Letting the Story Line Go
by
 Alice Walker
 
         Some years ago I lost the friendship of someone I greatly valued.  She and I had been very close, deeply committed to our relationship, for quite some time. What happened was that her work called her away from the city in which we lived;  I found I missed her almost more than I could bear.  All the abandonment bruises I’d accumulated since I was a toddler and sent off to school, away from my mother’s cushiony bosom, felt pounded by a hammer. In deep emotional confusion I struck out at her: I don’t care that you’re going, my behavior cried.  I don’t love you anyway.  She was graceful and caring, actually holding my hand as I sunk into a rerun of the four year old I had once been.  However, several weeks later, when I had forgotten my tantrum, she had just begun to respond to it.  
 
         She didn’t want to be friends, she said.  Everything we’d been to each other was over. My willingness to ignore the pressures she was experiencing in her life and to concentrate so completely on my own feelings, at the expense of hers, caused her to feel unsafe.
 
         I was shocked.
 
         Forgive me!  I pleaded.
 
         She refused.
 
         Never in my life, in a personal relationship, had I been refused forgiveness.  It was the most horrible feeling.  And though I asked her forgiveness many times, she would not relent.
         
         And so began a search for the easing of a heartsickness I’d never experienced before. 
 
         Time on the meditation cushion had always been helpful to me; but now, even this failed.  Until a friend mentioned the work of Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, and her collection of tapes called Awakening Compassion.  I lay on my couch in the country for about a year listening to and absorbing the ancient Tibetan Buddhist wisdom taught by this tiny, brilliant, scholar.  And the most helpful thing she taught me was a new/ancient meditation practice called Tonglen.  It is a practice which requires letting go of the story line of one’s suffering and developing instead the courage simply to feel the emotion raw. Instead of trying to banish one’s pain, one breathes it in.  It is then necessary to project or exhale one’s vision of a better way, happiness and not suffering, that one would also be willing to share with the world.
 
         “Let the story line go,” she says.
 
         I hadn’t realized until then how desperately I had clung to the “story” of what had happened.  Always rearranging it to try to make it come out better. More comfortably, that is, for me. Perhaps I should had silenced my four year old, I thought.  Perhaps I should have stifled my misguided words.  How could I have hurt, so thoughtlessly, someone I so dearly loved? Why did I have to be so stupid?  And so forth.  But in fact, things had already happened, exactly as they had. Nothing I did now could change them.  It was up to me, however, to change my own suffering.  And the first step was to stop clinging to it.  “Let the story line go,” was the instruction.
 
         I sat on my cushion or in my bed or on the floor or in the swing and I practiced breathing in the anguish of losing a friend I cherished. But I no longer identified it as that.  It became a heavy, hot, cloud of smoke, the pain itself, that I was stuffing into my heart, making sure it reached every nook and cranny. This was the in breath. Then I breathed out a bright sunny day at the ocean, the clean breeze blowing through me as if I were not there.  Pure happiness.  I wished this for all those, anywhere on earth, who might be feeling the identical pain I felt.  And I knew there were millions who did so.
 
         It is said that the most important Buddhist teaching is probably that there’s nothing worth holding on to.  That grasping or clinging of any sort, since everything eventually changes, is a sure way to remain miserable. I was to discover that it is our suffering that is sometimes the hardest to let go of.  A poet, novelist, short story writer, story teller, lover of tales and parables, verbal puzzles, koans and jokes of all kinds, it was especially challenging to follow instruction that demanded I forget all this, for my own heart’s ease,  and to rely on the simplicity of the sentient being who trusts patiently in the breath.  Breathing in, finally, I felt my heart scatter the smothering smoke, and give way to a larger opening.  Breathing out, I was free. 
 
         What does this mean?
 
         It does not mean I am without pain from losing a friend. I was born under the sign of Aquarius.  To us, friendship is everything.  However, I no longer suffer.   There will always be pain, but, according to the Lojong teachings that accompany Tonglen, suffering is actually “extra.”  It’s the stuff we pile on top of our pain, which actually makes it hurt a lot worse.  I have stopped piling suffering on top of pain, and have learned to let pain be pain.  To sit with it, to bear it.  To eventually bless it for its teachings - there are always those - and with gratitude to let it go.

©2008 Alice Walker