“…enoughness has absolutely zero to do with accomplishing, nothing to do with achieving, and is not at all about trying to be good enough. Rather, the realization of enough is right here in the fullness of presence, in the tenderness of an open heart, in the silence that is listening to this life.” Tara Brach
The story of the Buddha and Kisa Gotami is familiar to many. How she was desolate at the death of her little boy, how she was crazed with fear about her future status in her husband’s family, how she was delusional as she begged the Buddha to heal her fear and sorrow by bringing her child back to life, how he invited her to attempt to find a tiny mustard seed from a home where there was no experience of loss or death, how she failed, how she slowly was able to see for herself the truth of impermanence and then take refuge in admirable friends, in her own value and in a deeper reality.
I love the story. What touches me most about it goes beyond the deep teaching itself. I delight in how the Buddha taught it. He could have launched into sterile and esoteric teachings about impermanence or karma or emptiness. He could have judged and scolded her, dismissing her as an ignorant, foolish and unimportant woman. He could have ridiculed her obvious delusions. He could have turned his back and walked away.
Instead, in such a kind way, he listened. He was simply and fully present; he saw and welcomed her exactly as she was. He was sturdy and clear of course, but he did not treat her as broken and he did not immediately shatter her hope. Rather, he invited her to, slowly and in her own way, digest her own loss. With that emerging awareness, he then guided her to remember her place in the family of things. For her part, she asked; she was willing to consider the unknown, to explore. She allowed herself to receive. With the Buddha’s wise guidance, she slowly found her own path forward. She saw that she was enough.
Kisa Gotami is a sister to me. I came to a spiritual path out of a perhaps similar sense of trying to fix something that was broken. I had practiced hard and very early to be the most perfect and spiritual Catholic girl. Needing a refuge from ongoing family tensions, I would get my little self out of bed early each morning and walk alone down the street to our neighborhood church to attend daily Mass. The lights, familiar ritual and presence of Jesus were comforts to me before a long day of measuring my value by how much I could please the demanding nuns at school and how much I could get my overworked and overstressed parents to smile. After eighteen years of this, it was a logical next step that I would enter a convent where I would spend the next eight years buried away from the world – and myself – as a Catholic nun.
In the convent, I encountered my own Buddha in Mary, a wonderful older nun who was willing to see me. With kindness and patience, she challenged the deeply fixed views about worthiness that had long kept me confined in rigid, patriarchal and at times, abusive systems. She encouraged me to find my own way. To this day, she is shocked that her small moments of wisdom and kindness had such an impact on me. With her support, I eventually left that life. I wandered out alone and without money or home or job or friends into an unknown and chaotic world. I made my way, soon abandoning all allegiance to what I then perceived to be the heartless structures and rules of all organized religion.
Years later, as a new clinical psychologist, like Kisa Gotami, it was the dying children in the hospital where I worked who helped to lead me back to spiritual practice. As I, too, struggled to deal with loss and my own clumsy powerlessness and profound ignorance, I came face to face with brokenness; intimacy with the suffering of others brought me to see more clearly my own. I was drawn again to spirit, this time to a home in the Buddha’s teachings on love and forgiveness, on compassion and presence. Over the years, there have been many more teachers and friends who, while not perfect, have relentlessly manifested that kind guidance and care.
Nevertheless, even now, I can still reel with theories and rules about how I “should” be. I can so easily land in an inner self-critical voice that can direct the shame and inadequacy born in those early years back upon myself. I can even think that there are others “out there” somewhere who actually are immune from confusion and mistake and who therefore are much more perfect than me. I smiled and recognized when I heard Ajahn Sucitto’s descriptions of a self-critical voice that “drives, but doesn’t nourish, sets unattainable goals or timelines, thinks in the absolutes of ‘should’ and ‘never’ and ‘always,’ and offers a general mood that sees without love or grace: didn’t quite make it…and…not likely to.”
Over and over, my practice continually reminds me to let go of all that thinking and come back to a tender and kind discernment of what does, or does not, nourish my heart and my life. It is enough; I am enough.