens less often), it feels exactly the same as it has for years. When, for instance, the “I’m unworthy” part comes up, I am instantly a despondent three-year-old with an unavailable platinum-blond mother who is walking out the door. And when the bitterness-envy part is triggered, I act like a firecracker rolled in porcupine quills: demanding, loud, dangerous. Not someone you would invite to a dinner party.

  The most surprising part of being done with therapy is that there is no one to whom I can hand my selves and say, “Here, you do it. You fix her/them. I’m not up to the task.”

  Like an infant waits in her crib, like a toddler waits to be picked up, like a twelve-year-old waits in an empty house for someone, anyone to come home, I never stopped waiting for someone to come and get me. I knew how to go through the motions of being a good client or a good spiritual student, but I secretly resented having to save myself. I believed, albeit unconsciously, that I’d already paid enough in sorrow and was now owed salvation by someone else.

  At some point (it looks like this is it), therapy meets spirituality and fixing ourselves meets the realization that there is nothing more to fix.

  For forty years there was always the next person, the next hope. A future in which I could dream myself whole without taking full responsibility for that wholeness, in the same way that many of us pin our hopes on the next diet, and the next after that.

  “When,” I sometimes ask my students, “does it become nonnegotiable to stop turning to food when you are not hungry?”

  “When,” I ask myself, “does it become nonnegotiable to refuse to swoon to my top three siren songs?”

  It’s the same question in different forms. As long as we keep hoping that someone is coming, we keep waiting. As long as we believe the answer is out there, we don’t have to turn around and discover it now.

  Every good-enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems—no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are—it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that although she might be bitter or hateful for a moment, it’s not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is peace.

  At some point (it looks like this is it), therapy meets spirituality and fixing ourselves meets the realization that there is nothing more to fix. There are always going to be challenges in this dimension of body-personality: plane flights will be missed, people will reject me, and whatever thrilled me last year will disappoint me this year. Just when I think I’ve got it all together, an earthquake occurs. Someone dies. I get ill. When I take myself to be the sum of what happened to me as a child or is happening at this very moment, I can never get it right for very long. When I take myself to be the unending always-forgiving space in which the drama is unfolding, I am already always fine.

  Finally we have to fall on the sword of knowing what we know and stop pretending that we don’t know it. Until that moment—and I seem to be a slow learner because it took decades of therapy and spiritual practice to get me here—we act like children who are stuck on the wrong planet, in the wrong bodies, with the wrong families, and we spend our time searching for more, better, loving parents and ever more creative/addictive ways out. And when we forget, we can gently remind ourselves that even that from which we want to be saved most of all—death itself—is just closing our eyes.

  PART THREE

  Into the Sublime

  I began to understand that the question wasn’t what I did, it was how. And it wasn’t about adding more big experiences . . . it was about showing up day to day.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  A Big Quiet

  When Eckhart Tolle invited me to film a conversation with him for his television series, I was honored but didn’t want to go. The filming was scheduled for December in Vancouver. Rainy, cold, snowy-when-it-isn’t-rainy Vancouver. I’d read The Power of Now in 1999 when it was first published and liked it enough to buy a copy for a friend (who gave it back to me because she didn’t understand it, or him, or why anyone would want to). And I’d been to a workshop with Eckhart at Esalen in 2000; it was in a crowded outdoor tent, and the friends with whom I went, the ones who would soon file for divorce, bickered incessantly.

  Of seeing Eckhart Tolle for the first time, I only remember brief flashes: the numinous light reflected from the walls of the tent on the odd-looking man with big ears at the podium. The wave in his hair, his hard-to-place accent. I don’t remember what he said, or how I felt about what he said. More memorable was that my friend, the wife of the bickering couple, got sick from the spicy garlic eggplant at Saturday’s dinner and we left before the last session.

  At the time of the phone call from Eckhart’s office, more than a decade had elapsed since I’d attended that workshop, and Eckhart had become famous as a spiritual teacher. Still, I remembered his history. He’d been an anxious, depressed Cambridge-educated intellectual who, one night at the age of twenty-nine, reached a nadir of suffering, after which he had a shift (his words) into irrevocable peace and stillness. And, after rereading The Power of Now, I remembered what I was so taken with years before: the fact that he said, with absolute certainty, that it was possible to be in a human body and be truly at ease—and not because of anything you had, did, or looked like.

  It’s not that I hadn’t had experiences of this ease; I’d lived at an ashram in India in the seventies, attended meditation retreats in the eighties, and had been part of an ongoing spiritual inquiry group for two decades. During the past thirty-six years, I’d spent weeks at a time feeling as if nothing was missing. Each time, the experience was like breathing in fresh oxygen after being trapped in an airless underground room for what seemed like centuries. Like popping out of a bad dream into a palace of starlight. But those glimpses were fleeting, even the ones that lasted a few months—and most of them were brought on by long retreats or catastrophes. Within a few post-retreat/disaster months, I’d return to ricocheting between bouts of self-doubt and wanting the next “more.”

  Since I’d been banging my head against the wall of discontent for a few decades, I figured it might be helpful to converse with someone who had already stopped. So, after deciding on the essentials—what I was going to wear (black dress, motorcycle boots)—I flew off to Vancouver.

  From the outside, Eckhart looked like any other person, trending toward the unusual. His eyes were set far apart, he had a slight hump on his back, and he walked with a slow sway. He wore a teal blue sweater vest—not exactly fashion forward—that reminded me of my eighth-grade algebra teacher, Mr. De Lauria, with his bow ties and cable-knit vests. But it wasn’t Eckhart’s vest or walk or clear violet eyes that were remarkable; it was the feeling of being with a human sky. After hugging me, he regarded me with a combination of curiosity, warmth, and lack of pretense, as if to say, “So. Here you are,” and the immediate effect it had on me was that I didn’t feel awkward, or not enough, or dumb. I wasn’t even aware of myself in the usual way. It was as if I’d been living inside a machine and had gotten so used to the drone of the engine that
I’d forgotten that it was on. With him, only a big quiet remained.

  One of the first things Eckhart asked me—after he mentioned he’d read my books and liked them very much—was what I was going to write about when I wasn’t neurotic anymore. “When you are through writing about the trauma and abuse and addiction you’ve lived through, what then?” he asked. I wanted to say, “What makes you think there will come a time when I won’t be neurotic or crazy?” I wanted to say, “One needs to suffer to create. What about Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Van Gogh?” But the question so surprised me—no one had ever presupposed there would come a time when I wouldn’t be neurotic—that all I could mumble was “Gee, I have no idea.” Because, in fact, I didn’t.

  At dinner the first night, I watched his movements, listened to the cadence of his voice. He was deceptively ordinary and extraordinarily calm; he liked red wine, Nikes, and wind-up watches. But being with him was so challenging to what I called normal (i.e., being acquisitive, never having enough, defining myself by what I did) that it was like having dinner with someone from another star system. The waitress, a woman with bright red hair and a nose ring, asked me what I wanted. I answered that I’d like the broiled salmon with broccoli and a glass of Malbec wine, but what I really wanted to say, having just seen When Harry Met Sally for the umpteenth time, was that I wanted what Eckhart had. Then I decided, having only just met him, that even an oblique reference to orgasms might not be the best idea.

  Since my early twenties I’d been haunted by the specter of getting to the end of my life without having fully lived, although I didn’t know what that meant: traveling to far-flung and unspoiled places like Antarctica, the Amazon, the Galápagos? Adopting a foster child? Learning to skydive? But within a few months of meeting Eckhart, I began to understand that the question wasn’t what I did, it was how. And it wasn’t about adding more big experiences—I’d had plenty of those already (I didn’t wash my right hand for two days after it shook Nelson Mandela’s)—it was about showing up day to day. Was I actually present when I answered emails, planted strawberries, or listened to Matt tell me about his day, or was I careening around in my mind, fantasizing about the future, revisiting the past, wanting to get done with what I was doing so that I could get on to the next better thing? Since the answer was “anywhere but here,” I decided to follow two of Eckhart’s suggestions for thirty days. I figured that if careening was really better than showing up (i.e., breathing when I breathed, walking when I walked), I could easily go back to my old ways.

  When your lifelong partner is concerned you have the flu if you stop complaining, it’s a bit sobering.

  My first practice was to stop complaining. When my office manager forgot to send out an email that invited people to an event I was teaching, I set up a different reminder system, but I didn’t complain. When my bank account was hacked and I discovered someone was stealing money from it daily, I reported it to the bank and closed my account, but wouldn’t allow myself to complain. When I found a mouse sitting next to me on the arm of my favorite chair, I screamed and ran out of the house, but did not complain. (Then, for anyone who may be interested, I walked back into the house, trapped it underneath an empty cottage cheese container, and brought it outside, screaming [is a scream a complaint?] the entire time.) But it wasn’t just extreme situations; I stopped complaining to anyone about anything. I kept reminding myself of what I’d heard years ago: that complaining about what has already happened is like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

  I soon realized—it took about ten minutes—that what I called conversations were, at least partially, a litany of complaints about who done me wrong, and an attempt to elicit outraged murmurs of agreement. Without shoring up the me that this shouldn’t have happened to (but always, sigh sigh sigh, did), I wasn’t sure what to talk about. (Could anyone actually live without complaining? Did Eckhart? I wanted to write and ask him, but that seemed like a backdoor complaint about how hard it was not to complain, so I decided against it.) Matt and I would get in the car, and I’d open my mouth to say, Can you believe what Oona did today?, but the words would catch in my throat like chicken bones and I’d ask about his day, or I’d open the window and look at the trees. Since I didn’t tell Matt about my new resolve, and since I was unusually quiet, he kept asking me if I was ill. When your lifelong partner is concerned you have the flu if you stop complaining, it’s a bit sobering.

  My second practice was to be conscious of one entire breath, five or six times a day, for one minute. Since I was already breathing, it didn’t seem like a stretch to put my attention on the beginning, middle, and end of a breath. To notice how it seemed to start in my belly, work its way up to my heart, throat, head, and back. After daily meditations in which I’d follow my breath for forty-five minutes, noticing five measly breaths a few times every day seemed like a cinch.

  As the days passed, I noticed that I’d be walking in the forest, and instead of noticing the wild pale-yellow orchids I’d be thinking about dinner that night. I’d be walking to the kitchen, and instead of feeling the movement of one leg and then another I’d be thinking about the radiation from Fukushima, or whether the honeybees were going to become extinct, and if apples would still be around in ten years. It didn’t take long before I realized why I was perpetually haunted by a fear of missing my life: I already was.

  The very act of noticing how much I wanted to complain, or how far into my thoughts I’d wandered, pierced the familiar trance I’d called “my life.” I started noticing what I’d been missing: the first sip of tea, the barely perceptible lift of the wind on my face. Each time I refrained from complaining or noticed the full range of breath, I was startled by the vividness of what was in front of me, even if I’d seen it a thousand times before—a chandelier, a strawberry, my husband. “Be like a child,” the Tibetan Buddhists say, “astonished at everything.” For a few times a day every day, I felt like a child and understood for the billionth time that we become what we spend our time on: when I spend my time complaining, I find more and more to complain about and become an alte kaker, as they say in Yiddish (translation: a cantankerous old fart).

  I was startled by the vividness of what was in front of me, even if I’d seen it a thousand times before—a chandelier, a strawberry, my husband.

  There are months now when I am definitely not my same old cantankerous self and everything seems to be made of a kind of fizzing light—arms, legs, banana slugs, garbage. On those days I feel like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, whose character has been impersonating a female soap opera star. He turns to his paramour, Jessica Lange, and says, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man.” I am a better me as not-me than I ever was as me.

  Then there are the other days. The slog days. I wake up grumpy and, within thirty seconds, enter the rat maze of my thoughts. It’s almost as if the spaciousness has suddenly become unnerving, as if I’ve convinced myself that although I was dumb enough to drink the Kool-Aid of believing that freedom from suffering was possible, I’m over it now and can get back to the comfort of feeling grumpy, rejected, and worthless. (It reminds me of my students who, after spending seven blissful days on retreat in which food was not a problem, get home and are furious with me because they fell for the possibility that their whole lives could be like that.)

  On those days I feel trapped in a familiar underground room, and it takes a while to return to life aboveground. But when I pop back into the stillness, it always feels the same: as if I’ve just been dreaming myself and am now awake. And each time, the sweetness and stillness of return feel more and more like home.

  I learned a lot from spiritual practice—about ease and loveliness and my crazy mind—but it didn’t dispel my fears of death.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  The Breaths I Have Left

  When I was eight my father gave me a copy of Death Be Not Proud, a book by John Gunther about the life and death of his son Johnny,
and by the time I turned the last page—and I say this in the kindest possible way—I’d become a bit of a hypochondriac and completely death-obsessed. Not only did I start worrying that every time I got a headache I had a brain tumor (as little Johnny did), but I also became convinced that the end was near. When my parents walked out the door, I wondered whether I would see them again. When my brother went to Mike May Day Camp, I worried he would get run over by a car. I just couldn’t believe that eight-year-old Johnny had died—and that everyone else would die as well. It didn’t seem fair, it didn’t seem right. Or, as Woody Allen said, when asked how he felt about death, “I am strongly against it.”

  In my twenties and thirties I elevated my death-obsession into a spiritual practice. I learned Buddhist meditation, went to graveyards with teachers who were intent on teaching us what I’d known for years: Life is short. People die. You will be amongst them. I traveled to India and saw the burning ghats in Benares. I witnessed how long it took a body, with all its bones and muscle, hair and eyes, to turn to ashes. (FYI: a long time. I had to get a Coke halfway through and come back for the rest.) I learned a lot from spiritual practice—about ease and loveliness and my crazy mind—but it didn’t dispel my fears of death. If anything, it exacerbated them because I became more aware of the shortness of life. My life in particular.

  There is an old saying in Buddhist circles that this human life is so precious that it is as if each one of us is like a turtle that lives in the ocean and comes up for air every hundred years. If by chance that rising turtle put its head through a bucket floating on the ocean’s surface it would be extremely rare. Attaining a human life is even rarer than that. So, since you have a chance in this one precious life to discover who you really are—your true nature—don’t waste a single second.