Category: people

Family is everything. If you have it, it’s the source of your identity and security. If you don’t have it, it’s the source of your longings. If you love it, you become it; if you hate it, you seek to become what it’s not.

If you’re lucky, you can make your own family, one made up of those you love and who love you. This could come in the traditional form of marriage and children, or be a family of friends, lovers, mentors, partners.

Yet, however fulfilling these ‘second’ families might be, you will never fully escape the sense of loss for your family of origin and of what might have been – an ache that will return now and then as you move through life.

The need to belong is wired into us. There’s no escape. You can wish you weren’t part of your family; you might even reject them, but you’re never free of them. Inner doubts, resentments and justifications gurgle on. We’re born to connect, and the imprint of that first connection is indelible.

The Myth of the Ideal Family, the Reality of Love

Of families born or made, none are perfect. They all have flaws. Like you and me.

Family includes the people who love you in the strangest ways; who constantly interfere, come across as patronizing or judgemental, or perhaps even distant at times.

Yet, these are the people who are there for you without hesitation when the sky falls – the ones you can rely on unconditionally. So why is it they can also be the most difficult and annoying? That’s family.

The great philosophers have grappled with the meaning of life and can’t agree on anything. For the poets and seers however, it’s a no-brainer: We live for love. You might say we reach for love. Much like a plant instinctively reaches for the sun.

Feeling unloved or misunderstood by family, some people lament while others encase themselves in suits of emotional armour. And then there are those who settle, allowing their independence to be trampled, their uniqueness to be ignored. You can grapple with anger and sadness; even hatred can move you on. But settling for what you’ve got – that’s the worst. It’s an act of surrender that shuts down hope and puts change beyond reach.

That’s when you find out which side of your family you stand on. Your relatives may be judgemental, supportive or indifferent.

If only family could just love us. And if we could only just love our family. How complicated is that?

For some, spirituality is an escape from worldly difficulties, but it can also be a way to align ourselves with reality. Self-awareness, mindfulness and thoughtful reflection are the key. Life is busy and we need to get things done but also, as Blaise Pascal said, ‘… miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’

You can spend your life lamenting that things aren’t the way you want, or you learn to accept and value the family you have. And appreciate the positive, loving aspects.

So as you ponder the reality of family and grapple with mixed emotions, know you are not alone. Hopefully, that thought brings a form of familial peace.

What does this post on family (longing, belonging) bring up for you?

“There are things that are too big for us humans: pain, loneliness and death, but also beauty, sublimity and happiness. For them we created religion. What happens when we lose it? Those things are still too big for us.” —Pascal Mercier

I stride through the supermarket on a mission. It’s Friday evening. I want to get home to my family, have a glass of wine with Caroline and cook a slow weekend dinner. I’m in a hurry, but a good one. I run into a few people, exchange greetings. Hudson’s a small town.

Everyone’s smiling at me. What’s that all about? I smile back. Feels good. I’m making eye contact. I turn an aisle and almost knock down a burly working guy. Before he has a chance to react I grab his eyes with mine and squeeze a smile into them.

Who is this? No, not him. I mean me.

Once upon a time, my greatest wish was to be invisible. I found it easier to presume most people were hostile. Eye contact was a necessary evil. I was well into middle age when my daughter Melanie urged me to turn up the corners of my mouth. “They’re always down in a frown,” she said. I went to the mirror and stared. She was right! I’d been looking in mirrors for years and never seen that. How could it be?

Forcing the facial muscles didn’t work. I pushed fruitlessly against long habit. The frowning was etched in my face by years of deflection. Gradually, I found the stress behind it and let go one grimace at a time. A smile began to reveal itself. In time, my eyebrows relaxed too. The clouds lifted. I liked people.

The memory of unhappiness is opaque, like a dream; it doesn’t really hurt, at least not directly. What’s more disturbing is the absence of happy memories, years gone by with no emotional trace.

My mother wouldn’t like me writing this down for the world to see. She meticulously concealed all her disappointments behind a gracious smile and a lightly spoken, “never mind.” She never fooled me though. My siblings followed in her footsteps but I was the black sheep.

Unhappiness is socially incorrect. It’s messy, it embarrasses others. It’s inconsiderate. In polite society one can emote only so much, preferably by being cheerful. Disdaining that social nicety got me into all sorts of trouble, but in the long run it was a blessing. I’ve been more confused in life by my self than anything else, but I learned one thing: hide an emotion from the world and you hide it from yourself too.

That’s a tragedy, plain and simple. To be out of touch with your own emotion is to put it beyond reach. How can you change what you don’t acknowledge? Thoughts adapt to argument and experience, but emotions have to express themselves one way or another. Suppressed anger becomes resentment. Deflected sadness turns into depression.

But who will listen to all your self-doubt and inner wrangling? Friends like that are few and far between.

Many people settle for acquaintanceships, thinking they’ve missed out on real friendship, or are unfit for it. It’s easier to play by the nice rules and remain in good standing, but spending your time safely like this distracts from the opportunity to share the big questions of happiness and unhappiness with a real intimate. Meanwhile, time is passing.

Even the most familiar of acquaintances is very different from a friend. Friends are those who tell you what you don’t want to hear when you don’t want to hear it, and know how to get it in your ear. They commiserate. They’re people who’ve been as baffled by their own lives as you are by yours. They’ve faced up to their own unhappiness. They know we’re all only human.

That’s why, when I teach a Quiet Mind workshop, I feel so at home. I sit with people who are eager to explore all sides of themselves, not just the pleasantries.

And at home, I’m truly blessed by my family. They tell me all the stuff I don’t want to hear and that no one else want to tell me. I love them for it. There’s no greater gift. Sometimes it’s tough, but in the end it makes me smile. Really.

It’s surprising how often family ties are antagonistic, and how many adults are still enmeshed in sibling rivalry. Even those of us with complicated families tend to think that everyone else’s family is just fine.

I don’t speak to my brother Philip. I dream of him though, a lot. At night he becomes my lifelong friend — someone I trust, who understands and respects me. I recently dreamed that we sat in a fancy hotel lobby, shared a bottle of fine old Scotch and chatted the night away.

Unfortunately, our reality is different. It started a lifetime ago. Our father was difficult. He used guilt to keep my brother in the family restaurant while setting me free to explore my wanderlust. Meanwhile, our mother taught us that conflict was to be avoided at all costs. That wasn’t just a notion but a pattern of behavior built right into us, the way only a mother can do.

Philip and I grew up in the same house, shared the same vernacular and learned the same superstitions from the same nuns and monks at the same schools. We were close in so many practical ways, and yet from day one we were baffled by one another.

Later in life I thought he was wasting his life by clinging to respectability and convention. He resented my rebellion against it. When I tried to discuss our judgments of one another he insisted he had no issues and ordered another pint of beer. I think he believed his story; he certainly took refuge in it. Everyone else noticed our mutual antagonism, but we never actually had that conversation.

Being together didn’t make us close, and estrangement brought us no relief; on the contrary. My dreams only remind me of the hopes I’ve nursed for so long. I know Philip’s a sentimental softie and probably wants to be loved just as much as I do. I bet he’s as disappointed as I am.

Loving Someone is not a Decision

That sounds like reason enough to make another effort, doesn’t it? Trouble is, effort has very little to do with it. All relationships need work from time to time, but without the underlying respect and trust, what do you work with? On the other side of the situation is the question of when you stop trying. It’s not a conscious decision. In fact, I dare say we haven’t stopped.

A friend of mine a few years back was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He marveled at how his brother, with whom he hadn’t exchanged a word in thirty years, became his best friend for his last few weeks of life. Perhaps something like that will happen to Philip and me. I’m afraid it’ll take an earthquake like that to rearrange the landscape of our brotherhood, but you never know. If he called me tonight, I’m sure I’d respond.

With colleagues and acquaintances, a bit of courtesy is enough to grease the wheels and get things done. But family relationships are driven by subliminal fears – of being ‘wrong’ or ‘bad.’ It raises the sorts of spectres that inhabit our childhood nightmares.

We formed those relationships before we were fully socialized, and embedded buttons in our psyches that only family members know how to press. They’re shaped not by our rational sides but by the animal instincts we all know so well from the schoolyard: envy, retaliation, opportunism, selfishness and brutality. They’re wired into our brains.

What Happens to the Child in You?

Growing up doesn’t mean the child disappears; simply that it’s overshadowed by a rational grown-up who seems, tries or just hopes to know better. How do we reconcile our animal and social survival instincts? How do we accept our irrational side without giving into it? How do I accept that I don’t get along with my brother even though I really long to, and think he does too? Sometimes it’s more about acceptance than resolution.

Denial, entertaining distractions and the constant preoccupation of ‘hard work’ are all convenient ways to put awkward questions on the back burner. They’re still there, though, simmering away.

Avoidance can’t free us from the seeds we sow of our own disappointment. They come back to haunt us – in my case as lovely dreams that leave me sad when I awake. They’re reminders that we’re not at peace. At a certain point in every life we suspect that peace is not our destiny, that it’s a fantasy. After all, homo sapiens is just a species of ape, clever but not invulnerable.

For some reason, we stubbornly refuse to accept that. We insist on peace despite its overwhelming unlikelihood. It’ll take more than wishful thinking, though.

For millennia wise men and women have preached ways to peace of mind. All agree that it takes work and a special sort of letting go. Of what, exactly? That’s something we each have to figure out. The tool of mindful reflection helps us do just that. It’s what we learn in Quiet Mind Workshops.

“Valentine’s Day: the most horrible day of the year.” —So says Faith, our sixteen-year old.

Like all holidays, Valentine’s Day is fine for those with something to celebrate, but heartbreaking when you’re reminded of what you don’t have.

There’s more to love than romance. There’s the love of family, friends, siblings — even pets. And there’s more to romantic love than make-believe, or flowers and chocolates on Valentine’s Day.

It hurts to feel lonely, isolated, unloved or unlovable, and this day brings it to everyone’s attention. Our instinctive remedy is to fantasize about the emotional security of true love, but that doesn’t make things better. As the Buddha points out, we react to pain by dwelling in illusion, not in reality. That’s escapism, a contrivance — just like the notion that your ‘soul mate’ is somewhere out there, just waiting for the stars to align.

Yes, we need to feel loved. And no, at a certain point in your early teens your mother’s love isn’t enough. You want a peer to see you for who you really are, to bring out the best in you, to challenge and support you without getting the two confused.

And, of course, you want to feel like a million dollars.

And so you go out looking for it. Is that a bad idea? Well, that depends on your attitude. Are you trying to make it happen?

The teenage version of romance is all about that heady hormone feeling, but there‘s also such a thing as mature love. It has a powerful hormonal side to it too, but so much more. It’s not just about feeling good together; it’s about finding your path through life.

Getting to the Heart of Who You Are

If you’re reading this blog, you’re presumably trying to get strip away the outer layers to find yourself. There’s no more challenging method than mindful reflection, and no more potent situation than the chaotic, unpredictable, organic daily life of family and friends.

For a new couple, Valentine’s Day is a time to look forward to that challenge, to see what riches lie beyond that mutual good feeling.

For parents, it’s a time to step back and see how simple romance overflows into our far more complex, unconditional love for children.

For those who’ve lost their love it’s time to look inside and see whether that experience has left you bitter or made you wiser. Any negative experience can help you grow if only you choose to face it.

Finally, for those who’ve never found that sort of personal love, it’s a day on which your deepest expectations will stand out. When I asked our teen daughter if she thought anyone else felt like she did, she shook her head. When I told her that she was probably in the majority, she shrugged. Perhaps she’ll think about it.

The idea is to see life from the inside out, to start by seeing what we bring to it. It’s not easy to let go of expectation without losing hope. It takes courage, but helps us wend our way in and out of this simple and yet most complicated thing called love. It’s so easy to get caught in our own tangled dreams.

Love and Attention

Valentine’s Day is a reminder and an opportunity to pay deeper attention to love.

It’s all very well to believe in the beneficence of God or the Universe or Fate or Karma or whatever you want to call it, but love is unpredictable. When you encounter it, it’s a stroke of luck, but if you expect it to be a certain sort of love – especially romantic – you’ll miss every other moment.

It all comes down to attention. So many people think of meditation and the spiritual life as an alternative to the stresses of life, as an escape or an achievement of ‘enlightenment,’ when life’s sufferings fall away. I don’t believe any of that. I think life is miraculous because it’s as full of joy as pain, as confusing as it is enlightening. To embrace it fully you have to stop dreaming and open your eyes. I think that deep down, we all know there’s no other way.

So yes, be skeptical and cautious of commercial holidays, but don’t let that stop you from finding an authentic way to be on Valentine’s Day.
If you’re alone and lonely, that’s okay. Your feelings are real, but you can work with them. You can be excused for feeling you’re the only one, but you’d do well to let go of that particular fantasy. It’s just not true.

Love is not just a good feeling between two people. It’s an opening of your heart towards life and its infinite possibilities. Valentine’s Day is a hurtful trap if you allow it to be.
Instead, open your heart to this greatest thing that life has to offer. Love your parents, your siblings and children, your friends and acquaintances. Express your love not by declaring it out loud or by hanging on to it sentimentally but by simply opening your heart to the mystery of being connected to life itself. Celebrate the love that others share.

It’s an old saying. Call it a cliché if you want, but it’s as true today as ever it was: Love makes the world go round. Really.

I first met Georges in 1980 when we were both Buddhist monks. Shortly after returning to lay life, he invited me to join him in Montreal. I’d had enough of the holy robes, and thought I’d spend a year here before moving on to who-knows-what future. Each March 28th anniversary of my arrival surprises me. I can’t believe I’ve grown nearly thirty Canadian winters older.

We had lunch together this week at Scarolie’s, in Pointe-Claire. Afterwards, pushing his plate away, Georges commented that he hardly recognized the bitter old cynic he remembered from our monastic days. “You actually seem happy,” he chuckled as if it were preposterous.

His humour was a sobering reminder of the distance I’d travelled. “It’s true,” I confirmed. “I am.” He scrutinized me while I waxed enthusiastic about all the good stuff that was happening. “It started after leaving my ex-wife.” I began. “That’s when I took back the reins of my life.”

Georges wasn’t around at that point; I’d withdrawn from pretty much everyone I knew from the old days. With monkhood I’d thought I was joining a community that was ethically superior, one step closer to ‘enlightenment.’ Much to my eventual disappointment, they turned out to be just men and women like me, facing their existential angst. Failing to realise what a fine basis for friendship that actually was, I wandered off, simply because I was unable to believe any longer in rebirth, enlightenment and the Tibetan way. After my stint in Sera Monastic University, all I knew for sure was that I’d tried to adopt a foreign culture and it didn’t fit.

The words of the Buddha, however, still rang in my ears. Each setback and disappointment confirmed his first teaching, “Now, this is unease.”* Every day I received another small confirmation of the unsettling truth that getting what you want — if you even get it — doesn’t end the unease; it just pushes it away for a while. The pleasures and transient satisfactions of life are temporary distractions.

I was gazing out the window at the traffic on St-Jean Boulevard, and rambling away. I looked back at Georges. He was listening intently.

“Once I took back my life, I began to see straight again. I met Caroline and recognized her not just as someone who would make me happy but as a helpmate, a real friend. She gave me the great gift of reminding me what I was passionate about. We’ve shared and worked on those things together for eleven years. I’ve also watched her grow in value in her own eyes, and learn to more fully express herself — all because of our partnership, our synergy. There’s more substance to this happiness than any I’d experienced before, and it helped me go further. I started doing in earnest what my peers have been doing for thirty odd years. I started teaching Mindful Reflection™ and writing consistently.”

“And that makes you a happy man?”

Perhaps seeing Georges familiarly before me regurgitated the memory of my old negativity. “Well, I guess my motivation is still my own pleasure — at least in part. Now, I’m a hedonist, a narcissist … a wannabe born-again Buddhist.”

We laughed.

For all this talk of happiness though, a wave of regret was washing over me. For twenty years I’d watched my old colleagues Stephen Batchelor and Alan Wallace rise in prominence in their teaching and writing while I’d sunk deeper into the morass of cyclic existence. Things might be going well now, but I felt I’d wasted two decades.

I changed the subject, asking Georges, “So how’s the diet going?” Since last fall he’d systematically lost eighty pounds by sticking to one meal a day, forgoing carbohydrates religiously and making do with the meagre consolation of chalky diet bars. It wasn’t healthy, but it was working.

“It’s fine,” he said cheerfully, patting his still considerable belly.

“Surely,” I said projecting my own feelings, “you must get cranky from time to time. Don’t you crave your old comfort foods?”

“Of course I do, but I don’t give in; I’ve learned to see the craving as just restlessness. I’m restless anyway,” he said sardonically, “whether I eat what I want or not. I used food to push the restlessness away though — as we both know — it just keeps coming back. I medicated myself with food. Heck, everything I do is medication.” He laughed self-deprecatingly.

I, however, was awed. “That’s quite some insight,” I said.

Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Georges was his old dismissive self. “Maybe the Buddha was right.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe he was.”

We smiled at each other.

In the silence that followed, things appeared in a new light. I was using regret to fill in the gap of restlessness — but I too had drawn insight from my unease. If I had anything to offer as a teacher today, if I had anything of worth to write about, it came from facing my angst. When I disrobed all those years ago, I’d refused to follow an academic trajectory, as Wallace had done, or to remain in Buddhist communities, as Batchelor chose. I’d decided to test the Buddha’s teachings face-to-face with daily life. I’d expected it to be a struggle — though if I’d known just how much, I might have flinched. In that moment, sitting in Scarolies’s smiling with George, I was glad I hadn’t.

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* Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta

I was thirty-five, divorced, broke and miserable when I decided that I’d wasted my life following idle dreams. It was time to face reality and settle down — meaning to get real. I was sure at the time that I was doing the adult thing; boy I was wrong. My unhappiness had blinded me to the other meaning of ‘settle’ — to compromise oneself.

You don’t always get what you want; even if you do it may not be what you need. That’s why compromise seems so practical and grown up. But when happiness seems like a childish dream and cynicism sets in, it’s easy to settle for pleasure instead of joy, mere company in place of loving companionship and just more stuff rather than the wealth of life lived to the full. At least, that’s what I did. I told myself it was temporary — just until I found the real thing. The trouble is, settling goes against the grain and keeps you so busy justifying yourself that you soon forget all about the real thing. Say what you like about loneliness and misery, but they kick you where it hurts and get you off your backside. Settling smooths everything over in the most unhealthy way.

For years as a naïve young Catholic, then a hippy and finally a Buddhist monk, I’d indulged in notions of escape from this painful world into the transcendent bliss of the next. Now I’d woken up to the fact that I’d been on a fool’s errand. I left behind the issue of whether or not there was a better reality and focused instead on the real possibilities of here and now; I surveyed the options before me and determined to choose the best ones.

See how reasonable it all sounds?

In that far-too-rational state of mind, I chose a new wife (people said we looked great together), shelved dreams of becoming a writer to take a well-paying job in the technology sector, and tried to forget the lifetime of idealism that had brought me to my knees. Everyone commented on how fine I looked.

I clung to these superficial rewards, but deep in my gut I hated it from day one. Such is the power of human denial that it took me six years to admit that fact — to myself. Meanwhile I continued my slide into compromise, befriending phony people, ignoring memories of my undigested past and turning into a nervous wreck. The more I based my self-worth on that outer shell, the more arrogant and disconnected I grew.

One morning I found myself staring in the bathroom mirror at someone I barely remembered, but who threw me a smile of recognition. I saw not just the failed person I’d worked so hard to leave behind but also the child and young man from whom I’d grown. I knew this was my friend, or should be. I compared our situations, felt empathy for myself, and actually shed a tear. Six years of denial evaporated in an instant, and I acknowledged it quite simply with, “I’m back!” It was a happy surprise.

Nevertheless, that was the beginning of a tough year. I had to undo many mistakes, disappoint a lot of people and sacrifice all my hard-earned but ultimately futile gains. I came out of it chastised, leaner, far more honest than I’d ever been and — at long last — mature. I was also happier than I could remember, even though I was feeling pretty lonely.

Shortly after that I began writing again in earnest; I made contact with old friends from my ‘weird’ days, I took up teaching once again and rediscovered the power of being true to myself. It was an epiphany that just kept going. I thought of the Jimi Hendrix song, “I’m the one that has to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”*

Just remember, others may try to stop you, but only you have the power to actually stop yourself in your tracks — and then rationalize it. Have you ever done that? Are you doing it now? It’s not always an easy question to answer, trust me.

Watch out for denial; it’s worse than the devil himself.

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* If 6 Was 9, from the album Axis: Bold as Love (1968)