Saturday, August 7, 2010

Soap, sweat and tears ...


Housework
Originally uploaded by giuseppedr

"The ego likes to think it can achieve a state called 'enlightenment', and then its work will be finished. But 'awakened' just means you'd better roll up your sleeves and pay attention, because life continues to happen."
~ Jason Shulman

My teacher goes on to speak in this passage about being in love with enlightenment, singing while he did the dishes at a monastery. This stage feels much like the "pink cloud" or "honeymoon" period that not only occurs with spirituality but in the beginning of intimate relationships or new jobs or even addiction recovery. When we're in this dreamy state, we think we've "arrived" and then the bottom drops out from underneath and if we're not paying attention, we fall hard. When we are more awake, we recognize that this is the call of reality.

What goes up, must come down. Newton's law of gravity has relevance here.

A good friend and I had a conversation about relationships over dinner last evening. She's recently had a bumpy free fall from the pink cloud she's been riding on in the form of a new girlfriend. Now that she's felt the turbulence, she's questioning why relationships have to be so hard. If it were up to her, she would always experience a state of bliss and feel loved constantly. Anything short of this is a disappointment and a rejection.

I understand this territory all too well. It's how I lived in relationship to others for a very long time. As a dear one has stated: "We have to experience the fall from grace" -- otherwise, we idealize and keep our partner on a pedastool. These false and unrealistic expectations of others is a complete set-up for failure -- for them and for us.

Being awakened -- be it in life or in a relationship -- is hard work. It does, as Jason points out, require rolling up our sleeves and paying attention. His "enlightenment" gained through dish washing does not just involve singing, but soap, sweat and tears. This is the stuff good relationships are made of. And patience. And trust. And timing. There is understanding the nature of pride and ego and transference and projection. There is action and non-action. It is about responding from one's interior and not moving too quickly based on the other's exterior. It's give and take and asking the other to give a little or being okay to take some. One of my favorite lines of a Maroon 5 song is: "It's not only rainbows and butterflies but compromise that moves us along."

And life continues to happen. We can work hard and make plans and believe we're making headway toward the most ideal outcome and life still unfolds as it will. And this may not be anywhere close to the destination we stuck the push pin at on the roadmap of our life. This makes the ego stand up and get its feathers ruffled. What d'ya mean we're not going north ? Who put this detour here ???? Time to get back into the car or on our bike or with another set of hiking boots and follow the path that's now here.

And here's the cool part: we still can sing in the middle of trepidation because we're awake to it. After my head-over-heels phases of my current relationship, there have been periods of minimal contact or sets of challenging conversations or tough processing through the individual aspects that clash between us. Some of the best love-making I have ever experienced has been right after a down and dirty, raw honest discussion. The egos have been wrestled to the ground and the nakedness of that moment is shimmery, sweaty enlightenment.

No comments:

Post a Comment