Monday, October 30, 2023

 Monday, October 30, 2023            

  Darby said something surprising: “When you ask someone to change, you’re asking them to lie.” Wow! I have a very different point of view. I believe it is the job of those in my life to hone my personality. Each person ignites a different aspect. Each person offers me an opportunity to change and grow. We have to take care and select people in our range, people who like us, and we like enough of us to make the relationship tolerable. If that isn’t there, it is a case of irreconcilable differences.

    When Mike died, I stopped taking the minimal dose of Lexapro I had been taking ‘for my husband’s anxiety.” When he was around, I had my anxiety under control. Nothing helped his. He took a massive dosage of some medicine, more than the prescribed maximum. I was concerned about its effect. He said he would rather be dead than live with that free-floating anxiety. The medication may, in fact, be what killed him.

      A friend turned me on to the YouTube videos of Tara Brach. She talked about two arrows. This is a teaching of Buddha’s that I never came upon before. The first arrow is the one to cause the injury. We are injured. The second arrow is the injury we inflict upon ourselves with our discontent with our condition.

   Buddha said the cause of this suffering was craving or aversion. I saw the second arrow as comparable to  what people call “taking an injury personally.”  I hate that expression. How can I not take an injury personally? It happened to me. If someone hit me with a car, those injuries happened to me; they’re personal. The second arrow is another matter. It’s not personal; it’s an overwhelming aversion to the original injury. That can manifest in several ways. We can feel we’re doomed; nothing goes well for us. We can feel we deserve the injury, the slight; it’s confirmation something is wrong with us. That reaction is natural to us as humans.

  We’re programmed to care deeply about our reception by others. In the time of hunter-gatherers, our lives depended upon our acceptance by the members of our group. Being spurned could mean death. We might be expelled from the group. We couldn’t survive on our own.

    Brach also talked about radical acceptance. The friend who told me about these podcasts brought them up when I mentioned self-forgiveness. I thought she meant this as an alternative to self-forgiveness, but Brach pushes self-forgiveness as the pathway to radical self-acceptance. Radical acceptance of self is only one aspect of it. The other two are radical acceptance of others and life’s circumstances. It’s not just for ourselves.

   The type of self-forgiveness we need is social. I have committed no great sins, at least not in my eyes. (I lived with my husband before we were married. That was a sin once. No more.) I find small social gaffs haunt me. Nowadays, when there are no fixed rules of conduct, and we all come with different social expectations, it is so easy to stick your foot in it.

  Communities of old ran on scripts, literally. That’s what canned conversations were called, and most were canned. Every conversation in today’s world is improvised; everyone has their own worldview. Everyone has always had their own worldview, but in the old days, behavior, dress, speech, and all manner of conduct were dictated by social rules. Everyone knew the script; everyone followed it or deviated at their peril. Nowadays, there is no universal script that everyone agrees upon. So many are not good at improvisation; it means dealing with the unexpected.