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

This morning, I finished reading “There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate” by Cheri Huber. As a way of helping me process some of what I learned, I’m focusing this post on truths from the book.

1. Truth: As children, we learn that love, acceptance, and approval are “out there” and must be earned somehow. I heard this idea first in one of Brene’ Brown‘s books, that when we are young, 0-5 or so, we view love and attention as survival issues, because we are aware that we are dependent on others to have our needs met–unless we can get others to love and care for us, we’ll literally die. We believe we must earn our very survival, get others to meet our needs.

Me and Dressy Bessy, Early 70's

Then, even later in our lives, we don’t look to ourselves for love or care, don’t see them as needs we can meet. “Without feeling full ourselves, what looks like generosity and kindness is often a backwards plea to get our own needs met. A silent, ‘If I meet your needs, you must meet mine,’ ” (“Start With You” by Nona Jordan). Some of us, without even being conscious of it, stay stuck in this way of being. Stuck in looking to others for love, acceptance, and approval, we don’t learn to love, appreciate, accept, care for, or trust ourselves, we try to earn it.

2. Truth: Stuck here, we believe if our needs aren’t met, it’s because we’ve failed. We need others to meet our needs and when they aren’t, when they don’t, it’s because we aren’t good enough, we’re flawed or broken. If only we could please or perform, be perfect, we would get what we need. We don’t believe we can provide for ourselves. We become self-hating, self-destructive, self-denying, and smash ourselves to bits to try and be what we think others want. We believe we aren’t loved or accepted because something is wrong with us. We spend our attention, time, effort, and energy trying to be good, earn approval, get permission, please others by being perfect. It’s like that cellphone commercial where the guy keeps saying “can you hear me now?” but instead we are saying “do you love me now?”

3. Truth: The way out of self-hate is to learn to love and accept yourself, exactly as you are. No need for self-improvement or change, no need to earn this. We can simply drop the trying, the smashing ourselves to bits, and accept ourselves–simple in theory, but hard to do when something is so old and deep and sticky, but it’s workable, and worthwhile to try. And the good news is:

We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves–the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds–never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake. ~Pema Chödrön

One wish: That we all know our basic goodness, remember it, have faith in it, trust it. “If you are ever going to be free, you must be willing to prove to yourself that your inherent nature is goodness, that when you stop doing everything else, goodness is what is there,” (Cheri Huber). Goodness that is loving and accepting, that can provide everything you need. “We think we are rocks, but we are gold.” May we all embody and manifest this truth.

There’s so much more truth in Cheri Huber’s book, 300 rather than just three. I put folds in the top corners of 37 pages, the places where something shimmered, the brilliant glittery light of truth almost burned through the page, made my eyes tear up. Letting go of self-hate is important work. For those of us working with it, (here’s your bonus wish), may we accomplish it quickly and without obstacle so we can get on with the good work of loving ourselves and being of benefit to others in their struggle, so that we can ease suffering in the world.

You might not know this about me, but I contemplate death a lot. From a Buddhist perspective, this is healthy and good. In fact, it’s one of the “Four Reminders.” Pema Chödrön describes them this way:

The traditional four reminders are basic reminders of why one might make a continual effort to return to the present moment. In your daily life, try to:

1. Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life. Beginning to realize how precious life is becomes one of your most powerful tools. It’s like gratitude … once you have this feeling of gratitude for your own life and the preciousness of human birth, then it takes you into any realm.

2. Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone. Life is very brief. If you realize that you don’t have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually had only a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude.

3. Recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result; what comes around, goes around. The law of karma is that we sow the seeds and we reap the fruit. So when you find yourself in a dark place … you can think, “Maybe it’s time to get a little golden spade and dig myself out of this place.”

4. Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote about the Four Reminders this way:

Joyful to have
Such a human birth,
Difficult to find,
Free and well-favored.

But death is real,
Comes without warning.
This body
Will be a corpse.

Unalterable
Are the laws of karma;
Cause and effect
Cannot be escaped.

Samsara
Is an ocean of suffering,
Unendurable,
Unbearably intense.

Some things I know to be true about death (life?):

1. Truth: Grief is love unbound. When the form that we love is no longer with us, we don’t know what to do with all the love we feel. With no forehead to kiss, no ear to whisper into, no hand to grasp, nothing to hold, we are adrift, lost, maybe even angry and afraid. The lovely Courtney Putnam recently shared this quote on her blog, The Healing Nest, in a really great post, “Continuing to Love“:

We give our love to someone or something or someplace. We are attached to that love. And suddenly (or slowly) that object is gone from our sight. Where do we put the love then? We have this love with no place to put it. Grief becomes our experience of not having our love received, of not having anywhere to put our love. Healing our grief means continuing to love in the face of loss. ~ Deborah Morris Coryell, Good Grief: Healing Through the Shadow of Loss

I had never thought about grief in this way before, but this feels so true.

2. Truth: Form leaves us, love doesn’t. We may find ourselves with nothing physical to direct our love to, but it’s still there. I can no longer have a bodily experience of those I’ve lost in the past few years. I will never again smell the musky stink of Obi’s neck or touch the soft hair of his belly. I will never hear Kelly laugh or be able to hug her. And that is devastating, heartbreaking each and every time I think of it–but the love remains.

3. Truth: Faith is believing in something you can’t prove, and I have faith in Love. I can’t even explain what love is exactly. I would say that reality is anything you can experience through your five senses, and that means that our thoughts and emotions aren’t technically real, but rather a fabrication of our minds. And yet, what does that mean about love? I’m not even sure if I’d say it’s an emotion or a belief, or defined by actions, I just know that it is, and it’s the most powerful force in the universe. Love is everything.

One Wish: That you know love, even that which is unbound from form, even grief. Our life is precious, death will come, karma is real, and we will suffer–but if throughout all of that, we can know love, we can practice love, it will all be worth it.