Trust Enough to Look
Confiar lo suficiente para mirar
A student explores her pattern of forgetting presence, using an image from her medical work to illustrate the anxiety of waiting. The teacher responds with a subtle but precise invitation: even in the midst of struggle, nothing is truly missing.
Trust Enough to Look
A student explores her pattern of forgetting presence, using an image from her medical work to illustrate the anxiety of waiting. The teacher responds with a subtle but precise invitation: even in the midst of struggle, nothing is truly missing.
I have some things that always seem small but turn out to be big. A couple of sessions ago, someone said something that struck me: "Why don't we remember?" That helped me a lot, but I want to ask about it more deeply. Why was that said? Was it because you know that energy comes and goes, and in that moment I was very open, and it took me with it?
I held onto those words and repeated them, because I recognized something. You once spoke about how I spend all my time thinking about the future: if I do this I'll be better, if I do that I'll be even better, and I'm never really in the present. Those words, "Why can't I remember?", made me see that I forget again and again. I keep using that strategy of thought to avoid being in the present. It's a structure.
The mind doesn't have a clue
I think what happens is that you're dipping in and out of the mind. From the point of view of what is not the mind, it seems so strange that you could go back into it and forget. One teacher calls that "ignorance": going back into the mind and not remembering what's so obvious, what you've heard so many times. "Be in the moment, it's now." But you go back into this dream of mind, and it becomes a different experience, a different reality.
The other thing I've started to trust is that it really doesn't matter that much. The mind doesn't know. The mind doesn't have a clue. So maybe your mind thinks you're in the future, and you're actually not.
Maybe. Why not? Thank you. I like the point about trust. And I had an image come to me in that moment, before you started talking about this.
I was attending a delivery. I don't know the mother; it doesn't matter. I put my hand on the mother to feel the position of the baby's head, because my first work in medicine was obstetrics. It wasn't the right moment yet. I had to wait because the cervix wasn't fully open. I said to myself, "Just wait. Just wait. It's okay. I have two options: either the baby comes through the vagina, or it's a cesarean." The anxiety was so intense, and I said, "Okay, just wait." It was intense enough to tell me to stop thinking, to stop strategizing. Just: okay, that's the image. I don't know what else to say about it, but it was powerful.
Waiting without knowing
You said you had that image. Is it the sense that there are two options, you need to make a choice, and one will take you there and the other won't, and you don't know which way?
No, it's that I have to wait a little more. I have options, one or another, but I have to wait. I have to be without the part of me that was down in the rabbit hole, which was uncomfortable, filled with anxiety. That's okay.
Something very subtle, very fundamental
What I would add is this. When I say "trust," there is something in our experience that is very, very subtle, but also very fundamental, very profound. Sometimes we build something really big on top of it. We might recognize it only because we've built something so big on it that it becomes obvious. But the foundation itself is very subtle and very small.
Sometimes the experience is intense and there is suffering, and the only thing that seems to matter is the intensity of that suffering. Other times it is far in the background, very subtle. But our relationship to it is still, in a sense, commanding how we function.
What I am saying is: trust that what I'm pointing to is very precise, and trust the possibility that what seems to be missing is not necessary. There is something you can discover. It's not from believing my words or my description that you will find it. It's a discovery in you, made possible by a leap of faith and trust.
That leap can happen in many ways. It might come through the accumulation of past experience that convinces you to explore. Or it might come in a single moment where you hear something, feel something, and say, "Okay, I'm going there." But there is a trust needed to explore this possibility.
Even in the anxiety, nothing is missing
Even when there is anxiety and you are contracted, when the anxiety is intense and you have to process it, sit with it, contemplate that there is a choice but you have to wait: even in that image, even in life when that situation happens, even in that anxiety, even in that struggle, something is not missing.
The normal experience tells you that something is missing, especially in those moments. But that is an interpretation. That is the belief. The only way to be okay is not to want to be okay. When there is anxiety and a belief that something is missing, the interpretation will be: the anxiety has to go away for me to be okay.
I am really emphasizing this, and repeating the proposal, not for you to take it as a new belief system or a new conceptual understanding. It is for you to look at it, investigate it, and find it. Trust enough to think, "Okay, maybe this is true. Let me see." Because it has to be a discovery within yourself, by you.
I like that. Thank you. I said something to my last patient today. I said, "I need time to know you. I cannot apply a treatment without knowing you. Of course I apply what I can, but I need more time. We are so complex. In one session, I cannot do it all." That is what this feels like. Thank you.