{"id":175,"date":"2014-04-29T22:13:54","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T05:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/?p=175"},"modified":"2014-11-29T15:18:45","modified_gmt":"2014-11-29T23:18:45","slug":"start-with-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/start-with-yourself\/","title":{"rendered":"Start With Yourself (A correction, and a riff)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days after I published my last blog post<\/a>, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she had been intrigued by my description of lovingkindness meditation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cI\u2019ve been doing it since I read about it there,\u201d she told me. I felt a twitter of surprise and satisfaction inside. \u201cSee, Amy,\u201d she said, \u201cRipples, ripples.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flutter of satisfaction lasted for another few days, until, on the drive to pick up my children from school one day, I realized that I had gotten it wrong!\u00a0<\/em> And because of my error, my friend was living out an old pattern of mine (which is, in fact, bigger than me). You do not start lovingkindness meditation with someone you love easily, like I said in that post. You start with yourself!<\/em> \u00a0 And, lord knows, loving myself does not always come easily.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting for me, at this point in my life, to chalk it up to being a mother. I\u2019ve lost track of the number of times since my children were born that I\u2019ve recited the mantra: \u201cPut on your own oxygen mask first.\u201d In the middle of the night, holding a screaming baby, feeling terrifying feelings that I did not expect to emerge from my womb. In the middle of a grocery store, trying to rein in an out-of-control toddler, feeling the embarrassment of being \u201cthat mother\u201d I swore I would never be. In the middle of the weekend, trying to find the time to go for a run, run an errand, or just breathe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a pattern bigger than motherhood, or parenthood, or even womanhood. It\u2019s some deeper, more culture-bound challenge of loving ourselves. Once when I was on retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center<\/a> before my daughter was born, one of the teachers told a story about the arrival of Tibetan lamas in the United States. They could not understand, she said, why it seemed so difficult for Westerners \u2014 women and men \u2014 to include themselves in the offering of compassion. I\u2019ve forgotten a lot of other things about that retreat, but I\u2019ve never forgotten that story. It struck me like a wave, because I recognized that difficulty in myself.\u00a0 And then when I looked around, I saw it in the constructed world \u2014 what\u00a0Clarissa Pinkola Est\u00e9s calls the overculture<\/em> \u2014 all around me.<\/p>\n

We walk through the world surrounded by fences, labels, and boundaries \u2014 many erected by others, many of our own making. We are incessantly showered with praise and blame, and shore up the edges of our uncertain selves with hyper-individualism. Once safe inside our own existence, we are exhorted (and exhort ourselves) to \u201creach out,\u201d \u201ccross borders,\u201d \u201conly connect.\u201d In such a world, to turn and actively offer yourself love (love, not product-driven affection) is frequently, and quite logically, considered a withdrawal behind the fence. A closing in, a closing down. We are caught in this dilemma, never knowing on which side of the fence we rightfully belong, or where something called virtue can be found.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But how could you not start lovingkindness meditation with yourself?\u00a0 To do so would be like trying to offer ripples to the world without the central event of dropping a stone. Where is the stone? What does it feel like in your hand? What soft or glittering colors does it harbor? What shift in the earth\u2019s patterns led it to this patch of soil?\u00a0 These are stories worth telling. This is not just about self-care. It is about weight, texture, history. The actual contours of your life.<\/p>\n

It would be like growing a tree without a seed. Like birdsong without the bird. It\u2019s really impossible. But obviously the taboo against truly loving yourself, against knowing yourself to always inhabit a place where you belong<\/em>, is so strong in me that it took several days before I even noticed my own erasure. By passing that absence on, I was passing on a pattern that just doesn\u2019t make any sense. I was wrong.<\/p>\n

But\u2026 \u201cNotice when you try to make yourself wrong,\u201d my Zen teacher has said to me several times over the past year. But, I could say to her, this time I was really<\/em> wrong. Bad Buddhist! I got the instructions wrong! I didn\u2019t start with myself! But you know what? It\u2019s okay. Everything is a gift. Sometimes even being wrong is a gift. And if I had not made that particular mistake, I would not have realized the strength in me of this tendency to leave myself out. And maybe if I had not realized that, I would not have had the dream I had a few nights later.<\/p>\n

I dreamt that my husband and I were on a bus together. He placed his cheek or forehead against mine, softly. It was a gesture that was very sensuous, intimate, and real. And then he said, \u201cIt seems as if whenever you wake up, it is always with or through something.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s all.<\/p>\n

But that was enough to shift the dilemma for me. My interactions with the world since that dream have been washed with a bright tenderness, and a promise, that I have not felt before. Of\u00a0 course we can only wake up with or through people or things. Every thing, every person I encounter is a gift, a compatriot, a gateway. And if that is true in one direction, it must be true in the other. You are not exactly me; you do not have my precise weight, texture, history, or song, but there does not need to be a fence for either of us to reach across, or withdraw behind. I am innately a gift, a compatriot, a gateway for you. I can love that in myself, without fully understanding where it comes from, without needing it to possess a quality called virtue. I can just start where I am. I can start with myself.<\/p>\n

Friend \u2014 do you feel that ripple?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days after I published my last blog post, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-motherhood","category-social-change","category-zen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Ripple_-_in_rail.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4goq1-2P","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}