Buddhist Relief

I went to a Buddhist talk last night held by the Canberra Kadampa Buddhist Centre at the CSIRO Discovery Centre. The talk was given by the spiritual director of the Kadampa Buddhist Society, Geshe Rabten, who is normally based in Hong Kong, but is visiting Canberra for talks. The meditation was great. I think I was really ready for it, after the last few weeks of puppy-related suffering and I dropped into a wonderful state of peace. It was actually pretty timely. It made me look at the last few weeks of pain in a new way and it reminded me of some key ideas in Buddhism about the nature of suffering. He talked about how when we're in a difficult situation, our attention becomes very narrowed, so that the problem becomes massive in our minds, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else. This causes even more suffering. He talked about how the painful situation makes us feel very isolated from others, because we think we are the only ones going through it and this also causes even greater suffering. These two ideas really resonated with me. He talked about how important it is to find ways of feeling at peace even in the midst of suffering, otherwise the situations that cause us suffering will keep recurring again and again, until we get it. This made me very clear about what is a major cause of suffering for me, that recurs over and over. I can sum it up in the following phrase: I suffer when I feel left holding the baby. Our new puppy is the most recent baby. There's a great episode in Spongebob Squarepants, when Patrick and Spongebob find an orphaned clam, which they adopt and agree to raise together as a couple. Pretty quickly they fall into traditional roles, where Patrick goes off to work each day and Spongebob stays at home with the baby clam. There are hilarious scenes as they play out cliched parts. Patrick comes home later and later, promising each day to do his share of the child-minding, but obviously has no intention of doing this. He usually comes home to a scene where Spongebob is desperately multi-tasking while holding the baby clam. Mountains of diapers pile up, with Patrick promising again and again to do what he never ends up doing. Finally the couple get a shock when the clam decides to fly out of the house through an upper storey window, thinking that they have been negligent as parents, when in fact, the clam is actually old enough to leave the nest. It's a great episode. Even though, in this day and age, the cliched roles are less relevant to many couples, I do believe that even in families where both parents are working, the mother is more often-than-not, left holding the baby. When an infant is really young, this only stands to reason. This excuse becomes less and less plausible as the children get older, however. I have felt many times in the last fifteen years, that I've been left holding the baby. Each time Brian has got work far from our home, I have needed to be the main carer. It's a role almost genetically inherited. My mother did the same thing, as did hers (sadly, my grandmother never managed to fulfil the role and subsequently my mother being the eldest, was left holding the babies) Then there was my paternal grandmother who raised five children during World War II, while her husband was away in Papua New Guinea. Towards the end of her life, she became very bitter about how she never knew where he was, because he didn't write much. She found out afterward, that he was often based in Sydney, where she believed he must have been enjoying bachelor life, since he failed to tell her of his whereabouts. When he came home on shore leave, she usually got pregnant and it would be several months, if not years, before he came home again, at which time the events would repeat themselves. It's not a unique cause of suffering, in fact I would say it's a universal one, an age-old one, one that women have endured for as long as there was no extended family to help share the responsibilites of child care. So, the meditation we learnt, is designed to stop us from feeling like we are the only ones suffering as we are, to reduce the focus on the suffering and improve our karma, by actually helping others in an energetic way. Here are the steps: 1 Get calm and quiet in your mediation space. 2 Get in touch with the painful thoughts and feelings associated with a particular situation. Really feel them. 3 Think of others who may be feeling the same pain, who may be in the same kind of situation, or worse. Visualise them in their suffering. 4 Imagine their suffering leaving their bodies as thick black smoke and entering into your heart. 5 Imagine the thick black smoke mixing with your pain and suffering, dissolving and disappearing as it mixes together. 6 Imagine yourself giving, or sending feelings of peace and happiness to those people you have been imagining. That's it. I felt great afterward and today actually made some changes in the house to the puppy arrangement, that are giving me a sense of space again, which is a huge relief. The puppy is now contentedly sleeping outside of the laundry screen door, after a morning where I puppy-proofed our back yard. I intend to let her spend more time outside of the house from now on. This gives me space, where I am not being followed around the house all day long and reduces my poo/pee cleaning duties. Maybe the meditation even helped another woman somewhere in the world who is suffering because she has been left holding the baby. I hope so.

Puppy Landia

It's been a while since I had to care for a newborn or toddler, so maybe I don't remember that time of my life clearly any more, like it truly was. I wonder about my failing memory, because my current experience of raising a puppy reminds me in many ways of that early time in my children's life, but feels much, much worse. How could a small puppy be worse than raising kids, I wonder? My memory is that babies sleep a lot. They don't have razor-like teeth that destroy everything. They don't need a constant supply of new chewable objects to stop them from destroying everything. They pee and poo in diapers, minimising clean-up effort. They are completely portable in most situations (except workplaces) and can be taken most places, without too much trouble. Breastfeeding a baby releases lots of bonding endorphins, which helps to build loving feelings for the baby, within the mother. This chemical bond can help to relieve the stress caused by having a totally dependent creature taking total control over your life. Sometimes it's not enough though and I'll be the first to admit that I suffered mild to moderate post natal depression, at various times. What nobody told me before buying a puppy however, is that the experience of having a destructive, completely dependent and very demanding creature in one's care, can induce a sudden and horrendous post natal-like experience, that is not relieved by the wonderful chemical endorphins that come post-childbirth and can leave a woman feeling absolutely devastated. Last week, I told everyone it would have been easier to have had another baby. Last week I yelled at the dog, called it a shit of a dog, told it I never really wanted it, that I only gave in to pressure from my daughter to buy it. Last week I told myself that it was my husband and mother-in-law's fault for making me feel guilty for never wanting a dog. I told myself that frequent comments in favour of dogs always make me feel like I am somehow deficient, that I don't have enough room in my heart for a dog. That I am a lacking parent for not wanting a dog. As you can imagine, it's been a torturous, emotionally draining time. I think mostly, I am angry. I am angry that no one would listen to my pleas of "But who will care for the puppy while everyone's at school/work?". I am angry with myself for not really thinking this through. I applied for a job a few weeks ago, before we got the puppy. I am going for an interview soon and I think I have a good chance of getting the job. I am hoping that the dog will have developed enough bladder control to last for the five hours a day that I will be absent for this job, otherwise it will be sitting in pee all day, in its crate. I'm also hoping that the RSPCA is correct in asserting that a puppy feels comfortable and safe in a crate for several hours and that the experience won't turn it into an even more psychotic and destructive creature than it already is.