Taking my son to the doctor, I find myself dreading the receptionist.
She’s not mean, really; just smug.
I hate people who are smug.
I have all these judgments about her:
That her life is easy (she only works three days a week)
That her life is calm (her office gleams a wan, peaceful pink and tinkles with soft, stressless music)
That her life is perfectly stable and unruffled (her inordinate concern for the details of checks and such points to not much else going on)
Yes, it seems she’s Got it Good, and that makes me resent her, especially when I feel judged by her. She sits in her calm, clean, unspoiled atmosphere, irritated by me being late or forgetting my checkbook or having loud kids. She always says things like, “You’re working now, right?” As if, as a mother, I shouldn’t be; as if, if I had done things right, I wouldn’t be.
I feel resentful. I want to poop on her neatly organized desk.
Lowering the Shields
So, mindfulness practice. This time, as I head to the doctor’s office thinking of this woman, I consider that maybe beneath all that smugness is a person who wants to be happy, just like I do.
I forgive her, a little.
I consider her a human being, consider her from within her skin, imagine that beneath her wrinkled nose and sneering lips, there’s a tender heart, there’s a woman who was once a girl and an infant, there’s a budding Buddha.
I pull up and park. (And my heart is in The Park?)
Instead of entering the office with a defended stance against the receptionist, my shields were lowered, my heart open, my attitude friendly.
When we interacted, I’m pretty sure she was the same as she always is. But somehow she seemed softer, kinder, not as threatening; I chatted easier; she chatted back; there was all this spaciousness between us, instead of embattlement and cagey scanning.
Suddenly the world was a bigger place.
Loving Your Enemy
And it struck me, as I drove away, full of ease as opposed to resentment, relaxed and not riled up, that if I start reassessing all the people in my life who I have internally filed under “Mean” or “Hated” or “Annoying” or “Boring” or “Not Worth My Time” – if I can unstick those labels and just approach with openness to who they really are – open to the idea that, however mean or rude or snarly or snotty they are, that’s not the whole truth of them – and it has nothing to do with me – there’s a lot more wonderful opportunities in the world for happy experiences, sweet acquaintances, supportive strangers, possible friends.
It’s easier to feel like you belong in a world if you stop assuming that everyone in it should be classified as a probable enemy.
I don’t, of course, mean that one should ignore the reality of being mistreated, not notice that you don’t like someone, or feel that you have to be best buddies with assholes.
I do mean that we get closer to the reality of a person when we approach with our guard down. Guns on alert, we aren’t really engaging with other people – we’re just pushing them away. Not a lot of information is getting in.
Getting Out of My Head
I’m not going to be calling up the receptionist and inviting her to lunch. But I am going to continue to foster a more receptive heart to this receptionist.
By letting her into my heart, with her surly arrogance and all, I am happier because I am, paradoxically, safer from any attack she would level at me. Her judgments – if she really has any – don’t hurt me, because I have taken all that power away by loving her for her real self, seeing her as a real person.
Holy Cow! All those judgments I was believing that came from her – who was really making those? ME!!!
I was reading into her expressions; I was drawing all these conclusions; I was creating a mental war totally within the bounds of my head. She was my enemy, because I made her so. And the real enemy the whole time was myself.
And that, folks, is what I call a doctor’s visit that really brought on some healing! Hee hee.
A deep appreciation waits for me, opposite shore, the waters between us lap against my feet and tug me to go.
I did not learn that the world was an abundant and beautiful place.
My landscape was populated with self-righteous, boring consumers feigning Christianity and wasting their lives. The enclave of my family – defined as the ‘group’ in which I was raised, not at all including the blood relatives who were as bad as the rest of them – was a world within a world, and it was the only world worthwhile. Here, we were creative, real, dynamic, engaged, passionate, following God and our callings and our missions and turning the world ‘upside right for Christ.’
I didn’t know there were people on the Outside who were genuine, moral, open-hearted, true. I had no idea that creative sparks danced in the minds and hearts of – well, everyone, from store clerks to poets to djs to bus drivers to office managers to dancers to dmv workers.
I also did not think much of the natural world – other than my literary-inspired imaginative overlay applied to the drab tree allowed to live in our LA front yard. Yes, it was ‘God’s handywork’ and all that, but there was no refuge or delight derived in my family from the concrete world. The ideas in our heads, the spiritual and theological abstractions, the plays we performed, the prayers we delivered – that’s what concerned us; that’s what really mattered. “The rest will pass away.”
So it is a new discovery for me to actually See the beauty around me, with my full attention and awareness. The trees are not just a background against which the human drama unfolds. It’s not ancillary scenery. It’s alive, and stunning, throbbing with a presence equal to my own in energy, in importance to the whole.
I don’t know the names of trees or rocks, and I barely know how to interact with people, openly, nonjudgementally, and without a purpose in mind.
I was habituated to snub the ordinary, the everyday. The boring, pointless pursuits binding and blinding people.
Mindfulness practice has been a challenge.
But it has opened my eyes.
I am just at the beginning of noticing this world around me, and seeing that it is a rich, diverse, wonderful place existing. I am lucky to be here. It is an honor to be sharing this moment, these breaths, these words, this experience, with you, all of you, right now. It is a great relief to know that that small tight ball of my ‘family’ was not the sole habitation of vibrant people, beauty, meaning. It is a great relief to let go of the terrible guilt, shame, responsibility, loneliness, isolation, and desolation of holding membership in the Outside world, a subpar place marking me as a failure.
I don’t need to feel there is no beauty to be had, no grace or wonder here.
I don’t need to turn the world any direction – as if I could. As if I would want to.
I’m just another person, part of the large magical wacky miserable mystery tour that is our occupation on planet Earth.
As such, I’m as ordinary and as sacred as every other person.
There’s this one shopping center I pass every day on the way to work. Its landscaping ignites repulsion in me – a wince and a cringe that feels physical, like a splinter you can’t ignore.
A search for "ugly trees" reveals a ton of gorgeous trees. Not sure there ARE ugly trees.
My disgust roots in on the:
a) ugly aesthetic that shaped the evenly planted pines
b) nondescript shrubbery and shabby grass, lacking any care or attention
c) obvious treatment of the fauna as accessories, belying a lack of care or love or relationship to the other life on this planet
d) cheap, boring construction
e) fact that I have to live in a contemporary society that builds these ugly areas of commerce
My aversion feels so strong, I feel a hatred for this industrial society, for this western culture, for myself, even, for my participation in it. I want to run away somewhere idyllic and beautiful, I don’t want to live here, I want to belong to something lovely, where I don’t resent my environment, where the People in Charge care about beauty and everyday experience instead of the bottom line.
Kind of an awful feeling.
Today, however, something different happened.
I was on the same road, in the same traffic, viewing the same row of straggly trees edging the same lousy grey store fronts. Instead of the usual twinge – there was the memory of my son’s amputated plastic frog.
The Ugly Frog
Every so often, I sift through the constantly mounting collection of toys and sticks and paper scraps in my kids’ rooms and move them to the basement – a kind of staging area before they leave the house for good.
Sometimes when I do laundry, if I’m not careful, my son Sam follows me downstairs and ‘discovers’ old favorites that he’d completely forgotten about and the enchantment with the toy or stick or scrap revives.
Yesterday, he found a once-treasured rubber frog.
It is a very, very ugly frog. It is rubbery in a slimy way, neon orange and yellow, dirty, and full of holes. But Sam hugged it to his chest in delight.
Upstairs, however, his face crinkled up.
“His leg is gone,” he cried, holding up the nasty little thing and showing where a back leg was indeed missing. “I don’t want him anymore.”
“You can’t love him with a missing leg?”
“Noooooo….,” he wailed. And threw the thing to the ground in a huff.
I should have been relieved.
Instead, I was kind of disturbed for the poor, ugly little frog.
And that little, mishapen, unwanted, and hole-y hunk rose in my mind like a flag when I saw the boring ugliness today.
My heart, awakened to compassion for the rejected frog, was still open, its doors hinged with compassion.
Loving the Unloveable
Maybe the landscapers and developers who plopped these trees down, poured concrete slabs around them, plugged in those bushes, maybe they didn’t love these life forms, but – how could I not? Love them despite their conditions, despite their ugly situations, despite their predicament?
Even as they are, broken, ordinary, each tree has its own movement in the little bit of wind, its own graceful leaning, each stretch of grass and bunch of bush sparkling a little in the sun. No, the scene wasn’t beautiful as such; I could not scrawl edits over them, pretty them up with lies about their poses. But I could love them as-is. Take them for what they are.
This was not a feeling I forced into myself, tried to feel, or a state of mind I attempted to install. Rather, I believe it flowed naturally from my practice in compassion and mindfulness, my practice of accepting and loving What Is.
It’s not an easy practice.
We want our toys, our people, our lives, our shrubbery, our surroundings, our relationships to be whole, lovely, easy, complete. A toy with a broken leg, a person with a sour disposition, a coworker who cusses, institutional plants, divorces, unrealized dreams – these don’t only leave us dissatisfied and disappointed. They often make us feel like things are Wrong, to be escaped or avoided.
When we love someone or something, we open our hearts to it, we connect with it, we claim it, in a way, mark it as loved. You can’t really love someone and at the same time offer a disclaimer to the world that you have no association with the beloved.
You know – that’s why people have their Likes on Facebook pages, and bumper stickers on their cars that say “I love hiking.” What we love defines who we are.
If you say, “I love the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains,” or “I love the south of France,” others will nod in appreciation, concluding you have great taste.
If you say, “boy, that’s a nice stretch of trees at the strip mall,” others will think you are deficient in numerous ways – as deficient as the strip mall itself.
To love something that’s broken is to allow for brokenness. You are connecting to it, claiming it, holding it, cradling it. And you are implicating yourself – guilt by association. Someone might see you loving the ugly thing and think you are therefore ugly. Someone might judge you to be unworthy of love.
Loving truly requires bravery, and honesty. For if we are honest, none of us is without broken parts, disfigured features, unpleasant qualities. We’ve all been besmirched by some run-of-the-mill imprinting by our commercially focused society.
Love is…
But love, as the Bible says, heals all wounds. For in love, the idea of wrong or right really don’t matter. Love is not a moral judgment. Love is not an aesthetic appraisal. Love is not about the worthiness of the beloved. Love is about the worth of all that is. It is the big open space that accepts all things within it.
Learning to love those trees, to accept them, not only unbinds my heart, but reveals something to me truer than my judgments of ugly or beautiful. There’s an intimacy, a feeling of belonging that blossoms, or begins to. Part of my aversion to the ugly things meant separating. Instead of turning away, but accepting them for what they are, I am accepting reality. I’m here. I live here. I live around these trees that are like this. It doesn’t mean I’m blind to the situation. It means I really see it, I really see them, in the clear light of compassion, which I am suddenly seeing and believing is more truthful and accurate than the cold harsh logic of teethy judgment that I was brought up to believe was Right.
This is a huge mental reversal for me.
A Guide to Action
And of course, when it comes to considering proper or right action, which is the best guide? Judgment, hatred, disgust? Or love?
Acting out of disgust for this landscaping, I might just run away, call for its eradication, want it leveled, have them all killed. Or just ignore their plight.
But acting out of love, endearment, I will want to feed and save the trees, I will want to plant more plants around them, I will want to make this mall this town this world a more pretty and beautiful place, out of love, out of a sense that this is my home, that I care for it, that I want to treat it tenderly.
I honestly have never wanted to care about ugly malls, or boring tasks, or dumb subdivisions, or annoying eco-unfriendly highway construction – I’ve just wanted to hate it and hope it doesn’t get too close to me. I haven’t wanted to pay attention to it, because I hated it all so much.
This aversion feels like a dull pounding of a hammer in my head. When my heart opens, that pounding ceases. Things aren’t ugly and boring and abhorrent. Even the people in charge of their creation aren’t. The frog’s leg doesn’t reappear. It’s still a frog with a broken leg. But through love my perspective changes, and they are loved, not because they deserve it, but because it is the way I am learning to perceive everything – as connected, as one, as part of each other – and loved for their very virtue of Being. Loved for existing. In whatever battered shape they happen to exist. In the way a mother loves her new baby – the baby has done nothing to earn that love but be born.
Could it be – our very nature – the very nature of being – is love?
All Worthy
Of course, as I write this, I can’t help but have hovering in the background the many instances of conditional love – of love taken away – of judgment dressed up in a false costume of love – that I and my fiancee and many people around the world have experienced. These instances teach us the entirely wrong thing. We grow up believing we aren’t worthy of love.
But there is no such thing. We are all worthy.
And so I am thankful for that ugly stretch of stores on my daily commute I have always hated passing, for that frog I had shoved in the basement, hoping it would be gone from my sight forever. Look how important they have become for me, what great teachers they have turned out to be! Proving again, how precious even the smallest, crudest thing can be when we give it our attention, when we see it for what it is, as something that exists, and therefore deserves, as we all deserve, love, kindness, compassion, happiness. Each and every one of us.
She said she tried to meditate on peace. “But I realized I wasn’t peaceful. I was trying to fake something that wasn’t there. And I didn’t know why it mattered anyway. I didn’t feel peace; why did I or anyone else need it?”
I nodded, out of empathy.
Peace has often not only felt elusive to me – but not very desirable.
What is it exactly, anyway? Something warring countries say they want but don’t ever achieve? Long hair and potchuli? Muzak and mechanical waterfalls?
Peace = boredom. Impossibility.
Yoga Fail
I will never forget the first time I took a yoga class – the sparks of fury igniting along the edges of my skin as the instructor encouraged us to relax, feel peaceful, let go, breathe deeply, stop our thoughts, etc. Everyone but me sighed into a shared calm. I wanted to hit somebody.
I didn’t want to cooerce myself into something that wasn’t real, didn’t exist. I resented the instructor (and the world, really) for assuming that relaxation was something easy anyone could enter, like a pair of pj pants. As if everyone owned pj pants. That fit. I didn’t feel peaceful, so I felt judged, unacceptable. My thoughts, instead of stopping, raced faster against themselves in a frenzy of self-hatred.
Everyone else lay there on the floor, soaking in the piped birdsong, breathing and sighing in ecstasy.
I felt murderous, stiff, and ashamed.
Yoga twisted me into a self-conscious straightjacket. I hated it.
Faking it Won’t Make it
When I think back on this incident, and on others similar to it, my misery seems quite rational. The process goes like this:
It seemed I had to feel something I didn’t
Since I didn’t feel it, I had to make it happen
The way to make it happen was to ignore, “let go,” of all the knotted up, angry, sad, critical parts of myself.
These parts only clung to me harder when I tried to dump them out of the aircraft.
What I’ve noticed about peace from my mindfulness practice is that it is not something you can force or fake your way into feeling – precisely because they are not peaceful actions. Forcing amounts to violence; faking installs a screen of lies. Neither of these forms of control honor the truth.
You can’t think your way into feeling peace, either. Applying logic to internal commotion is like trying to reason with a toddler; it’s an act of futility. Telling yourself “there’s nothing to be upset about” or “worry gets you nowhere” or “crying doesn’t do any good” might all be factual statements (and haven’t our parents told us these things over and over, impatient with our overblown value ascribed to a lost doll, a hurt feeling). But emotions don’t give a lick about clear-minded solutions.
So how does one find peace?
A Way to Peace
You can’t make yourself feel peace or think your way to it, but you can choose it.
You can choose to act peacefully, just as you can choose to act with love, compassion, presence – whether you feel them in your body, heart, mind, or spirit or their exact opposites.
I know, because I’ve experienced it; and I have been trying it, because it made sense when I heard it described by Tara Brach in one of her podcasts.
But I’m not one to believe or trust easily – I did have to test it.
Making the choice is not an act of didactic logic or emotional hijack – it’s not a forcing. It’s free choice, it’s free action that one practices with the whole self. In the act itself is where you find the freedom of the act, and it is also where you find – where you generate – peace.
The Act of Peace
If I’m feeling unpeaceful, and notice that – no, there is not an ounce of peace anywhere inside me – I can still choose to listen to what IS there without judgment or the intention to change it, kick it out, dress it in a costume. I can treat my feelings with an intentional attention – and there’s the peace, there’s the love, right there.
Your rabid heart is like a toddler whining, “Pay attention to me, look at me, watch what I’m doing.” No, don’t get distracted by what you think is more important, or to the parts of you that seem easier, more well-behaved, better trained.
Listen to your strain, your aches, your bitterness. Find out where they come from, what keeps them alive. Discover what’s at their core and in the roots – and have compassion, and acceptance, for what you uncover.
In this act of paying attention, you will illuminate within yourself all the peace, love, lovingkindness that is already within you, even if just as the seed of a memory, a cloud of possibility, a faint dream.
You won’t just feel peace. You will be peace.
If this is confusing, remember, peace has been described as “passing understanding” for a reason.
My daughter gave me a lesson in mindfullness yesterday.
She folded her bath towel. I can’t tell you exquisitely she did so, but it was like something out of a catalog or a shelf at the mall – neatly arranged into a cohesive burrito-like unit that I found impressive.
I am deficient at folding anything. I don’t have the knack. I held her creation next to the towel shelves and the contrast was not missed by my four-year-old. “I can fold all of those for you, mommy,” she offered. Because on my shelf, the towels are shoved into balls and crushed into wrinkly messes – and I really, truly do fold them before I stack them in there – it just doesn’t matter.The result looks awful.
“Let me show how I do it, come see come see,” said Jo, eagerly. So I complied, wincing – I HATE domestic chores! I hate folding, I hate laundry, I hate brushing my teeth! It’s so BORING!
Well, to me it is. But you would think folding a towel was a delight the way my daughter danced and pranced as she laid the towel down, matched the corners, straightened the fold, made the crease. “There!” she said, triumphantly. Another beautiful towel.
Why was it so easy for her? So fun? And why did I actually enjoy watching her do it? It was just folding a towel. And yet – she was thoroughly engrossed. She treated that individual towel as if it were a special, fancy dress; a dear, expensive wrap; a treasure. She cared about that towel. She threw herself into the work of making it perfect. She was completely in the moment, present in the now, utterly open to it, full of enthusiasm.
My therapist often encourages me to not do what I “should” do in life, but to move towards what I love, want, and enjoy. This is much like the Joseph Campbell invective to “follow your bliss.” The implication is not to indulge in activities of decadence or self-centeredness, but about being true to yourself.
I often treat tasks like folding towels as things I have to and should do, not at all near the path of my bliss.
And yet – there is something really and truly nice about a folded towel. It looks great on the shelf. There’s a satisfaction to the order it creates. It says something about caring for where I live, and the items that live with me. And I feel encouraged to treat even those most minor rag with some attention and appreciation – and maybe dance around a little.
Okay, I’m being a tad idealistic. I am doubtful I will truly be able to transform my relationship with the mundane routines running a household requires. I heard a Zen podcast about a meditation exercise where all the participants had to do things like washing dishes, closing and opening doors, sweeping floors over and over again. It sounded like utter total hell. They might have all had deep revelations; I am less realized. I shudder.
But I do think there’s something about accepting vs. resisting tasks like towel-folding, something about being present with it instead of trying to keep my mind distracted and distanced from the task because I find it so awful. This strain actually doesn’t make it any more bearable or enjoyable. It doesn’t make it go faster. And I tend to avoid folding the laundry altogether (don’t go in my bedroom; those clean clothes have been waiting for me to put them away for a few weeks now).
I want to revisit my approach to chores, to the daily practices. I want to open myself to the realities they represent – not because I ‘should,’ but because I feel inspired by Jo’s enthusiasm.
Just a spoon full of sugar, Mary Poppins sings. The sugar she’s talking about may not be an external product to magically make everything put itself away and fold itself, but certainly the sweetness that makes the medicine go down is that love and embracing of what must be done, what presents itself to us in this moment.
Taking my son to the doctor, I find myself dreading the receptionist.
into the park 