P5: Learning to Teach

See online version at:
https://webspace.utexas.edu/wcj262/Bump/P5/P5.htm?uniq=-h1x27

(Sorry, Webspace was not working on Sunday night when I submitted the link.)

Eye of Compassion (Medicine and Compassion)

(A chalazion, the culprit of my travail. It's a bacterial infection that clogs the little tubes in your eyelid, forming a bag of pus below the eye.)
On Thursday before Spring Break I went to the ophthalmologist to have a staph infection seared from the inside of my eyelid. I had tried antibiotic goo prescribed by a campus doctor and then two other antibiotics prescribed by the ophthalmologist, none of which were reducing the swelling. Actually, the herbal eyewash (a simple tea made from witch hazel bark) was much more effective until it ran out. But it had been two months since I had contracted the infection and my vision was worsening. I have only taken antibiotics once or twice in my life and am resistant to many conventional medical practices, especially surgery. At last I caved. I was ready to be done with the mess and I wanted both eyes for the beauty of Italy at Spring Break.

I was reticent to have the surgery, first of all, because the ophthalmologist who previously saw me radiated sickly energy. He was not at in his body and seemed hollow when he spoke to me. He had done this examination countless times so his body was able to run through the motions without requiring much mental or emotional input. He also looked unhealthy and not very happy – two qualities in doctors that make me justifiably wary.
(I really don't feel comfortable being operated on by a man who looks like this. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think he is.)

Luckily, when I went back in to have the surgery, they assigned me the head doctor (apparently he was the only one allowed to do this surgery now – fewf!). He was much healthier, and I was able to joke around with him, lighten the mood and let him know that I was an intelligent person and not just a patient. (I had been reading Dass at the time so I tried some of his breaking through the roles techniques.) Feeling his positivity, I “[became] much more receptive to treatment because [I] trust[ed] the caregiver” (Rinpoche, 32). Hey, this won’t be that bad!
(Not a particularly inviting environment for a warm and compassionate doctor-patient exchange.)

When I am experiencing pain, I usually try meditative techniques of entering the pain and staying calm to cope. Seeing as this surgery was a more significant source of pain – and pain to which I was knowingly subjecting myself – it seemed like an especially good chance to experiment with this approach. As I leaned back in the patient’s chair, I began to slow my breathing, focusing on my biorythms, trying to stay calm. Before I was quite ready, in went the needle, right into my eyelid, injecting Novocain. Don’t flinch, I thought. Take it! Don’t let it hurt. I tried so hard not to respond, to continue focusing on my breathing (I suppose this is the macho attitude many women accuse Eastern spiritual traditions of promoting?). And it worked! The doctor was amazed. He had never seen anyone respond as little as I did. Almost everyone flinches or cries out, and now it was over, he said.

And then started the repercussions. I began to feel nauseous, only slightly at first but it steadily built until I lost consciousness. I was swimming in a swirl or black nausea, stuck energy. I had tried so hard not to feel any pain, which is not what meditation teaches, that I had repressed all the pain that I had felt and the energy built inside me until it overwhelmed me and I passed out. Meditation teaches (at least until it alters your perception so significantly that pain is not perceived as being quite as painful) that we watch our pain, that we not attach to it so that it tortures us. Much more difficult to do once we actually encounter a substantial amount of pain. This “calm acceptance” (Shlim, Medicine and Compassion Introduction, 9) does in fact mean acceptance, and it means letting it pass by like the leaves that Dass watches from the river bank. The monks Shlim treated dedicated their entire lives to cultivating this equanimity suffused with compassion, and were able to remain “kind, calm, and completely unafraid even at the end of life” (Shlim, Medicine and Compassion Introduction, 9). But “[t]here is a real difference between just acting as if we are kind and open [and able to face pain in such a way] to everyone and actually feeling kindness and compassion for all people” (Rinpoche, 51). That is the difference between Shlim’s monks and me. But the only way, I suppose, to turn acting into feeling is to continue to act, to build habits from virtuous acts until they become ingrained. It is a life along practice, and with each failed attempt I learn a little bit more about the direction I ought to take if I am to embrace and truly feel virtuous and compassionate. I certainly learned from this painful, miserable, bloody experience. But I’m still hoping I won’t have to do it (at least this particular surgery) again.

Burnout, self-righteousness, visions. Persistence.

(How can I live with so much suffering in this world?)
Watching the Ken Wilber video that Charlotte posted reminded me of the pain I have been feeling lately. I’m only nineteen, and already there are times when all I perceive is suffering. In Tibet, the monks are marching peacefully to regain basic liberty; the Chinese respond violently and riots erupt. The number of children in Africa that die every hour because of malaria, poor sanitation, dirty water, AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, and starvation is staggering. How can I pay attention to this? How can I live the affluent life I am blessed with knowing that the cost of my airplane ticket to Venice is enough to support many starving families for weeks in third world countries? I am only nineteen. I have so long to go, and I am only at the beginning. What do I do, where do I go? I don’t want all the suffering that I will face, that I will feel around me? How can anyone live knowing about the world’s suffering? (A response to living Samsara - the world of human suffering. Here Wilber speaks about gaining the perspective, "Hurts more, bothers you less.")

Other times, I feel that I really have a plan figured out. I’ve got this great meditation practice – benefits certain to be reaped(?) – supportive family, intelligence, potential and drive, a great relationship, and an admirable role model to guide me through it all. I am planning to attend an education workshop in Washington this summer, which will be my first personal contact with the Integral community. Sometimes I feel so good. I’m really making progress. I see others’ suffering and their lifestyles that feed it, so I try to help. “If you’d just step back and realize that you are doing this to yourself…. Just practice!... There is a bigger You behind all this….” “Fucking semantics” as the tearful woman in Wilber’s video cries. Sometimes I am able to deliver my help modestly, unobtrusively. “But much of the time we come into social action … and we’re just a little self-righteous” (Dass, 158). I struggle against pomposity but am addicted to having the answer, something really wise to say, even if it doesn’t accord with my own experience, or even make any real sense.

How can we impel our vision without becoming self-righteous? We have to learn (self-righteousness again) to be “an environment, not an argument for social chance” (Dass, 163). So we lead by example. We’re transmitting our energetic states all the time. If your best friend is depressed, and you are spending much time with her or him, you are likely to share his or her depression. Excitement is contagious as well. I had not even paid much attention to the Obama Clinton race until they came to campus and the buzz reached swarmed me. I couldn’t wait (and neither could many others who may not have cared). With these examples, we realize that our state of consciousness moment to moment is touching those around us. We have a vision? Play it all day and you’ll begin to sell popcorn. (Everyone knows how contagious yawning is. "Studies have found that contagious yawning is directly linked to our ability to connect with others emotionally." http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/contagious-yawn-1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://health.howstuffworks.com/contagious-yawn.htm)

Sometimes I’m optimistic and grounded in my vision. Then, “Conflict isn’t an obstacle. It’s an opportunity to move forward” (Dass, 167). Right now, my stomach is killing me – I’ve got minor food poisoning. But I don’t want to take Advil because I want to feel the sensation, want to learn to dissolve my resistance to pain. Whether this is productive or stupid I do not know. Other conflicts, however, are just plain painful. I suffer; they are obstacles! I try to remind myself that, as Dass says, it’s where I stand in relation to the pain, not the pain itself. So I continue to try. “You do what you do when you can. And when there’s nothing to do, and burnout tries to rear its ugly head … you M*A*S*H it” (Dass, 201). When I can’t try any longer, I usually become frustrated. I can learn to carry a little levity into more of my endeavors. That’ll keep me going. I’m only nineteen, but I have to keep going.

Dass 1

(Babysitting requires that you find the balance between playing the Cat in the Hat and playing authority figure. Sometimes, in times of crisis, we must learn to drop both roles and access the compassionate self.)
Kids say the darndest things. Last summer, I babysat twin five-year-old boys. (Actually they turned six on July 20 – they’d be furious if I suggested that they were five for the entire summer.) By August, I had developed a good healthy and mostly enjoyable relationship with them. Some of my fondest moments were when one of the two would unexpectedly pop out some profound comment or aphorism. Driving them back from summer school one afternoon, I was doing my best to simultaneously keep my eyes on the road and stop the cardboard box war in the back seat. Ben, as usual, ended up crying because his brother had once again out-muscled him. Avery, the macho man, would of course get frustrated at his brother’s childish tears and usually lash out angrily. So I asked him, “Why can’t you let Ben cry? What’s wrong with crying?” After giving me the usual reasons – “he always cries; he wants his mommy; I’m tired of it” – Ave said, “His crying makes my brain hurt.” Now, this might seem beside the point, but I thought it was quite an astute observation. Not, “His crying hurts me,” but “His crying hurts some part of me, some object within me.” We say similar things like, “My stomach hurts,” or “This great idea just passed through my mind,” or “My desires lead me astray.” But who is this “me” behind the “my,” the owner of the stomach, the mind, and the desires? Is the stomach part of a physical me? – but we still say, “my physical body.” Are my desires an aspect of my mind or a bridge between physiology and mind? Is the mind an aspect of the mental rational me? “Our own mental reactions are equally objects to be observed as anything else in our field of awareness” (Dass, How Can I Help?, 104). Who or what is this me encompassing my physical, mental, and emotional bodies?
(Yes, Thing 1 and Thing 2 are the perfect metaphor for twin five-year-olds.)

Ram Dass writes about this problem of identity. He says the identifying with roles is one of the greatest hindrances to helping others and being compassionate. “[A]ny model of the self, positive or negative, will limit our capacity to help” (Dass, How Can I Help?, 26) because “[t]he more you see yourself as a “helper,” the more need for people to play the passive “helped.” You’re buying into, even juicing up, precisely what people who are suffering want to be rid of: limitation, dependency, helplessness, separateness” (Dass, How Can I Help?, 28). So if I truly want to help or share an experience, I ought to try to shed my identity as nurse, father, boyfriend, and, during the summer, as babysitter. By simply being present I can better understand what you actually need or want. Stripping myself of the guardian role led to some of my most intimate experiences with Ben and Ave. Just sitting and allowing them to cry or shout or express their pain was usually the most effective path. I generally kept certain boundaries in place, however, because five-year-olds do need guidance and structure. The balance is interesting.

("Know thyself.")
If you “Know thyself” (inscribed on the tower at Delphi), finding the balance between self and higher Self or babysitter and compassionate listener becomes easier. This brings us back to that slippery question, which the Caterpillar sums up so nicely, “Who are you?” (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 48), or simply, “Who you?” (Dass, How Can I Help?, 30). We can answer this question with varying degrees of specificity and profundity: I’m a doctor, a teacher, a brother, a child, an intellectual, a human being/becoming. We need theses identities for stability, but not completely identifying with any of them has benefits as well. Shedding identities can help us to remember “the Self, seated in the hearts of all beings” (Swami, Gita, 81). What is this Self? Does this Self feel like a religious concept? In what ways is it beyond religion? (I’m curious.) Some people say their greatest fear is that they might be nothing. As Zen lineage holder Genpo Roshii responds, “You might just be” (Integral Life Practice, Big Mind DVD). The Gita says, “At the dawning of that day all objects in manifestation stream forth from the Unmanifest, and when evening falls they are dissolved in It again” (Swami, Gita, 67). It, Self? Here we see examples of the problematic dualistic nature of words, which we have stumbled upon so often in recent classes. It and Self are symbols, but that’s all. As concepts they have their limits. Without the appropriate experience, this signifier may be nonsensical because it will have no referent and the mental signified will be distorted.

I’m sure Avery had all this in mind when he informed me of his brain pain.

Ghandi, King, Ahimsa: To Experience WITH

(A dream of Ahimsa and compassion brought about my King's ability to understand, by entering others' experiences, the suffering of his people.)
As we mature, our circle of care (hopefully) expands beyond our egocentric demands to incorporate family, then community, nation, eventually all people, and possibly all sentient beings and all of manifestation. Krishna describes the culmination of expanding compassion as “the perfect saint who, taught by the likeness within himself, sees the same Self everywhere” (Swami, Bhagavad Gita, 55). This is the saint who has cultivated the consummate sympathetic imagination by accessing that spirit, or consciousness, that pervades us all. Doing so inspires not only internal piece but global piece as well. “I propose that sympathetic imagination is the root of all peace—peace with society, other people, your roommates and yourself” (Julie C.). I believe this statement conveys a profound truth. In order to be compassionate, one must “suffer together with” (OED, Course Anthology, 126) another person. (I will qualify this definition below.) Sharing a common experience intimately and meaningfully requires that we heighten our “natural and instinctive sympathy” (Anthology, 132, “The Sympathetic Imagination”) by “pentrat[ing] the barrier which space puts between [us] and [our] object” (Anthology, 131, “The Sympathetic Imagination”). Our ability to feel others’ suffering relies on our ability to conjure or remember a similar experience within ourselves.

This is also why compassion can be difficult: We interpret others’ experiences through our own. We assume that we know how they feel, that they are feeling just as we have before. And this is partly true because all humans have experienced suffering. But the individual experiences of suffering are unique. If we can simply be with another, allow her or him to have her or his experience without having to label it, we can enter that common experience of just suffering without getting as tangled in the relative details of an individual experience.

According to the OED and our discussion in class, compassion means to suffer with or “suffer together with” (OED, Course Anthology, 126). But as I have been reading Ram Dass’ How Can I Help, I have realized that “suffering” can mean many things and that it is not necessarily the proper way to think about compassion. I think compassion is more to experience with or experience pain with someone. And pain need not be suffering; suffering is the fear of and resistance to pain. Ahimsa teaches a way to experience pain while decreasing suffering. As Ahimsa and many other devotional, spiritual practices advance, a cultivated mind experiences a world that “hurts more, bothers you less” (Ken Wilber, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TUr949kmZk). (Ken Wilber addresses the increase in pain that comes with heightened awareness. Though you are more sensitive, you are not attached to pain in so painful a way.) In his “I Have A Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the term “creative suffering” (King, Anthology, 122) to describe faith-based suffering aimed at creating a vision of peace and equality. (King's passionate cry to unite behind peaceful suffering.) Behind this lies the idea of creative emergence or evolution. Through “creative suffering” rather than physical violence we align with the natural progressive flow, or Eros, or synthetic drive of the universe. Existence is naturally creative – look where we are today, walking and talking and sending people to get married on the moon; we used to be dirt. Something happened. By acting through peace (though with the fiery persistence of King and Gandhi) and expanding our circles of compassion, we become conduits for the natural creative flow to which we owe our lives. This is “creative suffering.”

(Ghandi protests by disobeying the salt laws - peacefully.)
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi were fearless in the face of suffering. Indeed, “Ahimsa is not possible without fearlessness” (Sivananda, Anthology, 115). To continue with a dream in the face of immense adversity, without succumbing to the instinctual fear and anger that leads to violence, is truly admirable. The Qur’an says, “oppression is even worse than killing” (Ali, 167). Even though Ghandi and King experienced the worse of these two, neither resorted to killing. Fighting with compassion, with vision, with Ahimsa, they managed to overcome oppression I can’t even fathom.