 |
| Like
the near enemies, the force of compartmentalisation separates our body
from our mind, our spirit from our emotions, our spiritual life from our
relationships. Without examining these separations, our spiritual life
stagnates and our awareness cannot continue to grow. This proved to be the case for a determined young man who went off to spend a number of years in Japanese Zen monasteries and a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka. He had come from a broken home, his father having died when he was young, and had an alcoholic stepfather and a sister who had become addicted to drugs. Through a very strong will and powerful motivation, he learned to quiet his mind and to concentrate deeply. In Japan he answered many koans and had strong realisations of the emptiness and interconnectedness of all things. In the Sri Lankan monastery he did a practice where he learned to dissolve his body into light. When his sister died, he was called back to this country to face what was left of his family. He helped everyone through the difficult period, but not long afterward be became ill and frightened. Trying to understand his condition, he went to speak to a counsellor The counsellor asked him to tell his whole life story. As the young man did this, the counsellor would periodically stop him and ask how he felt. Each time he would answer by precisely and meditatively describing his body sensations. "My breath stops a little then and my hands get cold, or "There's a tightness in my stomach." At the next session, when asked how he felt, he described "a pulsing in my throat" and "flushing with heat throughout my body." Finally, after several sessions like this when asked yet again, "But how did that feel," the young man burst into tear and an enormous amount of unacknowledged grief and emotion begin to pour out of him. He had been aware of his body, he had been aware of his mind, but he had used them in his meditation practice to build a wall, to exclude from his awareness the painful emotions he had experienced for much of his life. From this point on, he realised the need to change his way of spiritual practice to include his feelings. As a result many of the traumas of the past were healed, and his life took on a joy) he had never known before |
| A collective example of
compartmentalisation in spiritual life was, described to me by a Catholic
nun who had spent twenty-four years in a cloistered order. For the first
fourteen years she and her sisters kept to the strict practice of silence,
and in a superficial way the community ran rather well. Then, with the
opening of monastic orders in the years following Vatican II, the nuns of
her order took off their habits and began speaking to one another. She
said the first years of speaking were a disaster for the entire community.
Dissatisfactions, petty hatreds, grudges, and all the unfinished business
that had built up for decades were now aired by people who had little
skill in bringing awareness to their speech. It was a long, painful period
as they learned to include speech in their practice, a process that almost
destroyed the community. Many of the nuns left in the middle of this
process, feeling that they had wasted a part of their lives by not dealing
with their true relationships to one another. Fortunately, those who
stayed were able to re-create the community with a new spirit of
commitment to truth and sisterly love. They brought in some wise mentors
to help them and learned how to bring their conflicts and speech into a
life of prayer. Wholeness and grace returned to their
community. The compartments we create to shield us from what we fear exact their toll later in life. Periods of holiness and spiritual fervour can later alternate with opposite extremes--bingeing on food, sex, and other things--becoming a kind of spiritual bulimia. Even a society as a whole can act out in this way, having "spiritual" areas where people are mindful, conscious, and awake, and other places where the opposite is demonstrated through abusive drinking, promiscuity, and other unconscious conduct. Compartmentalisation creates an opposite shadow, an area that is dark or hidden from us because we focus so strongly somewhere else. The shadow of religious piety can hold passion and worldly longing. The shadow for a strong atheist may include a secret longing for God. We each have a shadow that in part is comprised of those forces and feelings that we outwardly ignore and reject. The more strongly we believe something and reject its opposite, the more energy goes into the shadow. As is commonly said, "The bigger the front, the bigger the back." A shadow grows when we try to use spirituality to protect us from the difficulties and conflicts of life. Spiritual practice will not save us from suffering and confusion, it only allows us to understand that avoidance of pain does not help. Only by honouring our true situation can our practice show us a way through it. This was demonstrated in a painful segment of the life of a wonderful Tibetan teacher named Lama Yeshe, who was highly regarded as a meditation master and a compassionate and enlightened teacher. One day he had a heart attack and was hospitalised. Some time later he wrote a private letter to a lama he considered his brother. It said: Cont'd Next Page . |
| A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield |