The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (34 page)

Here was her plan: We will go on as usual. We will keep things as normal as possible. We will never say the word Alzheimer’s. “Your father is who he always was,” she said to me, “only slightly diminished. We’ve got him on the best medications.” Mom held on as best she could, holding tight to old patterns. She sat—resolute—in the passenger seat of the car with him as he drove forgetfully, straight through stop signs and red lights.

I do not blame Mom one whit for the strategy she employed to deal with the meltdown of her life. I understand her instinct to treat it this way. Indeed, it was heroic. As things deteriorated, Mom was monumentally self-sacrificing in her caretaking for Dad—as are so many of the wives who sit by their bed-bound husbands, feeding them meals in small spoonfuls. Like these other wives, she put the ridiculous party hat on his head at his eighty-second birthday party, when he did not know who or where he was. The family smiled, aghast.

In Mom’s strategy the illness was seen as an alien intruder—the enemy. This was completely understandable. (In the face of their mutual catastrophe, I felt, really, that Mom was entitled to any strategy that she could hold on to.)

I said nothing. But in the back of my head I knew that there was another possible approach to this disaster. A radical one, yes. An approach that involved walking a razor’s edge, yes. But one that might transmute some of their suffering into
possibility
. Here’s the other approach: Instead of declaring war on Alzheimer’s, embrace it. Take the whole bloody mess as your dharma. Take it as your new calling. Name it. Claim it. Live the experience of Alzheimer’s consciously, fully. Talk about it. Investigate it. Look high and low for the meaning in it. Experience it. Open to the possibility—yes, even to the slim possibility—that this ordeal could be some kind of crazy initiation into wisdom.

The
Tao te Ching
says, “
If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.”

Embrace death with your whole heart?
I remember the first time I read that line from Lao-tzu’s masterpiece. I thought: This is crazy talk. But I knew from the bottom of my heart that it was right.

I actually knew of an Alzheimer’s patient who tried this approach. He took Alzheimer’s as his dharma. He walked the razor’s edge. OK, he was a very adept Buddhist meditator, and so maybe his whole life had been a preparation for this final effort. He belonged to a meditation community out West. He became famous for embracing his ordeal as dharma. His whole community participated in it with him, taking it on step by brutal step. His courage transformed a lot of people. It was a high-wire act of skillfulness and courage.

3

Krishna has something to say about all of this. He has a teaching that sheds some light on what we might call the built-in flaw in Mom’s declare-war-on-it strategy. But it’s a very tricky teaching, and it’s not for everyone. It is, indeed, one of the most complex parts of the Gita.

Here’s the deal: Mom declared war on her situation, right? Now, if Krishna were sitting with Mom, he would explore this with her very
carefully. What, precisely, was she declaring war on? They would talk about it. He would gently prod her to examine what she was feeling—to examine
precisely
what she was feeling.

Mom would resist, of course—being Mom (or really just being a human being). But eventually—like Arjuna—she would relent, and begin to ponder Krishna’s questions. (I can see her in my mind’s eye—tilting her head slightly. Gazing into the middle distance. Taking the question seriously. What
was
she feeling?) Well, it wasn’t just
one
thing that she was feeling. It was a whole mix of thoughts, of feelings, and of sensations. Aversion. Hatred. Resistance. Denial. Horror. Repulsion. Anger. Rage. Betrayal. Loss.

Krishna would ask her to explore these very carefully. And then he’d tell her something interesting about the whole lot of them. First, though, he’d have to get a running start by giving Mom his lesson about grasping. And then he’d reveal to Mom that yogi scientists discovered that grasping has a flip side. It is called aversion. Aversion is also known by its many other names, almost all of which Krishna uses at one point or another in his discourse with Arjuna. They are: hatred, disdain, anger, fear, revulsion, judgment. This was all very familiar emotional territory for Mom. She knew its peaks and valleys.

Krishna would continue. He would teach Mom that grasping and aversion are twins: They are mirror images of each other. They both involve a rejection of
how it is in this moment
. The grasping mind says, “I long for that experience over there. That experience looks very pleasant. Let’s go there.” The aversive mind, on the other hand, says, “I hate the way it is right now. This is very, very unpleasant. Get me out of here!” The aversive mind pushes away the unpleasant.

Do you see? Mom was stuck in aversion. “This Alzheimer’s will not stand. It will be war. I hate this. I reject this. I will fight this to the bloody end.”

What’s the problem? Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that yogis, looking closely at these difficult aversive states, found that aversion has exactly the same deleterious effects on the mind as grasping does. Remember our friends disturbance, obscuration, and separation? Yep. The aversive mind is visited by each of them.

It’s not hard to see how this happens. First, aversion
disturbs
the
mind. Anyone can see this. Then, aversion
obscures
our capacity to see clearly. This, too, is obvious. When we’re hating something, we do not tend to see it clearly. We see the object of our hatred as all bad—not a mixture of bad and good and neutral as it really is. And finally, and probably most painfully, aversive states
separate
us from ourselves and from others. “I hate this moment. Get me out of this moment. I do not want it to be like this.” Aversion is a seat in hell. It separates us from
now
. When the mind is colored by aversion, we can never be at ease—can never have a moment’s peace.

Aversion is a notoriously slippery creature. It can begin very, very small, with the simple internal act of moving away from the unpleasant. “I don’t like the way I’m feeling just now. I think I’ll turn on the TV. Maybe that will help distract me.” Avoiding the unpleasant: What could be more human? But this simple impulse to move away from the unpleasant can snowball. Krishna details the inevitable movement of aversive states: The impulse to eschew the unpleasant leads to avoidance; avoidance leads to aversion; aversion leads to fear; fear leads to hatred; hatred leads to aggression. Unwittingly, the oh-so-natural instinct to avoid the unpleasant becomes the root of hatred. It leads to war: war within, war without. Entertaining aversion is a slippery slope.

4

So, Mom was caught in the vise of aversion. You might reasonably observe:
Well, of course she was
. Wasn’t that perfectly natural? We do not want these experiences of suffering.

Absolutely right. But Krishna will point out a subtle distinction here. Mom’s problem was not her aversion to Alzheimer’s. That was perfectly natural. It was her
aversion to her own aversion
that was the problem. She
hated
the aversion. She hated the feeling of aversion itself. She hated the fact that she felt it. She was not comfortable with her anger, with her rage, with her disdain. Her proper WASP tool kit did not include the instruction manual for this level of aversion. She was ripped apart by it.

The great Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this experience of aversion to the aversion “the pain of pain.” Pain is inevitable,
of course. And aversion is a natural response to it. But aversion to the aversion? This is not inevitable, as it turns out. This part is optional. And the kicker: The aversion to the aversion is where the
real
suffering lies. As my friend the American Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein says so often: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

If Mom (in our imagined dialogue between Krishna and her) had finally opened her mind to this teaching, Krishna would have been able to help her quite a bit. He could had helped her with the pain of pain.

Remember Krishna’s brilliant approach to working with desire? Go
into
the desire. Feel it. Explore it. Discover what exactly is in that stew of craving, of wanting. Maybe even find magnificent things in it, like aspiration.

OK:
It’s exactly the same teaching with aversion
. Go
into
it. Go into your anger, your fear. Feel it in the body. Get to know it. Find the energy at its heart. Find the secret gift at its center. Don’t be afraid. Let it wash over you.
Know
it.

All of the Eastern contemplative traditions stumbled onto this brilliant principle: When difficulties arise, give yourself to them.

When difficulties arise, see them as dharma
. This does not come naturally to us. Our instinct is to avoid discomfort at every turn. And we live in a culture that helps us to distract ourselves from discomfort’s every manifestation. No! counsels Krishna. Do not try to distract yourself! Try it just the other way ’round. Rather, go into the heart of the difficulty. Experience it. Investigate it. Take yourself into the center of the conflict. Learn to tolerate its discomfort without acting or reacting.

And what do you find at the heart of fear, dread, loathing, anger, hatred? You find a surprise. You find a gift.

A gift at the center of hatred? A gift at the center of aversion? Could it possibly be? I am skeptical. Show me just one person who really lives this way—diving into the burning heart of aversion. This would be one person in a million.

Well, our next exemplar is one of those people. Her name is Marion Woodman. She is one of the world’s greatest Jungian analysts and teachers. She was squarely in the middle of a brilliant career when she was struck down with a virulent form of cancer. She was told she would
die—indeed, that she would die a very painful death.
Wham!
So much for your brilliant career, Marion. So much for your dharma. And what was Marion’s dharma to be now?

Marion did the unusual. She decided to take cancer as her new dharma. She walked the razor’s edge: She did not declare war on it. She invited it in to see what she could make of it, and to see what it would make of her. She opened to the possibility that this experience could transform her in salutary ways. Marion lived with her husband of many years—Ross Woodman, a distinguished scholar and author. And Ross—heroically—took it on as well. They walked the razor’s edge together. And they discovered, eventually, The Gift at the center of cancer.