To love it all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything and your heart will be wrong and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact,
You must give it to no one,
Not even an animal.
Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries.
Avoid all entanglements.
Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket,
Safe,
Dark,
Motionless,
Airless,
It will change.
It will not be broken.
It will become unbreakable,
Impenetrable,
Irredeemable.
To love is to be vulnerable.
In my own life,
And I believe also in the lives of a fair few of my spiritual companions,
Both monks and not,
Quite a lot of emotional suppression occurred in the guise of letting go,
Acceptance and non-attachment.
All human beings are born with a wide spectrum of emotional responses,
All providing important directional guidance and impetus.
We can categorize these as anger,
Fear,
Sadness,
Disgust and enjoyment.
This is not the only way to categorize emotions,
But it's very useful as rough categories,
Like the colors of the rainbow,
Red,
Orange,
Yellow,
Green,
Blue,
Indigo,
Violet.
Through the combination of the conditions I came to life with and the influences of parents,
Peers and culture.
I came to assume that some of the colors of my emotional rainbow were weak,
Shameful and not manly.
Joy and related positive feelings felt welcomed and I permitted myself anger and contempt at times.
Sadness,
Fear and insecurity however,
Was brushed aside or ignored,
Often not even consciously acknowledged.
They just didn't fit with my identity.
The shame and fear associated with my vulnerabilities made me compare myself to others a lot and made me quite competitive and demanding of myself.
This kind of emotional stunting also contributed to me becoming quite idealistically minded.
So when I discovered Buddhism I quickly latched on to the enlightenment ideal that you could become someone perfect,
Ever wise and compassionate and completely above all suffering.
Now in many ways that is a noble ideal but I related to it as something I should be.
It made it really difficult to accept what is.
I was so concerned with being compassionate and a good person.
And at the same time being really concerned with being the best,
Being better than everyone else,
Being the one to give,
Never to receive.
Occasionally it made me into quite a dick actually.
A dick generally loved by everyone,
No pun intended,
But nevertheless a dick.
But that was a necessary step on the way for me.
I needed to go through the phase of being a dick in order to become a truly good friend and a fellow human being.
So you see the problem is that the ego can convert anything to its own use,
Even spirituality.
I lived with some really accomplished meditation masters in Thailand but because I was so closed off and unwilling to acknowledge and express the stuff that I struggled with I actually didn't give them much of a chance of helping me.
So it took a long time for their teachings to rub off on me and for me to figure things out for myself.
Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.
Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy,
The experiences that make us the most vulnerable.
Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
So so The irony is when we think that being vulnerable is being weak,
We fear the expression of it which make us weak.
Being vulnerable is being human is being human and vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.
So trying to get rid of emotions is like trying to bleach the rainbow.
We can't really do it.
We can however bleach a picture of a rainbow which is like dulling our inner acknowledgement of the outward expression of the emotions.
The drawback though is that it doesn't just numb feeling blue but also the redness of love and the vibrant colors of spring.
No tree it is said can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
So so What's in the way is the way.
So so
