Month: March 2018

Tears

For years, I kept my daily life separate from my relationship with Mark and Tommy, even to the point of denying they were a problem for me. In my first experiences with therapy, I mentioned them as a matter of course while giving the family history, but insisted that my real problems lay elsewhere. In the meantime, however, there was a subterranean river of grief that would break through to the surface occasionally, surprising me for a spell before disappearing again. The water metaphor is an apt one, because when I finally accessed the grief, I did so through tears that seemed to have no end.

I remember clearly a scene at Tanglewood during my first summer there. I was just 18 and was between my first and second years of college. I had had a difficult time managing and masking my stage fright, but on one night in particular it broke through during a concert of the Fellowship Orchestra, when I felt so panicked that I abruptly rose from my seat among the violins and walked off the stage in the middle of the performance. Backstage I almost literally ran into a trombonist who had unsuccessfully tried to romance me earlier in the summer. We walked around the grounds while I poured out my anguish in a flood of shame and frustration, until my parents found me and my father took over. He told me that he and my mother had watched me struggling with this torment for years, and he urged me to give up.

Now in the American vocabulary, quitting is commensurate with failure, made all the more blameworthy when it is chosen. What’s more, being advised to quit meant that I would never know whether I might have succeeded in conquering my fear if I had persevered. So I struggled with the notion as we walked, the fork in the road between the easy way out and the valiant fight to the end. And then my parents drove me home, and I somehow was moved to dig out the family photo album, pictures of me and my brothers as we were growing up, and I cried over them for what seemed like hours, grieving for all that I had lost.

That night marked the beginning of my tears. For years thereafter I would cry over my brothers almost any time I was left alone. If I was on a bus, I would turn my face to the window and cry. If I was alone in my room, I would pace the floor and cry. I cried in therapy, I cried in bed at night, I cried wherever and whenever I was alone. There were thoughts that were guaranteed to trigger the tears, like the thought of how sad it was and how much I missed them. Sometimes I would dwell on a fantasy of my brother Tommy’s death, imagining a phone call, usually while I was in a large group of people. In my fantasy I would break down completely, finally relieved of the heavy burden of maintaining an appearance of functionality.

At some point I began to suspect that the grief was for myself and had little to do with the people my brothers actually were, but I could not make sense of that distinction until my mother told me that when she first learned of the diagnosis, particularly of the younger of the two, she grieved for herself, then grieved for them, and then finally grieved for me. As the sister my grief may have come third in line, but it still had a place, and so I continued to grieve for myself.

Along with the grief there were painful fantasies of what might have been. I would look at young men who seemed to be my brothers’ age and wonder what my life might have been like if these “normal” people had been my brothers instead of the ones I had. I imagined Another Laurel, the one who grew up in a normal middle-class American family, the family that was taken away from me. What would she be like? I understood enough to know that it was impossible to tell, but the question needled me nonetheless. The family I actually had appeared to live out its life under a cloud of sadness and isolation. What would it be like to live differently? Would I be like these carefree young people I saw around me? (although of course I had no real concept of what their lives were really like either).

There came a day when I was listening to an interview on the radio, about the complex emotions of parents of autistic children. I suddenly thought, “I’m done with that.” I wasn’t done with grief, but I was done with thinking things either could or should have been other than what they were. I may have been painfully slow about it, but I had finally passed through the earlier stages of grief into a grudging acceptance.

The Three Characteristics: Suffering

Dukkha, “suffering” (also translated as “unsatisfactoriness”), is central to the Buddha’s teaching; in fact, he reputedly said, “I teach only suffering, and the end of suffering.” We’ve already encountered the role of suffering in the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha also appears as one of the three marks or characteristics of existence, permeating our lives and our surroundings through and through. There are things that please us, beguile us, hook us in; but none of these things satisfies.

When we’re young, we are full of plans for what we want to do with our lives. For most of us, these plans might include things like a career, marriage, children, a nice place to live, money to spend on necessities and a few luxuries, travel, hobbies, good food, nice clothes, and friends. Young people are encouraged by their families and teachers to look to the future and to consider their immediate difficulties to be transitory. I recall a conversation with my mother and one of her friends, during a time in my life when I didn’t fit in. “Some day,” they told me, “none of this will matter.” They were wrong: as I became an adult, the identity I formed in adolescence proved to be remarkably tenacious.

Enter the Buddha and his teachings regarding dukkha. One of my dharma teachers, Kenneth Folk, has said that “the Buddha is not your friend.” Warm, rosy predictions of a brilliant life in samsara, the turning wheel of birth and death, are entirely unfounded. Some adults in our own culture might agree with him once we hit our midlife crisis, when we realize that our fond hopes in youth have not materialized; or maybe they have, but without bringing the happiness we had expected. People may be tempted to jump ship, make a career change or look for a new partner, or buy a new house or car they can’t really afford. It might work out in the short run, but letdown is inevitable.

From time to time I imagine my life as if it had been different in some significant way. Maybe I never had the stage fright, and would be able to perform in music ensembles without stress. Maybe I had the kind of systematic focus that would allow me to work an eight-hour day, go home and relax, engage in an enjoyable hobby, and then go to sleep without difficulty. Maybe I wasn’t plagued by the grandiose illusion that I needed a big, fat career, and so would never be constantly comparing myself to others, or feeling like a failure just doing a good job day in and day out. In other words, I imagine a life without dukkha.

This Other Laurel is still a meditator, I’ve decided. She gets up early, makes herself a cup of tea, maybe takes a brisk walk around the block, and then settles down for some cushion time. After work she heads to the meditation center for a half hour sit with a group before heading home. She also volunteers in her community (because of course, she has the energy for it). She lives simply but comfortably; she is not tempted to spend more than she earns. Is she married? Sometimes I imagine her as single, but it seems like a lonely life to me, so I give her my husband, except he’s the Other Husband, also free of dukkha.

I have found a place for this paragon to live, and have even imagined her car and her wardrobe. The entire fantasy seems to be an equivalent of the dreams I had as a young person, except instead of dreaming of my imaginary future, I dream of an imaginary past. But although I can see the outer trappings of this person’s life, I am unable to make sense of what lies within. I can only try to imagine the absence of things like stress, depression, boredom, regret, negative judgments, and anxiety, all the while knowing that it is impossible.

Traveling allows us to see other places, and imagine what life might be like for us if we lived there. We read novels or watch movies and television shows in order to put ourselves in the place of the protagonist. Maybe we fall in love with one of the characters—the protagonist’s love interest, most likely—or imagine ourselves working in that person’s occupation. Such experiences help us to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a human in the world, to place ourselves in another person’s skin or context, which is an essential component of a moral education. Still, they can never be more than the product of our imaginings.

I have recently longed to move somewhere else, either to the city that is an hour’s drive from here or to a warmer climate, or maybe even out of the country altogether. These longings are accompanied by imaginings of Other Laurels living in Other Places with the Other Husband. Yet several years ago I looked out the kitchen window at the trees in my neighbor’s yard, and just realized, “This is it!” I laughed. It was so simple that I might not even have noticed. This is it, just this. This is all that is it. No other, no else. Just this.

The Big Wow

I think it was in a post by Brad Warner that I first heard about The Big Wow, or perhaps it was just on one of the Internet forums I frequent. The Big Wow is the overwhelming, transforming, hit-by-a-bolt-of-lightning mystical experience that changes you forever after. Everyone wants one of those, and once you get it, you spend a good part of the rest of your life wanting another, and another, and another. Yet it’s not the Big Wow that actually transforms you; it’s the plodding, day-to-day grind of sitting in meditation, doing walking meditation, practicing mindfulness during the day, questioning yourself, and getting your act together on a number of fronts (which is what the Noble Eightfold Path is all about). You may be able to draw on the memory of that experience to motivate yourself to keep plugging away, but in the long run it’s a mistake to make too much of it.

My Big Wow happened when I was 19. It was March of 1973, and I was returning to college from spring break. For some reason, my violin teacher had loaned me her car for the week, a reflection of how close we were during that period. I was traveling east on the Massachusetts turnpike, going a little over 70. There was a school bus in front of me, and we were approaching a slight hill. I got in the left lane to pass the bus, accelerated to about 80, and then without warning the school bus pulled in front of me (I can still see it in my mind’s eye). Being a young, inexperienced driver, I did the opposite of what I should have done: I slammed on the brakes, putting the car into a tailspin. I overcorrected with the steering, tried the brakes again, and then began to panic as I lost all control of the car.

What happened next is hard to describe. I remember skidding back and forth over the highway with a few other cars in view, and I remember a look of concern on someone’s face through a window of one of those cars. I recognized with a sickening horror that I might not be able to get out of it alive, when suddenly I surrendered and everything stopped. I felt myself gently pulled upward, out of my body, and I felt the various parts of my identity fall away as if I were dropping layers of clothing. I had a thought: so now this one is over, the one called Laurel, tall, blonde, a violinist—and so it ends, and now I’m returning. And then I was flooded by an indescribable love, and thought briefly with regret about my parents, how they would grieve. But consolation was immediate: soon they will know, in no time at all. And there was relaxation into that love which was my true home.

The next thing I recall was returning to myself in a daze, with the car on the left shoulder, facing in the opposite direction of the road. I had no idea how I got there. I eventually made my way to the right shoulder, where I was approached by a kind man who had stopped to help me. I slowly followed him and his family  to the nearest rest stop, and had a cup of chicken soup and some tea. “See,” he told his young daughter, “Laurel went through all that and now she’s sitting right here.” We parted and I drove the rest of the way into Boston.

It would have been lovely if, in the aftermath of that experience, I could have integrated its insights and lived my life forever free from the fear of death. Instead, I was left with another phobia about driving on highways, which has stayed with me to this day. It would also have been lovely if I had gained the kind of perspective that would have led to better mental health, or at least more maturity. No such luck. I did spend time and energy puzzling over it, in an attempt to put it in some kind of framework that would make it intelligible. At the time I was under the influence of my Christian Scientist music teacher, who urged me to put it out of my mind and not speak of it. Traffic accidents fall in the same category as illness, something that involves the unreal material world, which according to that doctrine we must transcend.

Later, when I became serious about Christianity, I viewed my experience as an encounter with the pure love of God. I read mystic writers with a sense of having something of my own to bring to the table, feeling a little smug about it, to be honest. I had fallen into the trap of seeing myself as special, an inevitable pitfall of the spiritual life. Later still, as a Buddhist, I saw it as one of the stages on the Path of Insight. In some respects it fits the profile of both traditions. I have come to prefer calling it The Big Wow, however, because that term is just irreverent enough to keep it in perspective. Such things can happen, and then other stuff happens, and it’s best not to wallow in it. The most such an experience can do is inspire you to keep practicing when you might otherwise skip it. It is ancillary, not central. That is all.

 

Stage Fright

I began my musical training at an early age, first on the piano and then on the violin. For five or six years I studied violin with a teacher at a local community music school, where I made a lot of friends and participated in performing ensembles. I also took part in recitals, my first taste of performing solo in front of an audience. I didn’t like it at all. Nonetheless, the stakes were relatively low, and I had what might be described as a normal case of nerves.

That all changed when I began studying the violin more intensively with a formidable new teacher during my junior year. He was charismatic, demanding, and by turns seductive and scathingly critical. In two years I made my way through a sizable chunk of the major solo repertoire, developing my technique far beyond anything I had achieved before. I also spent three summers at music camps, where I was thrown in with highly trained, sophisticated people, many of them New Yorkers. By the time I was out of high school at 17 I had a full-blown phobia. My most obvious symptom was a shaking bow arm, which would happen even when I wasn’t experiencing the emotions of panic. I came up with ways to circumvent the problem,  but the result was that I found it impossible to concentrate on the music itself. Sometimes the shakiness would intensify, while at other times it would subside. It didn’t always hit, and not always under predictable circumstances; for example, I was okay in a group or in a rehearsal of a solo, at least for awhile.

My teacher wanted me to go to Juilliard, or failing that, a college with a world-class music program. I ended up instead at a prestigious liberal arts college with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Actually, the problem was that I had too many ideas, and one of them was still music. I spent the two summers following my freshman and sophomore years in the Fellowship Program at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I began studying with a violinist from the Boston Symphony, who happened to be a Christian Scientist. She was about 10 years older than I was, tall and blonde (like me!) and we became close. I attended the Mother Church in Boston with her a few times, stayed at her apartment on occasional weekends, and identified with her completely, expecting to follow her path.

The only fly in the ointment was the damned stage fright. Christian Science teaches that even physical illness is a manifestation of a disordered view, a lack of faith and trust. In the case of a phobia, the sufferer is all the more under the spell of misguided thinking, which needs to be corrected through a combination of contact with the truth and prayer. It is best, in fact, not even to allow thoughts of fear to arise, if at all possible, because thinking about it, worrying about it, gives it power. Unfortunately for me, however, I thought about it all the time. I went into therapy with a classic Freudian analyst and talked about anxiety, my family, sex, self-image, and Lord knows what else, to no avail whatsoever (although it was lovely having someone pay so much attention to me). Forty-five years later, after numerous interventions (CBT, EMDR, Beta blockers, whatever) I can’t really say what the source of my phobia was, much less how to get rid of it. I have lectured in front of hundreds of people, sung solos in church and at a diocesan convention, and yet to this day if you stood me up in front of a small kindergarten class and asked me to pull a bow across a string, my right arm would shake.

Under the circumstances, Tanglewood was a protracted nightmare. The stakes were higher than ever, and my fear became paralyzing. By the second summer I was taking Valium for my nerves. I was also enrolled in a conservatory for the following year. Now the paralysis would set in even while playing in an orchestra with a large section. I soldiered on, unwilling to believe that I couldn’t get past the problem. It didn’t help matters that I could play very well, that I was actually accomplished enough to realistically imagine a career for myself. I loved music passionately, and felt overwhelming fulfillment in being able to bring it to life under the power of my own body. I just couldn’t share it with anyone. The grief and frustration I felt were indescribable. It’s only in the past couple of years that someone—a therapist, actually—labeled my experience as “incomplete loss,” the same terminology I had encountered elsewhere to describe the feelings of family members of people with mental illness, people like my brothers.

I left the conservatory after one year and returned to my liberal arts college, where I majored in intellectual history. By then I was married and no longer playing the violin. I would later participate in sight-reading chamber music in graduate school, but eventually I would stop playing altogether for about twenty years. At the time, it was the only decision that made sense.

 

The Three Characteristics: Impermanence

The Buddha taught that all of our experiences have three basic characteristics, the first of which is anicca, or impermanence, the second dukkha, suffering, and the third anatta, not-self (also translated as no-self). We are most familiar with impermanence from the changes that occur over the days and years, with children being born, growing up, and leaving home, or our bodies showing signs of aging. We may resist these changes, grieving the loss of our children or of our youthful appearance, or we may welcome them, but either way, nothing stays the same forever. Moving to another house, town, or country; changing jobs or careers; losing loved ones to accidents, illness, or old age—all present challenges to our sense of security and self.

My father worked for a single bank in our hometown for two decades before retirement, then left it all behind and moved with my mother to the other end of the state. Soon after his retirement, the bank was consolidated with several others in the region, and most of my father’s contribution became a thing of the past. The new president was the manager of the conglomerate, with the bank my father had managed only a relatively minor part of the new entity. As he and my mother began a new life elsewhere, the network of friends and neighbors they left behind thinned out. In his prime, my father had been a major figure in that community. In no time at all, he was barely remembered. I watched this happening during my own prime working years, when I was leaving my mark on the world, or so I thought. It was a soboring lesson in impermanence.

There is another, more refined level of impermanence which most of us never see, that being the instant-by-instant rhythm of life itself. We order our lives temporally as past-present-future, remembering the first, experiencing the second, and imagining the third. In truth, however, each of these is a construction of our minds, and the present, in which we believe we live, is gone as soon as it arrives. In a famous commentary on the Buddhist scriptures, the 5th-century teacher Buddhaghosa describes a series of stages meditators will traverse as they practice insight meditation. The fourth of these, Insight into the Arising and Passing Away, is the point at which we will have direct experience of the instantaneous arising and passing of sensations from our minds. The experience itself can be rapturous, with the rapidly passing sensations overloading our senses’ ability to recognize them. Soon after the meditator enters into a new series of stages that are known as the dukkha nyanas, which some call the Dark Night. Their very names are indicative of what they are like: Dissolution, Terror, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance, and worst of all, Reobservation, in which the meditator goes back over the series again and again until they have absorbed all of its lessons.

Insight meditation, also referred to as mindfulness,  is the means by which we learn to observe our minds and bodies more and more closely, until the Three Characteristics become clear to us in all of our sensations. There are numerous techniques for doing this, not to mention differences of opinion about the appropriate level of preparation for insight practices. Some teachers endorse a gradual approach, with significant work to quiet the mind prior to undertaking insight, while others recommend beginning insight work much sooner and pressing onwards. In addition, not all Buddhists recognize the Progress of Insight map as represented in the commentary, or even if they do, there are some teachers who believe it is not helpful to share information about the different stages with students. There are several reasons for taking this stance, chief among them the concern that our impressionable minds could easily lead us to imagine ourselves at one or another of the stages when we are in fact nowhere near.

Observing the mind at close range is inseparable from observing the body. Many westerners have only a vague idea of what is present in the body because we spend so much of our lives in our heads, preoccupied with our thoughts. In practicing mindfulness of the body, meditators learn to recognize and describe the physical manifestations of our emotions, especially those we tend to ignore or repress in day-to-day life. As a result, insight practices can be hard on the meditator because they bring painful emotions to the surface. I can remember one retreat where my mind-chatter was much worse than usual. I had taken on a practice of choiceless awareness, which involves letting thoughts and sensations pass in and out of awareness without interference, but in the process I was flooded by so many thoughts that I might as well have been daydreaming. I finally turned to a more structured approach called noting, which entails attaching a brief label to sensations as they are recognized. I was immediately plunged into the most excruciating feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and grief, so intense that I could hardly figure out how to work with them. I recognized that my mind had been using the chatter to prevent these feelings from arising, but then my noting technique had dislodged the thoughts. The work of this particular retreat was to allow these emotions to arise and then pass, as all things eventually do, by virtue of their impermanence.