How does one foster compassion and overcome anger when they have been really hurt or mistreated?
Vanilli
Veteran
As I have posted before, my boyfriend (I am leaving my boyfriend, but do not have the resources yet to do so ) is controlling and at times abusive. It's really hard for me not to struggle with very deep anger and fiestiness/defiance internally when dealing with this. I don't know how to combine compassion with this situation?
I feel like I really struggle with cynicism and anger towards guys who have a romantic interest in me as well. I am naturally a fiesty person - but having gone through this situation, I feel like I have built up a wall of mistrust, cynicism and seeing relationships as a battle (so not really seeing them in the best light) - in response to all the pain of being hurt and controlled.
I am admitting I have a problem. And I can guess that some people will say "oh so one guy hurt you and now you are angry at all men? That's stupid and sexist" - I am not really asking for a judgement on how rational or unfair the way I am thinking is - I know it is, I know I am struggling with it. I just don't know what to do - how do I get past these feelings and become open and compassionate towards guys who are interested in me, rather than seeing them as very threatening?
And how do I avoid or let go of anger when someone is just constantly hurting me? I feel like every day I am angry and I know anger is a poison in Buddhism. How do you get past anger when people really hurt you or continually treat you in controlling and disrespectful ways? How do you stay open hearted and compassionate?
Comments
I would say the priority right now is take care of yourself. One way you can do that is to focus on the first state of metta bhavana for a while:
http://www.wildmind.org/metta/one
To steal a question from Jack Kornfield: "Is that who you really are?"
I'd suggest (as @SpinyNorman has above) looking after yourself for a while and steering clear of guys perhaps.
Good luck!
It's probably harder for you right now, knowing your future plan to move away (unbeknownst to him), which means it's hard to live in the here and now, because you're looking (and imagining/dreaming) about how much better life will be -- creating a lot of anxiety that you have to sit on.
I've always been feisty (and people say pretty quirky as well), and from reading your post, I think feisty can indicate fear...if you don't mind me 'shrinking' you a bit. I suppose I should speak for myself, but it was a notion that I think you're capable of accepting or rejecting after giving it a think on that possibility. For me, I think it's a bit of a defensive - sometimes cryptic mode because you don't want them to see you sweat, in a manner of speaking.
I've gotten so much from the short time I've been practicing mindfulness and meditation and want to encourage you to do that every chance you get. (*)
@Vanilli: right now is not the moment to consider prospective romantic involvements.
It is the moment to put this story behind you and heal yourself.
And please: the world is full of gorgeous and wonderful men who will be more than willing to prove to you that not all men are mean when you are ready to love again.
Sometimes it is hard enough for a guy to muster up the courage to ask you out or pay you a compliment, it would be unfair to dump him under the "abusive" blanket within five minutes of meeting him.
Forget terms like "battle" or "control" when referring to relationships.
They tip the balance the wrong way right from the start.
Relationships are about a man and a woman meeting, liking each other, compromising rough corners and hopefully building something together.
Hurt is a destination the road to hurt can be very different. Physical, mentally, helpless or even self hurt.
Now when your pride is hurt you need to let go of your pride, when your hurt because your helpless you are in for a harder treatment. When being helpless, help is best I remember my dad hit me very hard, but it was for a very stupid reason. He didn't think of my feelings and I was really hurt, now I have forgiven him. I realised my dad is full with holes the more I get to know him, here insight can be important. Like dhammadragon says, there are nice men. The same dad that hit me for no reason would never hit my mom, and every week he buys flowers for my mom and really cares for her.
Having grown up in this family I have learned to respect the ladies, and I might not be the best guy I remember asking a girl out was really scary for me and often I'd hear no, sometimes I got friendzoned as the kids would say nowadays for being to soft or friendly.
Now I am not trying to promote myself as best-man© but trying to say there must be like minded men that could be very nice. However you can read about it or hear, you have to experience yourself to know, same as mediation people have to experience benefits or they would give up.
Now then to find some insight in this is quite hard, to find insight in anything is hard actually self-delusion is a problem..
So I am falling into long lines of texts without solutions my apologies its a Dutch habit... But in the struggles of today I do know compassion can or is hard. Well according to the Buddha compassion will do good, however if you cannot feel compassion at the moment or are hurt in the process of doing so try to think at least of impermanence and let compassion be for another time.. The Buddha adjusted his teachings for all walks of people, nothing wrong with letting compassion be for now, trough meditation you might get more insights and it might become easier.
The spiritual path is one of growth and we all have to grow, we do not instantly become oaks we are seeds cultivating trying to become oaks, compassion might be a story for another growth stage.
Your questions are awesome.
Personally, (not to suggest that my opinions reflect the opinions of everyone here or in the world,) even for people who have been practicing for a very long time, it can be difficult to work with the emotions and trigger-impulses we have [which are] associated with people or things that have caused us harm, or simply been in the same room when harm "happened."
There's an old experiment, mind you it's not a very nice one, about conditioning. This doctor proposed that he could make a baby terrified of anything, which essentially meant that he could make a person terrified of anything. So, you know, what could you possibly do that's crazy and radical and insane? Let's make the baby afraid of a bunny. Of course, they pick the cutest darned bunny in the world and when they show the bunny to the baby they pinch the baby's bottom and the baby cries. Rinse, wash, repeat... now you have an adult with an irrational fear of cute bunnies. Crazy and sad and twisted (and true).
I'm not saying your situation is like that, but I do want to say that conditioning affects us on a multitude of levels. In the dharma, Buddha in all his wisdom and love broke down the constituents of being into the five aggregates, or the 18 dhatus (sensory spheres / gates / their objects), and there are probably other breakdowns that are well known to more learn'ed people.
So, consider that you can start your meditations with compassion -- basically, everyone suffers at one point or another, and at any instant there are myriad numbers of sentient beings (people) suffering, experiencing pain in some way. It's really quite sad, although don't be disheartened by it, but reflect on it, our pains as individuals are really small, drops in the bucket.
When you can see that everyone suffers (even if you don't have any particular people in mind) then you can be much more open to seeing the world impartially and with some abandon. Not to be aloof, as aspiring buddhas we must create and foster the stores of merit and wisdom that penetrate through to the truth of Reality. Reality with a capital "r."
So just as some practical advice [practice-able words], contemplate on how beings suffer, from heat, from freezing, from thirst, from abuse, from destructive emotions, from their bad habituations which get them into more nonsense.. Reflect on that for 10 or 15 minutes. It's okay if you cry, that is definitely part of the process of breaking free.
Now, and this might be hard if you have people around you who tend to induce anxiety and reaction-chaining around you, try and imagine someone you know who is really struggling in life. Could be a friend in hard times, could be that homeless person, could be an animal, but think of them, be with them, invite their life to your conscious space and feel for them.
"Touching the heart of suffering" as my friend/teacher/guru once put it, is truly a tremendous undertaking with the power to completely transform. We are all connected in this common ground, that we don't want to hurt and that we want to bask in happiness and love.
Now that we have this foundation (and it could come instantly, it can take weeks, it can take a long time to sink in, the true magnitude of this), we can focus on the How.
How is pretty much the whole of the buddha's teaching. He presents us with the why and then says "by the way, the path is the how, practice the path and you shall realize the goal"
Your questions are specifically about how to practice love and compassion under duress. Well, my friend, lay your foundation, build a solid one. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche remarked that to not lay your proper foundation with renunciation is like building a mansion on a frozen lake... the lake melts and where did your mansion go?
Renunciation is accessible to all of us, and i think that meditating on the sufferings of [many many many] sentient beings is really a good key in that process. It's also like a spark to ignite your compassion. We all have these qualities, let's allow them to manifest(!)
You will have to train diligently, and you will have to remind yourself (at first it will be very frequently, and then when you are accustomed it will be natural). "Beings suffer and they've helped me in the past, I wish to remove their sufferings completely" ... something that gets to that /feeling/ ... so with practice you can tap into the feeling and your own words will come. Just like prayer, whatever fits is the right one, unless you are gonna do a specific mantra practice or whatever.
So, maybe that is a stretch, how are these people [who are hurting me right now] helping me? Well, you are alive, yes? You are probably pretty healthy, physically fit, able to move around, able to read and put the teachings into practice, and all these are blessings. Blessings blessings blessings. To be able to see the sky is a blessing, every moment in this life is a blessing worth more than any amount of diamond and gold. But how is this person right now who is harming me actually being of assistance to me?
Consider Inter-dependence.
Inter-dependence is roughly saying "no thing that ever was came into being by itself." no sharks with laser beams on their heads that shoot out sharks with laser beams on their heads.
It's a fabric of reality, it's woven together, and the boundaries where your friend ends and where the universe begins are arbitrary at best. Sure, it's useful when foraging for food or running from a neighboring tribe, to know the "boundaries" but we take them to be solid, and eventually find ourselves running into walls which we ourselves put there, sometimes more consciously then others.
So there are a few very powerful approaches to tearing down the walls we've built up over time. As Rumi once said, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
That statement is very deep. It hints at love being the natural condition, and that all this stuff we have on top is adventitious, temporary, not-the-real-deal, a soot covering on a bar of gold, etc. This is essentially the crux of the term "buddha nature"
So, there is maybe too much knowledge jammed into this one post, but I offer it all to you as a reflection, and if there is any particular segment you wish to know more about, or anything that sounds particularly helpful, please ask, and we all can help throw some more heart-felt intentionality your way.
I will say this, though,
you can deconstruct any wall, and if you can be super mindful, hyper mindful, lucid and aware in the moments when you'd normally react with some chain of behavior, try and just stay with it, give the tiger room to be in the closet with you. Eventually the closet is a bedroom, is a tennis court, is a stadium, is a palace. More and more space. Often, we are trying to wrangle and control and contort our emotions, but doing so can be counter-productive. It's like trying to halt the flow of water through an aqueduct by adding more aqueducts to the first. The streams split and keep flowing. "Be the water around the boulder."
Alright, those are personal things you can try and do and not-do and think about and not-think about.
Here are some intrapersonal things you should keep your eyes open for and at least aspire to do some day:
Find someone who is struggling with their relationship. Befriend them. Listen to them with both your mouth and your ears. (your views, whatever they may be, are not as important as this person being heard-out)
Think of someone you absolutely can't stand and write down 10 amazing things about them. Yeah, this one is easy for an accomplished practitioner (if they can even think of someone "they can't stand" .. but is not so easy for a novice like me, but by the time you're done, you could very well have a deeper appreciation for the nice qualities in someone you thought was purely rotten)
Drop everything you're doing to help someone in an emergency. Sometimes an emergency is having a warm place to sleep for the night, or jumping their car.
Hug at least 5 people every day. Good heart-to-heart hugs. Hugs that say "you are safe, you are cared for, you are protected."
Plant some seeds of love, be happy that you did so. It's actually recommended to reflect on the good deeds you've done and cherish that you did them.
One last piece of advice,
do good deeds and
don't tell anyone you did them.
Your ideal self will shine through, and it is no self at all.
Thanks sova. Very insightful and thoughtful
I saw a documentary about this a little while ago. They had footage of the baby being experimented on. It was quite difficult to watch.
Someone told me they wanted to do experiments on the effects of leaving new born babies alone to cry without comforting them. However, it wasn't allowed as it was considered unethical.
And yet new parents are often still encouraged to do it?
We are strange beings......
For me, it's a combination of time and mindfulness. I need to grieve a loss, a hurt - to "lick my wounds". I'm not recommending wallowing in pain but I need patience to find the balance:
Followed by:
These are two different 'attainments'. One leads to the other.
Say you are in a box and someone is able to poke you with a pole pretty much no matter what. You can't get away from them. They poke and poke. So how do you get past the anger at the poker? You are in a human body. It hurts to be poked. Your body's natural, instinctive response is anger (fight or flight). I suppose a siddhi or cave dweller monk attains 'no anger' after a few weeks of hard core meditative and yogic practice, but isn't that a bit much to ask of yourself?
Living with an abusive person, not being quite able to leave, is no different. He pokes you over and over again. You are not a yogi.
Once you are out of there, and are no longer constantly poked, THEN your human heart will relax and begin to open. But not until then (you aren't a yogi).
Being a Buddhist sometimes seems to interfere with us doing whatever we concretely, physically must do to relieve our suffering. If you're anything like me, I'd must rather deal with it all in the abstract, you know? Buddhism is so NOT abstract, but it gets misinterpreted as 'it's all in your head'. At least I did/do that. Nope. We aren't yogis, remember?
The pressure you put on yourself to be open hearted instead of resentful is, IMO, inappropriate to the circumstance. Once he is no longer taking shots at you (ie, you have left) THEN worry about that.
Thank you everyone! Whenever I post asking for some help here, I always feel kind of embarrassed or like maybe I shouldn't have haha, but you leave me such wonderful, wise replies - I appreciate all your wisdom and compassion so much - thank you all
.
Hah! You wait until the year-end exam... we delete all your threads, and the questions aren't multiple choice, but really tricky!!