When I first felt myself drawn to Siddha Yoga, my long-time spiritual practice, one of the things that most appealed about it was the recommended practice of noticing what was going on in my head as I moved through my day. Not like an aggressive gardener bent on rooting out weeds, but gently, curiously. Just observing. Seeing how I reacted, on the inside, to things that happened on the outside.
My children squabbling: how that generated heat in my body, which generated yelling, and sometimes grabbing. My husband phoning to say he’d be home a little late: how that made the remaining minutes of being a single parent seem to elongate, or multiply. Receiving a real letter from a literary journal (not the standard small slip of paper, rejecting my poem): how that swelled my heart, gave me a sense of being a “real” writer.
There was a causal relationship between what happened and how I felt about it.
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Until I encountered this idea of noticing my interior as its own world, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that there was a separation between that inside reality and the one out there — the things that happened, the situations presently surrounding me. To me it was all one big integrated blob, the inner and the outer woven together in a way that made them a whole thing. One reality. As far as I understood it, there was a causal, inevitable relationship between what happened and how I felt about it. What I told myself about it, how I responded to it.
As my mother often used to say of her own behavior and attitudes, “I couldn’t help it.” I hated that she would say that, especially when it had to do with things about herself that I saw as signs of bigotry. The “colored” laborer working in the lot by our house, who asked little-girl me for a drink of water, and my “white” mother gave me an emptied-out peanut butter jar of water to hand him, instead of a drinking glass. I asked her why, and she said she couldn’t help it. When I took the empty jar back inside to my mother, after the man had quenched his thirst, she threw it in the trash.
Later, older, I chided her for that. But in some sense, I would ultimately understand, she really couldn’t help it, given who she was and the era she’d grown up in. To her, a glass that had had Black lips put to it would ever after be not altogether cleanable. She told herself she “couldn’t help it,” and so — believing it — in some sense it was true.
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I might have prided myself on being free of my mother’s egregious version of bigotry. But the truth was, all my life, until I stumbled into Siddha Yoga, I believed as truly as she did that I couldn’t help feeling and believing what my interior insisted was true. You might say I couldn’t help being racially tolerant. Because of my conditioning, because of growing up in the mind-opening sixties, and going to a racially integrated school, I couldn’t help recognizing that people were people. My mother had her conditioning. If I had grown up in the 1930s, in a world where the races were sharply divided by a set of white people’s unquestioned assumptions, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hand that thirsty man a glass of water.
Of course, the real point of the business of observing the inner world is to see it as a conditioned place, the particular conditioning being not so relevant. I had conditioned myself to believe my little children should never squabble. Oh, I never had this thought consciously. (The most potent of conditioners are unconsciously held.) But the fact that I reacted to their uproars with such frustration, such heat, had behind it an unwillingness to accept what was surely inevitable with siblings. I didn’t want them to squabble. It was easier for me if they didn’t. I wanted them always to get along. It would make my day less hectic. Even just looking at that — at what I wanted, for them never to fight, never cry, never need my intervention — would bring into the moment a breath of calming air.
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Until this practice of just plainly looking at what went on in my interior, without any judgment of what I saw, it simply never occurred to me that the source of my frustration, of my pretty regular suffering as a stay-home mother, was not my children’s behavior: it was my mind.
The inner world and the outer were starting to look as though they were separate, as they carried on quite independently of one another — not, as I had believed my entire life prior, that they were a single world, over which I had very little control.
My spiritual practice shone blessed light on one of the things that would become my great teacher: that reality out there is one thing and what I make of it is an altogether different reality. My kids were not causing me to suffer: I was doing that to myself.
I wish the same dawning awareness for you, my friend.
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Here’s my sincere gratitude to those who responded to my acknowledgment, a couple of months back, that (like so many) I’m in challenging times financially. Your help has been a great blessing to me.