Sewing my rakasu (or should that be Rakasu?)
I Can't Do It
I have deep psychological scars. That's why I trained to be a psychotherapist. Through Zen I've come across parallel concepts to certain psycho-babblish nouns. In Buddhist terminology, I think my complex-driven beliefs are called saá¹…khÄra. You might say that they manifest as my schtick(s) (Yiddish slang meaning "gimmick" that has come to mean "someone's signature behaviour.")
If I were to reduce one of these patterns of thinking/feeling/behaving down to a phrase, that phrase would be – I can't do it. It's a feeling state of panic I avoid these days by not doing anything difficult.
My first recollection of this experience taking over was aged seven, sitting behind a very old-fashioned Victorian school desk (with an inkwell), trying to work out a long-division sum. The more I panicked, the more the numbers jumped around until I didn't know what should be removed from what, where or how. I had been kept back from going to lunch. The upshot of this hysteria was that that I had the back of my hands battered with a ruler and was forced to eat cold rice pudding. Earlier that day, I had stood on a low chair, with a gingham cloth on it, while the school sang 'happy birthday' to me. Unsurprisingly, I do not have as much as a maths CSE.
Years later, doing my first degree, I whipped myself into a frenzy of hysteria trying to understand G.E.Moore's philosophical essay: Is existence a predicate? I also walked out of a logic seminar which was too close to algebra for comfort.
And then, half a lifetime passed and there came... The Rakasu. Oh dear. Very kindly, a friend gave me a few hours help and I took the pieces away. I started the front and was happily sewing along, when hubris, that great levelling God, led me to an experience much like the one I had recently at the Glastonbury festival. (I'm a veteran.) One minute, in sure and certain belief, I was thinking, I know exactly where I am, and in the next, I knew no north, south, east or west. (I knew only that I'd sewn one seam back to front before the view from my raft held no horizon whatsoever.)
What to do? (as the old lags in India say.) I can't do it had become a phrase guaranteed to tip me head over heels as whatever I tried to do became more and more fragmented with the panic. But this is Zen, I thought. Stuff the Rakasu. I mean, I wanted to take the vows but to do so at the expense of my mental health seemed pointless. I felt that the choice was either to leave it or to embrace the other half of my personality (the authoritarian part), go deeply into my suffering as I relived it, however long that took, until I let go of the trauma. I'm 55, I thought. Life is far too short.
And then – Catherine Gammon appeared, manifesting the compassion I had delivered to myself by telling me exactly what to do, step-by-step, unpicking the mess, saying 'sew that bit to that bit' and presiding over an oasis of supportive calm round at Devin and Nicky's. I am incredibly grateful. Unknowingly, she circumnavigated my utterly helpless child with a quiet practicality.
It's not finished, of course, but I am a quantum leap ahead in confidence and the devoted Devin and Nicky couldn't be more willing to help, bringing a whole new, largely down-to-earth entirely non-metaphysical meaning to the phrase, I couldn't have done it on my own.
Maybe I'll be a fully vowed-up Zen woman one day, after all.
With very deep bows of gratitude.
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