Feeling Bad Just Leads to Feeling Bad

I’ve been wanting to post on my blog, but I have been watching the Tour de France.  Sometimes, when I am choosing that instead of writing something, I wonder if I should feel bad.  It suddenly seemed clear to me yesterday that the answer is no.  If I am practicing ahimsa (non-harming), then the answer is always no.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of disappointment or a realization that I didn’t use my time wisely or that I don’t look back and think, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”  Just that there are no circumstances that require me to be ridiculed, put down and made to feel bad.  None.  Now, I have heard this many times, but I feel like I am understanding it in some new way.  The process of feeling bad just leads to feeling bad—it doesn’t lead to making better choices (despite the fact that most of us believe that).

A couple of people in my life have led me to think lately about shame and what a powerful and devastating feeling it is.  That a person can be going through a really difficult experience and feel it is so horrible and embarrassing that she needs to hide it, which just multiplies the suffering exponentially.  We so want to be seen and loved and yet remove any possibility of actually being seen and loved by hiding who we are.  And the really awful thing is that when we expose these terrible parts of ourselves, we often find that we’re not the only one, that other people understand, that we are actually not a mutant freak.

My mom was adopted and as an adult found her biological mother, who was probably in her seventies by then.  Her mother was still so afraid that anyone would find out that she had had a baby some thirty years ago that she did not want to have any contact with my mom.  After she died, my mom did get in touch with some relatives who immediately said, “Oh, we always knew you were out there somewhere” and wanted to meet and spend time with her.  Everybody knew!  It makes me sad to think about this woman living in fear and shame for NO REASON.

So much of our suffering is caused by shame and the feeling that something about us is so terrible that it needs to be hidden.  Overcoming this requires ahimsa and develops ahimsa.  And a step toward accepting the unacceptable in ourselves would be to stop feeling bad about watching too much t.v. or eating too many french fries or smoking a cigarette or saying something mean.  I can recognize that it’s not what I want to do, that it’s not getting me where I want to go, that it’s not helpful or effective or healthy or whatever . . . but I don’t need to feel bad.  Real self-study can’t happen without non-violence toward myself, otherwise I hide, even from myself.

Here's a great quote by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:  "You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of!   That is the basis for telling the truth."  So I’m here to say that at work I never wash my fork, I just lick it off and put it in the drawer for the next time.  I also pick my nose and will spend a lot of time over the next couple weeks watching bicycle racing.  How about you?