For years, I avoided the one requirement of spiritual practice: being willing to give up myself. Evidence that my way of being wasn’t working was everywhere: two failed marriages, unsatisfying work and a deep discomfort in my own skin. I might have wondered what was wrong, but my investment in how I viewed myself—gracious, good Clara—was too great. Rohini delivered the truth the only way I could receive it.
Deconstruction began a year and a half ago. For months on end, in every contact with Rohini, I was unmasked to reveal the cruelty, indifference and hate lurking behind my goodness. Rohini would say, “You are cold and cruel,” to which I felt nothing, thus proving her point. The resentment I felt toward her grew, and I desperately looked for any sign that would make it okay, make me okay. My intellectual understanding was useless. I was the victim. Everything I did—from my “Hello” as I walked into class to the ripple of hate I exuded at a garage sale—was unmercifully exposed as inauthentic, hurtful or judgmental. I felt isolated from everyone and it seemed that no one spoke to or even looked at me. Then, I made a choice.
I decided to stop coming to group classes, the main source of my discomfort. As I saw it, no one wanted me there and my absence would free everyone to move on. What I didn’t count on was Rohini’s reply: she would no longer see me privately until I felt ready to rejoin the group. And: I shouldn’t think I was doing anyone a favor by staying away. Her response was as devastating as it was enlightening. Here I was, again, trying to be good while slapping Rohini and my fellow students for being mean to me. Rohini left the door open, and I had to choose whether to enter.
After a few days’ respite from facing anyone or myself, I returned to the cauldron. It was Friday night meditation. No one said anything to me while I sat and burned. Then, as I looked around, it dawned on me that everyone was actually minding their own business. My being there wasn’t the big deal I thought it was. They were simply showing me what I needed to do: focus on my own experience and start owning my practice. Until then, witnessing my experience had never been part of my act.
More months passed before I could crack the shell of who I thought I was. Rohini wasn’t seeing me privately but still guided me. She periodically asked how I felt when my younger sister Andrea was murdered at age 22. A few weeks before her death, Andrea had asked me to intercede with our parents to pay her fare from Oregon to Baltimore for my wedding. My half-hearted attempt went nowhere and she didn’t come. The call announcing her death came a week later. I remember lying in bed, fists clenched, for hours. In the ensuing months, there wasn’t a moment I wasn’t enveloped by the finality of her death. My only escape was dreams in which I would run into her in the street and feel overjoyed that she was alive. Then, for the next 30 years: nothing. Now it all came rushing back, the depth of my indifference playing out before me. I had been too self-consumed to notice her slipping into a life of drugs and crime. I hadn’t seen that, behind her bravado, she was in over her head. I had to accept how easily I had decided that her life had nothing to do with mine, how I could have helped her but chose to do nothing.
I reflected on my father. In his medical career and interests, he valued intellect above all. His relationship with his three children depended on whether we aspired to his ideals: we were within his magic circle or banished from it. I felt special to be his only audience. I recalled a conversation with one of my parents’ caregivers in the days after his funeral. My father enjoyed drives around the town where he and my mother spent their last years. On this particular day, my mother, long bedridden by dementia, had been breathing strangely all morning. Still, my father was anxious to go, insisting that her main caregiver accompany him. Shortly after, they got the call that she had died. My father had chosen to let my mother die without him rather than face his emotions. There had been no love in what he offered me, yet that was the model I chose to follow.
Gradually, the story I had made up about myself loosened its grip. New feelings surprised me. One Sunday after our monthly meditation, Rohini yelled at a student for not taking care of herself in a relationship. I felt such compassion in her angry words, and pain at how complacent and complicit the student was in her own misery. When Rohini had done the same for me, I had felt only harshness. Now I could appreciate her dedication to helping all of us, by whatever means necessary, break out of what makes us miserable and begin to Love.
My practice has just begun. I still rely on habits like abstracting to bypass my experience. But it’s now clear that it is always a choice. Every hour, every second, I can choose to practice what Rohini shares—be with my experience, let whatever comes up come up and function appropriately from the Heart—or not. I can choose to face the truth of what I have called “good” or “me”, or avoid it.
Rohini often voices the phrase from the Shiva Sutras about how the deepest level of spiritual practice occurs “by the mere orientation of the will.” Although I’m far from living in that state, that phrase has a new reality for me. Rohini has given me the gift of realizing that letting go of what isn’t me and resting in the Heart is possible at any moment, if I choose it.
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