Uncomfortable Insight
R emember in that interminable last election cycle the period when political candidates would be asked “What is your greatest weakness?” and it would be something totally disingenuous like “I just can’t make myself stop working hard for my constituents?” What I’m about to say may sound at first like that but it isn’t what I mean at all
I’ve secretly always relied on self-discipline as the sort of strength to compensate for all other failings. The psychological studies where small children would be tested on their self-control, not eating one piece of candy now in order to get two later? And this trait being correlated with success later in life? Those were my confirmation. What I might not have in talent I have in dogged determination, I might not be pretty but I jump on the elliptical daily so at least I am not fat, I may not be gracious, but at least I can keep the house in order.
It kicks into overdrive with the fasting. I will do this perfectly, with grim determination. By the end of the day, the hours which are tricky when I am well-fed, balancing homework and practicing and getting dinner on the table, meeting the needs of tired children after a day of school, trying to pack more into the over-stuffed hours counting down before bedtime, hunger will leave me tearful and exhausted and I am afraid that if I sit down or stop moving at all I will fall completely apart. I wake up with a grim determination to eat before the sun rises even though my eyes and throat are scratchy and all I want is sleep. Realizing my period is about to start, that I will have a few days of the exemption granted to women “in their courses” I realize I don’t want to take the exemption because I am frightened that adjusting to fasting a second time will be too hard. I want to meet this body and spirit, to be obedient and grateful and I try to use sheer will to control the tightened lips the narrowed eyes when my husband comes home from work exhausted and collapses on the couch but I have no poker face, and I know it’s somehow written there “I cannot deal with weakness of any sort.” I cannot deal with my own weakness, I am terrified of it, and it makes coping with anyone else’s weakness of any sort — even the tremendously natural response to a day of fasting — oh, I break off, I wail. Why is there no compassion in me?
It’s fear that makes me write three pages every morning, fear that puts me on the elliptical every day, fear that makes the bed, the tighter better, finding relief in the taut sheets, the barren plains of the quilt. The self-discipline that was supposed to be a protective carapace, an armoring against all my other failings — my biggest fear is that it is hollow, empty, nothing inside.
I recognize that there is some nuance required here, that what I really want to find is a balance between the self-discipline required to get anything at all done, and the compassion for my own frailties, and others’. But what kills me about this problem, is that it is not one that I can muscle my way through with sheer will power.
I pray daily
I testify at this moment to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth.
but I hold that reality at arm’s length, I want to be sufficient to myself. I don’t know how to do this, don’t know how to make this okay, and I sort of suspect that’s the point. Here I get to be weak, powerless, frail, I get to recognize the limits of what I am able to do.
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Lovely post, Mara. I don’t know many people who can write about the very personal experience of fasting…
I think It might be time to rent Cool Hand Luke, It says everything I want to say here, only better
I’ve thought about this post every day since you first wrote it. How is it that I never understood the powerlessness aspect of fasting until now? No wonder it’s such a rich spiritual practice. And hey, why is it that God likes us all week and powerless in the first place? Why can’t God talk to us through, say, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and espresso truffles?
Brilliant, how you worked carapace in like that. Have you found any crenels in your merlons?
Thief! Thief! That was my comment, not his!
Is it just dumb and obvious if I say, it sounds like it’s all happening exactly the way it’s supposed to? Which I think you say at the end anyway? That this chosen privation is bringing you right to your leading edge of discomfort and learning (awful, horrible, unwanted) information about how you normally cope/process/control the flow of the world around you and you through it?
Like how Mandarin and I, instead of saying to each other, “Have a good sesshin!” would finally always just say, before one or the other of us went into that particular 5-9 day-long testing ground/knife room, “Have a sesshin.” Because really it has YOU. And when preferential mind gets yanked out from under you like the cozy rug it is (what, I can’t just go to the fridge any time I feel my blood sugar dropping?), the gaping truths arrive. They sit on the sofa staring at you and unable to make civil conversation, like weird next-door neighbors who dropped in and won’t go home.
Taking away preferential mind (the Zen phrase) is all about practicing the powerlessness. Herself telling us that it was practice for dying. And for living. Because the control strategy is illusory anyway, of course. Because as Winston says in 1984, “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
The Brujo sometimes scoffs when I tell him stories of deliberate privation/restriction/abstinence, because I think he hears in them only my self-punishing desire, which is true—which was true for me, in how I did it. That whole “I brought my Calvinism to Zen” thing. But I did also learn somehow gentleness in the matrix of restraint (though not from Zen qua Zen, but from other people—from sangha, I guess, the group of others who walks the path with you). I don’t know that he understands that—that anyone can, who hasn’t delicately but firmly taken away their espresso and bonbons and remote control, and their talking and their moving around, and said: Well, okay, let’s see, just experimentally, what happens to this whole carefully constructed Me-person now, without all the stuff I usually use to hold up the scaffolding.
With, of course, great inner gentleness and a powerful sense of the self-loving voice. Of the internalized good parent—of the Goddess, frankly.
En bref (!): You are doing the thing. I am moved by your doing it, and by your telling what it is like. I found it to be like that too. And I wish you joy in the frailty, relief in the letting-go, and beauty in the breakdown.
Well and also: That the super-tricky part about this in particular seems to be that it’s a householder practice: You’re doing it AND all the normal stuff at the same time, whereas on a retreat you’re, well, in retreat, and don’t have to also help with homework etc. That makes it so much more the braver and fiercer, that you’re doing it at all. And requires concomitantly extra helpings of gentle observing and describing, presumably.
So — Eat Pray Love there’s everyone around her meditating and looking serene in the Ashram, while she’s rushing to the bathroom because she’s crying again? I could take God talking to me through Ben and Jerry’s and, you, know, the serene sort of spiritual insight, not the one that involves lots of nose-blowing. Plus, I always have to wonder, what if I have the big public, tearful kind because I am secretly unable to function without the attention?
And then the funny thing about THAT is that, in zendos anyway, you don’t get any extra attention. If anything you’re left alone MORE, because everyone can see you’re caught up in your process and need space (but I don’t want space!), need a tightly sealed container (no I don’t!) in which to watch it unband and dissolve of itself.
So then the tearful snotty kind (where you put about twenty tissues in your robe sleeve that morning because you know you’ll have used ‘em all by lunch) (or, in your case, no-lunch) just must be just what it is. Anzan saying to me gently, “You’ll do it until you’re done,” and me wanting to hit him, only not. Because he was being nice and offering me another tissue.
Plus maybe God DOES talk to me through ice cream, only I am so busy with the ice cream I forget to notice. Whereas snot is less distracting.