Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Junkyard to Garden

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-4354462

2164-0041

Phoenix Soleil,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

in 2006, I was working as an IT consultant in New York City. One spring day, I was stressed out, as usual, running up the subway steps and rushing to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. When I arrived, my client greeted me warmly and asked me if we could meet in her garden.The lush, sunshine-filled garden was an unexpected enclave of peace and beauty among the tall brick buildings. I could still hear street traffic, but the cars felt far away. My body relaxed as we sat at a table in the center of the garden. Bright orange climbers ascended the side of the oasis. Deep purple-veined petals spotted the far wall with a few bright green bushes grouped to the right.I told her that she was so lucky to have this sanctuary.“Yes, but it wasn’t like this when I arrived,” the young woman replied. “It was a dump. It smelled; it was horrible. You have no idea!”She proudly went on to describe how she had inherited a lot filled with fragments of furniture, bicycle parts, trash, and glass. Nearly every weekend for a year, her friends helped her remove the junk. Then they brought in soil, worked the ground, tilled the land, fertilized it, and finally planted seeds.Although I never saw the Chelsea gardener again, I have recalled her plot many times. The evidence of transformation touched me, how she changed something terrible into something beautiful.Her lush garden caused me to ponder: What do I want to create from the landfill my family and society piled into my ground? I remembered growing up in a home where my mom hurled insults at me every day, where shame, fear, and loneliness jabbed at me constantly. I did not want to be present. To escape, I lost myself in television, daydreams, and books. As I got older, I took long walks along the quietest most tree-lined streets in East Flatbush, Brooklyn—roaming down Clarendon, Courtelyou Road, or Avenue D to the local library, the West Indian ice cream shop, or Mostly Books shop. Even though my mind was sometimes flooded with cascades of internalized “I hate you’s” and other negative self-judgments, I also found peace gazing at sun-filled branches with the feel of my foot against the sidewalk or the occasional leaf in my hand amid the silence of a quiet beautiful street. I had begun to build my internal garden through solitude, relating to the “now;” a foreshadowing of what I woud later develop more in my meditation practices.Meditation has become one of my tools for clearing and cultivating my internal “garden” and, thus, my piece of mind. It is so hard to explain why I love meditation because sometimes it feels like torture. When a knotted memory brought to the surface painful emotions, thoughts and sensations, I became certain that I would die if they didn’t go away. But instead of running, I’d practice sitting or walking meditation, learning how to detangle myself. Joseph Goldstein, one of my teachers, has a saying: “The thought of your mother is not your mother. The thought of your mother is just a thought.”At times, I felt so captive to my inner critic, my mom’s doppelganger, that it pervaded my being. I craved an exorcism. I was caved in around the painful moments from my memory as if I had a magnifying glass that only saw the pain between my mom and me. Meditation helped me develop equanimity with my story and its constituent thoughts. My teacher Andrea Fella explained to me during a three month retreat that difficult emotions and sensations often have many layers like an onion; as we explore the rings with sensitivity, we can come to understand how our reactivity manifests as fear, aversion, and hate; and then let go. I wanted to overcome the pain as expeditiously as I could but she warned that forcing myself to the center of the pain is violence to myself. Instead, she suggested that we open ourselves with kindness to each layer that we are experiencing in the moment. Armed with this and other guidance, I was able to navigate the whirlwinds of intensity, in which I could lose myself and through my ignorance, worsen. I was learning how to care for and compost my inheritance.During one three-month meditation retreat, I came to feel in my bones, rather than just intellectually, how my family’s cruelty toward me was impersonal. It had developed as a defense that was passed down through generations, fashioned in brutal slave plantations that later found its home in the East Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment of my childhood. My mom’s abuse and her gifts were a legacy from the suffering and strength of both French and West African ancestors, as were the genes that determined her skin color.From the vantage point of equanimity I can see how the causes and conditions of the past shape the present. Looking back to the Chelsea dumping ground, I can imagine the human hands involved with every discarded item that had been there. Who were the beings with their unique joys and sorrows who had touched and abandoned the dirty, torn up objects there? How are the histories of that soiled mattress, torn up table, and rusty bicycle entwined with forces of industry, economy, colonization, politics, wars, labor, and technology? They were affected by the deeds of people, some of whom never saw that dumping ground or the garden it became. Within the garden of my life, I cannot know all the wars, loves, sacrifices, mercies, gifts, humiliations, duties, hates, or hopes nor the West Africans, Taino Indians and Europeans people who impacted my hereditary line. Yet their existence and stories add up to me through some strange equation known only to the universe.In Buddhist communities it often felt that my stories of struggle, identity, intergenerational trauma were considered irrelevant. The concept of non-self is one of the fundamental truths in Buddhism and it helped me heal because it gave me tools to help me disidentify myself from my “junk.” One way to understand it is that we’re not permanent, fixed entities but are more like rivers with many different flowing parts that include all of the senses, including thoughts and emotions but none of which makes up a fixed and solid self. However, it can be used as a rationale for devaluing history, background and dismissing concepts of cultural identity, yet there other ways of understanding non-self. Rather than describing not-self as what you aren’t, Thich Nhat Hanh explains you are everything—the rain, the sunshine, the earth, your ancestors, place etc. the combination of these components changing constantly. In his essay, “Working for Peace,” Thich Nhat Hanh said of himself that had he grown up with a different set of conditions he would have been a pirate, rapist etc. In this way, he is seeing himself as a result of all of his past.I am the sunshine, the rain, the earth and the fire, I am my retreats, I am my 5th grade mentor, the elementary school bullies, my queerness, my Haitian background, the daily sneer of my mother, the kindness of my aunt, the consistent meals, the life changing college experience, and I am the years of being with my pain, and learning new ways to hold it. One can use the understanding of not-self to hold all experience with equanimity and appreciation of the paradoxes rather than getting rid of or dismissing aspects of it. If you don’t know about my junkyard then you won’t appreciate the depth of the flowers that now grow there. When you look at a person, you are not just seeing a person but a process.When my teacher Andrea Fella advised me not to go to the heart of the pain, she was offering me an important perspective shift that went along with the healthier alternative. The healing often requires a patient, spacious, attentive, compassionate presence that is so at odds with the fast-paced world where we default to destruction or throwing things out. Our world is full of landfills literally and figuratively. Humans are poisoning and destroying this planet. We lock people up and throw away the key. We use war and violence to kill our enemies. Even in spiritual communities, we try to get rid of what is uncomfortable. If POC (people of color) members are “creating pain” by their expressions of differences or needs, like for example asking for POC only spaces to practice, then the solution is often to get rid of people, or use a more nuanced strategy of “let’s get rid of the differences” as if it can be carved out of a being or repressed out of existence. Getting rid of what is painful seems an obvious solution but it is shortsighted. We lose out on the gifts of the experience, the flowers that inhabit all people and the lessons and intimacy that can come from healing from conflict. It’s easy to say this but, when you are the one in pain, it’s difficult to embody these values. It’s even harder when the harm was intentional and violent. What happened to a dharma friend of mine illustrates this point graphically.It’s before the start of a retreat and I’m sitting in a dining hall at a meditation center. I’m surprised to see my dharma friend wander in with a broken arm and a limp. She explains that she had been robbed and wounded by a teen. Knowing I teach at a juvenile hall, she looks at me with a pained expression and says, “I guess there are a lot of people with a lot pain in the world.” And then plaintively, “It’s hard to imagine what would lead someone to act this way.”Faces and stories of the teens who sat across from me arose in my mind. Could it have been one of them? Some of them stole to feed families or to pay for medical care for loved ones; some were homeless or in foster care. These are the easiest to feel compassion for. Then there are the ones who laughed about some crime they committed and said they didn’t care.After working so hard to heal myself, it was natural that when I found some peace, I wanted to share it with others. My intention is to support them building their garden. When their brown, black, and blue eyes are bright, teary, or fearful, it’s easier to imagine the rich soil of a garden lays underneath. When their face forms a glare, stone faced, or vacant look it obscures my vision. I find myself being judgmental. It seems their decision-making is so dysfunctional. Then I can look inside myself. I myself was never able to articulate to my teachers the mess of confusion and shame inside. I was so lost. Take a simple homework assignment from school for example. I could have completed the work had I begun; but I myself didn’t understand why sometimes I couldn’t just make myself do it. But now that I have an understanding of trauma and human psychology, I understand that with the abuse I had experienced, there were days where even focusing on the words required a herculean effort. The amygdala part of the brain that takes over when we sense that we are endangered, was activated and it was difficult to think because all this pain was streaming through my mind. In my environment, I was walking on eggshells, never knowing when the next attack would come. Without TV and daydreaming, there was a void and suffering that was so scary to face.I remember how life was so empty; where every day was so full of meaningless abuse that I didn’t care, and when I did care I tried to find a way to stop caring because it hurt so much. I understand the mind-numbing emotional pain and the void that drives you to do crazy things just to relieve the emptiness inside. I was unknowingly picking the suffering that creates more suffering. And, even though I am frustrated with how difficult it is to engage with some of these young people, I remember when a conversation was the most dangerous thing there was for me because that was how people in my childhood found ways to hurt me even more. I’d say to myself, “Don’t trust anyone,” and it seemed like life punished me every time I broke that rule. When you’re young, adults tell you to focus on your future, work hard so that you can make something of yourself. However, there was so little pleasure in my life that the idea of happy adulthood seemed unrealistic. When I talk with some of the young people I work with, the only time they say they feel happy is when they’re on drugs. How realistic is it to tell them to get rid of the only source of pleasure or soothing?In the room where I teach mindfulness at the juvenile hall, there is a wall papered with inspirational pictures of people who have overcome great adversity and gone on to make important contributions to society. I remember how adults would share those stories. I received the lesson that somehow I shouldn’t be affected by my environment. I should be able to overcome it like Mandela, like Lincoln, or like Martin Luther King. I decided I had only myself to blame, which sunk me into more shame. Somehow, most days I tore myself away from TV and daydreaming (little moments of peace in a war-zone) and got it together do the homework assignment.Many people, with the intention of relieving my suffering, told me things like, “Ignore what your mom said,” “She didn’t mean it, or, “You’re a wonderful person.” They thought that if I could I just believe them, my suffering would transform into something more self-loving. But that kind of thinking comes from the intellect, to which we sometimes give way too much credit. It wasn’t one exchange that had led me to carry an inner landscape full of negative influences but rather an extensive progression of repetition. The gradual, decades-long process of soaking in my mom’s words, the hatred of bullies at school, society’s racism, sexism, and homophobia led to unconscious osmosis and the build up of defenses.From a neuroscience perspective, my capacity for inner peace and my ability to see my mom and those memories in context was because I had healed enough to be able to access more of my prefrontal cortex: the part of brain associated with reason, logic, empathy goals and inhibiting impulses. When one is deeply traumatized, access to will power and the bigger picture may be impossible. It is possible to get unstuck from the amygdala cycle of fight-flight-freeze but it requires skill, wisdom and time.The causes and conditions that made healing possible included long stretches of time to myself. Proportionally so few people on this earth have this opportunity. Retreats were ideal because I had minimal responsibilities to others and could give my full attention to tending my inner garden. Through my many healing modalities I was able to connect to a lineage of people who had explored their inner terrain and could offer wisdom and tools that work, rather than judgmental, punitive, and desolate environment such as my homelife or a prison. Despite the difficulties of my upbringing, I had received enough nurturing from my family and community that I was developmentally able to take in support later.I feel uncomfortable urging these young people, or anyone affected by a lot of trauma to somehow “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” I am so aware that my will was holding onto a thin edge of a cliff -with an abyss below me. Most of the teens in juvenile hall have lives that are so much harder than mine, and I barely survived what I went through. It feels good that instead of rebuking the young people with “rise above the rhetoric,” I’m actually giving them the skills to help them access their prefrontal lobe and strengths. These are practices that may soothe their pain inside so that it becomes possible for them to focus for a while to finish their homework or write a resume. However, they need many more tools and resources to outweigh the challenges and negative influences on their lives.I wish I could go back in time to tell my child and teen self that my life was meaningful even in those moments of intense suffering—that those experiences would help me develop embodied compassion, depth and faith. Those insights came about because all people have an aspect of themselves that is bigger than their memories, sensations, or thoughts that rise and fall. Through accessing that aspect, I had a bird’s eye view that exposed the causes and conditions like currents in the ocean of history—currents that carried the impersonal hate to our living room, currents that long ago transported ships holding enslaved Africans. “It’s not personal,” is a popular adage that I found useless when I was snarled up in my past. However, the deep comfort of that saying arose organically as compassion and wisdom composted my pain. And now, my personal unique experience of my composted pain is what I offer the world. My memories are still there, it’s my relationship to them that turns them from trash to flowers.Every day my goal is to take my flowers out into the world of brown, black, and blue eyes that sometimes are shining at me, and sometimes glaring at me. Words like this about cycles of violence, paradox and transformation, rose in my heart to share with my dharma friend, but I didn’t speak them. When I felt into her brown eyes I saw that she needed to be with her broken arm, limp and heart. We can’t be with someone else’s pain until we have healed our own pain. How do we connect to someone’s humanity when we are receiving the full force of their hatred and urge to harm? That glare has shown itself in childhood bullies, juvenile youth, activists talking about the enemy, politicians, everyday road rage and the pictures of the Charlotteville supremacists. And I saw that expression on my mom’s face almost every day of my childhood. Trying to reconcile that experience with a bigger knowing has been the struggle of my lifetime. I have felt that rageful force in myself when I’ve tried to gather all my energy against someone I experienced as trying destroying me. I think the work of healing is to heal enough that we can do the spiritual work of embodying our values into our daily lives. Saying that I want to live from love sounds trite, yet the daily experience is courageous. When I see that day to day struggle as a mythic hero’s journey, rather than a distraction from a spirituality defined only as blissful moments of universal connection my path is easier.So this kid that grew up wanting to become hard, tough and not caring is now struggling to value her softness everyday and to find the places where love can be received and support the cultivation of other gardens.A few weeks ago, at a juvenile hall, where I teach mindfulness to youth, we were sitting in a circle, taking turns offering our “personal weather report”—using the weather as a metaphor for how we feel inside. There were five of us in a classroom, with the only window looking out into a bigger room with a guard always looking in. We sat in a circle made of desks welded to chairs. What came to me as a metaphor was the picture of a cyclone and its super fast forceful winds tearing up everything in sight. Growing up, I felt brutally and carelessly torn apart by powerful forces, and inconsequential as a paper bag. There are times when I continue to experience life that way, but what drew me to the metaphor was the description of the eye of the storm. At the center, it’s very quiet and still. I recognize stillness inside of me experiencing, witnessing, centered and free. It was always there, even when I was walking on Clarendon, Courtelyou Road, or Avenue D.