In this installment I present two sections from the chapter tentatively titled Vulnerability.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is a subject that I feel is important for you and me to consider. Much of what I feel important in Buddhist practice is about realizing we are all vulnerable, we all have hurts and pains, we all have our own areas of brokenness. Learning to be vulnerable can be healing and empowering. It may sound counterintuitive to say being vulnerable can be powerful. Yet when we know our weaknesses we gain a power over them we do not have when we are blind to them.
If you know what causes you pain you can prepare for it. If for example I were interested in defending myself in a fight I might take up some sort of martial arts training or boxing or wrestling. But I wouldn’t know to do that if I didn’t confront the fact that I can not fight. It is the same with our emotions. If we don’t confront our pain places then we will not know how to prepare or defend against that pain.
Being incarcerated and perhaps isolated from a Buddhist teacher places upon you some serious challenges. One challenge is who can you go to safely and discuss areas of vulnerability? Who is safe to talk to about such things, or to listen to your pains? I don’t have an answer for your specific situation. I have a temple member who leads counseling sessions for inmates at a prison in North Carolina. I do not know that service is provided at all prisons. I would suggest that if the resource is there for you that you investigate it and speak with the person in charge. Perhaps you might bring this book along with you and you may find they will support you on doing this work.
I do know from conversations I have had with inmates that sharing this with another inmate can be risky. I’ll leave it to you to manage your own situation.
In the mean time here are some suggestions I can offer. When safe, you may consider writing about what causes you hurt. At first this will be challenging, you won’t want to do it. It may be too painful to bring back up. Perhaps you have a childhood trauma. Just the thought of it causes you to hurt and run or lash out. Perhaps it is a later in life trauma around trust and betrayal. It could be any number of things, or it could be many things all tied up and tangled up. As long as you avoid these areas in your life you will remain a victim to them and they will exert power over you in ways you may be unaware.
As painful as it is, as fearful as it may seem, the more you work in that messy space the more power you will gain over your emotions and feelings. There is a part of you that is trying to communicate with you. It may be your 5 year old self asking why something happened and why you didn’t protect it. Listen deeply. Say to yourself if you need to “I hear you, I am listening to you”. You can be kind to yourself by saying that you did not have the ability in those moments to protect or listen. That now you are trying to learn and you will try to protect and listen.
Let me give you an example from my life. I call a part of my self the 5-year old boy. That 5-year old boy needed to be listened to. That boy wanted to be told he was loved. That boy wanted to be protected from being verbally abused. That boy did not want to be ignored. When I began to face my pain with my therapist we listened to what that 5-year old boy had to say. Now this is not a split personality, the boy didn’t have a different voice or anything like a television movie. The boy did have feelings and needs, these represented suppressed feelings and unfulfilled needs that I have and had not been aware of. I told that boy, myself, that I am learning new skills, that I will try to listen more carefully and that I wanted to protect that boy and not let him get hurt again. I welcomed that boy into my life instead of pretending he wasn’t there and had no feelings.
In the process of doing this work, several weeks, I began to see how I would often act in ways that I didn’t understand but were in fact places where this 5-year old boy was trying to be heard. It began to make sense to me and I could begin to change the way I responded to certain situations. Is the work done, I believe it will never be done and that is a pretty darn exciting thing. Buddhism encourages my constant development. There is no terminus to improvement and change. It doesn’t end, it is limitless and that means I am limitless also.
That same infinite possibility exists for you, even incarcerated.
You do have unique challenges facing you. Here is something I have come to know about people in prison. They are extremely creative, clever, and have skills that many in society never develop. Of course there are some who use these skills for negative reasons, but guess what there are a whole lot of people in the outside world who use their talents for personal gain and to harm others.
I am unable take away your pain and suffering. I can try to encourage you to not be defeated. In a later part of this book I will write about ‘fearlessness’. I hope you will go through your life with the fearlessness of a Buddha.
Safety
In all things you need to stay safe. This is fundamental. I’m guessing you don’t need me to tell you this, not really.
What I can say is stay safe skillfully. By this I mean learn ways of safety that do not compound our problems of being unsafe. You may need to be strategic about what you share or how you act with others, but do not then become so safe as to be a threat yourself. Practice a cautious safety.
An example from my own life again. I offer these examples from my own life because I am not at liberty to share other peoples life experiences. Also speaking from my heart I feel is a place of integrity. What I share with you and have shared with others could easily be used by someone who wished to cause me harm or further pain. I have engaged in deep introspection and mindful self work. I am comfortable sharing what I do, and I am at peace with what I share. I have taken the power of hurt away from these events of my life. They no longer have any power over me and so they would be useless to anyone as a weapon.
My skillful defense, my skillful safety comes from my own inner strength and my own confronting these events.
I try to write from my own story and from my own life experiences. To do otherwise would seem to me to be more about being afraid of my self and hiding behind the stories of other people. So that would not be a very secure place to be if I were concerned with safety. Yes it might have the appearance of safety since I was not exposing myself. But the weakness is that I would forever remain fearful. That fearfulness would then be a barrier to heart-to-heart communication. So my defense, my safety, would then be a cause of my being unsafe, and ineffective.
Going back to my lack of skills in fighting. I could take up training in martial arts, lets say. I could become so dedicated to it that I developed a persona of a tough guy, though if you knew me you wouldn’t be fooled. But let’s say I could be a tough guy. Well, I could be so tough that then people would be fearful of me. So my safety would be a threat to them. Does this make sense. Let’s think about the Cold War and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The US got the atomic bomb. Well that made the US safe, but it also caused other countries to be afraid. Then in order for them to be safe they had to get the atomic bomb. Now the US didn’t feel so safe so they got more. Now the safety of the US caused others to be fearful, and they had to get more atomic bombs. The cycle went on and on until there were and still are more atomic bombs in existence that are necessary to blow up the whole earth. Now that is crazy. How does the ability to destroy the entire earth make any of us safe? So safety in this instance actually causes us to be unsafe.
I don’t know you, so I don’t know where you safety is threatened. Perhaps it isn’t physical, perhaps it is in your heart. Only you can know this. Sometimes when it is our heart that feels unsafe we don’t allow others to connect with us and frequently it happens that the fear in our heart actually drives people away, even when we don’t want to do so. This is another example of safety causing us to be harmful to others and in the end more harmful to ourselves.
Explore your fears and learn to listen deeply to your life, your heart, your self. Don’t be satisfied with a simple surface explanation. If you do then you may not actually accomplish your desired objective. Going deep into your life will provide you with important insights and perhaps reveal more solutions than you ever expected.
