Pleasure

I have to say that hanging out at the pool all afternoon, drinking sangria with fruit and ice, and then biking at night to have dinner at Pizza Luce about every other weekend this summer just doesn’t get old! Neither do shows at First Avenue. Or making love. This summer, not to mention the past 10 months, has been so pleasurable. It is so amazing what companionship and love can do in your life. Everyone needs a BFF (Best Friend Forever). How lucky am I to have found mine! Thank you, thank you, thank you to whatever forces in my life that have made this possible. It is truly a blessing. Good karma.

“The Buddha has said, ‘If a man can find a suitable and understanding wife and a woman can find a suitable and understanding husband, both are fortunate indeed.’”

A Happy Married Life, by Ven Sri K. Dhammananda 

The key words are “suitable” and “understanding.” This means compatibility, maturity, wisdom and compassion. It means clear seeing and understanding each other’s true selves in a very real and honest way. Having a common understanding – similar thought processes, values, lifestyle, activities, tastes, cultural background, life stage, future goals. A couple who is highly compatible, mature, honest and communicate well are fortunate indeed. The relationship can be a safe haven of security, pleasure and even a platform for spiritual growth. It is a healthy attachment, and a healthy outlet for our desires.

Hey, wait a minute… Didn’t the Buddha say that desire and attachment cause suffering? How can I practice toward the goal of freedom from sense desires when I am pulled so strongly toward a romantic love relationship? Isn’t a love relationship just a distraction from the goal?

But then I remember, this is how it is for me now. This is nature. I am not a fully enlightened being who is free from sense desires. We can’t just run over our desires or pretend like we don’t have them. We can continue to practice toward the goal of being free from desires by seeing clearly and acknowledging that we have desires. As we meet our desires, we find understanding and insight about meeting desires. As we experience pleasure, we find understanding and insight about experiencing pleasure. We experience a deep understanding that desires and pleasures arise and pass away continuously. Our job now is just to pay attention and learn about it. A love relationship is a wonderful place to learn about desire.
Here is more from Ven Sri K. Dhammananda:

“We can study the Buddha's teaching regarding the feelings that man and woman have for each other. The Buddha says that he had never seen any object in this world which attracts man's attention more than the figure of a woman. At the same time the main attraction for the woman is the figure of a man. It means that by nature, woman and man give each other worldly pleasure. They cannot gain happiness of this kind from any other object. When we observe very carefully, we notice that among all the things which provide pleasure, there is no other object that can please all the five senses at the same time beside the male and female figures.

“The ancient Greeks knew this when they said that originally man and woman were one. They were separated and the two parts that were divided are constantly seeking to be re-united as man and woman.

“Young people by nature like to indulge in worldly pleasures which can include both good and bad things. Good things, like the enjoyment of music, poetry, dance, good food, dress and similar pursuits do no harm to the body. They only distract us from seeing the fleeting nature and uncertainty of existence and thereby delay our being able to perceive the true nature of the self.

“The faculties and senses of young people are very fresh and alert; they are very keen to satisfy all the five senses. Almost everyday, they plan and think out ways and means to experience some form of pleasure. By the very nature of existence, one will never be completely satisfied with whatever pleasure one experiences and the resultant craving in turn only creates more anxieties and worries.

“When one ceases to crave for sensual pleasure and does not seek to find physical comfort in the company of others, the need for marriage does not arise. Suffering and worldly enjoyment are both the outcome of craving, attachment and emotion. If we try to control and suppress our emotions by adopting unrealistic tactics we create disturbances in our mind and in our physical body. Therefore we must know how to handle and control our human passion. Without abusing or misusing this passion, we can tame our desires through proper understanding.”

Passion has arisen. Suppressing it is pointless. A committed love relationship is an appropriate outlet for human passion. We can’t let go of something until we are really ready to let go of it. So enjoy the worldly pleasures that you have. Enjoy them with wisdom. Enjoy them knowing that pleasures are just pleasures. They come and go. We must go with the ebb and flow of pleasure instead of trying to hold on to it. Enjoying a pleasurable moment and having the ability to let it go when it ebbs, instead of it becoming an addiction, is a skill. This is what we are learning and practicing.

I Will Try to Fix You

Wanting to fix people comes from a wholesome wish for them to be happy. But that wholesome wish for their happiness can become distorted if we let it. There is a big difference between wishing happiness for someone and feeling responsible for their happiness. We can’t ever let ourselves feel responsible for others' happiness. We are not responsible for curing people's pain.  It is not our place to do that. It is only our place to be loving and compassionate. The person with the pain or the problem is the one that needs to do something about those things if they are going to. And if they don't, it is not really our concern. Except that we may get irritated from people complaining about their problems without taking any action to solve them. They don't have to take action to help themselves, but they can’t carry on and on about it either. They still don't have the right to dump their complaints on us constantly, and if we get sick of it, we should let them know.

The next time someone complains, perhaps just say, “Well, what do you plan to do about it?” That is a MUCH better response than a fixing response. It keeps ownership of the problem where it belongs. If they specifically asks what we think they should do, of course, be happy to tell them, without any expectation that they will actually do it.

I will probably have to do this periodically, since it just seems like I am prone to being a “fixer,” but I hereby let go of responsibility for any and all of other people's problems. And I will continue to be an empathetic listener as long as it seems appropriate, before telling them to put up or shut up.

You and Me Against the World

It just occurred to me today that in an individualistic society such as the one in which we live, it is no wonder why anxiety and depression are so rampant. The majority of us are not meant to be so “independent.” Based on all I have read about attachment theory, it is clear to me that humans of all ages thrive better when they have a primary object of attachment. They are more happy, content, and less anxious.

From my own experience, I certainly had a more difficult time getting my attachment needs met when not in a committed relationship. I managed just fine on my own. I am as independent as they come in this society. And I have a good support network of family and friends that I can count on in times of trouble. But still it felt like something was missing. There was no one looking out for me on a daily basis for all the little things. Someone personally interested in and invested in my welfare. Someone to be a sounding board for my ideas and mundane concerns. Someone to feel really connected with and safe with.

I suspect it is possible to have a feeling of connection and safety like that if you are devoted to spiritual practice. I know that I have felt this way during times of intense meditation practice and times when I have been immersed in nature and away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. But I can’t be on meditation retreat all the time. I can’t leave my children to join the monastic community or become a hermit in the forest. I must be part of the world. And it is rough out there. Two heads are better than one in dealing with the demands of daily life in the world. A loving and committed relationship is like a safe haven.

For three years after the break-up of my marriage, I tried to find safe haven in myself. I took to heart all the advice that stresses the importance of “being happy on your own,” and that you don’t need a relationship to be happy. But I can honestly say now that it is not for me. I reached a certain level of independence and happiness as a single person, but there was always a nagging feeling underneath that I could not fight. The feeling that something was missing. The feeling that I belonged in a relationship. This is my nature. This is my karma.

We Are All Solitary

When I was a child, my inner world was magical. I had a blissful, private world full of delights. I was full of feeling and imagination. My parents loved me and cared for me well. There was nothing missing. I was whole and happy.

When I became a teenager, as I separated more from my parents, I discovered loneliness. It was sort of bittersweet, but it also seemed like a problem to be solved. The world told me that if I were to find a boy to love me, that problem would be solved.

So here I am, at a ripe age of 37, finally completely understanding through experience, that not only is a boy not the solution to the problem of loneliness, but that loneliness is not even really a problem. That loneliness comes and goes on its own and the more connected I am to myself as a solitary being, the less lonely I feel. It took awhile to get here because for most of my life, there have been so many boys available to me and eager to try to help me solve the loneliness problem. In my late 30’s, with a full time job and kids to take care of, opportunities with boys just aren’t as plentiful as they used to be.

At first that fact was frustrating to me. Apparently 1 in 5 couples these days have met online, so I tried online dating for awhile. I’ve met several very good men that way. But for whatever reasons, nothing has worked out. Maybe it is because people my age just aren’t as open and carefree as we used to be. We have some baggage and may be overly cautious. Or maybe we are too picky. We have a better idea of what we want in a mate and since there are so many people online, we may be too quick to pass someone over and move on to the next person. Or when we do find someone we like, maybe we move way too fast and it becomes uncomfortable for one or both people. Just add water and there is your instant relationship!

So now it is time to take a break from all that. It was fun for awhile, but now it is time to re-group with myself. Time to spend some quality time with my best friend - the magical, blissful, delightful, full of feeling, imaginative, loved, whole and happy solitary being that is me.

When I write that down, it looks like incredibly cheesy self-help pop-psychology or a Stuart Smalley-ism, but really it is true. The reason that I haven’t been feeling lonely lately is that I have been feeling in touch with my inner girl. I’ve been feeling connected with the part of me that existed prior to knowing loneliness, prior to knowing the mating urge, emptiness or incompleteness, danger or sorrow.

We are all solitary. There is no getting around our physical separateness from one another. Or our mental and emotional separateness. No one will ever know us as well as we know ourselves. No matter how many friends and loved ones we have, no matter how well connected we are socially, each of us is still on our own. When that fact is not scary to us, we have incredible power in our lives.

Protecting Your Inner Solitude

One thing that keeps ringing in my mind since my time at Aranya Bodhi was a teaching given about protecting your inner solitude. It involves staying present with yourself and even withdrawing from certain social interactions that are not conducive to spiritual goals. The teaching was focused toward monastics protecting their solitude and protecting their ability to keep their many precepts. But this teaching also applies to lay practitioners as well.

It is hard enough for a lay person to keep five precepts. The world and society we live in is geared toward getting more, staying distracted, and trying to achieve our fantasies. It is geared toward constant stimulation and social interactions full of fluff (small talk, gossip, etc).

One thing that has been very difficult for me to work with is the bombardment of entertainment that is hyper-focused on romance. 99 out of 100 songs on the radio have something to do with romantic love in some form or another. It seems like there is not a single blockbuster movie that doesn't include some sort of romantic storyline. And it is so far from reality! But we see it so often in Hollywood that we become convinced that this stuff is real. This just makes us feel like we are missing something in our lives if we don't have a romantic partner. Like there is something wrong with us if we don't experience that fantastic romantic story in which we are the star. I do love this song by Metric called Sick Muse. She sings, "Watch out Cupid, stuck me with sickness, pull your little arrows out and let me live my life." and "Everybody, everybody just wanna fall in love. Everybody, everybody just wanna play the lead." Yep.

This is why I don't watch a lot of movies and don't listen to the radio much. Most of the music I do listen to is instrumental. But my kids like to watch movies and even all those so-called family movies tend to have "happily-ever-after" type romantic themes! It is just impossible to avoid. And it is very tough to try to teach my kids that this is not reality. I can't just take away movies from them altogether. But we do have conversations about them in an effort to help them think critically about the things they learn from entertainment.

It is easy to start thinking that romantic love is our highest goal, our highest purpose in life. But romantic love of any kind is ALWAYS temporary. Even those that make it a lifetime, lose each other eventually in death. Intellectually, it doesn't make much sense to devote our entire lives to something that is fleeting. I think the reason that so many of us do is that we feel that a higher and eternal love and happiness is unattainable, or that it is only available to us in heaven when we die. We have a sense that since this highest love is not attainable, we may as well just give in to that fleeting, earthly, romantic love. And then we try to hang on to it and we suffer. Suffer dearly.

Don't get me wrong. I am actually not against romantic love. I still long for a beautiful companion to enjoy pleasures and pain with. But the lesson I am learning is that this is only an after-thought in comparison to my highest goal, my highest purpose for my life. My highest goal is solitary happiness. This solitary happiness is my rock. Resting in the reality of the way things are in perfect equanimity is my goal. I find this equanimity through solitude and meditation.

When I am alone, it is easy. I can dwell in mindfulness. When I am with others, I find that I need to do a better job of protecting that mindfulness and inner solitude. It is easy to get pulled off course. To get pulled away from my purpose. To get distracted. To get pulled into stories that spin off into proliferation in my mind.

Just having a mind of spaciousness when I am with others helps me to stay true to this inner solitude. It is possible to be with others and to have a mind of solitude. It is like abiding at the bottom of the ocean where it is calm, while the waves swell up above at the surface. Here is where I should abide when I get distracted by the search for romantic love.

Recommended Reading:
Nothing Higher to Live For: A Buddhist View of Romantic Love by Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano