Category — relationships

In the beginning, I took the teacher as teacher,
In the middle, I took the scriptures as teacher,
In the end, I took my own mind as teacher.

–From Journey to Enlightenment, pictorial biography of Dilgo Khyenste Rinpoche

Relationships are lonely. Even good ones. My relationship with my husband is lonely. My relationship with my guru is lonely. They’re the same kind of lonely—I have no idea what either of them is really talking about. And these are the good relationships. I really love them both, but in both cases the relationship is planted somewhere just outside my capacity for understanding. The only thing I know is that I’m no longer in a relationship with a person (husband or teacher). I’m in a relationship with a relationship. Which doesn’t really care what I have to say, particularly. So I just wait for it to tell me what to do.

The other day, we had a fight. (My husband and me, not my teacher and me) It was a bad one. Super bad. Bad like leaving-the-house-at-1AM-to-go-sleep-on-the-couch-in-my-office bad. It’s so cliché to say I can’t even remember what it was about, but I sort of can’t. Well maybe I can, but just don’t want to believe that something so unbelievably stupid (someone not telling someone else that they bought a new camera, for example; I mean it only cost $200 and I needed it for work) could cause two normally sane people to absolutely lose their minds and jump all up and down yelling at each other. I mean for goodness sake.

I was so depressed by this argument. I drug myself home at 6AM, dreading seeing him, but also hoping I would so he could see that I was still ignoring him. As I let myself in and walked up the stairs to our bedroom, he was exiting the shower, towel around his waist. His hair was wet and smelled like drugstore pineapple. His bare chest looked kind of dewy and sweet, not at all like the chest of someone you’d hate. Although I was still angry, I could see that he no longer was. (When he blows up in anger his emotions metabolize and become digestible—he feels better after a “good” fight. For me, a fight is like getting socked in the head, the kind of punch that at first you can’t even feel how much it hurts and then throbs for days…) He came toward me and held his palms up in an unreadable gesture. My palms spontaneously rose to mirror his, whether to stop him from coming closer or to hold him to me, I also couldn’t tell. Back off. Come here. It didn’t matter which one I did, because in that moment, I realized I was trapped. I couldn’t push him away, nor could I hold him close enough. I couldn’t keep him at bay because our lives are no longer two separate-but-parallel tracks as they were when we began living together. No. We’re living one life together. I don’t know at what moment this happened, but something invisible pushed us into a single life. We must have held each other one too many times. Inhaled each other’s breath while falling asleep one too many times. Had the same fight, kissed the same kiss, exchanged the same glance, eaten off the same plate one too many times. Our bodies and hearts have re-formed into cutouts that can only hold the other. From this realization and from the sight of his bare chest and the scent of his pineapple hair, I wanted to open to him, to hold him close just because for whatever mysterious reason, the mere sight of him touches me so much.

But no embrace will ever really satisfy. I could never hold him close enough for him to actually know me; he would never know what it felt like for me to do this, why I was doing it, or to recognize the sequence of thoughts and feelings that led to this opening. I saw the depth of our connection and the simultaneous inability to know each other. He must feel the same exact way, I thought as I pulled him close. Very lonely. And, I realized, the closer we got, the more shocking and painful it would be to still not really know each other.

***

In my spiritual practice as a Buddhist, I’ve been encouraged to open myself to spiritual wisdom, to the kind of knowing that goes beyond the conventional mind. I’ve made a commitment to this effort and have taken many vows, taken on demanding meditation practices, and even found a guru, something I had always scoffed at as an excuse made by the lily-livered to forego adult responsibility. But when you find your teacher, it isn’t all that different than finding your husband. On one hand, you are bowled over by the extraordinary fact of their very existence and how profoundly and unquestioningly you love them, but on the other, during the first-blush phase, you look at them and go, “that’s it?” Still, as both relationships progress, your beloved becomes both more familiar and more mysterious as time goes on. You question the vows you made. Some days they seem outrageous, impossible (I said I’d always love you?) and on others their true meaning deepens beyond what you had originally imagined.

If the marriage vow is to love, the vow to the guru is to open your self to his instruction and influence. It’s very scary. But here’s the funny part. It’s way more complicated than doing 100 Hail Marys or 100,000 prostrations just because he told you to. At some point, the guru enters your mind. It’s impossible to describe this. It begins with simply recalling his verbal instructions when you sit down to do your meditation practice (“make awareness itself the object of your meditation”), then graduates to unbidden reminders as you go through the day (you’re about to give the finger to the guy who just cut you off in traffic, but suddenly remember your teacher saying, “regard all beings as your mother,” which is a guru-way of saying, please don’t flip people off). But at some point, you stop hearing the teacher speak to you in his voice and you start hearing him speak in yours. I think. It’s very hard to know. But what seems to happen is, because he is your guru, you have somehow always known him. It’s sort of like, as a grownup, still hearing your mother’s voice when you’re about to take the last piece of pie (“haven’t you already had two pieces?”) only he says things like, “regard all dharmas as dreams,” and “the mind is empty and luminous.” The more you relax your mind, the more you practice, the more kinds of wisdom energies begin to manifest themselves in your existence. These energies are variously described as self-existing wisdom, Buddhas of wisdom, bodhisattvas of compassion, and, of course, as Susan Piver, if you happen to be Susan Piver.

But are the Buddhas and bodhisattvas really there? Do they know me? How will I ever know them? Am I inviting them or rejecting them? I have no idea. Sometimes I think I’m in a relationship with them, sometimes I don’t. I can feel that the longer I practice, the more something happens, but I’m not really sure what that something is. I used to simply go to dharma talks and then try to practice what I’d been taught. I still try to do this. But just as often, these days I get my practice instructions from Aerosmith songs or an overheard conversation on the train. There’s nothing mysterious about it—I’m just listening to my iTunes or going to work and suddenly something clicks, like, “it’s really true—I don’t exist.” I don’t know where it comes from. Everything starts to sound like the teacher’s voice and all I know is that my efforts to connect more deeply with him have become much more dreamlike and difficult to differentiate from my own mind. It’s very personal. Intimate. Lonely. Just like my husband stepping out of the shower with pineapple dewdrops in his hair, my teacher steps out of my own mindstream, palms held up in an equally inscrutable gesture. Communications are taking place in a way I no longer understand. These two individuals have taken root within my mind and speak to me in their own curious language, using my mind as their voice. Some days I can make out what they’re saying and on others it sounds like complete gibberish. The last thing I can share with either of them is what it’s like to be with them. It’s just too intimate to describe. Both relationships are teaching me something, but I can no longer understand the instructions. Still, learning occurs.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to friend of mine, also a practitioner, but from a different lineage. He was telling me that nowadays, his meditation practice consists of getting up in the morning, going to his cushion, and just sitting there. He basically tries not to do anything at all. To relate to the teachings, there are no longer any rules to follow such as “place attention on the breath” or “visualize an open sky.” Just like me, he doesn’t really know what to do anymore. He can’t go back to following a set of practice instructions, nor is there a new set to jump forward into. There is only space and the feeling of groundlessness. In his tradition, he says, this stage of spiritual development is called “stupefaction.” This is where no one can tell you what to do anymore, no one but your guru, who somehow can never be found, yet is everywhere. All I can do is listen, without knowing what listening looks like. Some kind of dialogue is taking place beyond my radar. No one will ever know what this is like for me. Not even me.

New Article in the upcoming issue of the Shambhala Sun: “My Vows”

Dear Celia and Rich,

Thank you so much for your comments to my blog post, Buddhism & Relationships.

The issues you both point out are so monumental and confusing. It sounds to me like the questions you’re posing are along these lines: Which kind of love is the kind I should seek? Where does my heart belong? How far should I go for love? And when I lose it, how is it possible to ever get over it?

These are good questions, but they are not possible to answer. They imply that the locus of control lies within you, that you can choose a certain person or vision of love and then go after it, or even that you can somehow dispose of the pain of heartbreak. But love just happens and its outcome can’t be controlled, no matter how passionately you love. And trying to choose between what you had once and what you have now is simply not possible. What you had is gone. It can’t be gotten back. Even if that person came back on their knees, you still could not have what you once had. Trying to re-enter love is like trying to dip your foot in the same river twice. It’s always rushing forward. Each time you step into it, it’s different. Sometimes the current is rough and other times it’s still. All you can do is feel what it feels like now and now and now. I’m not trying to say that this is all great or anything. It’s just how it is.

The issue then is authenticity. How clearly and vividly and tenderly can you be yourself, feel what you feel? How truthfully can you express yourself, without hope or fear? How patiently and gently can you embrace yourself as you ride the waves of passion, remorse, boredom, longing? This is fearlessness. When your heart is broken, you enter the territory of the spiritual warrior. The warrior’s weapons are curiosity, open heartedness, and sadness.

So, much as we all might like (myself included, certainly) we can’t strategize about love. We can only welcome it when it appears, no matter what its form, and mourn its absence should it depart. And right now, you’re both engaged in the only battle that matters: to keep your heart tender, soft, and alive, no matter what. Accepting your experience with kindness is the best way you can support yourself right now and I truly hope you will both be kind toward yourselves and those you encounter.

Let me know what you think of what I’ve said. It may or may not be helpful.

I wish you both well. Please keep me posted.

I gave this talk a few weeks ago for the Interdependence Project, an excellent grassroots, community-oriented non-profit “dedicated to teaching the insights of meditation and applying the truth of interconnectedness to life in the 21st-century world. “

Buddhism has much to teach on the topic relationships, even though it may not seem that way at first. I mean what do the four noble truths (life is suffering; suffering is caused by attachment; it’s possible to stop suffering; there is an 8-fold path for doing so) have to do with figuring out how to love someone—or how to survive when someone stops loving you? Well, as a student of Buddhism and one who writes about relationships, I can tell you that every time I’ve tried to contextualize a Buddhist teaching as a way of understanding love, it works.

So not too long ago, I thought about the four noble truths and the three yanas in connection with that which we long for and fear the most: love. I don’t mean to be facile with these precious teachings. It’s just that I’ve been helped by them so much in matters of the heart and wanted to share them.

The four noble truths are as described above. The three yanas (or vehicles) are the Hinayana (foundational vehicle), Mahayana (great vehicle), and Vajrayana (indestructible vehicle.)

Hinayana teachings focus on personal conduct; getting your own life together.

Mahayana teachings are about what naturally happens next: your heart opens to others. You can’t help it. So the Mahayana is about compassion and recognizing the profound interconnectedness of all phenomena.

The Vajrayana is about working with every circumstance as an opportunity for complete enlightenment. Here one finds teachings on ordinary magic, crazy wisdom, and auspicious coincidence—the ways the world conspires to introduce you to your true nature.

With these ridiculously superficial explanations, let’s look at the four noble truths and the three yanas in light of relationships.

I made all this up, so please don’t take it too seriously.

Four Noble Truths of Relationships
1. Relationships are deeply uncomfortable.
Whether it’s your first date or tenth anniversary, there is simply an enormous amount of discomfort involved in relationships. We’re afraid of being hurt, disappointed, overtaxed, ignored. The interesting part is that all these things happen. This is just the way it is, even in happy relationships.

The thing no one tells you is that it’s impossible to stabilize a relationship. Yes, I really mean those italics. Impossible. The emotional exchange between two people shifts like grains of sand in the desert: some days you can see forever and some days you just have to take cover because something kicked up out of nowhere and now shit is flying all over the place. You can’t see two feet in front of you and it stings. On still other occasions, imperceptible winds cause little piles to slowly accumulate until, one day, a familiar path is altogether blocked. You just can’t tell what’s going to happen. And just like hiking in the desert, you have to be as absorbed in the present moment as you are attuned to atmospheric indicators. Woe to she whose attention to either lapses.

The bad news is you never get to where you thought you were going. You get somewhere else instead. The good news is that there’s basically no way to have a boring relationship.

2. Discomfort comes from trying to make the relationship comfortable.
At the root of the discomfort is the wish that it wouldn’t be uncomfortable, that we could eventually find the “right” person and relax. But the truth is that when you do find the (or a) right person, it’s anything but relaxing: your neuroses, their neuroses, and all the hopes and fears you’ve ever had about love flood your situation. Whether you bargained for it or not, you get introduced to your deepest self while someone else is trying to introduce you to their deepest self. It can get very confusing. But instead of wasting time trying to make it not confusing, better to dive right in and be really nice to each other as you consider the root of your own and his/her confusion. (Acting nice to each other in the midst of confusion is love. Shhh.) (PS Acting nice doesn’t always mean being all sweet and demure. But I digress.)

3. It’s the inability to create safety that plots the path to love.
True love seems to exist on some mysterious edge of its own. It can’t be controlled and when you try, it calcifies. To keep it alive, at some point you just have to let go and see what happens.

When you work with all this nuttiness, love becomes more than mere romance. It turns into something way better: intimacy. Romance has got to end, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. But intimacy? It has no end. You can’t be, “oh, intimacy, we’ve done that. What comes next?” Nothing comes next. That’s it. Discuss.

4. It is possible to work with the uncertainty skillfully.
Instead of flinging yourself kamikaze-like into the flame of love, you can train in working with the heat. As with anything you consider important (or life-threatening, for that matter), you don’t want to just show up and hope for the best. You want to play the odds.

Applying the view of the three yanas could help.

Three Yanas
1. Hinayana
As mentioned, Hinayana teachings are about personal conduct: right speech, right action, and so on. You get your own life in order through discipline, honor, and effort. You know how to make your bed, pick up your clothes, and make it to work on time. Basic stuff, but without which everything simply falls apart. Very important.

When applied to relationships, Hinayana view could mean things like calling someone when you say you will. Being on time. Having good manners. Listening when they talk and other such radical propositions.

2. Mahayana
When you are a stand-up human being, you can extend yourself to another in a more profound way. In fact, you want to. It just happens. You could find love and actually enjoy it.

Once you get into a relationship however, you find out something pretty disturbing: you have to love them back.

For whatever reason, all the relationship books and TV shows in the world seem to be about how to get love, not how to give it–which is quite a complicated proposition. Here’s the problem: most of us aren’t looking for someone to love. We’re looking for someone to cast in the role of boyfriend or girlfriend. Central casting, send me someone who has a job, a car, and speaks English! (My stringent requirements for potential boyfriends, back in the day.) You can get as specific as you want when you send in your requisition (I need someone with brown hair who likes dogs but not cats, enjoys rowing, and has never eaten at Hooters), but eventually that person is going to break character. Then what? Alarmingly, you have to dispense with all your requirements and have a look at the actual person in front of you. You see that this person is as important as yourself. This is the very teensy-tiny beginning of compassion: when you agree not to be the most important person on earth. But that’s okay. Now you can start to figure out what it really means to love.

3. Vajrayana
If the Vajrayana teachings are about meeting the circumstances of everyday life as a potential moment of transformation, then applied to relationships it could mean something like this: Every single thing that happens between you and your beloved is an opportunity to love more. Everything. Even crappy stuff.

Just as no one can tell you how to make giving birth or spilling your coffee into an opportunity to attain enlightenment, no one can tell you how to do so when your beloved leaves you for someone else or fails to empty the dishwasher. (Although he promised he would.) Big or small, heart crushing or annoying, delightful or irritating, no matter what happens, in the Vajrayana view it is fodder for wakefulness, for love. And just as with Vajrayana meditation practices, you can read books about how to do them and even have a great person teach them to you, but at some point you’re on your own. You have to figure it out for yourself.

The willingness to try is love itself. Isn’t it?

Photo credit

An interview about The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say “I Do”

TODAY 2/16

This talk will be about the 3 poisons (passion, aggression, ignorance) and how easy it is to injest or inject them when it comes to relationships. It’s one thing to be all oh I’m so compassionate and peaceful but it’s another to fall in love without demands or survive a breakup without losing your dignity.

I’ll also touch on the 3 yana approach to relationships. In Buddhism, there are many references to the Hinayana (Foundational Vehicle), Mahayana (Great Vehicle), and Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle).

To oversimplify vastly, Hinayana practices relate to issues of personal conduct, decency, and basic human ok-ness.

Mahayana practices are about about love, compassion, and the “six paramitas” (transcendent actions): generosity, patience, discipline, exertion, mindfulness, and wisdom.

Vajrayana practices are about working with everyday life as the basis for enlightenment. In other words, whatever happens, good, bad, or ugly, is viewed as the means for waking up completely.

What happens when we apply the principles of the 3 yanas to love, romance, and friendship? That’s what this talk is about.

Sponsored by the wonderful:

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Today is supposed to be the most romantic day of the year and I hope it is for each and every one of you. And if you’re thinking of getting married or otherwise settling in to one relationship, congratulations. You are fortunate, brave, and, if you’re like most of us, terrified. Why do so many couples get divorced?!

When I was thinking of getting married (almost 10 years ago now, I cannot believe it), I got really panicky. I mean I loved my boyfriend and everything, but so what. All my divorced friends loved their boyfriends when they got married too. I thought really, really hard about whether or not to go through with it (obviously; I wrote 100 questions before I said yes) and I also reflected about (all) my past failed relationships. And I had a startling realization. None of my past serious relationships failed because we didn’t love each other anymore. It was not a matter of love at all. These relationships failed because one of us (okay, me) didn’t love our life together. We were unable to create a LIFE that we both loved. I was kind of shocked when I thought of this: you mean just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re going to love your life together?? No one had ever said this.

So I started to write down questions about our life.

Would we keep our money separate or together?

What holidays would he celebrate?

What would his son call me?

How satisfied were we with each other’s level of ambition? (Could be too much, could be too little.)

Where would we live? (At the time we lived in two different cities.)

How long will we live there?

What if one of us wants to stop working?

Will we have kids and if so, when?

Answering these questions proved to be an amazing experience. And believe me, it’s not like we agreed on everything. If fact, we probably agreed, disagreed, and drew a blank in equal measure. But here’s the thing. We loved, loved, loved each other so much when we were done answering the questions. WHETHER OR NOT WE AGREED WITH EACH OTHER. That was key. There is something so endearing, empowering, and–yes–loving about having this kind of conversation together. We felt so close. And let’s face it, romance is going to end. Period and just get over it if you think that’s wrong. But there’s something way, way better than romance: intimacy. Answering these questions was an act of great intimacy and trust. And while romance kind of piffles away at some point, there is absolutely no end to intimacy. It is profound, mysterious, and completely trustworthy. It’s worth a lifetime of commitment. After almost 1o years, I feel this way even more than when we first got married.

For our parents and grandparents, these questions were probably not
necessary. The conventions of marriage were understood. Parents or grandparents were likely of the same religion and the opposite sex. But today all bets are off. So extra effort is required to see through your projections of “the perfect partner” and instead see the perfect partner in front of you, exactly as he or she is. This way, when you say I love you, you’re saying it to an actual human being and not someone you’ve succeeded in casting in the role of bride or groom. When you finally do say “I Do” you will know what you are saying and who you are saying it to. And what is more loving than this?

Our wedding day. My dress had feathers.

The Tyra episode I taped (and blogged about) a few months ago will air on Valentine’s Day. The show is called “Will You Marry Me?” My appearance accounts for about 1/2 of 1% of the entire show. Although my hair takes up the entire screen. They really super-poofed my hair.

That’s me in the back, looking ferklempt (not to mention unbelievably matronly) at the real-time marriage proposal.

The dress they put me in came with it’s own cleavage, apparently. My hair and boobage were reminiscent of a 1973 Mrs. America contest. (Can you tell I’m fixated on the way I look and not the deeper meaning of the marriage proposal?! Fie!)