Peeling The Zen Onion

This week I had a really nice phone conversation with a "Dharma" friend I haven't seen in a while.  I will put a moustache and dark glasses on her to protect her identity and keep me from getting into trouble with the people I love.  She had been on holiday with her partner and made the interesting comment that their last holiday together had been a "renewal"  and this most recent holiday had been a "retreat".    She was hinting at the deep and difficult terrain we can get into on retreat (and with those closest to us).  It's like you go off for a sunny hike in the mountains and the storm comes in.  You get soaked, almost freeze, the stove doesn't work, the tent leaks, your boots rub your feet raw.  It is not the imagined trip you had in mind.  And yet, and yet....

She did not go into the details and yet I could feel deeply what she was talking about.  It's about the little dances we do with those closest to us.  And then finally one day we see what we're up to.  Maybe we've done the weird thing, the dysfunctional thing for the 999th time and the light finally goes on.  It is the rubbing up against another, sometimes until we are both rubbed raw, bleeding, scratched, and skinned.  It takes as long as it takes, my Zen teacher would say and then we wake up.  The first step is the seeing and the next step is saying I don't want to do this anymore.  I'm done with that.  And then there we are standing in the wilderness.  We don't know what to do.  The old response doesn't work but we don't have a new one yet.

My friend came to an understanding of how deep the habitual karmic pattern of her behaviour was.  She said she could see it reverberating through previous lifetimes.  In a strange but not fully understood way she perceived the origin of the deeply rutted groove of her behaviour.  When I talked to her, she and her partner were still working through their "stuff, exploring the shrapnel of their "retreat" experience.  It was the beginning of a new and deeper relationship with each other, one where another layer of pain and separation has been peeled off.  It's kind of like peeling an onion, this work of the heart.  We keep peeling and getting closer to the centre, to the truth, to our essential self, to our Buddha nature.  We get to see the first noble truth, the truth of suffering.  We get a first hand view of how we cause suffering for ourselves and others through our deeply habitual and often unconscious behaviour.

Do we ever get that pungent, "makes you cry", onion peeled all the way down to the centre, to the point of emptiness?  I don't know, but it seems worth the work.  And if I were a smart ass I might say something like, when life gives you onions, get out the cheese and toast and make onion soup.

Do Relationships Make Us Happy?

The moment has arrived.  I have written 67 blog posts since I started in December and I have finally run out of words.  Can you believe it?  No, I didn't think you would.  Okay let's get out the dousing rod and search for some juicy alphabits.

It was a sunny Friday in Victoria today and I had a spicy, coconut infused lunch with a friend at a favourite Sri Lankan restaurant.  We roamed happily over many meadows of conversation until we settled on the one that interests her a lot these days, a fairly new love interest.  They are both delightful people, but very different, one an introvert and Dharma practitioner, the other an outgoing, gregarious, grab life by the tail, spend a bunch of cash, kind of extrovert.  (their identities have been disguised with moustaches and dark glasses to protect the not so innocent, namely me!)

I know that they love each other deeply but the bumpy ground that stands between each of their wants and needs, likes and dislikes is a vast rock strewn tundra.  "One of us is very stubborn ," she says.  "Only one of you?" I ask teasingly.  She has a good sense of humour.  I can say this to her.  But I hear in her voice that she wants him to change, to do things differently.  Her requests seem reasonable to me.  She wants him to spend less cash, go out for dinner less.  She doesn't want to watch a couple of hours of TV in the evenings when he's at her place, she would rather go off with a book.  These are a few of their points of contention.  I remind her that in Buddhist practice the only one we get to change is ourself. She doesn't bite on that one but goes on to talk about the possibility of "seeing someone" to help them with their differences. 

I tell her about a great piece I read by Norman Fischer in the March issue 0f Shambhala Sun called "Applied Dharma".  In the piece Fischer talks about mediation and says the problem is never about what it appears to be, like the toothpaste lid, or the toilet seat or the TV watching.  (I wrote about this in a previous blog post)  but it seemed so relevant to what my friend was talking about.  I don't know what their real issues are, but undoubtedly they are deeper.  Are they about," you always insist on having your own way, I feel unconsidered?"  Are they about,"you're not listening to me, you don't even know what's important to me?"   And as Fischer points out, until we deal with the deeper issues, the problem will continue to exist.  I have found in my own life, if I don't deal with a problem in one form, it just pops up somewhere else, maybe in a bigger uglier form.  It's kind of like that old carney game of "wack a mole", it's just keeps jumping up all over the place until you put it to rest or your quarter runs out.

Relationships are our biggest opportunity and often the most difficult place to practice.  Many people find this intense point of practice with a partner, some with parents or children.  My mother is my great teacher.  And if we are honest with ourselves there is always work with partners and children.  I remember reading about a man who was trying to decide whether to take on a new love relationship and the wise Dharma counsel to him was, "yes go ahead, as long as you don't expect the relationship to make you happy."   So there it is, loving someone is not about having them make you happy.  This expectation is what creates some of the biggest disappointments and dissatisfaction in relationships. It is not why you love someone and not what the relationship is about.  It's the same as looking for gratification in a piece of cheesecake (but perhaps a little more complicated)  "Dear, could I trade you for that mango and kiwi cheesecake over there?"   Satisfaction, happiness, joy, is never out there.  It always comes from deep inside.  And a relationship is a complicated thing that sometimes makes you coo with joy and sometimes makes you want to relocate to a far away country.  In our beloved we are sensing the divine, the eternal in our human of choice.  We are often drawn in ways that are beyond our rational understanding.  Love is a strange cocktail in a tall glass of magic and mystery, stirred (not shaken) with a swirl of the pragmatic.

I could hear  in my friend's voice, how she wanted her man to change to suit her imagined desires, how it would all be perfect then.  They could live happily ever after.  We left the restaurant filled with spicy treats and delicious conversation.  We wandered down the sunny shopping street, me stopping to buy 4 stalks of pussy willows, us browsing in a gourmet food shop and the used bookstore.  We were having fun, recharging our solar batteries.  No moles in sight.