CARRYING OUR BURDEN
There is one of my favorite Zen stories about 2 monks walking along a stream, and come across a woman sitting along the bank, in tears. They stop and ask, what is the matter. The woman explains that she has crossed the stream early this morning to get food for her family, and now the stream has risen, and she can’t cross, and she fears for her children. The monks listen, and one monk picks the woman up with her groceries, and wades the stream holding her above the water. He returns, and the monks go their way. After a while, the one monk stops and confronts the monk who carried the woman, and says, “you carried that woman across the stream and you know we took a vow to never touch a woman. How can you do this and not be bothered?” The monk replied, “Ah, I left put he down an hour ago, I see you are still carrying her!”.
This is tied to my last paper on sexual abuse in this world. I fear that many “carry that burden” of what happened many, many years ago. This is not about “just forgetting about it”, but is about how we let it go and not continue to be a victim to something that happened long ago. And once we let it go, we can also talk about, bring it forth in conversation, bring it forth in speaking to power if necessary, bring it forth to not be ashamed to have been in that situation. Shame quiets all of us. Let it go. Not forget about it, but let the shame go.
I was a victim for a short time. A victim is one that lets external things dominate our being, long after the event. The more we do not let go, the more we keep ourselves in that mode. Letting go is freeing our being of our past. It is not letting the perpetrators have a free pass. Holding on to the shame is doing that.
I have no idea how many people out there are carrying the burden of a past that goes against the “rules we were taught”. It may be millions of folks that carry a secret that we fear being shown. We want to not be shunned by family, told we are crazy, deemed delusional, made into liars in some folk’s minds, and all the rest, when we express our scary past. It is a grand suppression of truth.
And this is not a call to those holding the secrets, it is a call to those who will hear the secrets. It is a call to hear of the pain, the fear, the shame, the embarrassment, the whole idea that it is somehow my fault that this happened to me. It is to transcend that cause/effect world and get that we humans are in a crazy dance of past conditions that make people do crazy shit.
And it is to forgive those who did that to you. They played out their insanity with you. They also carry a pain and guilt that does not go away. The need to let it go also. They need to be part of the healing in this. If we all conceal our burden, then no one gets over it. A secret burden is not shared by anyone else. It is carried alone and gets more burdensome as life goes on. To be free, we need to let it go, reveal our stuff, and know that the world out there shares your pain. Tlane 9/25/18
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