Your Truest Friend Resides Inside Your Own Heart

As we age it seems that fighting with friends becomes less necessary or even possible. There are fewer matters worth fighting about and even fewer worth risking the friendshipover. That said, I recently had a real fight with a dear friend. The fight arose because my friend had decided that I had done something that in fact I had not done. It was an action that I believe would have been unkind and devoid of integrity. It was not only that I had not committed the act but also, that I could not have done it, as it would have sharply conflicted with my own integrity and internal wellbeing.

Unfortunately for both of us, my friend had taken pieces of reality and, as the human mind is inclined and skilled at doing, woven those independent truths into a larger story, filling in the gaps and constructing a cohesive narrative, which could have made sense but was in fact not true. My friend was suffering intensely with his false beliefs about me, and the proceeding story, namely, what those beliefs meant for our friendship. At the same time, I was suffering at the hands of his mind, being punished for a crime that I had not committed, and a belief about my nature, which was radically out of alignment with my actual behavior. And yet, no matter what I offered, my friend chose to stick to his false assumptions and write the final act of our friendship. I realized, after great strife, that he was more committed to holding onto his pain-inducing and friendship-annihilating story than to opening to the truth, and possibly, the feelings that the actual truth might bring. I came to understand that the truth, what had actually happened, was irrelevant at this moment. His fictional reality was real in his mind and body. Real, but not true.

With so much at stake, fighting naturally erupted. He fought fiercely for me to concede to his mind’s version of reality, and I fought equally fiercely for him to know the actual reality, and with that, to stop punishing me for a fictional crime, and erasing the truth of our deep friendship.

While fighting for the truth did little to shift my relationship with my friend, it was profound in how it transformed my relationship with myself.

When we fight, our tendency is to want to correct the other person’s version of truth, essentially, to get them to agree with our version. We explain our truth over and over again, in newfangled words and styles, desperately trying to create some consistency between what we believe to be truth and what the other believes. The internal dissonance can feel unbearable when our version of truth is in contradiction to another’s with whom we are involved emotionally, particularly when the truth in question implies something about our character or who we think we are.

When all attempts at truth-correction with my friend had failed, I had nowhere to go, no way to be heard or known correctly. The desperate efforts that had been focused outward, on getting him to change his beliefs, to see the truth about me, had not given me what I needed. It was then that I woke up: I remembered to turn my attention inward, and bring myself the loving attention, listening presence and understanding that I had been so desperately trying to get from my friend. I realized that I could not stake my own okayness and wellbeing on his changing his beliefs. Not only was that not going to happen, but it put me in a perilous and helpless position. I needed to be able to get okay with just my own acknowledgment of my truth and goodness. I made the choice to stop chasing what I needed and open to how painful it was to be misunderstood and misperceived, and possibly to also lose the friendship for reasons that were false. I gave myself the right to know what was true, even if it would never be known by another. I honored my integrity and strength in having made the choices I had actually made. I gave myself precisely what I needed to receive from the outside world.

It’s normal to want those we care about to share our version of truth. And yet, our tendency is to need external acknowledgment and validation in order to make true what we already know ourselves. The time comes however, when we need to start taking care of our own knowing, to provide acknowledgment and kindness to our own truth. When I turned inward and honored the sadness and loss in being misperceived, the truth of what I know actually happened, and the integrity of my choices, I felt known, loved and comforted. The attunement that I desperately sought from my friend, I received from my own loving presence. While I will always wish for my friend to know the truth, and me correctly, I am nonetheless able to bring myself the love and understanding, the wellbeing that I thought only he could provide.

In our search for an other who will hear and understand our truth with compassion, we consistently overlook our own company; we forget our own presence as a source of deep comfort and kindness, and blessedly, one that is always available to us. We need only the willingness and wisdom (and sometimes the reminder) to turn our attention inward, listen with kindness, and care about our own suffering. Particularly when we are in pain, searching desperately for comfort and relief from the outside world, we need to remember to flip the process. That is, to turn towards our own heart, listen to what it is carrying, and offer ourselves the compassion and loving presence that we are searching for outside. The experience of being deeply seen and cared about is ours to give—and receive—here now, when we decide to truly be with our own heart.

Stop Hating Yourself For Hating Vacation

I have a confession: I am really bad at vacation. More to the point, I am really bad at doing nothing. When I say doing nothing, I don't mean not having an activity or a plan, at that I am quite skilled. Rather, the doing nothing that is so hard is that of not being engaged in some kind of purposeful endeavor: creating, learning, developing, figuring out, etc.

On a positive note, being really bad at doing nothing has served me well in life. While I am curious and energetic by nature, still, the anxiety that accompanies not being engaged in something has contributed immensely to my productivity. Not being able to do nothing has condemned me to a fate of continual learning, creating, and ultimately, accomplishing. You could say that not being able to do nothing has made me quite an achiever.

While it feels good to be productive, it doesn't feel good to not know how to NOT be productive. Being disengaged can feel like a death sentence, and yet, it is a part of life. We cannot be engaged all the time; we cannot outrun downtime. Knowing that there is a part of life that I'm really bad at, that feels like a death sentence, has always loomed menacingly in the background of my consciousness. It moved to the foreground this last week on the yearly family beach holiday. While reading, dialogue and just plain thinking are always available, for the most part family beach vacations are a time when we are purposefully not engaging our minds, but rather hanging out doing a whole lot of nothing (unless you consider sipping frozen drinks a something). We are on holiday, to some degree, with the precise intention of disengaging our minds. What to do then when your mind doesn't disengage but there is nowhere to put it. Herein lies the problem.

For years I have berated myself for having such a hard time on vacation, and felt disappointed in the fact that for the first five days of holiday I feel like a trapped animal pacing the bars of a too small cage. Why is it so hard for me to relax and do nothing, create nothing, think about nothing, just be here in the nothingness? I have asked myself this question on innumerable occasions (in a not very compassionate tone). Why must I always have a bone for my mind to chew on? After all these years of spiritual practice and meditation, am I really just as unable to sit still in the open, undirected space, to be awareness without an object of that awareness?

And then something amazing happened on this holiday. It seems that all the years of spiritual practice kind of kicked in. What changed wasn't so much "me" or "my" experience of doing nothing, but rather my relationship with that "me" and "my" experience. On the third day of this year's beach holiday I woke up edgy and uncomfortable, the way I usually do on vacation, but with the profound realization that this IS the way I experience beach holidays. I do feel caged in and claustrophobic with an underlying “get me out of here” anxiety—at least for the first four or five days, just in time to enjoy one or two days and then go home again. I woke up that third morning to the realization that this simply is the way I'm wired. My experience is not supposed to be another way, better or more peaceful. I am not supposed to be another way. To know this was so simple, but oh so life changing!

What changed on this holiday was not how I experience vacation but my struggle against that experience. Instead of trying to will or berate myself into enjoying the holiday, I started observing myself as that edgy trapped animal. So too, I started compassionately allowing myself the right to do whatever I needed to do to feel less trapped. I gave myself more time to meditate and run. While I had always offered myself this in the past, I now gave it to myself without guilt or remorse, as one would offer insulin to a diabetic. I, the larger awareness, could then be okay while my mind frantically burned, struggling against having nothing to sink its teeth into.

It is not so much the difficulty that we experience that causes the worst pain but rather, the way we struggle against that difficulty, as if we are not supposed to have it. Finally, after many years of vacationing in agitation, I let go of this belief, that it could be any other way, and that I could or should be someone who can transition out of her engaged life at home and immediately start enjoying nothingness, simply because it's warm, I'm with family, and most of all, it's vacation—the very time I am supposed to be having fun. Finally, I welcomed the mind that actually lives in this body, the one that doesn't enjoy the first few days of really…anything. With this acceptance, I became kind of okay.

When I stopped judging myself for the experience I was having, stopped hating myself for hating vacation, I discovered two wonderful things: humor and compassion. Humor, in that I could suddenly laugh at my persistent irritation and overwhelming restlessness, and my complete inability to land in the loveliest of places. And, that after all the effort that it took to get there, all the waiting for it come, all the counting down of the days, the truth is I really wanted to be anywhere else. Compassion, in that I could feel loving kindness toward my own mind, my own self. I certainly don't want this to be the way that I experience holidays, and yet it is. At last, I could laugh and empathize with my own uncomfortable nature, a part I had long rejected. What a different place I had discovered simply as a result of dropping the fight against what is happening. We believe that suffering will end when we remove the experiences that are difficult and unlikable. That would certainly make sense. But the truth is counter-intuitive. We remove the primary cause of suffering when we stop criticizing and trying to change our experience as it actually is. We find equanimity when we surrender to the chaos. We find peace and self-love when we agree to meet and welcome the parts of ourselves that we enjoy and even more importantly, the parts we don't.