The Pause

So, pretty much as soon as I posted that last one, I was having mixed feelings.  I was concerned that it seemed trite and minimizing.  It really can seem so ridiculous to be faced with all the suffering and troubles in the world and to just try to be more compassionate and understanding in my own life.  It is true though, that in my experience, this is my best shot of making a difference.

Anyway, within a couple of hours of posting, I was confronted with the fact that I had done something wrong that was hurtful to someone close to me.  Now, I have been accused a couple times in the last year of doing things that I hadn’t done, things that were perceived differently than the way I experienced them, but this was not one of these.  This was me having knowingly committed a wrongful action—confirmation that the sameness and potential of all of us is real, not just an idea.

I am not going to share the specifics because when I started this blog, I decided that just because I wanted to write a blog didn’t mean that everyone in my life agreed to participating in it.  The blog is about my experiences, struggles and insights and talking about people I know in this public forum would not be practicing asteya (non-stealing).  So without discussing content, I am going to share a bit about the process I have been going through, which has been illuminating for me.

I acted out of selfishness, disregard for the potential impact on someone else and denial or blocking out some pieces of information (interestingly, the same qualities I projected onto others in my last posting).  So how did I end up letting these parts of myself make the choice in this situation rather than other parts of myself?  It seems like one factor was urgency.  I was feeling overwhelmed and desperate to do something and felt it needed to be right away.  The sense of time pressure rarely contributes to the best decisions.  Even when something feels urgent, there is actually time to pause, time to sit with the whole situation before acting.  I understand and have compassion for the part of me that was caught up in urgency, and I know that I could have paused, which would have allowed me to see that there were choices and probably would have led to a different course of events.

The other main contributing factor was my willingness to believe assumptions and rationalizations.  We humans can pretty much rationalize anything.  I don’t know whether or not I can stop my mind from coming up with these ways to explain why it is okay or even right to say or do this or that.  But I can recognize these as just one perspective on the situation and see if I can generate some others, including some that aren’t easy or don’t get me what I want.  I have to be willing to own the fact that I rationalize in order to be able to see when I am doing it.  Quite often, people may say things that aren’t totally consistent—in one moment, a person says one thing and, at another time, she says something that seems contradictory.  This is fertile ground for rationalization.  Rather than assume I know what someone wants, how they feel, how they will feel when I make a certain choice, I could actually check it out.  So, if I really want to do the right thing, to live my yoga and to cause the least amount of harm and suffering, I have to step out of the limited viewpoint and experience of this person called Stephanie and take a wider view.  Again, this requires a pause.

So with this svadhyaya (self-study), I feel like I have some idea of how I came to do what I did.  I admitted I was wrong and apologized for it without any qualifications or excuses.  I know that I did not purposely hurt this person and totally accept responsibility for the fact that my actions did do that.  That is pretty much all I can do.  And yet, I keep thinking about it and thinking about it.  I replay the conversation, I create other conversations in which I defend what I did or grovel for forgiveness and everything in between, I go over what I did and what happened and go into the future, imagining all kinds of scenarios that could unfold.  In some weird way, it seems like some part of me thinks if I replay the whole thing enough times, it could somehow have a different ending. 

But even more, it seems like some form of punishment.  I did something wrong and I need to be punished in order to make sure that I really know I did something wrong and don’t do it again.  So I better keep thinking about it so I can remember how bad I am and what a mistake I made because otherwise I could forget.  I think this is a common and strongly-held part of our conditioning.  And even though my mind is busy at work with this belief, I know I don’t buy it.  I don’t need to feel guilty to learn something from this.  Feeling bad doesn’t make me a good person, literally or figuratively.  And not feeling bad doesn’t mean I don’t care.  It’s even possible that feeling bad could keep me from taking action.  I am disappointed in myself.  And I am going to practice pausing more, so I can make better choices, whether big or small.  I can only practice in the present moment, though, so when the yammering in my mind starts, I bring myself back to my breath and pause.