Perfection purchase

This time of year there is a great deal of preasure get things just so. For countless families in America and around the world, the race is on for the perfect Christmas.

I remember when my family moved from the rural valley to a middle/upper middle class (for Montana) neighborhood closer to town. We had moved up to paved roads, where nobody had three or four or eleven broken down cars in the yard, and everyone watered and mowed their lawns. Personally, I didn’t notice much difference (I was 11 at the time). Now I was playing in a grassy park or someone’s drive-way basketball court instead of our wood pile or the dirt behind a neighbor’s house. Big woop.

But for my mom, there must have been some sort of new pressure to measure up. This made itself abundantly clear each Christmas. Instead of the hokey, fun with random neighbors dressing up like Santa, we were to have a proper Christmas, complete with just the right lights, a properly positioned tree, proper holiday cheer, and all the trimmings. And every year we disappointed her, she would get overwhelmed, we (kids) would fight or get bored, tempers would flare, and for a bit at least, no one would have fun.

Bah humbug.

Luckily, after four or five years at the new place she mellowed out. Her husband (pictured a couple posts back with me at age 5) was still a hill-billy, even on paved roads, and her kids were still pretty wild in their own ways. But so long as she clung to a vision of Christmas perfection in her mind, the rest of us suffered.

Tonight, Julie and I hosted the Missoula Vipassana community at our new place. We’ve hosted the UM Campus Sangha for a while now, and I’m very glad to have the opportunity to host another Sangha. Tonight we listened to a portion of Tara Brach’s “Radical Self-Acceptance.” In it she said, “Shame or self-aversion is the most pervasive type of Contemporary suffering” and went on to describe the sources, symptoms, and strategies for dealing with our shame or self-aversion.

The beginning is, as my teacher and friend Bodhipaksa says in his teaching on metta-bhavana, is to start where you are. To look within. Not judging. Just seeing. Accepting this as your starting point. The practice is in making all of what comes up, all of our junk and shit and messiness, part of our practice. Not turning away from any of it.

So as I meditated I just let whatever needed to come up to come up. There was my frustrated mother at Christmas, my worries over thesis and jobs, and my big one, my almost-marriage. I think getting married was for me what moving out of “the boonies” and into suburbia was to my mom. It was perhaps my way into the club of respectable grown-ups which, at the time, I wanted so much.

And Tara discusses our shame or self-aversion (I like that she uses the terms together and as synonyms) as based in our sense of not-belonging or isolation. Society tells us we need to do this or that, look this or that way, buy this and that, and so on, in order to fit in – in order to not be isolated and separate. We are raised with a constant sense of not-okay–ness, from our parents’ urges this way or that, to religions for most of us in the West, and then on into society.

But in meditation we help reverse this process. By allowing the feelings of lack, of want, of insufficiency to arise, be noticed, and fall away, we see that these too are impermanent. These too are not-self, they are not us. Only when we cling to them do we become limited by ideas or demands. Watching this in action in meditation is an amazing experience. It’s a bit crazy, because who knows what’s gonna come up next. But it’s amazingly liberating, because you gain the confidence that whatever does come up, it’s just going to dissolve away like the last thing.

The Buddha, worrying about what Christmas presents to get for his dad and step-mom, scary stuff.

But the Buddha at this time was pretty good at the whole “letting things dissolve” practice. So he got through it, and so can we.

I like this image of the Buddha, here with Mara (death) attacking him just prior to his awakening. I also like the emaciated Buddha, and the fat Buddha (actually Pu-Tai, or Ho-Tei, a Chinese monk) because they shatter our narrow images of what the Buddha should look like. Life isn’t pretty. Even for the Buddha. I like studying lives of Christian Saints for the same reason. We often get the dumbed-down Sunday-school version of these people, but in reality they were crazy, angry, lustful, stupid folks – just like you and me.

The same goes for Buddhist Saints, of course. And likewise for contemporary teachers. These are people who have endured great craziness and great suffering, one way or another, and who have gained amazing wisdom simply from learning to learn from that suffering. Meanwhile, the rest of us ordinary, foolish, lowly persons, simply run away from life: in a thousand different ways.

So I propose that we of a Buddhist or contemplative ilk come to truly celebrate Christmas. Not as devotion to Christ. Not as devotion to Consumerism (“Consumistmas”?). But as devotion to awareness and acceptance of our own sense of lack. Let’s not turn away from it (within ourselves or our neighbors) in disgust. Let us face it – but not give in to it!

(disclaimer: I did buy a $13 set of wireless headphones and a $6 CD to learn French today. I, too, am far from perfect. Big Smile.)