Prefer Now
This year my father and I accomplished a major life goal, journeying through North India to help our ancestors find peace. In a way, we had been preparing for our entire lives: healing, building trust and confidence. We enjoyed each other’s company traveling to holy places from Badrinath to Gaya. We also navigated the dangerous landscape of intergenerational trauma. It’s as if our ancestors’ unresolved pain was dramatized in our bodies, fears, and words. Both of us threw tantrums, unable to control the violent emotions coursing through us. What kept us alive was a discipline to stay present through pleasure and pain. Buddhists call not preferring pleasure “non-preference.” Below I discuss non-preference, and how it helped us face great challenge.
Persistent unease
At some point in our life, many of us stop, for the most part, throwing tantrums. We understand that changing what’s happening now is not always possible. We moderate extreme reactions to protect those around us. At this point, we develop both indifference and repression. Indifference allows us to be okay with strong feelings. Repression involves controlling our desires. From repression we develop a persistent unease — anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger. Relating to unease might be considered a principal aim of the spiritual path. The school of life teaches many methods of coping: biological, chemical, relational, or psychological. Sometimes we contrast “effective” methods, like training for a better future, with “ineffective” methods like substance abuse. But most methods are alike in that they avoid the present.
Extra suffering
And yet by resisting what’s going on right now, we create “extra” suffering*. If it is an unpleasant moment, we long for it to end, and time moves slowly through our disappointment. We fight it, creating suffering for self and family. We might create intrusive, unpleasant memories that relive it, or tell victimization stories that lock us in sadness. During pleasant times, we fear the moment will end. We replay the past repeatedly until it is cemented in our memory. Pleasant memories make us happy, but they also create a shadow of dissatisfaction, an obstruction to ongoing presence. Pain and pleasure are normal and healthy, but resisting change can cause us trouble.
Are we really suffering?
Many of us believe we are happy. But Buddha predicts cracks in our cocoon of happiness. He is like a salesman uncovering insecurity. While this sounds cruel, he is hoping to save us from the extra suffering we create by avoiding unease now. Buddha is the best kind of salesman: he encourages you to take nothing on faith.
I’ve spent years investigating whether I believe him or not. Increasing sensitivity through meditation, I’ve found anxiety, fear, and anger hiding in the present. I’ve surfaced many subtle coping mechanisms, but found that none provides lasting relief. One of the most seductive is the idea that I will find the perfect person, guru or lover, with whom I can finally rest. I’m ready to release these fantasies I’ve been carrying for decades. While nourishing relationships are possible, there is no person that can take away my suffering. As Buddhists often say, ending suffering is work that only you can do — work you can only do now. So how do we stay in the uneasy present?
Not resisting now
In one particularly dramatic moment** of our journey, I sat in our hotel room in the holy city of Benares staring out the window. I was brushing my hair and my father was behind me. That day we would go to Bodh Gaya, site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and the next morning to Gaya, for our ancestor ritual. A small misunderstanding about our relative ignited the anxiety in the air. My father began pouring out his disappointment about my life and my choices, in an angry, seemingly endless tirade. Perhaps he was discharging his duty as an Indian parent, as his father had before him. The energy was incredibly intense. My entire life seemed like preparation for this moment.
I did my best to avoid coping, calling on reserves of stillness and self-acceptance. I could feel defensiveness tingling in my forearms, but I knew that if I paid attention, this sensation would change. Doing a sensation meditation, I stayed present, avoiding dissociating into fantasy, or cultivating defensive thoughts. I understood my father was expressing ancestral trauma as energy, the echoes of our forefathers’ trauma. If I resisted, this energy would find a home in my body. Instead, I visualized there was absolutely nothing in the space of my body. Nothing to be disappointed about. No person to defend. I continued meditating and brushing my hair. I imagined my father was a channel for energy coming from our ancestors, passing through me, out the window and into the ground, totally dissipated. Getting no response from me, he eventually left the room.
There’s a narrow path between trauma and presence, but I believe I walked it. I felt freer of anger or hurt than I have ever felt after such an experience. Since I had taken care not to process or create defenses against my dad’s words, there wasn’t much of a story in my head. I was left only with the visualization of our ancestral energy dissipating through us into the ground. I avoided sharing this story for a few days, given the temptation to be a victim. Neither was I victim, nor a survivor, nor a victor. I was simply a conduit for energy. I wondered, “Who’s energy was this?” I know little of my ancestors’ trauma — my father’s pain, a few of his mother’s stories, and a dream I once had. Was this energy bound up in some forgotten trauma, decades or generations ago in my family? Maybe something bad happened, resistance prevented proper healing, and extra suffering cascaded down the generations to us.
I felt the great healing potential in being present for something unpleasant, by dropping all resistances — personality, story, memory, and identity. By getting completely out of the way altogether, we helped heal a cycle of suffering.
Choose now
Maybe we can flip non-preference on it’s head. What if we choose to prefer now? Sitting in the hotel room, I imagined that I was actually creating this moment, that “I” was an amalgam of my ancestors, my father, my body, the energy, and the environment. This gave a sense of power and ownership that helped me stay alive, aware, and safe. What if our preference for now is so strong we believe this moment is divine? Nisargadatta suggests,
At every moment whatever comes to you unasked, comes from God and will surely help you, if you make the fullest use of it. (95)
My father was exactly what I needed in that moment. His challenge was exactly equal to my emotional and spiritual fitness. Together we enacted a drama that helped our ancestors and bodies release the trapped energy of generations of pain.
Change happens
Though my father was the tip of the lightning rod, he let the electricity pass through him and quickly returned to ground. He invited me back into human connection. Over a few hours in the car, I released any residual feelings of anger or fear, and joined him again in trust, love, and presence.
My father and I saw the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. I meditated there that evening. The next day we went to Gaya and performed our duties to our ancestors. Hopefully they can rest easier, and we can too. We felt a sense of accomplishment and hope. Together, we moved through some of the most stuck energy of our family past. We allowed it to live and we allowed it to die.
It’s difficult to drop all our preferences for pleasure or our resistances to now. And yet we can practice this skill perfectly now, for a moment. We can choose now. Through practice, we see that clinging to pleasure wasn’t so useful after all. Unconstrained in the present, we discover paths never before imagined.
*Mingyur Rinpoche discussed “extra suffering” in a Spirit Rock lecture I attended in 2010. In 2011 he left his Bodh Gaya monastery for extended retreat.
**Story written with generous permission of my courageous father. Thanks dad!
Quotes for reflection:
“Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem.” (3)
“The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding. In reality, there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession, leaving traces in the brain and creating the illusion of continuity. A reflection of the watcher in the mind creates the sense of ‘I’ and the person acquires an apparently independent existence. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying himself with the ‘I’ and ‘mine’.” (71)
“Were your mind clear and your heart clean, you would learn from every passer-by.” (58)
— all quotes above from Nisargadatta’s ‘I Am That.’ (Dialogue # in parentheses)
