metonymy4u

As I sat in zazen last night listening to my teacher describe his experiences growing up in a family that practiced meditation and mindfulness, my own growing up years were suddenly thrown into stark relief. I realized that I had grown up in a home beset by the constant threat of violence. And when I started to imitate the violence of my parents, as children will, my parents then used violence to try and suppress the violence that they themselves had taught me! Much of my adult life has been taken up with learning to live with the consequences of this violent early learning history. And in that moment of zazen that I have been speaking of, I realized that the thing I most try to avoid in my life is a sense of inadequacy, the sense that I am broken and that I am a creature that can only be confronted by violence, and that if there is a solution to any vexing problem in this world, then violence must be the answer, and must be the answer that people are approaching me with. I often assume that those whom I have not learned to trust are approaching me with violence in their hearts. The possibility, the very real and dependable possibility that non-violence might be a more effective solution was never taught to me, at least not in the realm of interpersonal relations. This was something I had to learn from other teachers, principally my psychotherapy supervisors and meditation teachers including my one and only al-anon sponsor of some years gone by. In the course of my professional career as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I have learned that my particular story is in fact quite common and I often stop to wonder: has the world gone completely mad?