“Cuca Maria (how She endearingly called me), worry not, I promise you there will come a time when you will be indifferent to this topic and person. Then you will know you have become free”. Little did I understand at the time how - with her habitual wisdom and direct sparce words - my dear sister - who was already a teenager when I was born and generously shared her bedroom with me and my toys as she was taking her law degree and unexpectedly tragically passed away last week - was guiding me towards the development of Equanimity.
A tree does not consider whether those who seek its shelter are deserving or not of its shade and shares its perfume even with those who cut it down. It is to this metaphorical “indifference” or “Equanimity” that my sister was pointing to. Maybe that is too lofty or absurd of a goal to have as human beings: treating all the same, making no differences, and potentially serving all with our talents in the same way, without “specialness”. Our biological system, particularly our brains, seem to be wired for survival, for win-lose perceptions of situations, for considering with special attention or “love” those who can give us what we believe we lack. When our brains lead us to perceive attack, our mind-body system default mode gets triggered into the habitual fight-flight-or freeze mode. And our well-meaning parents, educators and friends have often told us “don’t just stay there, do something”. So, we tend to run around like headless chicken, tricking our minds to believing that activity is meaningful just for its own sake… somehow silencing our deep longing for purpose with the noise of our running.
Having rushed into marriage at 23, I was not long after told by my wise husband (also not long after to be ex-husband) “you live your life as if you were running in moving sand”. It took the pain of a divorce and extreme exhaustion to understand the depth of his metaphor. And to change. To go from an activity bias to a reflective stance. To experiment with - in the words of the “father of mindfulness in the West” Thich Nhat Hanh – “don’t just do something, stay there”. You may say that I have learned to be more like a tree than a runner. More stillness, less judgement, and more equanimity.
During our Adam’s Choice Dare to (Un)Learn – Find Within Your Self session we challenged our enthusiastic participants to unlearn. To go back to being children and drawing a Tree of Life, of what they envisioned their fulfilled life to be, as if it was a Tree. We shared a simple model inspired by the work of Karl Jung and Klaus Moller (amongst other authors) where:
As Thomas Merton poignantly counsels: “He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others.” It is my hope that our powerful “If I were a Tree” metaphor may inspire us to greater self-reflection and to Finding Within Our Selves the nourishment we need to lead happy and creative lives.