Psychology + Zen = Philosophy and methods to relieve suffering and reveal happiness.
Psychology: We project onto others what we reject in ourselves. Some call it a Shadow. Healing comes from making the unconscious conscious, taking responsibility for our projections, integrating what is split off as our own thing.
Zen: There is no separate self. When we can be at one with every aspect, then we belong everywhere and we reject no one.
We heal the world by becoming intimate with our whole selves.
Do you recognize me? Sometimes I forget who I am. It's a lifelong problem, soon to be solved by death.
Since my typing hand no longer cooperates with my thinking brain, I've decided I can cut and paste some excerpts from diaries.
I fell in love with a poet who lived in the woods, March 24, 2018
photo by Tsuh YangThis morning I heard yet again a person equate sad and negative, and suggest that someone with negativity (which was actually sadness) had some understandable reason for being so, and deserved compassion therefore.
Do you pity negativity?
what about negative ions? negative feedback loops?
what about shabbat? a day of rest.
what about darkness? death.
says the sutra on the Identity of Relative and Absolute:
Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.
Be so-called positive if it pleases you but you cannot escape the negative.
Tumbling toward death
with open arms
one fist, one palm
heart aflutter
November 8, 2021
My mother died on February 17th.
In recent years I called her Mum as a repair for the awkwardness in my youth that arose from obeying my father’s insistence that we call her Mother. This stilted salutation, I believe, was to repair the fall from aristocracy that our family suffered by leaving Russia. The proper word really would have been Mama but it didn’t stick, maybe because we were repairing our Russianness too. So much brokenness, never spoken but always implied.
Who was my mother? Who are any of us under all those repairs?
While I was mourning her loss, my Zen teacher, Roshi Joshin, asked if there was an image of her that came to mind, a way that I could sense her presence now. I thought of a butterfly, then changed my mind because butterflies land on things, and my impression of her was that she never really landed. "Perhaps a hummingbird," said my daughter. Perhaps. All I know is that I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t touch her. Or I couldn’t get her to reach me. I’m not sure what the difference is.
Later I realized that she saw me as a butterfly. And when I saw one several days later, seeming to call for my attention at the window, I realized that she was present in the way I see myself. In fact, my first memory is of a blue butterfly crushed by my brother. Maybe I expressed it to my mother. Or maybe I constructed it from things she said. Anyway she wrote a poem called "Blue Butterfly" for my 50th birthday. It memorializes the time when a photographer asked to use my picture in an ad, then saw that my legs were in casts and I could not walk. Here’s an excerpt:
Here was a spotlight on the indifference around, the dismay of a mother,
the trust of a child, and her innocent faith that she would be well,
made so by the grown-ups who loved her. With a turn of the prism,
our powerlessness was bared in the glare. A slight twist cast a softer
yet lucid light on the sweetness of innocence that, much too soon,
would be lost.
Yet another refraction made blaze the pain that awaited
in the tomorrows, no matter our will or resolve. In the midst of this spin,
there she sat, my blue butterfly, tranquil still in the moment.
Time enough later to learn of the future and change.
Refractions upon refractions. Reading her poem now, I understand that my illness (JRA) destroyed her idea of innocence and beauty, and there she was, spinning, while I sat, tranquil still. Of course I had no choice; I couldn’t get up and walk, could I? And this, in a nutshell, produced my lifelong struggle. She was moving so fast I couldn’t sense her center. I felt like I needed to move faster but I couldn’t. The frustration was immense. When I expressed it, they called it rage. And then it became rage. Such is the tragedy of interconnection, healed somewhat by poetry belated.
The 9th Zen precept is classically translated as "not being angry." I remembered that the Zen Peacemaker version was something like 'transform suffering into wisdom,' but when I went to look it up, it had changed! Now it is "bearing witness to emotions that arise."
Oh, if only someone had been able to bear witness then! How different our lives could have been if she had been able to bear witness to her dismay and grief instead of trying to escape it; how different had I realized that brokenness is part of the nature of things, to be included, not rejected. What if the photographer had chosen to feature the disabled girl? How different the perceptions of all those consumers of culture, how different our understandings of each other!
Thankfully the world is trying to change. Thankfully I have access to this wisdom now as I heal and accept my body as it is. I just listened to an On Being podcast with Resmaa Menakem on healing racial trauma through awareness of the body and an understanding of the context of trauma. And our own Village Zendo featured a talk by Tokuyu Hoshi on brokenness. And yesterday I watched a conversation on Disability Justice sponsored by Dance NYC on Facebook. We are bearing witness. We are acting. We are healing.
was me not you
I thought
I knew
butterfly adieu
now who?
Related: Who Was She? Part One
June 18, 2020
Womanhood: three generationsMy mother died on February 17th after refusing invasive medical treatment for several weeks. I was ill at the time with the thing that landed me in the hospital later, yet I travelled to California twice, once before she died and once after. We were able to have a conscious final conversation, for which I will always be grateful.
At the gate to the other world she finally saw herself as what she was, divine woman energy. "I'm not just crazy mixed-up me, I am a great woman, I am womanhood." Later during our vigil she revealed how she wanted to be a boy when she was young. I remembered her as a woman aspiring to appeal to men, whom she valued over women. "Dress for men," she would say, "women's fashion is ridiculous," or something like that.
She insisted I survive, called me a humanitarian, beeped my "pretty nose," said she wished I could have believed I was pretty. Later she bumped up against a disturbing memory. "Wasn't there something, something hostile when you were a teenager?" Oh, yes, there was something--so much rage the neighbors called the police, so much hurt that couldn't be expressed. Naturally I tried to brush past it, absolve us both, go back to the divine absolute love, but she stayed, wanted to resolve it so that she could let go. It was too big for that, but I gave her a morsel and it turned out to be enough.
Enough for her but not for me. Only after emerging from the nightmare hospitalization did I start to ask into what I had lost. What was this "crazy mixed-up" legacy? How could I reach her, touch her, so that I could let go?
My mother is a winding road
of pockets far from the center
My mother is a winding of whorls and eddies,
each teaming with tiny life
safer tinier far from the center
Lost in the eddies that she
mistakes for the big life
No, not lost
She is hiding there
June 18, 2020
Share Article → 