I read the loveliest little book a few months ago.  Everyone has those instances when they feel stuck somehow in life and then something or someone comes along, seemingly by coincidence, that provides just the right nudge to get you moving again.  This book was an excellent nudge out of a stuck spot I was in.  I was confused about a lot of things and lacking in confidence in myself, and now I’m not.

The book, The Joy of Full Consciousness, is a biography of the late Vietnamese Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh, written by a pair of French journalists, Jean-Pierre and Rachel Cartier, who had access to Plum Village, where his monasteries were located in France.  Rather than being a dry and confusing presentation of Buddhist teachings and philosophies, the knowledge is imparted by the telling of stories about life in the Village, as well as stories told by “Thay”, as he was referred to in life by his disciples (a Vietnamese word meaning “teacher”).  The book is peppered with instances of someone asking a question and a story being relayed in response.

As the title implies, the stories tell how to live a joyous life of full consciousness, which basically means always being in and aware of the present moment, not stuck in the past or worrying about the future.  I have been attempting to apply these principles in my life for some time, but in the absence of feedback, I wasn’t sure if I was on the right path to successfully do so.  Reading this book assured me that I am.

A variety of practices are presented in the book, which are all very important to the goal of living in full consciousness.  One of the ones that struck a chord with me was for couples, a weekly ritual involving a flower called “beginning anew”.  It’s something they do at Plum Village on the New and Full Moons in which everyone sits together and first says nice, appreciative things about one another, all while listening silently.  Thay called it “watering the flowers”.  Then regrets are expressed with kindness, again accepted in silence.  For couples, a third step is included: a kind airing of grievances.  The flower is held by the person speaking in all three steps while the other person simply listens.  Then they’re given the flower and a chance to explain themselves after any grievances, which often results in a surprising resolution of the situation.  Performing this ritual in the absence of judgment and guilt is key to preventing the resentments that threaten relationships from arising, as is allowing anger to subside before communicating.

The whole thing made me think about my own marriage a lot.  I’m lucky enough to have been with the same person for over 27 years, married for over 20.  We don’t have any friends who have stayed with their partner for so long.  I’m constantly reminding myself that virtually any other person on Earth would have abandoned me long ago because of my mental health issues, but for some reason my husband has been able to look past all of that and stay focused on the person he fell in love with, even if he can’t see her in the moment.  He knows I’m still in here somewhere at those times and he patiently waits for me to re-emerge.  I should be more grateful for this characteristic of his, because it means he remembers something about me that I still do not.

With all that in mind, I find myself frequently ashamed and embarrassed at some of the thoughts and feelings I have regarding my marriage.  I know what their source is: childhood programming courtesy of the kinds of marriage dynamics I witnessed growing up, which were anything but healthy.  I often find myself thinking or feeling something or even saying something that immediately or later makes me ask myself, “what the hell was that about and where did it come from?”  The answer is almost always my parents, and if not them, then cultural and social programming.  Trauma makes people hyper-focus on the negative as an instinctual matter of survival and ignore the positive, so I often find myself being unnecessarily critical because all my brain sees is what’s wrong and bad instead of what’s good and right because that’s how I was programmed.

As has often been the case over the last several months, I’m finding that the only antidote to this situation is to suspend judgment.  Judgment of myself, judgment of my husband, and judgment of my marriage.  Our culture and society is filled with judgment, though, so this is extraordinarily difficult.  Since birth, we are coated in layers of judgment from nearly every aspect of our lives, and becoming aware of these layers is kind of horrifying, especially when you also become aware of the effects of all of that judgment, not only upon yourself, but upon everyone around you.  Peeling all this away and replacing it with understanding and compassion is this only way I have been able to soften myself and slowly change the tint on the mental glasses I wear that have painted my world black for so long.

Suspending judgment and applying understanding and compassion to people and situations, particularly myself, is slowly allowing myself to actually acknowledge the love that is expressed to me, if not feel it.  Prior to this, good feelings from others just bounced right off me, like my heart was made of stone.  They just didn’t compute because I was always judging myself negatively, and I would even think a person somewhat deranged for seeing anything good in me.  More recently I have been able to accept on an intellectual level that people love and care about me, but I still can’t feel it.  This creates a conflict within me that I am currently struggling mightily with.

However, my heart of stone has recently shifted to one of ice, which might not sound any better, but it is in my mind.  Stone must be patiently chipped away at for a very long time.  All ice needs is warmth to disappear.  I just have to be willing to sit close to the fire of people’s love.  That means making sure I’m around people I trust not to hurt me, and that may take a little more time.  Trust is the first thing to be broken with traumatized people, and I imagine the last to be repaired.  I will simply have to slowly and gently expose myself to positive interactions with others until the ice thaws and the trust returns.

Living consciously seems to be the way to go about this.  Being conscious of the present moment means I’m not somewhere else in my head lost in some kind of emotional morass, which happens frequently.  It’s like I’m walking a very narrow path that drops off sharply to either side, and if I’m not paying attention to where my feet are at that moment, I’m at risk of falling over the edge and having to climb back up to where I was, which can take a while depending on how far I fell.  The path is my intellectual ability to calmly apply logic to emotional situations and break them down so they make sense in such a way that I can incorporate the emotional information.

This process is melting the iceball of my heart it seems.  My intellectual breakdown process of emotions often involves crying.  I often recall the Jewish proverb “tears are for the soul what soap is for the body” and envision the hot tears carving channels in the ice.  Not too much at once, that ice is there for a reason.  I’m seeing it kind of like those frogs who have the ability to freeze solid in the wintertime, and when springtime comes, they slowly thaw out and as they warm up, their little heart starts to beat again, making their blood flow.  It’s a slow process to give their hibernating bodies time to adjust.

My biggest problem with this process is frequently having no words to describe how I’m feeling because I’m dealing with parts of my psyche that were very young when they were created.  I find this incredibly frustrating since I’m a writer and insist upon clear communication in my life.  Sometimes I’ll be dealing with a part of myself that can only say “good” or “bad” in reply to being queried how they feel.  Sometimes the answer is “I don’t know”: also very frustrating.  I’m also discovering I often don’t know how I feel in the moment.  Some time has to pass, hours or even days sometimes, and then I’ll figure it out.  Again, frustrating.  I feel I now understand how very small children who are learning how to speak feel when they’re trying to communicate and can’t.  They can tell it’s something they should be able to do because their parents can, but they’re not quite there yet and it makes them mad.

Living as presently and consciously as I can also seems to help here, although it required learning how to do something that is uncomfortable for most people, to say the least: just sitting with one’s feelings.  Our culture does not honor feelings and teaches us to suppress, repress, oppress, and push them away since they are, for some bizarre reason, considered bad and undesirable.  Ironically, this actually makes emotions a much bigger problem for people individually and collectively than they would be if we could all just sit with our feelings for five minutes and acknowledge them and where they came from.  Easier said than done, I know from hard experience.

So that’s where I am now: trying to stay on my narrow path, stopping here and there to apply calm logic in an effort to avoid falling off, and even sitting down occasionally to figure out an emotional conundrum.  It’s like untangling delicate necklace chains that have become knotted.  If you don’t want to break the chains, you must use patience, and perhaps toothpicks and some olive oil.

There’s a lot more I could say about how living consciously has positively affected my life, but perhaps the most important effect is one of appreciation and gratitude for the positive things in my life rather than spending so much of my time focused on the negative.  Suspension of judgment and education about the nature of trauma and the brain’s natural survival mechanisms allows me to recognize why that is my tendency and apply some logic where it’s needed.  Acknowledging the positive and resting within that space should slowly dislodge the mental pathways that look at the world with black lenses.  Like the ice around my heart, those lenses are there for totally valid reasons, and it will take time before taking them off doesn’t result in light-blindness and fear like it so often does now.