As I think about what to write, what to share, I arrive at a point of general vacuity. Well, several ideas come streaming through but none excite me. That’s when I realize and remember that the best writing I do is when I am writing for myself rather than some imagined audience.
I have come to see that this motivation brings out the most powerful and meaningful writing from me because it almost always unhinges me from my comfortable, controlled and distanced view from the deck. This kind of writing forces me to dive in deep into places I have made mental notes of to avoid or where I have kept my forays into the unknown (yet feared because of the known) superficial and brief.
It’s not that I see value in relentless, soul pounding psychoanalysis. I don’t. But I have savored the nutritious wholesomeness of insight gained by following with sparkling curiosity and patient abiding the guidance of a light that draws me into some dim, obscured or neglected place in one of the many rooms in my mind. So where does it draw me today?
Embarrassment. Undeserving.
Embarrassed because I did not demonstrate adequately something that I had learned. Specifically, these were some techniques in Aikido that I had learned as a student at a lower rank. It was grading day yesterday or as they wisely prefer to call it in my dojo, Promotions day.
I had prepared to demonstrate the four techniques that were specifically required for the level that I was being promoted to. Sensei instead instructed those of us grading to this particular rank to demonstrate other techniques which I was a little rusty on. And of the four techniques that I had so thoroughly prepared for, only one of them was ‘tested’ during the grading. Talk about abject disappointment!
At the time, the disappointment rapidly conflated with the memory of the shame I’d felt this time last year when I had turned in another poor performance. That was almost instantly overridden by frustration because this year I felt so much better prepared and was so excited about being able to demonstrate the techniques.
It didn’t have anything to do with pride. It had a lot to do with showing my instructors how well they had taught me. I was so looking forward to that joy. Instead, I felt myself careening toward dismay and an increasing sense of frustration. Last year I felt I had messed up. This year, I was confident and determined I wouldn’t. But I felt I did. Perhaps not as badly but disappointingly enough.
Admittedly, I was not as traumatized with my performance this year as I had been last year but I did feel disappointed. The anger fortunately had a humorous edge to it. ‘I could have killed Sensei’ I thought to myself and said as much to others who sympathetically sought to reassure me in a number of ways: By telling me that Sensei does tend to do this to keep us on our toes and to also share similarly embarrassing experiences in the course of their Aikido journey.
But none of these really helped. I felt myself emotionally smarting from the experience for a while and long after the event was over. Without fully recognizing it at the time, I was feeling cheated. I had done the work and I hadn’t been given a chance to demonstrate it, something that I especially wanted to do because it would ‘prove’ to my wonderful instructors that I was deserving of the promotion. (Needless to say, all this was part of my ego story. For all I know, none of my instructors would have been particularly bothered however I had performed).
It was only today, as I allowed that guiding light to lead me as I gently and calmly followed that I realized how embarrassed, how cheated and how undeserving I had felt.
Embarrassment and undeserving have much to do with self-worth. Certain situations and events in life are more likely to taunt them into appearing than others. By and large, I carry a healthy sense of self-worth but every now and again, it gets unhinged. I am certain that some of it has to do with beliefs around age.
As a mature student, I am determined that age will never be an excuse for anything, physical or otherwise. In fact, in many ways, I feel a much happier, healthier and fitter person today than I have ever been, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. This has largely to do with having released so much of the baggage I had been carrying from a very traumatic and unhappy childhood and to which I’d been adding in my earlier adulthood. Daily and ongoing meditation has been an integral part of this process.
Feeling cheated has to do with beliefs around agency – who really has control over what happens to me. Again, I would say that by and large, I am deeply aware of how I am the puppeteer of my own life. And again, this is something that I have realized through the practice of meditation whose central focus is observing the nature of the mind- conditioned and unconditioned.
Here, you see the conditioned mind behaving in ways that it has learned to behave. These are habits that have arisen out of fear as an evolutionary stance as well as through our collective and personal socialization. But fear is only ever present in the unconscious state of ignorance. In Buddhism, it is referred to as our ‘fundamental ignorance’. And what is that?
It is a lack of awareness of our true, unconditioned nature which is
Indestructible
Unenhanceable and
Unsurpassable
Does recognizing the strength of my emotional states help? You bet.
Does realizing where it comes from help? Absolutely. How? By showing me the lack of validity of some of my persistent beliefs and pointing me to the truth that they veil.
Does recognizing the truth help? Is breathing essential? Of course it helps. My goodness, that is putting it mildly. Recognizing the truth allows the life force to flow freely and fully through me and as me once again. That is what being alive really means!
So tomorrow, I set off once again to train. I relish the thought. I adore the training. And I couldn’t be in the company of a more supportive and caring bunch of people.
I could still kill sensei though.
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