Annie Get Your Gun

"Now Ive been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, something good has begun." Cat Stevens

There are the days when we sing about the peace train and there are the days when we oversleep the alarm, can't find our ticket,  and forgot why we ever thought it was a good idea to board anyway. That would be me today. Poorly slept, behind in what I need to do and what I planned to do even though at least on paper I have ample time to do it all (Note to retired friends: I now totally get how it is one can NOT have a day job yet scarcely find time to return a phone call!).

I became interested in what my meditation (Western Zen) teacher, Cheri Huber calls an awareness practice, organized around, well... meditation... readily and dramatically after attending a day long workshop at the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment. Starting to meditate so quickly (like the next day) surprised no one more than me quite honestly. Celia's Top Ten Least Likely Activities would include meditation right *after* sleeping outside in a tent and aforementioned guest stints on Survivor.

However, Cheri 'got' me when she began explaining that nothing in the universe was dedicated to my suffering. Now my husband John over and over respectfully disagrees with this idea, and is happy to supply a list of people he KNOWS want him to suffer but I, lacking in that masculine, affable, sales guy confidence have to admit that my suffering could not possibly hold anyone's interest that long. By process of elimination, like the day at age 5 when I vehemently denied magic markering my parents' painted white windowsill and my mother, acting on a hunch, asked me to turn over my hands which revealed black magic marker (I still to this day wonder how she KNEW to ask me that!)-- that meant I was doing something somewhere along the line to muck things up for myself just enough to have perpetual angst and never feel like I was participating in the right life or living the "right" way.

As in the Big Box Zen store where the guide shows us around the voices and parts of our emotional selves that go around masquerading as ourselves, I came to believe that sitting meditation would take me toward the path to becoming the internal observer of the store that alternates between being overseen by a kindly, older grandfatherly like presence with infinite patience and understanding, and a psychotic control freak with an emotional age of 5 at the very most standing at the helm with machine gun ready to fire.

We talk about watching ourselves *become* someone else. With much study we define these aspects of our personalities and sometimes give them names. They are spoken of as subpersonalities. Over time (and I wouldn't ask how much at this stage as it certainly doesn't sell the process), we come to understand that however powerful those familiar scenarios are when we have become a part of ourselves, we are not *that* person but the presence that watches, contains, and ultimately can love that person. Sometimes, often in fact, that person is 'those 2 people,' in the form of a younger child being given information by an older child. That's where, in part, the voices section of the Big Box store does well and when we sit we get in the habit of noticing what is being said in between couting breaths.

So today, very fair to say that identification with a tired, overwhelmed and much in need of grown up attention subpersonality had her way with myself and my family (gee, wonder if my name is on John's list of suffragettes). Often, the only remedy is to hope we realize when we check out and patiently wait Father Knows Best style for this little person to feel reassured by the bigger presence that we actually can offer at these times. Other times, we wake up to an emotional battlefield the day after smelling of virtual gun powder and littered with used up artillery. The trick is to see that all that is nothing more than remnants of us doing what we are conditioned to do, and fearlessly start over.

Today that amounted to taking that person running my mouth away for a while and going to a favorite karmic refuge, the movie theater. I have been engaging in meditation, retreats, email classes, and reflective listening offered by the Zen Monastery Peace Center for just about 6 years now and it's been a lamp of solace and joy that has restored both of those things even when Machine Gun Milly is taking the lead.

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow.”

Mary Anne Radmacher