Take Courage

Not getting what we want is probably equivalent to the first noble truth that all life is suffering. Of course, the Buddhist solution is to let go of wanting anything, thereby reducing and ultimately eliminating suffering. There's the reality for me, of not being able to change the wanting and just taking courage in the face of suffering. 

I'm still meditating and interested in equanimity. Love shines through non-attachment as it does through attachment, more diamond-like and permanent. My attachment creates conditions on love whereas my non-attachment makes it possible to aim toward unconditional love. 

I haven't talked much about Refuge Recovery, which I started at the first meeting of the Tempe group back in February. The meeting starts with a 20 minute guided meditation. I'm feeling at home there, although I find it amusing that addicts and alcoholics are so stubborn that they demand that AA not be religious, while gladly accepting recovery that is explicitly religious as long as it is non-theistic.

The last two times in a row, the meditation has been via Sharon Salzberg, on lovingkindness. You start by concentrating on these phrases: "May I be safe, may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I live with ease." Then you offer those phrases to a benefactor, then you offer those phrases to an acquaintance, then you offer those phrases to a person toward whom you feel animosity, then expand the meditation out and offer the phrases to all sentient beings. 

This practice helps me get past the inevitable anger, frustration, resentment, jealousy and what-if thinking of not getting what I want. "You always, you never." It helps me remember that, if I authentically want to love, which I do, I benefit greatly from letting go of the object mentality and loving as a practice. The most challenging thing about being so devastatingly in love with the loml is calling back to my mind and heart the plain fact that I do not love her as an object but as a being. An independent, end-in-herself autonomous and free otherness. 

To keep tenderly loving someone who is unable to provide what we want or unwilling to, as long as they are not also actively harming us through deliberate cruelty or abuse, is the biggest lesson for me. I am seeing quite clearly also how I have been unskilled in many ways, in the past. 

Yet another route to step one in CoDA: We admitted we were powerless over others, that our lives had become unmanageable. To seek power over an independent, end-in-herself, autonomous and free other is ordinary insanity. The sad irony is that it is also extremely painful. And that I often mistake someone doing exactly what I want with loving them. 

Suffering is here to stay, until I find myself under some Bodhi Tree somewhere. The challenge then is to suffer while loving or to suffer from loving. To suffer with it and stay alive, or to suffer from it and go dead and cold and bitter. This is my middle ground of Romanticism coupled with some oversimplified Buddhist thinking.