For Part 1 in the series, see #1 Raw is Good
#2 Resist the urge to fortify
When I open the door and step into my home, I'm hit with a sudden gust of emptiness - so much floor space where my dog Balthazar should be lying. He moved across country with me. He was by my side through 7 houses and 4 states. He had a motto: there's no human sadness that can't be addressed with a few strokes of the tongue. But he cannot cure this sadness. He died last week. It hits like something sharp.
Hearing about a much loved black teacher shot during his 90-somethingth traffic stop, or a policeman with a four-year-old daughter fallen to a sniper - I can't help but feel for the people that knew and loved the victims. It feels like my Balthazar void; only it comes in waves and hits whole families.
Raw emotions like these seem so sharp we feel they will cut through us. We wonder if we can contain them. The little comfort we get from well-meaning friends may distract us from the pain but doesn't attenuate it. For me, this is usually when I turn to the Buddhist teachers. They say, "Raw is Good." They say, Here is a strong emotion; let's get in close for a better view.
"We are constantly looking for padding so that we don't run into the sharp edges of the world," Chogyam Trungpa said in Smile at Fear.
In a way, this is not soothing. But sometimes soothing and sympathy aren't what we want. Painful emotion fills us with energy and we want to take action.
Our padding against grief may be to call a friend, go out, party, get busy, multi-media multi-task, exercise hard, or work late. When the pang is sharp, we might get the urge to slap it away or better yet to strike back, if only we can find a "cause" for our grief.
It's not easy to resist all this padding and face the blank space. Just sit with it. For example, what do I do with the rage for the driver who hit my dog, dislocated his hip for life, and disappeared into the night?
#2 Resist the urge to fortify
As I sit with my loss, the driver's action is 3 months behind me, but I am very tempted to leave grief and go there - to the more powerful domain of blame and anger. When sitting with grief, it is always tempting to look for a more comfortable emotion, and in finding one, to stop and seize it.
If you can bring yourself to continue sitting with the hard feeling, you may stumble upon a whole ball of emotions just waiting to unravel. Grief morphs into frustration into anger. If you stay with it long enough, you may unsettle something less outward and obvious, such as powerlessness. For me, and I imagine the families of shooting victims, the story of powerlessness goes something like this:
Someone harmed my loved one, and I couldn't stop it. Time will not run backwards. Some things you don't get to undo.
When looking at the void, each of these truths has the striking power of a dagger. We want to escape the blows. So in combination with seeking a more comfortable emotion, we also meet emotions we want to run from. Buddhists would call this yo-yo action the natural human desire to "avoid pain and seek happiness." They would also say that once we recognize these drives are common in everyone we meet, we begin to have compassion.
The idea of "sitting" with emotions sounds pretty passive. But Buddhist sitting - in pure observation and honesty - is active and has many challenges. I typically find myself jumping off the self-honesty treadmill sooner or later - to seek sympathy, to complain, to rage, or to attack.
If you can keep parsing the root ball of tough emotions, not stopping at or seizing on any one (at which point words will oblige you and rush in with an appropriate story), you will find the innermost kernel of the root ball. It's almost always a close relative of fear. Hence, Trungpa's book title, Smile at Fear. When we sit down to explore strong emotions, fear pushes back on our explorations like a force field. "Don't go there," it warns. According to Chogyam Trungpa, there's another piece to this dynamic.
"Fear does not allow fundamental tenderness to enter into us," he says. "When tenderness tinged by sadness touches into our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality. That is quite raw. That sensitivity is the basis of warriorship."
As exporters of Iron Man, X-Men, gangstas, the WWE, and the strongest military, we Americans may not be so comfortable with the language of "raw and tender." We certainly don't equate tenderness with "warriors." But as Trungpa doubles down on his language, the connection becomes clearer:
"Warriorship is so tender, without skin without tissue, naked and raw; it is soft and gentle; you have renounced putting on a new suit of armor, you have renounced a thick hard skin; you are willing to expose naked flesh, bone, marrow to the world."
Trungpa caught my interest when he connected this rawness to the word "reality." Everyone knows "reality" has a strong subjective component. Human history is full of attempts to reason, argue, and empirically prove one or another reality. But what if, when we slam into this rawness, we take it as a signpost telling us to shift our attention to some spiritual antenna, and there reality will be, in full view?
It may sound like a maudlin kind of pacifist approach, but in the context of Smile at Fear, Trungpa is discussing a samurai warrior who slices his opponent in half - with compassion. The warrior act is not the actual slicing, but whether the warrior can bring the slice from a place of "tenderness" rather than rage or fear.
While I find this a tall order, one that I may never fill, this concept of warriorship offers me a sense of the direction, the "True North" of the practice. It also serves as a different reference point from what familiar bromides offer.
While in the face of physical danger "attack" may be the correct response, this practice says that when the situation is not urgent, we have the luxury of examining; we can ask "is it the right response"? As students, we are to realize, with gratitude, that this is the greater luxury. Unfortunately for those who like to jump up and do, when given the "luxury" of painful past actions that can't be undone, the meditative action to take is always, "sit with it."