You’re So Different Now
“You know, Kristin,” Myrna said in her slow Cajun drawl, “I didn’t like you when I first met you.”
Ouch...
My co-dependent inner child did not like hearing that. AT. ALL. I’m a lovable person! I’m funny as shit! I am nice to people! I do things for them. I go out of my way to do things for them. I always have. How could sweet, soft-mannered, gentle-souled, motherly Myrna dump THAT truth on me?!
“When I first met you, you were so angry. About everything, at everyone. For no reason, for all reasons.”
Damn, she’s not gonna stop, is she...
I spent a few seconds examining where I was when we had met almost 10 years ago. I was married and things weren’t going well. I was in a job where I couldn’t get ahead. My best friend, Myrna’s cousin, had just been abandoned by her lying, cheating husband and I was at her side to help pick up the fractured pieces. OK OK, I was also a born and bred New Yorker AND Scottish. I MIGHT have had some anger issues. But I was working on them!
Therapy helped me see and talk about the mask I had worn every day since I was 3. It was the mask of kindness, humor, and sunshine to hide the bitter pain of a lifetime of neglect that had forced me to learn to parent myself when my own didn't show up to do it. I thought I was a master of faking it, playing the game. Apparently the lie only worked on surface people, who don’t dig below the pudding skin to see who a person really is. Myrna is not a pudding skin person. She lives life completely, fully. Obviously, she saw the truth. Therapy was beginning to uncover and address all the sordid pain and anger, but it didn’t provide anything to fill the space where the toxic tissue had been.
I didn’t have an ‘aha’ moment the first time I walked into Kunzang Palyul Choling, a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Maryland. I didn’t have it three months later either, when the sangha rallied around me in prayer and compassion upon learning that my father was dying, teaching me how to help him die and me to grieve. The ‘aha’ (along with a little ‘whoa’ and a drop of ‘holy shit’) came one late night, sitting in the temple prayer room.
The prayer room is open 24/7, for a 33-year-old prayer vigil. You are surrounded by gigantic quartz crystals that amplify prayer, brass statues and fabric wall hangings of enlightened beings that show the potential of what every sentient being is capable of, all bathed in the warm, soft glow of so many offering candles. In the late hours when the world is sleeping, there is a stillness that seems to amplify the sensory experience of that prayer room.
There I was, deep in my practice, mind filled with the visualization of Guru Rinpoche and the buddhafield. For the first time, I felt such a profound sense of connection to everyone, everything, to the buddhas, to the insects in the ground, even space dust, to the realms I can’t see yet. That toxic void no longer existed, replaced by an ocean of nectar.
Hooked!
“You are so different now,” she went on. “You are so much calmer, so much more peaceful. There’s a light from inside you that wasn’t there before. And I am so thankful to Jetsunma for finding you.” This, from the devout Catholic, showing gratitude to my Buddhist lama for turning me into less of an asshole.
I’m pretty grateful too.
*Originally published on Meditation Matters! by The Unusual Buddha February 19, 2019.
