We Can Wake Up
On puppies, punches, and the pain of learning the hard way
Dear Ones,
Last weekend, I made the agonizing decision to return my 14-week old labradoodle puppy Charlie Angel to her breeder. He was thrilled to buy her back from me.
She’ll be reunited with her mom and dad, he assured me. And we will love her well.
While most of me knew this decision was right, another part of me resisted it because this was not the dream I had dreamed! I love dogs and I love being with my friends’ and family’s dogs and I prepared so carefully in every way for this big change, and it was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be good for Freddi, who begged for a dog for five years, and it was supposed to be good for us as a little family, who would now have this third member to love and care for together, and maybe if I just tried hard enough, stuck with it for longer, the dream would begin to take shape.
There’s nothing like immediate in-the-body experience to wake a girl up from a lovely dream.
Experience like Charlie’s sharp, hours-long howl when I would leave the room to teach or work with a client. Experience like puppy-bitten punctured skin, bleeding hands, ripped clothing, and shredded pillows. Experience like potty training in -13 degrees. Experience like the tedious watching and re-watching of cheerful, “results focused” training videos about crates and separation anxiety and puppy nervous systems. Experience like my own daily crying, tight shoulders, and irritability.
Have you ever been punched in the face? a wrestling dad friend and former competitive boxer asked me recently. We were sitting on the edge of the wrestling mats, watching our kids practice single leg take-downs.
Actually? I asked. Or metaphorically?
Actually, he laughed.
Can’t say that I have, I said. Do you recommend it?
100%, he said. There’s nothing like a fist to the head to instantly change your understanding of the world and your place in it.
I believe you, I said, but I think I prefer the slower path.
Suit yourself, he grinned. But if you want to wake up, my way is faster.
I always say I want to wake up. I always say I want to practice presence. I teach it. I talk about it. I read about it. I wax poetic about it. I practice it in my meditation. And, like most humans, I wind up more often in the drowsy blur of delusion. I find myself hitting the snooze button again and longing to go back to the realm of the dream.
Evasion of the unadorned immediacy of life is as deep-seated as it is relentless., writes Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Beliefs.
Even with all of the high-sensation challenge of owning a puppy, it was difficult for me to confess the truth of what I was realizing: that this was not, in the end, what I wanted. Not the right time. Not the right puppy. Not the right circumstances. And it was hard because, first of all, Charlie was incredibly adorable and wonderfully feisty and worthy of love and second of all, because my kid had wanted her so badly and I didn’t want to disappoint him, and third of all, because I had also wanted her so badly and dreamed of her so thoroughly and invested so much of myself in making her a part of our family that to let it all go would be… well, that would be death… and how could I face that?! Evasion through story-telling is much easier!
Something must be so wrong with me, I cried to my therapist. I always make bad decisions!
Is that it? She asked in a way that told me she didn’t believe that was it. Or is it that you are overriding and ignoring your body? Like most of us have been taught to do.
Truth usually stops me cold, and this statement left me speechless. What does it take for me - or for any of us - to accept the truth of our own experience without layering onto it the burden of judgment, comparison and criticism? How can we begin to use the body’s immediate, unadorned responses to help us live in and from truth rather than from the story we wish were true or have been taught by others is true?
*
I never liked fighting with Freddi’s dad, but I grew used to living with conflict - all those incompatibilities between us - because I wanted to believe it was and could be different than it was. Big dream-like stories were at work within me, guiding my choices. I believed that the suffering I experienced was just how romantic relationships had to be. That the pain was necessary in order for me to also have the good stuff we shared, the storybook stuff of our love, and the epic nature of our highs and lows. That in order to fulfill the dream of a life I had conjured as a kid, I would have to deny large parts of my own experience - ignoring and overriding my body - and that meant suffering. So be it, a part of me decided. I was an athlete. I was tough. (That was another favorite story I told myself.)
But the story began to unravel. I gave birth to Freddi and my body became much more communicative, my nervous system more responsive, and my energy more limited. As I was able to tolerate less denial in myself, I felt things more instantly and more intensely. This led to bigger fights, and the more outspoken and troubled I became, the more violent my ex grew. Sometimes he would slam a fist into a wall or a door. Other times he would throw things. During one fight, he threw his cell phone across the room, not far from where I stood holding Freddi.
It smashed a hole in the wall, I told my friend after it happened. Can you believe that?
She herself had been in a violent relationship, so I knew she could believe it, but when she didn’t say anything, I grew uncomfortable.
But it’s okay, I added. He patched the hole a few days later.
When she still said nothing, I asked, What are you thinking? and she said, I’m wondering what you’re waiting for, and I asked, What do you mean? and she said, what I mean is do you need him to punch you in the face?
What?! I asked.
Do you need him to punch you in the face? she repeated. How bad does it need to get before you to see what’s happening here?
Stunned, my mind could hardly take in her question. It was so absurd - the possibility of me being punched I the face - so far-fetched. I mean, I was a masters degree holding prep school teacher and a feminist. A published writer with a loving family and tons of friends and lots of confidence. I would never ever wind up in a relationship with someone who would punch me in the face! Not me… not the me I thought myself to be… not ever!
I laughed nervously. I made up excuses for him and for myself. I felt both offended and troubled. I quickly got off the phone and cried.
Don’t forget how you told me you always stay in things a year too long, my mom recently reminded me as I wrung my hands about Charlie. It’s hard to deny the truth when people quote my own realizations back to myself. And yet, evasion and denial are human specialities.
I wonder what it takes to wake up to the truth? What causes and conditions, what inner preparation and outer support must be in existence for us to admit with humility these places of suffering or struggle or vulnerability? To be willing to let the dream die so that actual life can be lived and known?
For some of us, I’d wager it takes at least a year too long. For others of us, a punch to the face. And maybe even several.
*
I’m no scholar of the Zen Buddhist tradition, but I do know that there are plenty of stories featuring punches, slaps, and physical shock as the precursor to enlightenment. The force of the blow stops thinking and clears the static of the mind. The immediate impact arrests the chatter that keeps us distant from reality. It shatters misconception, punctures ignorance, and delivers us into the actual, intimate experience of what is.
I remember going to my first Zen Buddhist meditation hall and seeing a meditator get hit across the shoulders with a keisaku stick, sometimes called the stick of encouragement. The meditator bowed deeply to the one who held the stick, and the session carried on. I was later told that many give their consent for this exchange.
It helps them remain awake, my companion told me. It’s a reminder to wake up when they’ve gone to sleep or gotten lost in their minds.
I said something about there maybe being a nicer way, or an easier way.
Well, the stick isn’t for everyone, he had acknowledged. Then again, waking up without encouragement is really hard.
It’s easy to think of waking up to life as a good thing and a lovely idea and it is, but the experience of it can be a painful thing - a bracing, unwanted feeling kind of a thing - and it can take many times of waking up to slowly build our capacity to be fully here, in this moment. And it’s hard to choose to wake up in part because what we are waking up to is often surprising, it’s not what we think it’s going to be. Sometimes it’s far better and then we might we clutch it with death grip. Sometimes it’s much worse and so we might instantly fight it with anger. A lot of the time, we’re just cruising along in delusion.
Dan Harris on his podcast 10% Happier quoted one of his teachers as saying that the experience of greed feels like a hole in the heart, the experience of anger feels like a hot fire, and the experience of delusion feels like truth.
Yikes! I thought when I heard that. If delusion feels like truth, then how can we know we’re in it?!
We are so lulled by our beliefs - the inner conditioning about what we should do or should want or should feel - that we don’t experience them as beliefs, just truth. We are so entranced by the rocking rhythm of our lives as it moves in the well-worn rut of habit that we don’t experience it as a rut, just the way it is. And that’s true even if or when that rut includes suffering since certain kinds of suffering are often familiar and habitual.
But then, bam! A cell phone whizzes by your face and bam! A puppy howls in the background for 90 minutes straight and bam! You jolt awake at night, covered in sweat and you cry to your sister, exhausted, and she says to you, Sara, I’ve never seen you this miserable and dysregulated for this long, and bam! you hate to think of yourself that way - so off, so indecisive and stressed - but, thanks to years of practice and therapy and love, you also allow the comment to sink in like a Zen riddle and you begin to wonder, What dream am I lost within that has me avoiding reality and choosing this suffering? What kind of conflict with reality am I in?
Charlie’s face after she would howl next to the bathtub and try desperately to get into the shower with me. Looks cute now, but….
Realization is hard to talk about because it is something that can only be known through experience. In fact, some would describe realization as the state of being fully intimate with experience and that means realization is here, close at hand, because we are always in experience, at every moment!
As the Zen Buddhist teacher and poet Dogen explains, We are all replete with enlightenment, continually and at every moment.
But you may not realize it, he adds. You may be in the habit of arousing discriminatory views and regarding them as real.
Am I living in the immediacy of life? Or am I living in and buffeted by my story about life?
There’s the finger that points at the moon… and then there’s the moon itself. There’s the story about a fated and epic love… and then there’s the experience of the fractured, divisive relationship itself. There’s the dream of a self who is a happy dog owner… and then there’s the crying, anxious dog owner herself.
Dogen encouraged practicing meditation (zazen) in a way that embodied and celebrated the immediacy of actual experience.
Engage yourself in zazen, he encourages, as though saving your head from fire.
Feeling fully the pain of my experience with Charlie - as well as the suffering that my resistance to the truth of the pain was causing me - allowed me to wake up. Waking up was not pleasant – as a punch to the face is not pleasant – but, as my wrestling-dad friend seemed to indicate, it wasn’t unpleasant either.
What is more unpleasant is being divided from the truth. That’s what actually hurts worse. Remaining outside and in denial of the experience of our bodies creates long term patterns of stress, pain, anxiety and anger. And this is so commonplace, so encouraged by our wider culture, that we just get used to it. Lulled by familiarity, this separation feels like truth.
Being in actual truth, however - which is to say, experience - is and feels settling, even if and when that means we must get closer to the pain that is here. Even if and often when that means fully allowing our grief to surface. After all, choosing truth often means we are allowing something that wasn’t truth to die. We are allowing the death of a dream. The dream of the life we thought we were living. The dream of a relationship we thought was unfolding in a certain way. The dream of a self that no longer is.
The week Freddi’s dad and I separated, grieving the dream of a life I had longed for.
I cried for 24 hours before I returned Charlie to the breeder, but on the drive home I experienced a settled lightness I hadn’t felt in months.
I’m glad to have you back, Freddi said a few days later as we snuggled in his bed, no whining, biting, restless puppy in sight. I felt a little sad at first, but I like this more.
I hugged him tight and felt the warmth of his body near mine. Hanging above the bed was a picture of Charlie Angel as a newborn puppy, and she was as adorable as ever. But it was only that - a picture of our dream - and we understood that now. And in acknowledging and understanding, we could let it go.
Two days later, the breeder told me that Charlie was thriving. Living now with both of her parents and two other puppies, she, too, had settled.
Some tensions in life don’t resolve as easily and with as much grace as this situation has, and yet many do. All the ancient wisdom traditions remind us that clinging to that which is not true life is what causes us suffering. But it’s hard to remember that!
I never did get a punch to the face from my ex, but his fist came within inches. Even with such bracing experience, I often forgot what I knew. After we separated and I was around him less, I found myself getting caught back up in the fantasy of what I thought our life had been or could still be. The things I believed about myself and about him - those things that I wished were true- were often stronger than the actual experience I had known. Paging through old photos, reading past letters, and revisiting history, I felt deeply the anguish of a dream unrealized. I wrestled intensively with regret, got swept away in memories and ached for the good times we had had. Was I wrong to leave? Could I really trust myself? Had I felt what I thought I had felt? Had I just chosen a selfish route?
Everyone collaborates in everyone else’s forgetting, writes Stephen Batchelor.
A lifetime of overriding and ignoring the body’s experience - along with the encouragement of a culture that teaches this - can make it hard to suddenly start trusting it.
As I struggled to wake up, bouts of longing, clinging, doubting, and grasping rocked me like a melancholy folk song into states of forgetfulness. But suddenly the encouragement stick would come! And I would remember! Life would throw a punch and I would startle awake again, reminded where I was and why I was there. The static would clear. The light would come. I would bow. Thank you, hard, undeniable truth. Thank you, kind friends for speaking truth and reminding me what I have forgotten. Thank you, body sensations, for being so strong that I had to pay attention and do something different.
Over time and through much effort, I began to forget less and remember more. I stopped allowing myself to get lost in the dream for too long. I practiced coming back, to being here in my body and cultivating relationship with safety and wakefulness. I began to trust myself more and more to be able to be present within the unpredictability of life. Over time, the pain lessened significantly.
It was shocking to be so broken down by a puppy, but the situation with Charlie activated those old memories, beliefs and patterns in me, and though it was not fun, I am grateful to have gone through it. Not only did it give me an opportunity to strengthen the muscle of saying the nos and yeses I needed to say, it let me experience the grace of an easeful ending. It let me feel the blessing of people coming alongside me, helping me and loving me through it. And, most importantly, it allowed me to see what has changed in myself and in my life.
I am not who I was ten years ago, though my mind might still get hooked on notions of Who I Am. Five weeks of suffering, dysregulation and indecision is nothing compared to the years of anguish I used to live with before taking the steps I knew I needed to take. In this situation, I tuned into my experience more thoroughly, directly and with compassion. I chose the joy of freedom more quickly.
The morning I returned Charlie, calling on all the courage within me.
Awakening is not a linear process, and it does not happen all at once. Rather, it happens in stages over time and in surprising ways. It might not feel great in the moment, but once we feel and taste the experience of presence, of intimacy with what is true, we begin to orient towards it. We would rather have that - and any challenge that goes along with truth - than what is false.
We are in a time of uncertainty, political corruption, cruelty, and, now, war. Greed, the desire for power, and the constant craving to be anywhere but here, in actual experience, is the engine that seems to run the world. The craving for that which is different than what is here holds most of us entranced and in states of suffering. It captivates us and shackles us without our realizing it. Our hair is on fire, and the good news is we can wake up.
And If it were not possible, the Buddha said, I would not ask you to do it.
What truths are stirring you awake? What deep, soul desires are you noticing? How is the experience of your body - maybe of discomfort - igniting curiosity, self-examination and exploration? What parts of yourself - beliefs, habits, ways of being - are holding you hostage to a version of life that no longer aligns with what is true now?
Wherever you are, I am here with you in it, in the ever unfolding process of waking up and learning to hold the intensity of feeling, to step into the challenge of facing the truth of this unpredictable life, to experience fully what is to be alive and letting that experience keep changing.
With love, with trust, with great effort, with only one or two snooze buttons every morning,
Sara
Waking up is not always hard or hard for very long! This awaits!
PRACTICE and CONNECTION
Remembering takes practice! Waking up is a process and we can learn to do it and begin to slowly feel into it.
One of the most profound ways to wake up is in guided, intentional rest meditation practice. Yoga Nidra.
The yoga of sleep allows our normative consciousness to quiet - mind and body stop striving in all the usual ways - so that deeper, more expansive awareness can awaken. Not only is the practice of Yoga Nidra supremely restful and healing for the body, it can lead us towards important insights, creative solutions, and sustainable pathways towards change.
I offer Yoga Nidra online near or on the new and full moons every month. You can practice with the group or purchase the recording for a donation of $5-$25. Come and see! Experience the joy yourself!
And, guess what? It’s happening TODAY! Wednesday, March 4th, near the full moon lunar eclipse, at 12:05 EST. Reach out for more details and to receive the link!
For other practices:
I offer online yoga, intentional movement, and meditation twice a week: Tuesdays and Saturdays. Recordings always available. Learn more here.
For fast, sustainable awakening, I offer one-on-one hypnosis, life coaching, and profound nervous system education and support. This Ministry of Presence draws on 25 years of my own study, practice, and training in yoga, meditation, breathwork, reiki, self-inquiry, hypnosis, and spiritual practice of all kinds. Reach out to schedule a discovery conversation to find out more!