My Secret to Stop Swimming in Shame and Blame

Everyone makes mistakes. Nobody is perfect. Self-love is possible.

Before the Buddha became The Buddha, he was Gautama, a silver spoon prince. At 29, he left his wife Yaśodharā and infant son Rāhula. Just like that.

We learn that Buddha didn’t leave on a bender. Not the usual type, anyway. He didn’t leave his wife for a younger woman or to gamble away his father’s fortune at the casino in Lumbini. Buddha had bigger havoc to wreak. The man (mid-life crisis, anyone?) was in search of the truth.

Along the way, Gautama witnessed no end of suffering. He suffered mightily himself. Once they realized what he was up to, trying to see clearly, they — whoever they are — threw at him everything they could conjure: Rocks, burning ash, hot coals, demonic temptresses, starvation, thirst, and perhaps the most torturous torture of all, discontent.

It is so simple. It is so hard.

At last, Gautama discovered the secret to ending suffering. It is so simple. It is so hard. So hard that among the billions upon billions of souls who’ve lived out their full human lives, few even try to end their suffering and wake up. If they do, fewer still create the means to come to that full stop, one that demands casting out all else from our world. We need that quiet. We need everything to get very, very still. Who can think straight otherwise?

Long ago, I knew the outlines of this story, but Buddha’s abandonment of his family had never registered until I heard it retold in a Dharma talk the other day. This time, the story held more meaning for me because I also left my husband. I asked him to move out more than four years ago. He was my best friend, the love of my life, and the father to my two children. He is a kind, smart man. Who does that, leave a good and loving person? I did.

Guilt and shame, such relentless a-holes

Instead of time healing all wounds, the guilt and shame of having hurt the person who I am supposed to protect from life’s harm more than all others, aside from my children, metastasized as days and then months and then years passed.

Every single morning for years, before I get out of bed but when I finally open my eyes, I see them. “Hello! Still here!” they say because guilt and shame are not only relentless but a-holes. After at least a half-hour, finally pulling myself out of bed despite the stifling cloud of self-punishment, it takes only a few steps to reach my closet, where I pull on that ugly shroud of confusion that envelopes me morning until night.

This spring isn’t just any spring

But look at this. Spring is here. As she does, spring arrived without shame, without reluctance. Why should she be ashamed? She offers us life and possibility, color and warmth. Unlike the darkest fall last year, when there were days the sun disappeared, this year, she is more explosive and tumescent than I’ve ever remembered.

With good reason. This isn’t just any spring. This is the spring of 2021. The warmth is chasing away the winter that chilled our hearts after a year of suffering, one plague and then another, and another. The cherry tree and the purple and white lilacs and the bushtit nest in my backyard and green and speckled brown eggs my chickens lay are more spectacular, the birdsong more vibrant.

We need that quiet. We need everything to get very, very still. Who can think straight otherwise?

Today, I feel more vibrant, why, almost vibrating. Something is happening, a shifting. You don’t always notice pain when it is gone, but Sunday morning, the morning of the week when it is so quiet and I miss my husband the most, I didn’t feel that tightening in my heart and my gut. Maybe it’s that I have been listening to Tara Brach’s course on transforming suffering.

An essential component to end suffering is to forgive, she tells us. Brach, our soulful tour guide, takes us on an exploration of what self-forgiveness could mean. Forgive yourself first, she says. Here’s the deal: Until you do, no other forgiveness works. Brach’s heart-break tour continues by asking us to extend forgiveness to those you have wounded most, whether they are alive or not. Then you must forgive every living being, including, especially, those beings that we love to chastise, to tsk about, to demonize because they are such horrible, horrible people.

Forgiving from the inside out

So I begin by forgiving the woman who, as Brach puts it, had her “foot in a trap,” as we all do at one point or another. You are in pain. Often, because of the pain, you cause pain. I am sorry. Yes, dear one, I accept your apology. I think. It will take a while. But I am starting to forgive you. By you, I mean me, because I have been living in self-condemnation for more than four years, for more than 1,500 days. With that forgiveness emerging, I see more clearly. Strange. But only now can I ask forgiveness from the one I’ve hurt the most. Please, I ask my husband, I ask your forgiveness for the hurt I have caused. I see the pain you have felt, the loneliness and abandonment. I am so sorry.

Don’t stop there, Brach asks us, because, you know, the Buddha always asks us to go bigger. Time to forgive everyone, and no, not only the easy ones, like the check-out guy who asked if you wanted a senior discount. Or the neighbors you like very much who didn’t invite you to join them for their monthly pandemic curbside drink. We are talking about everyone. This includes all of the monsters of the world. But how? There are so many, and they are so monstrous. Especially, it feels, now. So much of last year was so dark that the monsters who usually hid under our beds, in the closets, under the floorboards, or simply stayed hidden out of sight in their own online chat rooms, surfaced, without shame, en masse, exposing their wickedness in plain daylight.

This doesn’t excuse the monsters’ hideous acts. But still, the Buddha, who himself had been wicked, asks us to look at any living being as a potential Buddha, as one capable of unlimited love and compassion. I myself have been a monster. Look at that monster, any monster, from a safe distance. Imagine her as a baby monster, and now not a monster at all. Now, just a baby. Or, Brach says, imagine any villain with their leg in a trap. Wouldn’t you feel pity for their howling, even if they snarl when you step closer in hope of easing their pain? It takes braveness to step forward and look at their traps, whatever trap keeps them fixed in place, held back from others.

Throwing off the shroud of confusion

Today, tomorrow, the day after, I vow to practice radical forgiveness. I will often get it wrong, but I will try. I vow, too, to no longer allow guilt and shame to be my first and constant companions throughout my days. I will wake instead with a deep, grounding breath. Hold that stillness. Then I will step out of bed, walk to my closet and pick out an outfit, any outfit so long as it isn’t that worn shroud of confusion. I will get dressed in a translucent vestment, light as air. A fairy tale cloth that I have stayed up weaving, night after night, working so hard to make something that lets me move with more ease, more expansively, through the world.

Clarity lets me calmly state my intentions, for today, for tomorrow, for the rest of my life. The intention to be my own best friend. To be a loving and good friend to the man I left. To continue keeping a guiding, gentle hand on my children. To treat those I know and those I don’t, why, everyone — my chickens and the lilacs and the monsters and the monster babies — with compassion. It is so simple. It will be so hard.

Sometimes, a Buddha must do a very terrible thing to another being, if only because they must go a different way. They will meet much suffering once they launch out, suffering in ways they couldn’t have imagined, especially since the first impulse to leave felt like liberation, but a freedom soon eclipsed by grief. Even so, they must go because they can no longer live in confusion, live without seeing. They want to wake up. Please, please forgive me. I had to wake up before I died.