The Hot Iron Ball

It has taken me a lifetime to understand this, but better late than never. I’m talking about the incontrovertible truth that there is not a single two-legged being on the planet who is not suffering in one form or another. If one is so fortunate as to avoid the big catastrophes— war, family abuse, political oppression, natural disasters, trauma, depression, addiction, etc. etc.— we are all without exception awash in loss. Friends, parents, loved ones, colleagues no longer available to talk to directly or touch or hold. Likewise, the loss of the selves we and our loved ones used to be— perfect children grown to sullen teenagers, our adult youthful energy fading, alongside muscle tone, hearing, sight, libido and such. We all of us have known disappointment, sometimes magnified to betrayal. You get the idea. And so did Buddha, whose First Noble Truth is “Life is suffering.”

 

As a young practicing Buddhist, I didn’t love that notion. “Come on, Buddha! Life is fun and laughter and beauty and Pepsi moments under the sun with perfect teeth when we smile. Don’t be such a downer!” It took me a long time to understand what Buddha meant and discover he knew what he was talking about. But the missing part that has finally become clear is that the road to the fun and laughter and beauty (forget the Pepsi moments) is through that dark forest path of personal loss and disappointment and betrayal , through our current collective cultural unravelling and treachery and confusion. 

 

As Michael Meade, that eloquent spokesperson for the Soul, reminds us: we all have a unique inner story struggling to blossom within each and every one of us. That “deep Self” is where the gold lies, but it demands a high price of the controlling ego before it reveals itself. It requires courageous vulnerability, willingness to look at difficulty straight on and put it all in a different context. It often requires, as Meade notes, “some kind of dramatic event, a loss, an accident, something that stops us in our tracks, before we are willing to look in exactly that place that we need to look, that otherwise we avoid. According to the old stories, it's necessary to go through some layers of confusion, trauma and pain.” (Robert Frost confirmed this in his line “the only way out is through.”)

 

In an essay titled “To Not Abandon Oneself: Living Myth Podcast, Episode 482,”  Meade says: “Whether through avoidance or over compliance or stubborn defiance, we repeatedly sabotage the true project of our deeper self and soul.” The idea that in times of crisis, we either grow larger souls or retreat to smaller selves, is everywhere around us in the news. We are witnessing literally millions of people awakening to the unacceptable political realities that also call in question the deep issues of character, kindness, caring, justice that have helped people awaken to what matters in ways that might not have happened in calmer times. Equally, we can see others doubling down and going deeper into their habits of heads-in-the-sand or hatred on full display. The real characters in this drama are not Democrats and Republicans, but larger selves and smaller selves. 

 

Avoidance, over-compliance and stubborn defiance are the forces at play when people refuse their soul’s invitation. Avoidance includes binge entertainment/ drink/ drugs, the futile effort to escape by rampant distraction, sensation, mindless trivia. Over-compliance means avoiding the hard work of consciously shaping one’s character and owning one’s own genius, giving your power over to those who do not wish you well in some fantasy of “Daddy knows best,” be it a priest, politician, or Fox News pundit. Stubborn defiance means outwardly projecting your own refusal to do the work of claiming your inner beauty and storming the Capitol or typecasting whole groups of fellow human beings as “other.”

 

But how does one grow a larger soul? Simply speaking—and it is never simple— we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we react to it, how we frame it, how we understand its purpose. As poet David Whyte notes in an essay on “disappointment:”

 

“The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of the world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation.”

 

So the question for all of life’s challenges is: Do we run toward it or away from it? Do we sit patiently with it and see what it has to say or bury it in distraction? Do we actively express the full dimension of the feelings in art or writing or talking to trees? It serves us to recognize that we’re all the walking wounded, but we all don’t walk those wounds the same way. How we respond, how we accept, how we express, how we enlarge the context, is the real question at hand.

 

My own personal story. When I experienced a grand disappointment that grew to the magnitude of betrayal in my beloved school where I taught for 45 years, I remember a moment when I felt wholly trapped and at a loss as to why this would happen and how I should react to it. Including in a lifetime of never once having suicidal thoughts, actually thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge. It felt like the Zen koan—“You have a hot iron ball lodged in your throat that you can neither swallow nor spit out. What do you do?”

 

Damned if I knew! I certainly could not swallow it and pretend it didn’t matter or I didn’t care. I chose not to spit it out and leave the school in a huff. I simply had to sit with it and see what it was trying to tell me. And the answer that finally came was far greater than the words that describe it. In short, my life’s work grew inside that mostly marvelous school, but the work itself was not dependent on the school. It was much larger and wholly independent of this place or that. As all my subsequent work in an extraordinary variety of settings with a grand variety of people in a remarkable variety of places has testified as truth. The story trying to speak through me was not to be pushed away by a few small-minded administrators and a mostly silently compliant community not wholly willing to step up on my behalf. The way to endure that hot iron ball of betrayal was to become so large that that it felt  like just a little tickle in the throat.

 

It took a poet (again, David Whyte) to speak the words that confirmed my insight in his poem Santiago:

 

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside

hiding, then revealing the way you should take,

the road dropping away from you as if leaving you

to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up, 

when you thought you would fall. 

 

Such an eloquent description of my experience! Class after class, the beckoning road suggesting the right path to take, then disappearing again, then holding me up. Until those moments of betrayal (never from kids, only adults) when I felt the road had wholly dropped away. But then:

 

The way forward always in the end

the way that you followed, the way that carried you

into your future, that brought you to this place,

 

By refusing to leave the path, it proved a true one that indeed carried me to exactly where I needed to be— and continues to do so. But it’s important to acknowledge the heartbreak as the dues paid to making a serious commitment to the Soul’s demands. 

 

No matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,

No matter that it had to break your heart along the way;

The sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back

to the only road in the end you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love…

 

The poem goes on with yet more deep insights, but for now, it is enough to describe the process of following your Soul’s calling, with the risk and vulnerability and heartbreak and feeling lost (and then found—and then lost again) that it requires. None of it is easy and of course, that’s why so few seem to undertake it. And yet it is what is wholly necessary to arrive at our own promise and to help heal our collective suffering. 

 

I’ve long ago forgiven (but never forgotten) those who betrayed me, but ultimately strangely thanked them for re-doubling my commitment to walking the path that fits my feet perfectly. And on I walk…