Sunday, August 3, 2008

Your Original Face

Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!®
-- Mike Dooley


Now that our spouse is dead, who are we? An easy answer is "a widow" or "a widower." But what does that word mean, really? How does that word map on to who we are? We used to define ourselves by words like "I'm a husband" or "wife" or "companion" or "mate" or any other number of descriptive words to indicate our relationship with our love.

But now, we have to start over again in so many ways. And our self-descriptive language changes as well, especially the language we use to talk to ourselves, that ongoing conversation in our head. Perhaps now the language changes to phrases like, "I'm scared," or "I'm angry," or "I'm frustrated," or any other number of ways to describe our new life of limitations.

The caveat here is that what we think about expands. If we think about ourselves as weak, hurting, lost, alone, or troubled, we will get more of the same in our life. It can be very difficult to break out of these thought patterns, especially when we are in the terrible pain of grief. Yet we must.

The following excerpt challenges us to examine our lives from an earlier time, a time before we found ourselves in our current predicament. No, not before our spouse died — before we were born:

Who Were You Before Your Identity?

A while back, I happened to read about a Zen koan, or saying, that goes "show me your original face before you were born." Not surprisingly, my initial reaction to this was "that makes no sense — I didn't exist before I was born." But I also noticed that, when I seriously pondered what I was like "before I was born," I experienced a peaceful emptiness in my mind. Most importantly, all the negative thinking I usually did about myself, in that moment, disappeared as if it had never been there. For a few seconds, I was free of my limiting identities.

I was fascinated by the peace the koan brought me, and for a few months I regularly thought about it, hoping for a deeper understanding of its meaning. One sleepless morning at about four a.m., I finally came to a realization. In the words "before you were born," "you" means your identity — the beliefs you've formed about yourself and who you are in the world. You "gave birth" to your identity when you made decisions about who and what you were. The purpose (or, at least, one purpose) of the koan is to show us we existed — we had an "original face" — before we adopted any beliefs about ourselves. We are not our beliefs, in other words — we are their creator and believer.

When we contemplate the koan, we get a firsthand experience of what life was like before we developed all these harmful ideas about ourselves. As I discovered for myself, that identityless state gifts us with a peace and freedom we rarely experience in our lives. At first, when we try to remember what we were like before we adopted our identities, we feel like we're "drawing a blank," not coming up with anything. However, we only see it that way because we're so accustomed to having all these thoughts about ourselves, and in the identityless state those thoughts don't arise. In fact, that calm blankness is who we were before we decided we were this or that.

I also recognized that, whenever I wanted, I could return to the peace of my "original face." Whenever I started running myself down, replaying memories of difficult interactions with others, or generally thinking negatively, all I had to do was remember how I experienced life before I adopted the harmful beliefs. This memory gave me more than pleasant nostalgia — it actually put me back into the tranquil emotional state of my very early life.

In that state, life took on a joyful and effortless quality. Without all my ideas about my limitations as a person, the anxieties about relating with people that used to trouble me simply faded away. Spiritual teacher Osho's description of this state in Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously captures its essence well: "Just be what you are and don't care a bit about the world. Then you will feel a tremendous relaxation and a deep peace within your heart. This is what Zen people call your 'original face' — relaxed, without tensions, without pretensions, without hypocrisies, without the so-called disciplines of how you should behave."

As always, I'll offer an exercise to help others experience the peace this practice has brought me. If negative beliefs about yourself have been limiting you, try the following. When some harmful idea about yourself arises — for instance, "I'm too scared to do this," "I'm not an interesting person," "people are going to mock me if I try this," and so on, pause what you're doing for a moment. Ask yourself when you decided that this was true. Then, see if you can recall how you felt before you developed this hurtful notion.

You may, like many people, experience the feeling that your idea has "always been true" — that you've "always" been inadequate, unattractive, not smart enough, or something else. If this happens, ask yourself how you felt when you were an infant, before you were born, or — if those two questions yield the same answer — before you existed. As you inquire into how you thought about yourself further and further back in time, you'll eventually come to a point where your mind becomes blank — where you can't come up with anything you believed or felt about yourself.

Don't give up here simply because you don't think you can remember anything — allow the blank sensation to persist, and hold your attention on it. As you simply give the emptiness permission to be, you may find a sense of calm and focus pervading you. This is the experience of your "original face" — your natural state before you learned to label yourself in limiting ways. You can return to it any time you feel restricted by your thinking.

[This article is by Chris Edgar from Purpose Power Coaching (www.purposepowercoaching.com)]

1 comment:

Chris Edgar said...

Thanks again for the compliment Vic. I'm glad to see that the article was helpful to you. -- Best, Chris