​​Learning to Be: Remembering

This afternoon in the meditation hall, the sun smiles gently through tall glass windows, conspiring to create a pleasant gathering helping us reflect on how memory colours thinking, feeling and sensing both ourselves and the world. We settle on our cushions and chairs. Our teacher enters and wastes no time in casually informing us that,  “Memory is remembering in the present.”

 

And pauses.

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My jaw drops and remains open until I remember to close it. “What’s she talking about? Memory is in the past, isn’t it?”

 

This simple statement touches a raw nerve. A door has just been flung open, inviting me to engage with how my traumatic past begins my journey discovering who I really am right now. Although this challenges all my tightly held defences, I’m curious. Years of meditation convince me that as I can only ever be in the present, then remembering is also in the present.

 

I sit at my old pine desk and start by remembering my childhood.

 

6 months

Lying on my back in a Silver Cross pram with hood up, my mother pushes me along a grey, windy pavement in Hull. I travel backwards, past humming brrmmm brrrmmmm to my right (later labelled as traffic?), light and dark shapes on my left (shops?). Feeling left, right, no words, just feeling. If she were to turn the pram around, the humming bbrrrrrmmmmm would be on my left and shapes would be on my right. I feel and know everything is relative. Dreamed insight, imagination or memory?

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4 years

In a suburban summer garden with flowers, grass and flies, my smiling face and pudgy arms hold my flared skirt out sideways. “Oh, you are such a cute, pretty girl,” parents croon. I want to please them, but I am irritated. I’m far too earthy and stubborn for that mush. I’d rather take a stool to the end of the garden and sit with my back to the house or colour in my Sooty book.

Maybe I’m not a nice full of sugar and spice little girl? Oh dear. Or I can’t fit in with grown-up bullshit? Either way, will I get told off? My father seems to get me. When I purposely lock myself in my bedroom, he accepts I want to do that and he lets me. Mum is distraught, as I am not behaving like the good little baby girl she had imagined when playing with her dolls. I don’t fit.

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8 years

We are on the train from Hull to Hove. Grandpa has encouraged mum, his favourite daughter, to leave father in Hull and stay with my brother, sister and myself in his Edwardian home as her weight has plummeted to 7 stone and she can't cope.

Grandpa and Grandma are rocks of stability in an utterly dysfunctional family.

 

I love my Durham-born Grandpa Sydney, maverick son of Latvian Jewish refugees who was a piano player in silent movie cinemas, now turned racing tipster after a career flogging black market chocolates during the war, a not very successful career as he ate most of the chocolates himself. He was always self-employed, apart from one day’s employment as a book-keeper above a fish and chip shop in Hove, a career abruptly terminated by a heart attack, after which he wisely returned to self-employment.

 

Sabbath

Friday night is Sabbath night, even for non-practising Jews like my grandparents. Grandma Rivka makes gefilte fish, a good Jewish dish: moist, grey, lumpy. 

Grandpa Sydney enthuses, “Eeeee Rivka, that looks grand!” as he surveys the offering before him. 

“And how are her bowels today?” he adds, turning towards my mother. 

“I don’t think she’s been.”

“Oh aye, it’ll be liquid paraffin then.” I groan inwardly.

 

“Yaachchchhrrch”. Grandpa goes puce and pop-eyed. 

I wonder what’s the matter.

“Yeeeaachhhhhhhhh”.

“He’s choking on a fish bone,” groans Rivka, thumping him on the back.

“He’s always choking on fish bones,” recalls mum. 

Grandpa swallows some water and his eyeballs retreat. He seems to be breathing normally. 

Ahh, another family Sabbath.

 

Grandpa buys a 1930’s semi-detached house in a tree-lined road nearby for mum and us children to live in. Three young children and a fragile single mother are too much for an elderly couple to live with. My brother stays with them, but my baby sister and I move in with mum. My memories of living there are so traumatic that I can only remember it as very dark, cold and scary.

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10 years

Waiting

Hove General Hospital waiting room late October in the early 60’s is gloomy, grim, colourless and cold. Light bulbs in metal lampshades dimly illuminate rows of metal chairs and their hard wooden seats. There is no one else here. I shiver beside my exhausted mother not knowing what to do. A young, kindly man in a white lab coat quietly settles himself on her left side and speaks gently, almost apologetically to her. She looks aghast, but I also sense relief in her. Now she knows. She has pneumonia and pleurisy and needs to immediately go into this hospital. At least it is nearby.

​

It all happens so quickly. No, she hasn’t got pneumonia and pleurisy, she has tuberculosis, which explains her extreme weight loss. She must immediately go into an isolation ward at a hospital an hour’s bus ride away. I sit next to her in a taxi to the hospital, where she is admitted and I am not. I am not allowed to visit her for 6 months while she receives treatment. She waves to me from the first floor ward window. We part. Distraught, I weep for days.

​

Every other evening my stepfather visits mum on the gruelling, two-hour  freezing cold round trip to and from hospital. My one-year old sister also has TB and is in hospital with mum. As I do not have TB, I am left alone at home, with a hot water bottle, rug, supper, TV and a candle in case of power cuts, of which there are several in this snowy winter. My brother comes to sit with me sometimes, but not always. I feel lonely, abandoned and terrified.

​

There is a certain quality to the gloom of an evening sitting feeling abandoned in front of the telly with a hot water bottle. A central ceiling light bulb is not quite bright enough to be cheerful. Dimness penetrates the mind and body like a cold, damp mist, which as they say here in Suffolk, “It goes through yer, not round yer.” It has taken me years not to be triggered by fear and depression when sitting in a dimly lit evening room.

​

I realise some of this trauma has lightened when I come back home hip replacement surgery a few years ago. A cold February with a seriously foul, orange-alert storm brewing means only one thing in rural Suffolk: power cuts. On my own, hobbling round my pitch-black house on crutches with a powerful torch strapped to my head and bitter wind howling outside, I remember my youthful trauma. To my surprise I realise I’m okay. It’s a nuisance, and my hip hurts, but I’m okay. Simply here. Meditation is really helping.

11 years

Good girl

“If you’re not a good girl, mummy will die,” pronounces mother, while my 11 year-old body reclines naked, vulnerable in the bath. 

“What?” I say. 

I worship her slender, femme-fatale Marlene Dietrich eyebrows, Scarlet O’Hara red-painted lips and rouged high cheekbones, terrified she will die, or faint if I breathe the wrong way.

“If you’re not a good girl, mummy will die.” She milks it, perfectly timing the jugular with narcissistic precision.

 

Mother is now home after six months coughing and making fluffy rabbits in her tuberculosis isolation ward. She has gained some weight but the medication makes her vomit. Home is poverty enveloping us with gloomy black mould, freezing cold, a tiny paraffin heater in a stinking dark hall. Brother is now permanently with grandparents, divorced father remains in Hull, sister has just come home from foster care, stepfather is bent, depressed, caring for us all. Poor guy, mum knows how to wind him round her little finger.

​

I pray at night that mum will recover. I have recurrent dreams about scales, hundreds of them with huge black clouds above me, reflecting depression and the black mould slowly growing on my bedroom wall. I keep poking my toes through holes in damp flannelette bedsheets but no-one bothers to mend them or find sheets with no holes. There’s no let up in the ever-shifting sands of uncertainty: just as things seem to be settling, mum has another eruption of spots, faints, is sick or lies around while step-father serves her and I worry she’ll die.

​

Mashed jacket potato with lashings of butter is rated top-of-the-line comfort food along with home-made hamburgers and gravy made by my step-father. Banana and custard are good nursery follow-ups. Food is love. No wonder I get fat.

​

I am also confused, conflicted. I want to be caring and helpful, but something feels off that makes me hold back. Why is mum telling me I could be a little nurse for her? I never imagined myself in that role but dutifully dress up in the nurse’s costume she buys for me. I am fed and watered but feel emotionally unseen and ignored. My sister looks fed up too, but I don’t have the capacity to relate to her lovingly.

​

15 years

Everything is relative

I’ve been discovering art, dance, drama, writing at school with visits to theatres and exhibitions in London funded by Grandma. I begin to express myself creatively. Crouched on my bed staring into our suburban garden, I am birthing an insight, something exciting and new. I still have my fluffy rabbits. When mother enters my room without knocking, I uncharacteristically tell her to bugger off, I’m THINKING about The Meaning of Life. 

Quivering, I feel my body may explode.

​

Then I see. Really see how everything is relative, that how things seem to be depends on my state of mind. Reality is a matter of attitude. But I don’t really know what to do with this insight, it’s just a seed, a gift, carried from the pram. Or remembering from another life? Either way it feels momentous.

​

”She is getting difficult,” I hear mum say. You bet. I am fed up with her dying swan games and manipulation that go way beyond genuine illness. I refuse to collude. And besides I am an adolescent and know how to flounce. We both get so annoyed with each other that she slaps my face. I quickly slap her back. I stand my ground.

​

Something has changed. We draw our lines.

 

16 years

Brother where are you?

Knock knock. Curled up in agony with a hot bottle nursing period pain cramps I am too feeble to crawl from the back dining room into the hallway to open the front door. Mum has to do it instead. I hear her and a man’s voice as they walk into the front room. Too bleary to care, I fade back into a hot water bottle sleep.

 

Mum appears in front of me frozen like a statue, “I think you’d better come into the front room.” Oh. What now.

Clutching my bottle I totter into the front room. A man in a blue-grey uniform is sitting on the arm of the old maroon 1950’s sofa. Odd.

“He’s from the RAF and has news for us.” Oh crikey, my brother’s in the RAF.

Apparently my brother committed suicide, hung himself. Why? Don’t know.

“It happens quite a lot,” explains the man. "He ejaculated when he died. That’s common too." Oh. Not much else said while I was in there.

 

I am devastated. Mum can’t cope with travelling to the funeral.

​

21 years

Stripping

Awareness meditation is like peeling away layers of an onion. What are we peeling away? Delusions mainly. Teachers say that when these ingrained delusions soften and dissolve, what remains is boundless, naked awareness, joy, love, compassion, creativity and wise insight. But I’m not quite there yet. My need for money, lots of it, is paramount, so I can free myself from poverty.

​

A blonde-wigged burlesque stripper, I pose seductively in a silver lamé gown edged with voluminous white boa feathers fanned out around me, my look-but-don’t-touch phoney smile knowing I will soon be free from poverty. Glamour is only wig and false eyelash deep, but the power of money earned buys me a house. Then I will do something meaningful with my life.

​

Life is colourful, if sleazy. I twirl my boa feathers in an Antwerp nightclub run by Big Frank, who is fine with me despite his reputation of being a bastard. My husband and I travel to Amsterdam and stay for a few days in a noisy hotel near the red light district. He decides that a striptease ‘double act’ using a blow-up rubber doll as partner will go down well with continental audiences in Belgium. I am less than enthusiastic, but he insists, so I go along with it. We purchase Esmerelda in one of Amsterdam’s many sleazy sex shops, pack her deflated in a suitcase, then off the three of us go in a train back to Antwerp, hoping the border checks don’t inspect our suitcase.

​

My photographer husband drinks like a fish, which doesn’t bother me at that time as I am so co-dependent, but is why I eventually leave him. We live in a studio apartment building in Antwerp, with me going off to work at about 9pm, leaving him to his own devices. That particular night - Thursday keeps coming to mind - I return home about 6am. About to enter the foyer, I notice a dark-haired young man loading a familiar-looking suitcase into the boot of a car parked outside our block of flats. Gosh, I didn’t know you can get these suitcases here, but there you are…

​

Reaching our first floor studio flat, I see the front door is open showing our contents in disarray with my husband slumped in a drunken stupor on a chair. The female nextdoor neighbour rushes in, hysterically babbling about a man with dark hair trying to break her door down and how my husband gallantly rescues her by luring him into our apartment with offers of a booze-up. Husband gets as drunk as a skunk, while his new companion is sober enough to raid the apartment and make off with our valuable cameras in our suitcase.

 

I phone the local police station and report the incident, not really expecting to get the items back. A couple of hours later we have a phone call from the police saying that the camera and ‘other items’ have been recovered with the driver being arrested after having drunkenly crashed his car in the middle of town. The police turn up at our flat with the suitcase, cameras, Esmerelda and massive grins on their faces. I am hugely embarrassed and utterly fed up with my husband for his behaviour of ‘if there is a problem, drink your way out of it.’ After we later process the film in the camera, we discover pictures of police having a great time blowing up the doll and laughing themselves silly. I have no idea what else they do with Esmerelda on this, her busiest night of the year.

​

This incident leaves me feeling unsafe and vulnerable. I have been so dependent on my husband, believing that if he travelled with me, I would feel protected from the criminal elements of nightclub life. Mistrust and doubt begin to creep into my mind, but I am not yet willing to face that I am with a manipulative, unreliable alcoholic.

​

35 years

India and Nepal

Wanting to explore weaving art, psychology and spirituality, I embark on a fine art degree. I  am already immersed in Jungian archetypes with previously representational drawings and paintings becoming more abstract as I start painting the mind, not the body; the inner weather rather than the surface of things. This exploration leads me to India and Nepal searching for spiritual enlightenment, knowing that here spirituality can reveal itself in completely unexpected ways. I know, even as I go, that here spirituality does not arrive polished or predictable. It appears sideways, through dust and open-ness, through moments that undo rather than confirm, revealing itself in ways I could never have imagined.​

​

In Nepal we travel from Kathmandu to Chitwan Wildlife Park for a few days’ safari, riding white water, sleeping in a mud hut and crossing a crocodile infested river in an ox cart. Returning to Kathmandu, we miss the bus at Thali Bazaar because our polite British queuing leaves us standing while everyone else muscles onboard, departing in a cloud of dust. An hour later, another bus arrives. I am hot, have a headache and am getting in touch with my inner stubbornness. “We are bloody well getting on it,” I growl to my second husband. Not caring, I push and shove with the chickens into this scrap heap in best Nepali style and we are on board.

Sweltering and rattling over narrow mountain roads for seven hours, I am squashed on the engine mount next to a young Nepali driver who crosses himself and prays while leaning out of the window on every bend checking that the bald tyres haven’t blown. I gaze, terrified, at the churning river two hundred feet below. After a couple of exhausting hours trying to meditate my way out of feeling freaked out, I let go and accept I will die along with everyone else in this rattling bone-shaker. Terror dissolves and I relax.

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Next morning as I contemplate hazy mountains surrounding Kathmandu from our hotel roof, this acceptance temporarily melts all my defensive boundaries into a blissful experience of boundless joy.

 

This is the profound spiritual teaching I have come for.

 

 

What Remains? An inquiry

Experimental excerpt from Image and Text used in this book, using art

 

Who am I? Does anything unchanging remain 

When clinging falls away?

Am I this ageing body 

Not the same from one heartbeat to the next? 

If so, this Self must change from one heartbeat to the next 

And does not remain

 

Am I these passing sensations 

Touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting? 

If so, then this Self is just a changing sensation 

And does not remain

 

Am I this stream of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, opinions, memories and habits 

Arising and passing changing each second? 

If so, then Self must change each second 

And does not remain

 

Am I these passing feelings and emotions 

Arising and dissolving second by second Or lying dormant in the depths of cells themselves 

Changing each second? 

If so, then Self is just a passing feeling 

Grasped at as permanent

And does not remain

Who

Am

I

 

54 years

Letter to My Mum, sent in response to her asking why I want to ordain

Dearest Mum,

As you might be wondering why I want to ordain as a Buddhist nun, I want to explain to you what led me to this decision, and to reassure you that you won’t be losing a loving daughter.

​

In the Buddhist tradition, we see our mothers as being kind because they gave birth to us, nurtured us and gave us the body in which we can awaken from the sleep of delusion and suffering. So, from the depths of my being I thank you for having brought me into this world, having fed me and cared for me when I was unable to fend for myself.

​

We shared many laughs, which have helped me take myself and life less seriously. We had our share of suffering: when you were in hospital with TB for 6 months and we couldn’t see each other, having no money, the long freezing cold winters, the breakup of our family and my brother’s suicide. It was hard for all of us, but it taught me not to take anything for granted, to have compassion for others and to look more deeply for an understanding of what we are and what the nature of suffering is.

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Dearest mum, you have suffered so much yourself – I can only begin to imagine the effect that being bombed in the war and being buried under an entire building at the age of 13 must have had on you. Feeling your suffering and my suffering, which is also the suffering of many, I wanted to help, but didn’t know how.

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When at 21 the opportunity arose for money and power as a stripper, I jumped at this as a way out of my fears of being poor and powerless. I was able to travel and use my creative talents, so at least I did the job well! A lot of it was about getting money, which enabled me to buy a house. Married by then, I slowly began to realize my husband was an alcoholic. As he became increasingly psychotic using drink and drugs, I became increasingly frightened; I don’t think anyone except his brother understood the unfolding nightmare.

​

So, dear mum, I don’t know what you would have done in this situation, but my reaction was to wonder why all this had happened to me. By then I was so fed up with stripping – the utter phoniness of glamour, the night work, being an object of sexual desire. I wanted to find myself and do something fulfilling with my life. I realized that although earning a lot of money solved some material problems, it brought little lasting happiness or insight.

My psychotherapist friend Mary was very supportive. She helped me remember that we create our own reality (something I had intuited at age 15 but not followed up on). She encouraged me to start looking within myself, taking me to courses on psychology, spirituality and healing. These replaced my desire for personal power with a desire for self awareness and to help others.

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I stopped stripping off clothes and began stripping off layers of anxiety, fear and trauma and began learning to love myself and discover who I really was. I had some extraordinary experiences showed me that I am not my body. I had psychotherapy and art therapy and started teaching. I learned so much then, but depression and anxiety continued to haunt me and I realized I needed something deeper than psychotherapy. Studying painting helped me discover myself at a deeper level, and this led me to meditation. This was like coming home because it dealt with the causes of suffering and how to find lasting peace.

Dear mother, I so want to dissolve my own suffering and to help anyone else who is interested to do the same. The more peaceful, wise minds there are, the better the chance of a peaceful world. So, why do I want to be a nun, why can’t I just practice as a layperson? Habits are hard to crack, and I have 54 years worth of habits relying on food, sex, money, entertainment, houses, clothes, career, status, friends, defences for happiness. While these have offered temporary enjoyment, they have not led me to the lasting wisdom, joy, contentment, awake-ness and loving kindness I am looking for.

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I need more boundaries to help me stay focused and not to be distracted, a bit like corralling a wild horse while taming it, and the vows and robes of an ordained person are a profound boundary. I will live simply at home, meditating, doing art and teaching. Just preparing for ordination I am beginning to feel calmer and clearer. I think this is because I have turned my mind away from always wanting this and that materially, so I am more content.

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You may be puzzled about what this awakened mind is. The best analogy I know of is that it is like unchanging, spacious, open sky, always there behind the darkest of daytime clouds. To discover this unchanging, compassionate, boundless awareness and help others seems to be the best thing I can do with the rest of my life. I will always enjoy the amazing display of the world in all its multiple facets, but I know that any deep, lasting joy can only come from within.

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Dearest mum, I hope that you too are beginning to find some inner peace and joy, and I will always be around for you. I do hope this letter helps you understand.

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With all my deepest love Denise xxxxxxx​​​​​​​​