Trying to get home

This morning I dreamed another installment in my "trying to get home" series of recurring dreams (a variation on the "missing my plane" dream I've been having since I was about 24). In today's version I am at a small church leadership meeting in a town ten miles away from the town where I grew up. The people who are holding the meeting ask me to go get something from the store, and when I get back everyone is gone and my ride home has left without me. I spend some frustrating time trying to flag down a bus, knocking on doors asking for help, considering (and deciding against) hitchhiking, etc. Finally I realize I'm just going to have to walk. It is getting dark. I think, "Ten miles is a long way to walk, but I know the way and at least at night the road will be quiet, not many cars."

In the dream I'm stoically resigned to going it alone, but still, I woke up all choked up. Part of it, I know, is the stress of the holidays and all the emotions that come up when I know I'm going to see my family, and also the fact that I still don't know if I'm going to be able to see them at all this year. Also, yesterday while going through some papers I found a letter my dad wrote me when I was 22, when I was getting ready to move to San Francisco, in which he said so many sweet and loving things that I had to stop working and just sit there sobbing for a few minutes. I miss him so much.

To get back to this morning—I pulled myself together and got in the shower. Once I was in there I sort of fell back into the dream and was standing there feeling all these swirling emotions about being abandoned, alone, unable to get where I needed to go, and unable to find anyone who would help me (the dream had involved lots of begging for help). Several minutes into this, still swimming around in this weird forlorn half-dreaming state of mind, I heard the bathroom door open and the boyfriend (whom I hadn't seen yet this morning) saying, "Hey, I just put your bike in the truck. I'm going to drive you to work this morning. It's cold."

So there was the nightmare, in which nobody would even acknowledge I exist — and then here is my waking life, in which this beautiful man is constantly giving me gifts it would never even occur to me to ask for. Giving me, in fact, the exact thing I had been begging for in my dream, without even knowing I had dreamed it.

It amazes me and moves me so much to be treated so kindly. It also makes me feel vaguely anxious. Why is he so good to me? Am I pulling my own weight in this relationship? What does he get out of all this? And when is it all going to be taken away? I try to let those thoughts pass. It feels so much better to just be grateful, and look for ways to spread the good feelings around. It's hard to ignore the anxiety, though. Do other people feel this way when good things happen to them? I would like to be able to just relax and enjoy it without always this little black bird of worry pecking away in the background.

I know I've written about this before, but it really struck me to read in a recent interview with Pema Chodron that although this feeling of "something not quite right" is a universal human experience, it seems only in the West do people take it so personally. This is something we need to learn to overcome, because it really gets in the way of our learning. She writes:

... The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. We feel this dissatisfaction because we’re not in tune with our true nature, our basic goodness. And we aren’t going to be fundamentally, spiritually content until we get in tune. Dzigar Kongtrul, my teacher for the past five years, says that only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as “Something is wrong with me.” It seems that thinking of oneself as flawed is more a Western phenomenon than a universal one. And if you’re teaching Western students, it has to be addressed, because until that self-hatred is at least partially healed, people can’t experience absolute truth...

In this same interview she says that years ago when the Dalai Lama was told by a group of American teachers that one of their big challenges was helping their students deal with their own self-hatred, he literally did not understand what they were talking about.

This fascinates me because while I wouldn't say I hate myself, a lot of the time I do interpret that feeling of dissatisfaction as "something wrong with me" (though I am getting better at not doing that). In fact, as a child in church I was told explicitly that if I felt that way, it was exactly because there was something wrong with me—specifically, because I was doing something wrong. This was confusing because a lot of the time I would feel that way even when I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. Theoretically, according to my Sunday school teachers (why did their words have such a long-lasting effect?), if you're living right and being a good person, you'll be filled with this celestial feeling of peace and joy that never ends, etc. etc. I wish I'd known someone back then who could've helped me understand the concept of dukka. It's bad enough to experience suffering, without blaming it all on yourself for not being a good enough person. At six years old, no less!

Anyway, It isn't like I think I don't deserve kindness—everyone deserves kindness. And I have experienced a lot of kindness in my life. I've been really blessed in that way. All the same, it always kind of surprises me when someone does something really special for me. And sometimes it's hard for me to accept. That doesn't mean I'm not grateful, though.

[Later] I just found out I'm not getting those days off. So I'll be here for Christmas. Again. Last night the boyfriend said, "Well, whether we go or stay, I'll make sure you have a great Christmas." And I know he will. And I will make sure he has one, too.