Pema Chödrön | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

Project Reverb prompt: “Where did you spend your money this year? Did you save it instead? What, if anything, would you like to do with your finances this year?”

My word for 2014 was “home,” and part of my intention for the year was to focus on staying home, not traveling, and focusing all my various energies on home, which meant no giving financial support to anything that wasn’t “mine.” The year before, I spent a lot traveling and helping, and I needed to “lie fallow” for a season. We did take a vacation, a month in Oregon with the dogs, and we paid off our credit cards, started saving more. I cut back on a few things so that I was spending less, and I tried to buy less books, but I was only marginally successful with that. There were projects and causes that came up that I wanted so badly to help with, but I mostly resisted. Besides our family vacation, the other loophole I allowed for was that if Susan Piver had a writing and meditation retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center, I could go (I’ll be there at the end of the month).

Next year, the places I’d like to focus on financially are: my health and wellness (whatever supplements, food, or other support I need to feel better), fixing up our home (we need a new roof, but it would be nice to finally update the bathroom, put a deck out back and a porch on the front), continuing to stay out of debt and saving money, maybe a few classes or retreats (Feast with Rachel Cole, for sure), and consulting for my “business” (the teaching and such I’d like to offer — feels weird to call it a business, but as such that’s why I need the help of a good accountant and a lawyer who understands how to legally set such a thing up).

Reverb14 prompt: “Biting back. Despite our usually sunny dispositions and dedication to the practice of ‘assuming positive intent,’ we all occasionally find ourselves having to deal with an incredibly unpleasant individual. While I’m sure you always handle it with the tact and finesse for which you’ve become so well known, I’m going to ask you to step outside yourself for just a moment. Think back to such a situation: if the gloves were off, how you really would have liked to have dealt with them?”

I don’t think I can give the answer this prompt requests. Sure, I have some examples, and when I was deep in those situations, I told the people closest to me what I really wanted to say, but I don’t at all feel comfortable airing that sort of thing here, and don’t feel like it would help.

In thinking about how I might answer this question instead, I remembered something Pema Chödrön shares in the first chapter of her book Taking the Leap.

There was a story that was widely circulated a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that illustrates our dilemma. A Native American grandfather was speaking to his grandson about violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart. One wolf was vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, “The one that wins will be the one I choose to feed.”

I feel like answering this prompt directly, telling you what I really wanted to say that one time, sharing what I held back that other time, “taking the gloves off” would be feeding the wrong wolf. Ultimately, the way I handled those situations, with compassion and self-control, at times with silence, was the right thing to do, fed the right wolf, the one who was understanding and kind.

1. I am working to stay open, but I get overwhelmed. I’m a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), “a person having the innate trait of high sensory processing sensitivity.” This means that my starting point is raw and tender, no skin, every nerve exposed. What is a normal situation to someone else feels to me like I’ve shown up naked while everyone else holds a knife and yells. Everything seems too bright, too loud, too sharp. Add to that my practice of attempting to remain open no matter what, connected to reality just as it is, and you’ve got a pretty complicated situation.

2. I’m trying to figure out how to have boundaries, how to stay open but somehow protect myself, what it would mean to avoid practicing “idiot compassion” or what I might call “idiot openness.” In Buddhism, “idiot compassion” is essentially enabling, what Pema Chödrön describes as “the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering.” She says,

When you get clear on this kind of thing, setting good boundaries and so forth, you know that if someone is violent, for instance, and is being violent towards you — to use that as the example — it’s not the compassionate thing to keep allowing that to happen, allowing someone to keep being able to feed their violence and their aggression. So of course, they’re going to freak out and be extremely upset. And it will be quite difficult for you to go through the process of actually leaving the situation. But that’s the compassionate thing to do.

3. I’m learning new ways to soothe and protect myself, without numbing out, shutting down, freaking out and running away, or staying and allowing myself to be wounded. It’s complicated and confusing. I make mistakes, get it wrong, but I’m trying, making an effort. As Andrew Boyd said,

Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.

One Wish: That in this life which is such a mix of so much suffering and confusion and aggression, but also so much love and comfort and wisdom, we find a way to be “strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”