Big Surprise

Your mind can be a powerful and splendid ally. It can be a motivator, a planner and a supreme puzzle solver. But it’s not necessarily your friend.

I was in the grocery store the other day and I passed the ice cream section. I saw boxes of chocolate ice cream bars covered with dark chocolate. Hagen Dasz. My favorite. I hesitated a moment. “Go ahead,” a voice in my mind encouraged me. “Buy some. They’re delicious.”

“They’re bad for you,” another voice said.

“You’re a healthy eater,” the first voice spoke again. “It’s one little ice cream bar. You deserve it.”

Remember those cartoons where someone has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other? Guess who won? I put a box of ice cream bars in my cart and I hurried home so they wouldn’t melt. Then I removed the paper covering on one of them and took a bite. My taste buds flooded with pleasure as I kept on eating – until the first voice began singing a different tune. “You shouldn’t be eating that,” it told me. “It’s unhealthy and it’s fattening. You know better. Now you’re screwed.”

Those of us with loud, persistent inner voices (isn’t that all of us?) are faced with daily obstacles that are so familiar, they seem like old friends. “I must be  not be doing this right,” we tell ourselves. “How do I get rid of this? What if I’d made a different choice? Is it better to deny myself or to feel guilty?” How about making another choice – doing what we want and feeling good about it.

When I was a kid, I thought that by the time I was in my third chapter of life, I would have figured it all out. The inner criticism would have gone away and a sense of all knowing would have replaced it. I was wrong and I’m not alone in this. I was in a Stephen Levine workshop years ago, when he said that he was sailing along one day, feeling good about himself when a big glob of self-criticism hit him in the face. It was something he had been working on for years, so he had learned not to blame himself. Instead he said, “Here it is again. Big surprise.” And he did his practice of being loving and compassionate with himself.

If we think we’ve overcome our obstacles for good, that isn’t a sign of maturity or enlightenment. It’s a sign of self-abuse and ignorance to expect that kind of perfection. It doesn’t exist. The act of staying with ourselves in the face of fear or sadness carries its own kind of perfection. It’s a commitment to stop abandoning ourselves and start appreciating ourselves, even if we think we don’t deserve it. It’s a commitment to stop judging when an old wound comes up. Mr. Levine said. “To heal is when we touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.”       

If we can be kind to ourselves when we feel shame and embarrassment, life will be easier. When something difficult appears in my psyche that I’ve dealt with over and over, I accept it as my life’s work. I try to follow Mr. Levine’s suggestion to touch myself with kindness. I don’t expect my obstacle to disappear but I expect to keep learning from it and I hope I never stop. With all the spiritual work I’ve done in my life, I’ve learned that I’m not the only one dealing with these things. I’m not that special. If I feel something, so do you. We may have different stories, we may have had different experiences but the way we feel is the same. No one is better or worse than anyone else. We are all fellow travelers walking along the same path together.

The AIDS epidemic was in full swing back in the eighties when I went to visit a friend in the hospital. He was having a hard time. He was in pain, he had lost a lot of weight and his breathing was labored. “I don’t want to be here any more,” he said. “Will you help me die?”

That was the toughest question anyone had ever asked me. I wanted to help him but I didn’t want that kind of responsibility. “I’ll think about it,” I said. When I got home, I was terribly agitated. I couldn’t sleep and when I went to see him the next day, I hadn’t figured out what to do.

It turned out that I didn’t have to. I stood at the foot of his bed and he said, “I’ve thought about this ever since I got sick but I decided to stick it out. I want to see this through. What if there’s one thing left for me to learn and I leave here without learning it? I don’t want to take that chance.”

During my life, loneliness, fear and judgments have been constant companions. They’re like visitors who never go home. As I’ve confronted them daily, I’ve learned that when I make a commitment to treat myself with respect, when I don’t  burden myself with judgments and self-abuse, my life lessons don’t seem so insurmountable. “Here you are again,” I tell myself. Big surprise.” When I accept this as my life’s work, I welcome it. As long as I have something to work on, I have meaning in my life.