Buddha and the Borderline

by Kiera Van Gelder

  Rinpoche nods. “We say that the Buddha is like a doctor, and the Dharma is the medicine. The people of the Sangha are like nurses, there to help you whenever you need it.”

  “But what is my sickness?”

  “You are like everybody else. You suffer from afflictive emotions—from anger, desire, and ignorance. You believe in permanence when there is none; grasp at a solid self although there isn’t one. You have yet to understand the infallibility of karma. But most of all, you do not recognize your true nature, the innate intelligence within: Buddha-nature.”

  “You mean that at the core of us, everyone is good?”

  “Don’t think in terms of good and bad,” Rinpoche instructs. “What you are is primordially pure—absolute perfection. It’s your innate nature. Buddha-nature does not come and go. It’s like the sky, always there: an awareness and clarity that can be temporarily covered by clouds but is ever present. It’s like the sun, never failing to shine. Do you understand that?”

  “I do… But I don’t believe it really, or feel it.”

  “Of course not,” he smiles. “It must be discovered. It’s like you’re living in poverty, in a shack on a dirt mound, but under that dirt is the most precious diamond. A wish-fulfilling gem. You need to find it. It must be seized.”

  A gem that must be seized? I’m all about that—just give me an instruction manual for seizing!

  “Right now,” Rinpoche concludes, “you have the right motivation but need proper guidance. It’s like you’ve been holding a very hot cup of tea and burning your fingers. Buddhist practice will give you a handle. Eventually you’ll know exactly what is needed, at every moment, because you will have the clarity of your innate intelligence. Your compassion, too, can be infinite, because it won’t be conditional. You will have true freedom.”

  “What is the practice?”

  “If you are serious,” Rinpoche says, “you should take refuge.” I nod and my eyes start to brim with tears. It’s just like the books on Buddhism described: the teacher, the teaching, the community—the three jewels.

  The rest of the day passes in a haze of delight and confusion. I keep wanting to drag my cushion up to Rinpoche’s throne and sit at his feet. Or maybe it’s my duckling part, now imprinted again. I receive reading material on the refuge ceremony at the end of the first day, and I decide to go back to my own place rather than Taylor’s so I can have total privacy and meditate on what’s just happened, on what I want to do.

  Taking refuge essentially means that you’ve decided to place your trust in the Buddha, his teachings, and his community—the three jewels—as the path to liberation from suffering. In the same way you can decide to trust a psychiatrist or type of therapy in order to relieve emotional pain, it’s a form of committing yourself to receiving help and applying it to your life. In DBT you sign a contract to stay in skills group for a year, but this is different. By taking refuge, you declare your commitment to the path of Buddhism. There’s nothing to sign, no money to fork over. And as Rinpoche explained later that afternoon, the Buddha never intended for there to be a formal religion with him as some kind of god. He was simply a man who discovered a way to free himself from pain and then devoted himself to teaching others the path to that awakened state. Taking refuge means acknowledging this—that we all are Buddhas, just in need of awakening. It also means committing ourselves to this goal.

  This is what I want—deeply: to have a community and an ongoing practice beyond the hospitals and diagnoses. I understand how distorted my thinking still is, how emotion mind still drives me, how I still fundamentally lack compassion toward myself and others. I see the beginning of a path that promises to transform a borderline into a Buddha, and I’m willing—excited, really—to take refuge in that.

  The next afternoon, four of us sit in front of Rinpoche and repeat after him: “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.” He cuts a piece of hair from each person’s head and gives each of us a Dharma name. Mine is Great Blissful Lotus, and I’m secretly pleased, as it’s much sexier and more exciting than Defender of the Dharma, which another woman receives. He presents us with a length of cord that he’s blessed, for protection, and gives each of us a piece of parchment paper with our Tibetan Buddhist names inscribed in calligraphy. I cry through the entire ceremony. It’s a little embarrassing, because I can’t stop. I cry through the afternoon meditations on karma and impermanence. And then, at end of the afternoon, a new emotion sets in: panic. I have no idea what to do now!

  One of Rinpoche’s students informs me that Rinpoche actually lives in Nepal and might not be back for another year. She sees how upset I am when I hear this and puts her arm around me. “There is nothing to worry about. Now Rinpoche is always with you.” I nod and don’t explain that I have a bit of trouble with separations and “internalizing” the presence of others.

  The retreat ends with each of us paying thanks to Rinpoche and, in keeping with Tibetan tradition, offering him a white silk scarf. “Email me,” he says, placing the scarf around my neck and smiling. This calms me down a bit. Thank god Buddhist Rinpoches have the Internet!

  That evening I bring my meditation cushion and newly refuged self back to Taylor’s. He’s sitting on the couch with his laptop, watching a documentary on guns and the Civil War. “Hey! I missed you!” he says and jumps up to hug me. “How was the retreat?”

  I sit down beside him. There’s a swirling disorientation, like I’m coming off an LSD trip and now have no words to explain what happened: “It was…you know…like…wow…” I try to describe what happened, but it all comes out as adjectives: Amazing! Unbelievable! I show him my scroll and the new name.

  “You’re not going to shave your head and move to Tibet are you?” He looks genuinely worried. He knows how Kiki happens. I promise I won’t. “Good,” he says, “Because that’s a long way to travel for some nookie.” We settle down with the cats and the TV. A part of me is still in that hall, feeling another world open up to me. Another part is relieved to be back to the smells, sensations, and taste of Taylor’s house and body. No one says a Buddhist can’t have a boyfriend—or a husband. Two months later, Taylor proposes.

  24

  Reversals

  It’s like a fairy tale—what I’ve craved from the very beginning, what I believe will finally fulfill me. I have Taylor’s undying devotion, a home we can share, and the promise that I’ll never be alone again. Everyone is delighted. Raymond sends flowers. Gail and Renee take me out to lunch. My mother cries. Taylor’s mother almost cries. I finally move completely into the house, where I discover that being at the center of Taylor’s world does not include closet space.

  There was immediate fallout after Rinpoche’s sudden appearance and then absence. It was like a spiritual hit-and-run: I felt the ground lurch from under me even as I floated half off it on the fumes of his presence. Taylor, true to his word, doesn’t seem the least bit jealous when I plaster pictures of Rinpoche all over my room. I need to keep the connection going, yet it feels very tenuous. I’m afraid to email him despite his encouragement because I now know that he has thousands of students all over the world. Plus, I really don’t have anything to say except, “Please pay attention to me!” One of Rinpoche’s longtime students gave me her email address at the end of the retreat, so I write her about my confusion and longing for a connection with Rinpoche. As the other student did during the retreat, she reassures me that if I think of Rinpoche, he will be with me.

  “But I don’t feel him,” I say. I photocopy more pictures of Rinpoche and tape them to all of my notebooks and mirrors. I do prostrations at my altar and say the prayers, and still I don’t feel anything. But I do feel Taylor. He holds me securely in his arms and rubs my shoulders when we watch TV. He sends me links to fifteen random and amusing Internet sites every day when I’m at work. No matter how strongly I’m pulled in the direction of a spiritual practice, I still find the concrete, visceral world of my relationship with T
aylor most sheltering. From sharing French toast in the morning to lying side-by-side at night with our books and reading lights, it keeps me secured.

  Eventually, I email Rinpoche for advice about the marriage (even though I’ve already said yes). He says, “You will know what to do,” which is exactly what Ethan says. I buy an expensive wedding planner book and put it on the dining room table, where it instantly gets buried under the perpetual accrual of Taylor’s detritus. It takes constant effort to prevent the house from sinking back into chaos; it’s like a vortex I’m constantly pulling against. So it’s the house I first start really complaining about to Ethan.

  “I might be developing claustrophobia,” I tell him.

  “Or you could be anxious about the marriage.”

  “No, it’s the house: the cat hair, having to put all my clothes in the attic, and the litter box back in the kitchen.”

  Ethan nods. “So, it’s living with Taylor that is making you anxious.”

  “Well no, it’s that…” I try to figure out what it is. Actually, I’m beginning to feel smothered—not by Taylor, who gives me all the space in the world when it comes to me doing what I want. It’s something else. I’ve read that, for some borderlines, the flip side of abandonment fear is the fear of engulfment. It’s another one of those “screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t” situations. All you want is love and belonging, and your very existence depends on it. But when you get it, you have no existence except that love; there’s still no you. And in relinquishing the last little holdouts where I was separate, I’m now covered with Taylor—and cat hair. I just might be feeling engulfed.

  Yet this is also new to me. I’m usually so busy figuring out how to keep whatever security I can. That Taylor is willing to commit his entire life to me and share everything not only scares me with its power, it also challenges core beliefs that continue to declare I’m an untouchable, unworthy of genuine love. Back when I examined the emergence process at Project Transition, Dr. Crabtree pointed out that every gain involves a loss. Even though successes are seemingly the building blocks of progress, they also upset the balance, and that makes you more vulnerable. I believe this is happening now.

  And then there are all of my parts, each with its different needs and perspective. Where is the truth, and how do I determine what’s right? I ask Ethan if there’s a wise mind perspective, and he replies, “What does your Buddhist part want and see?” I hadn’t thought of that before, asking the Buddhist part. That part is relatively new, and she’s still smarting from not getting a bigger piece of Rinpoche, but she does have a voice. So what does she see? She sees that I’m still suffering, that even when I get what I want—a marriage proposal, a real home—I’m at war with something. The Buddhist wants me to go in a completely different direction and find the cause of this. She says that until I do this, all my efforts will only lead to more pain. And she’s right, but as soon as I leave Ethan’s office, I forget.

  How do you shut up your Buddhist part? You focus obsessively on everything concrete, never allowing a pause in the ticker tape of thoughts running through your head, jumping from one activity to another, and numbing yourself with TV and sleep. In the daytime, this works pretty well, but at night I freak out. I wake up feeling like there’s a cat smothering my face. Sometimes there is, but usually it’s pure panic. For several constricting and seemingly endless minutes, I believe I’m about to make a giant mistake with this marriage, this house, and Taylor. I’ve gained a shell of security, but I’ve barely touched the seed within myself that is real and enduring—that primordial purity Rinpoche described. I lie there next to Taylor, his breath soothing me even as I’m realizing the horror of the situation. Then I fall asleep and am almost able to forget.

  In the months that follow, I watch as my excitement about the marriage sours, and I feel paralyzed, unable to tell Taylor. I’m starting to cultivate a fantasy about what my life would be like if I were on my own. I’d have a little apartment close to work. I would practice meditation, become a vegetarian, go to night classes for grad school, and definitely wouldn’t have any cats. My space would be uncluttered and my body completely my own. I’m also mentally compiling a list of our differences: our goals and priorities, food preferences, housekeeping styles, and even hygiene habits. Activities that initially kept us close, like sex and motorcycles, have fizzled out for me, and all we do together now is eat, sleep, and watch TV. But what isn’t clear to me is whether these are valid reasons to break up or problems that we could simply keep working on.

  My body appears to be deciding for me. First it’s the feeling of claustrophobia—not being able to breathe in the space. Then there are those night panics. I wake up sweaty and anxious, feeling like I’m close to driving my car off a cliff. A horrible pit in my stomach develops whenever Taylor and I discuss our plans. And the house itself feels toxic. One night, when we’re in bed and the cat hair has driven my allergic reactions to a height, I tell Taylor, “I’m going crazy in this house. I don’t know if this will work.” He hugs me closer and says, “Don’t worry,” already half asleep. “You get panicked. Everything is okay.”

  But it’s not okay. It’s like I’m giving birth to a monster. Taylor can’t see it yet, but he will eventually; there’s only so much time it can stay inside. Three nights later, I turn to him in bed again. He’s got his arm around me and I can’t look at his face, so I burrow into his shoulder.

  “I have to cancel the engagement and move out,” I say. No preface, no postscript. Taylor’s arm tenses, and we lie there for a horrible moment, suspended in an intimacy that’s been cleaved in half by a single sentence. This is exactly what I’ve feared Taylor would do to me, every minute, for years. How strange that now I’m the one who says the words.

  Taylor gets up and goes into the other room. He doesn’t talk to me the entire next day. I feel hollow and scared, and I don’t want to face him either. I page Ethan, and he coaches me to stay grounded and focus on the things immediately in front of me, which I do. When I come home from work that night, Taylor is still in bed, and I begin to cry. I know what I’ve done and I wish I could take it all back, and yet I can’t. This is what needs to happen. I knock on the bedroom door and he says, “I want you out of the house tonight.”

  “Okay,” I cry.

  “I want your things out of here in a week or I’m changing the locks.”

  I see him sit up through the partially open door, then he says, “You know what this means: It’s over. You’ve ended it. You’re not getting me back.”

  I say I know, and I pack my medications and some clothes. In the car, I drive instinctively toward my mother. On the way I call, and I’m sobbing so hard that she can’t understand what I’m saying. “Just get here safely,” she says.

  When I pull up, she brings me into the house and lays me down on her bed. “I didn’t know what else to do,” I sob. She puts her arms around me and rocks me. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…” She holds me for what must be an hour. I finally fall asleep, the pillow wet with my tears.

  “I still love him,” I say when she wakes me up and brings me to my old bedroom.

  “Sometimes love isn’t enough.” She pushes the hair out of my eyes and kisses me goodnight. “You’re going to get through this.”

  Three days later I hire movers and move into a single bedroom apartment I find through a realtor. It’s in an anonymous brick building in Waltham about a mile away from Taylor’s house, far enough that I can’t impulsively walk to his house in the middle of the night to beg for forgiveness, but close enough that I feel like I’m still grounded in the life we had. I feel completely lost as soon as I move in. All of my convictions about what I want and need evaporate in the desert of my sudden isolation. When I’m not at work, I’m in my new, clean, cat-free bedroom, curled up on my bed sleeping or crying. At work, people stop by and give me hugs. Gail checks in on me every hour. Raymond sends me more flowers. Since I was the one who ended it, I thought I’d be able to handle
this better. My mother offers to pay my rent to offset the additional security deposit, and she buys me a TV with a DVD player so I’ll have something to distract me when I’m at home alone. My father calls every night, and he’s finally stopped suggesting I go to a meeting. He just wants to know how I am.

  It takes a couple of weeks, but soon enough I begin to beg Taylor to give us another chance. He comes over and we talk. It’s horribly painful and nothing gets resolved, but I’m adamant that we can work things out. Then a few days later I panic, remembering particular frustrations and difficulties in our relationship, so I email Taylor and declare that it’s really over. Taylor says, quite justifiably, that he feels fucked with, especially as this happens over and over. But on the days when we’re on the side of hope, we have sex. And I don’t want to admit this, but I find it exciting: two bodies caught in this extreme tug-of-war, trapped within collisions and retreats. My passion is somehow tied to the knowledge that I’m losing Taylor. And just as my body revolted when immersed in his house, now it opens to him, trying to pull him back in. Taylor returns to me physically, but he’s wrapped in ambivalence. I find his emotional distance more intolerable than the state of his house or any of our previous issues and differences—and that makes me want him even more.

  Ethan and I discuss these attempts to win Taylor back, followed by sudden reversals that push him away. Ethan suggests that my difficulty with ambivalence—my own and Taylor’s—propels these swings in perspective. Taylor isn’t mine any more, and half the time I don’t know if I even want him, but there’s still a chance we could be together. We’re in an indeterminate state, and I can’t tolerate that. So the black-and-white thinking, the wild swings between idealization and devaluation, represent attempts to establish my position, and his. This happens so rapidly and subsumes my emotions so entirely that I will go from weeping and longing for him to an utter conviction that we must part forever, sometimes in the course of just a few hours. I genuinely try not to inflict these contradictory positions on Taylor. Yet it’s inevitable. If he doesn’t call me for a couple of days I’m desperate. Then, when I’m sitting on his couch in an attempt to make up, I only want to return to my clean, quiet apartment and be on my own.