How do I tell him to stop? It would seem so easy; just say something. Yet I can’t. He undresses me in the living room. And yes, he is in awe of my hairiness. If only I could say the words “I have to leave.” He pulls me up again and leads me upstairs, to a bedroom with mirrors on the ceiling. I am not joking. For the next two hours I watch myself get fucked and worshipped like I’m the star of a porn movie, covered in saliva and lubricant, only I’m upside down and numb. As soon as I understand that I’ve become choiceless again, it’s like an actress takes over. I pretend to like it, and this terrifies me even more. I’m playing along with his passion, even as it feels traumatizing. I still can’t tell him to stop, and it’s only when he dozes off after his third orgasm that I get up, pull on my clothes, and say, “I have to leave.”
“You’ve got to stop this,” Alexis barks when I tell her. “He could have killed you.”
“I know, I know.”
“Take all of those ads off-line.”
“But I don’t want to!”
“Take them off before someone chops your body up and throws it in the woods and I have to go looking for it.”
Until now, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’m playing with fire, especially since I don’t know how to say no—even when I really, really, really don’t want to have sex.
“You know how fucked up that was, right?”
I do.
I admit the whole thing to Ethan, who listens to the story without any visible reaction. I tell him I want to go into a monastery.
“Do you think that if you go there, you won’t have sex with anyone?”
Probably not. I’d probably be trying to seduce the monks. Ethan wants to know which of my parts were involved in this experience with Larry. What prevented me from taking care of myself? I go back over the sequence. At the door’s threshold, when he pulled me to him, there was a rift: My younger parts got scared, and my older parts wanted to get laid.
“So you didn’t pay attention to what the scared parts were feeling?”
“Worse than that, Ethan. I lost touch with the adult who is capable of saying no to sex. I became the child who lets an adult do anything to her—the part that doesn’t have the concept of boundaries and rights.”
I start to cry. How can I be so driven by the need for sex and connection and have so little ability to protect myself? I’m the lamb being led to slaughter, but I’m the one leading me. With Taylor, this conflict was somewhat contained. He took care of me, protected me, so that the young parts and adult parts could coexist on some level, even if they got confused in bed.
“Who inside you was in charge when you were at Larry’s house?” Ethan asks.
It was the six-year-old. I let a man have sex with my six-year-old. I suddenly realize that she was never taught to say no, and that I have to protect her.
“I’m being a bad Buddhist,” I tell Alexis during our weekly Saturday chai at Starbucks. “I can’t meditate, I’m chasing after pleasure and avoiding pain, and I can’t even get myself over to your Sangha.”
“You are not being a bad Buddhist, silly. There’s no such thing.”
“But why can’t I practice?”
Alexis finishes her chai in a big swig. “They say that the greater the purification, the greater the obstacle.”
“What does that mean?”
“That sometimes you have to go through a lot of shit to get to the diamond. Come with me to the open house this afternoon. At least get some of the energy from the Sangha.” The community recently rented half of a large house in the suburbs outside Boston, so they now have an actual meditation center where the Lama lives and gives teachings and people come together to practice.
I feel that same resistance I’ve always had about going to meditation practices, but with Alexis, even her requests have an inherent command.
Fine. I’ll go. But just to the open house. And they’d better not make me meditate.
26
Vajrayana
There are times when impulsivity leads to buying massage chairs, cutting off all your long curly hair, sleeping with strangers, or quitting school. Not having a sense of the consequences has its drawbacks. The flip side is that, if you aren’t held in place by boundaries, you can move in ways other people would rarely dare. Sensibility, reason, and planning don’t leave much space for intuitive and spontaneous action—like when you walk into a big house filled with Buddhas and Tibetan monks and realize that this is the place you need to be. Especially when this is followed by forking over your next month’s rent to a woman you once believed was destroying your life.
I recognize the house instantly because of all the colorful Tibetan prayer flags strung from its trees and awnings like party streamers. On the walkway and porch steps, people sit with plates of food. I still hate crowds, even those full of Buddhists, so I’m surprised at the calm spaciousness I feel once I step inside the house. Much of the first floor is taken up by a large meditation hall and an elaborate shrine room. Between the tall ceilings and hardwood floors, minutely detailed paintings of Buddhas line the walls and exquisite bronze statues sit on pedestals and mantels, surrounded by flowers and offerings. Alexis shouts out to me from behind a buffet table, and as I approach her, I scope out the scene. I don’t believe it. There are no hot Buddhist men.
“Why are there no cute men here?” I immediately ask Alexis.
“Horrible, isn’t it?” She leads me through the other rooms on the first floor: dining room, sun porch, shrine room, pantries. “It’s an epidemic. Guys seem to go for martial arts and only wise up when their bodies start failing them.”
Currently, three people plus the resident teacher, Lama Sonam, are living at the center, and although Alexis still lives in Lowell, she spends almost every day there.
Alexis pokes me and says, “Hey, there’s another room for rent. But you’d never survive.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, there’s no sex in this house.” Seriously? Why would anyone live in a house where you can’t have sex? On second thought, I can think of a few very good reasons why.
When I ask Alexis to show me the room, she says, “But do you really think you can live in a place without sex? Or meat? Lama Sonam keeps all of the monks’ vows. Living here is like being in a monastery—just without, you know, the other stuff.”
“Can I have sex and meat outside the house?”
Alexis pats me on the head. “You can do whatever you want outside the center, carnal Kiera. You just have to be a good girl in here.”
I think I can handle the no-sex rule. It’s a good thing. It will help me make sound decisions and provide some outside structure. We borderlines need that. Yet there’s a problem: I start looking more closely at the Buddhist paintings on the walls, and I discover many are of naked couples—having sex. I point one out to Alexis and suggest that maybe it’s not a good idea to ban sex and then put pornographic posters all over the place.
She swats me on the head. “Those images,” she says, “represent the most profound teachings in all of Buddhism.” I look more closely. Sex as something profound? Maybe they can help me here. “Those aren’t ordinary people, Kiera.” We stand in front of a large painting of two bodies clasped together, a man sitting cross-legged, and a woman straddling him so they’re belly to belly, groin to groin. Both look pretty happy. “Don’t think of them as people; they’re images of enlightened qualities. The male symbolizes compassion and skillful means, and the female symbolizes wisdom and insight. The merging of those qualities represents enlightenment.”
She leads me around the shrine room. “You can’t be literal here. All of this,” she says, sweeping her hand around the room, “all of this is symbolic. These images, these statues, and the practices are teaching devices, ways to train your mind to see differently and to cultivate positive qualities.” I look around and it’s true. Everywhere I look, there are symbols, ritual objects, instruments, and sculptures. And unlike the other places where I’ve seen Buddhist
images, here there are both male and female Buddhas, along with Buddhas with thousands of arms, naked women dancing on piles of skulls, and images that look like demons—red creatures with fire coming out of their heads. But before I can ask more questions, Alexis is dragged off to help prepare more tofu casserole. It’s a good thing they don’t have pictures of steak tips and chicken wings on the walls. I can only take so much temptation.
Later, Alexis introduces me to the other residents: Marianne, an operating room nurse in her fifties; Sophie, a beautiful artist in her early twenties; and Andrew, a young man who packed up everything he owned in Florida to move up here and help establish this meditation center.
And then there’s Lama Sonam, the Tibetan monk and teacher, with his maroon robes and shaved head. When Alexis introduces me, she says, “Kiera wants to move in, and I think she’d be perfect here.”
Lama Sonam smiles and takes my hand. “This is a good place to be.”
“Actually, it’s where she has to be,” Alexis says, and I glare at her. I don’t want my vices displayed quite just yet.
Lama Sonam nods. Maybe he knows more than he’s letting on? I thank him, and he gives me a welcoming hug. Apparently, whether I like it or not, I’m moving in.
Before we leave the open house, I’ve written the check.
“I may have done either the stupidest thing in my life or the wisest,” I say to my mom on the phone that night.
“Oh god, please don’t tell me you’ve shaved your head again.”
I find it oddly amusing that my mom thinks of my hair first, among all of my numerous misguided actions, from accidentally burning down my school’s old boathouse to getting arrested and put in jail.
“I’m moving to a Buddhist meditation center.”
“How wonderful!” she declares. She says she’s never liked the idea of me living in that brick box in Waltham all by myself. I agree; it hasn’t been much fun there. But she wants to know if I’ll have to do “certain things” to live at the center. Are there expectations? I explain about having certain rules when I’m at the center, in keeping with its status as a holy place.
“But you don’t have to be a monk, or is it a nun, do you?”
“No, Mom, everyone there is normal.” At least, I think they are.
Raymond is more worried about this move and asks, “Are you sure they won’t make you take some kind of Kool-Aid?” I don’t think so, but the truth is, I don’t know. It’s all an experiment. I want to be a Buddhist, and this is where I’m landing. It can’t be any worse than living alone and man-hunting around the clock.
My father says, “This is the best thing you could ever do.”
That surprises me, and I ask him why.
“Because you don’t do well alone,” he says. “Even I know that. And of all the places to be, a group of Buddhists is probably as good as it gets. At least you won’t have to worry so much about the dishes getting done.”
I tell everyone I know that I’m going to be “on retreat” indefinitely at the Drikung Meditation Center. This sounds a lot better than saying that my life is completely out of control again and I’m back in the dysregulation zone. Ethan continues to remind me that I’m not, but wherever I am, it’s a shaky place. And I have to admit that this makes me wonder how much of my mastery over my BPD symptoms is due to hard work, and how much is because, until relatively recently, I was held securely by Taylor and the DBT groups.
Current research is claiming that up to 88 percent of people with BPD eventually go into remission (Zanarini et al. 2006). But maybe I’m one of the 12 percent who will continue to struggle; maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life on the borderline between neurotic and psychotic. No. I can’t look at it that way. “Remission” doesn’t mean recovery, just that you have less than five of the symptoms on the official DSM list. Nor does it recognize the cyclical and complex nature of our progress. The whole point of moving to the Buddhist center is so I can stop thinking of myself only in terms of a diagnosis, with symptoms, criteria, and percentages. I’m making this move so I can deal with the BPD symptoms on a spiritual level, and as part of a daily practice with other people.
I think it’s a good path, yet if it weren’t for BPD, I never would have arrived here. And then there’s Alexis, the woman I once believed was my nemesis and the catalyst of my destruction. Now she’s opened the door to a place perfectly suited for me, one without saviors, but full of Buddhas in the making.
I imagine that moving into a meditation center will be like diving into a spring-fed pool. I’ll float in the clear, calm waters of the house, where once a day people gather to sit on cushions and breathe deeply, and to cluster around sacred texts, studying and sharing deep spiritual revelations. I expect it to be a more colorful and homey version of the other Buddhist gathering places I’ve visited: regulated, formal, and, above all, quiet and peaceful. So I’m not expecting that monks will clang cymbals, bang drums, and perform rituals that transform grape juice into the nectar of wisdom in a cup shaped like a human skull. I’m unprepared for people to appear at odd hours to get blessings from Lama Sonam and make offerings to the Buddhas on certain days of the moon cycle. But I don’t complain, as the shrine room is a virtual pantry full of fresh fruit and tasty niblets delivered by the faithful.
It is both humbling and frustrating to discover how little I know about Tibetan Buddhism as a living practice, beyond my occasional reading and the retreat I attended with Rinpoche. So far, all of my training and experience with Buddhism has boiled down to “sit your ass down and breathe” and intellectually grappling with concepts such as impermanence, Buddha-nature, and refuge. The atmosphere and events at the Drikung Meditation Center are entirely beyond my grasp.
Finally, I force myself to sit through my first group practice, and it doesn’t involve meditation as I know it. Instead, we chant mantras and prayers in Tibetan and visualize Buddhas dissolving into the crowns of our heads.
“I don’t understand,” I say to Marianne, on the verge of tears, my head hurting from trying to read the phonetic translations of Tibetan prayers.
“It’s Vajrayana Buddhism,” Marianne tells me. “It takes a while.” She smiles and tells me not to worry. “Some things need to be experienced in nonconceptual ways, and this kind of practice will do that.”
I turn to Alexis, who is stacking up cushions, for clarification. “Does that mean I don’t need to understand what I’m doing? I thought the Buddha said that we should never do anything on blind faith.”
“Each tradition has its own focus, and its own practices to bring you to enlightenment,” Alexis says. “Ours is part of the Tibetan Kagyu lineage, which emphasizes physical practices like praying, chanting, and visualizations. Other lineages have a different focus, like studying texts or certain kinds of yoga. It’s all about what works for you.”
I’m torn between resistance and longing. I’ve already complained to Alexis ad nauseam about how tired I am of just sitting and breathing—that I want more than a mindfulness practice; I want the three jewels—the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. I want to get to the root of this antagonism I have toward myself and the world and change it. However, now that I’m in the maw of the Tibetan Buddhism of the Drikung Kagyu lineage, I’m not so sure. My once-clear ideas about how Buddhism relates to my recovery, therapy, and skills grow fuzzy, and I’m trying to keep the threads connected. I know that the cognitive behavior therapy triangle of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors I learned back at MAP had its origins not in psychology but over two thousand five hundred years earlier, when the Buddha taught his first students that “all that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become” (Cook 2007, 346). Buddhism describes the causes of suffering as rooted in the “three poisons”—attachment, aversion, and ignorance—and from my years in therapy I’ve learned that my attachments, self-hatred, and cognitive distortions are among the greatest causes of my distress. The connections and similarities can be made into neat little
charts, and I’ve done that. So why, why do I want to run away from this new type of Buddhism?
Part of the reason obviously involves broken expectations—attachment again, this time to the way I’d come to think of Buddhism. I had a very concrete vision of what would happen when I moved to the center. I wanted a lotus pond, and what I got is a three ring circus of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, where I’m scampering from ring to ring, dodging clowns and trumpet players. People at work keep asking me what living at the center is like: Am I relaxed? Getting my meditation groove on? And I’m asking questions, too: If I complain about it, does that mean I’m still being a “bad Buddhist”? Should I admit that I spend most evenings holed up in my room cruising online dating sites because I’m afraid that if I go downstairs, Alexis will rope me into a practice and I’ll be stuck chanting for the next hour?
When I try to explain to Alexis, she says, “Talk to Lama Sonam.” But for some reason I have trouble doing this. Here I am, just where I thought I wanted to be: living with a monk raised and trained in a Tibetan monastery. He crossed the Himalayas three times and was imprisoned twice by the Chinese, and he’s determined to bring the teachings to people like me. Yet when I stand in the kitchen with him making tea, I’m tongue-tied, probably because I don’t want to sound like an idiot.
Buddha and the Borderline Page 26
