Being
Bodies, Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Enlightenment by
Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon
When I got home from my first week at
Goddard, I felt like I had been eaten by sharks and sewed back
together incorrectly. I felt like myself, but much different.
In her essay, Of Mud and Broken Windows, Michele
McDonald-Smith says, "It was as if I was a beautiful glass
window and someone took a giant rock, and threw it through the
window. It was like being totally annihilated. (I learned very
young to leave my body and look at myself from a distance.) I’d
look at this broken, damaged being, and think, 'Well, should I
try to replace the window? Or should I try to glue all these pieces
back together?' I had no idea what to do. And I wasn’t getting
any clues from those around me; no one else seemed to know what
to do, either… I would regress to very young ages and just
be going through the trauma. I had never learned to bring my adult
presence to that child part of me. That hurt part of myself was
totally alone… So what accompanied the annihilation were
layers of terror, rage, grief, hopelessness and deprivation… There
was a tremendous split between the wise part of me, and the damaged
child. I can say now, of course, it’s by re-experiencing
those emotions with mindfulness and compassion that the pieces
of the window get glued back together. Then there is no need to
split off from the body or the emotion, because one is no longer
afraid of them."
That pretty much says
it for me. It was incredibly
reassuring to have someone else describe exactly what I was experiencing.
I know I'm on a road to enlightenment, but I think it's going to
involve breaking myself down and putting myself back together.
Over and over again. A few months ago, I was going through a bad
time, and someone told me that grief's purpose is to burnish us
until we achieve the luster and patina of wisdom. I thought she
was crazy, and she said it didn't make much sense to her either,
the first time she heard it, but now I really like that image of
annealing metal. I think that's the word.
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