George Eliot defined 'friendship' as follows. "Friendship is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of Feeling Safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out Just as they are chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful friendly hand will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping, and with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away."
Friday, during my morning meditation, I meditated on the nature of true or real friendship (neither the "friending" on Facebook--where one notes that on Facebook one "friends" someone, one does not befriend someone on Facebook--; nor the "BFF" of text messaging), and fragments of the George Eliot's definition rose from the depth of memory. After locating the passage in one of my college notebooks, I spent much of Friday and Saturday thinking about my friendships, some long lost, others limping along. And, I realized that, on Eliot's criteria for friendship, I had not made a single (or at best one, now lost) new friend over the past twenty-five years. It has been over twenty-five years since I last experienced that "inexpressible comfort of Feeling Safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words." And, twenty-five years since I have even attempted to offer anyone that "inexpressible comfort of Feeling Safe" with me. It takes a great deal of faith and trust to let down one's guard to let someone be your friend. It takes a lot of time, effort and compassion to work on being someone else's friend. I have lacked the faith and trust to let anyone befriend me; and I have been unwilling to invest the time, effort and compassion to befriend another. It is said one reaps what one sows. I have sown no seeds of friendship. That is a sad statement, and it is all the sadder because it is true statement. Real friendship, real intimacy escapes me. I seem there, yet I am not. I have already slipped away. Leaving carnage and chaos.
"He is a man [] who has never become accustomed to families. All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy. [H]e has been a better lover than husband. He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses." Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Knopf, 1992), at 116.
How does one change one's karma, overcome one's habits and, thereby, prevent even more carnage and chaos? In my case, how do I escape being driven by my dark side, the dark aspects of my karma? And, for matter, how do I find someone capable and willing to deal with me and my dark side? Someone willing to sift through the grain and chaff, when everyone today wants the grain (organic, of course) and not themselves be bother with the sifting or the inconvenient chaff. I do not want to eliminate my dark side, for it is part of who I am? Who wants to be neutered? Who really wants to be a saint? Given a choice, more likely than not, women will choose the bad boy over nice guy. Though, eventually, most women settle for reasonably nice, reasonably safe, reasonably dependable, and uncomplicated guys. Then women reach 45, or 50, the children are gone, and realize they are bored out of their minds, and that they have been so for a decade or more. Their lives probably would have been a lot less boring had they taken a chance and rode through the turbulence along side some bad boy or another who, after all, do stop being boys and become men. But the dark side of the bad boys is out there to be seen, and it scares most women. (And many men learn to hide their badness from women. And those women have a right to feel deceived and defrauded when the badness surfaces, as it always does, as it must.) They settle for the guy who goes with their home decor, not the guy who might break up the furniture. Women want ease and steadiness; they don't want complicated. Yet love without the surviving of complications would not be true love. Friendship without weathering complications is probably not real friendship. Life without complications, without chaff, is not living. Life without its darker side would not be a real life. I will keep my dark side, thank you very much! Controlling, channelling, challenging, and being responsible for the forces of one's dark side is not the same as eliminating one's dark side altogether.
My yoga practice is showing me my dark(er) side in greater detail. (Part of the warrior that comes to yoga mat is the dark warrior. And, remember, Savasana, or Corpse pose, is essentially a meditation on one's death. Call it 'Final Relaxation' pose if that gives you comfort, but it is an acknowledgment that in the end we do die. A warrior knows that death is inevitable. And the yoga practice ends with a meditation on death so that one can get off one's mat and live life, confront the challenges of simply living, one more day having accepted the reality that one will die. Accept the reality that life includes loss. One would have little need for a warrior's heart were life all sunshine, roses, and happy endings.) And, in the process, my yoga practice is opening me up to the possibility of true friendship. Yoga, however, does not itself equip one to be a true friend or to accept friendship. Yoga practice itself will not contain my darker side. But it will aid me in acknowledging and addressing my darker side. Another work-in-progress!
There are magic moments in yoga practice, more frequent in Yin than in Yang yoga, where one no longer sees or hears the other members of the class. The teacher's voice is a mere whisper in the winds. The outside noise has become white. And where it does not really matter what asana one is doing, or whether one is doing it properly. One is surrounded by all that activity of a yoga studio, yet there is nothing in the room but you. That is when the dark side says "Morning!', and the day's work on the mat really begins.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2006) ("Fritz Perls, one of the founders of the Gestalt school of therapy, has often been quoted as saying: 'I do my thing, you do your thing; I'm not here in this world to live up to your expectations....You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful; if not, it cannot be helped.' This statement is on the notion of self and other as separate entities. It is not based on the insight of interbeing. I am not fond of this statement. At the very least I expect you to take care of yourself, because if you take good care of yourself, I will suffer less. My students have the right to expect me to be a good teacher. This means I must practice what I teach--that is only fair. And I have the right to expect my students to put into practice what they have learned from me. That, too, is only fair." "I would like to offer this gatha as a response to the statement of Mr. Perls:
You are me and I am you.
Is it not true that we inter-are?
You cultivate the flower in you so that I will be beautiful,
And I transform the garbage in me so that you don't have to suffer.
This is the kind of insight that is based on interbeing. If we live our lives according to this insight, we will not have to suffer so much." Id. at 165.).
