Читать книгу Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings On Awakening - Jan Inc. Frazier - Страница 13

When my mother was dying, which took a long time, I practiced accepting her death. There were so many times we thought — this must surely be it, surely this time she won’t survive. Each time, I got ready for that to be it, for it all to be over. I imagined the after of her: the utter stillness of her skinny body, the no more struggling to breathe, the never again of her voice. The lowering into the ground of the box. As if practice could get me ready for it. But then she’d survive. The ventilator hose would be withdrawn from her throat, leaving it raw, and before you knew it she’d be sitting up. Talking. Maybe even smiling. Of course, eventually she really did die. That time, when the ventilator hose was pulled out, it did not leave her throat raw.

A person can practice to die. Not by imagining the heart quitting, but by constant letting go. This isn’t the reason to do this constant letting go, to prepare for death. That is a secondary outcome. The reason to do it, to let go of everything that comes, is so you can live life as a free being. Actually, letting go is not really the thing. The thing is to not hold on in the first place. Letting go can’t happen if there has been no prior holding on. Talk about free.

A person can also practice holding on. Talk about not free. Often it feels like what happens is that the thing holds on to us. Like, say I’ve never forgotten the pain of the loss of this certain man in my life. It sure does seem as though the thing has held on to me. I prefer to see it that way, that it has stuck like flypaper to me, not that I have kept my fingers curled tight around it. It: the memory of his face, voice, body; the fact that I never had him in the daily way I wanted him. I carried that around in my fist for a long, long time, having no idea it could be put down, or how much energy was going into holding tight to it.

Until one day it all revisited me, and it taught me about itself. I was in the kitchen when it happened. It all came full force into me, not the memory of him exactly, not the data, but the feeling of it, the consuming quality of loving, missing, wanting, grieving. It poured into me, took up residence in my body, shook me, pulled ancient tears up out of me. Then it was gone. For good gone. I knew it. It was like it had come back for the purpose of teaching me something. Not teaching me about him, or about love and the force of loss. But teaching me about the power of choice, a power I’d always had but didn’t know it. Not the choice to love, but the choice to carry a thing with you, long after it no longer applies. And the pain that comes with that choice to carry.

That day, the day it all came back to me, and left for good, he wasn’t the only thing that came back. There was my father’s death, and there was my break-up with my husband, and there was the torment of my child’s difficult youth, and there was a woman who had once maddened me with jealousy because someone I dearly loved loved her. This went on for several hours, one powerful episode after another. Each came back to me, re-entered me, with the full force of how it had been, with how tightly I had held to it, with how I had ever afterward let it define me. I cried so much that afternoon I thought my body would run dry. It was as if the force of this thing had control over me, one relived experience after another coming to throttle me, to show me how much suffering it carried with it. Each in turn came, in its fullness, and then — it was gone, never, I knew, to return. That is how it was. I was being emptied. I understood this to be the case. Letting go was practicing on me, on all the gigantic stories from which my life and my sense of self had been constructed.

Because I realized, as each thing came, that it was a kind of last hurrah, there was a strange poignancy about its coming and going. Even though so much of what came that day, what burned through me, had to do with painful history, it had also been — for so many years — the way I could tell I was alive. It was the stuff of poems. It was what a person could know me by. When I became close with someone, these stories were what I had to tell, the long and complicated stories of what I had gone through. What I had survived. What had changed me. It was as if I were saying, if you don’t know this story, you don’t know me.

That was how I always was: my stories were who I was. That day they came back and then left, and I knew were leaving for good, I felt a wistfulness, that all of that history was truly history now. But I also felt light, incredibly light, and free. Unburdened. It wasn’t exactly that I had let all those things go. Not that exactly. It was that who I had been wasn’t there anymore. I had changed. The person I had been had left with all those dramatic events that had defined her. She was a memory too, like they were. Now, in the aftermath, I was just standing in my kitchen, dry-eyed, marveling. Utterly empty. Free.