What shape is your tree?

What shape is your tree?

We are born perfect potential, a seedling landing on soil able to produce germination. We begin to grow freely, reaching toward a perfect “sun” but are soon frustrated as our needs are not met and external influences pull and push. Imperfect parents, peers, religious leaders, teachers — twisted and bent trees themselves — unknowingly or knowingly place boulders in our way, causing us to twist and turn as we grow. We arrive at adulthood a misshapen tree ourselves, not without some joy in life — branches that get some sun or some flowers growing here or there — but not the whole, tall straight tree we might have been. Those boulders are ever present, shaping our decisions and coloring our world.

If nothing happens to intervene, we grow amongst these boulders until the day we die.

If we are lucky, we see our mistake earlier. If we are lucky, something in our life has led us to take up meditation or therapy and something else has led us to pursue it with enough effort that one day, a miracle happens: we wake up and realize that the boulders are illusions. The truth is that there was only ever soft soil beneath our feet and blue sky above. The boulders were a creation of our minds at an age when we didn’t have the choice to see them for what they were. After all, it was the all powerful people around us on whom we depended who put them in place. But now, as adults, we have a choice, we can stand alone and face the truth.

Once this miracle happens, the work is not done, however. With it will come an appreciation for how we became the shape we are, but growing straight requires something else. It requires that we revisit the moments in our life that shaped us, those lonely, terrifying, humiliating, embarrassing, frustrating, anger filled times when our growth was redirected, when we rejected parts of ourselves, let other parts die, twisted and turned to stay alive.

It is somewhat of a diabolic thing that the obstacles we must confront in order to grow straight and tall are EXACTLY those that we have grown to avoid, but there is no other way. Our trunk will not re-shape unless we release what is held within it that keeps it twisted and bent.

The truth is that everything dark, scary, needy, hateful, and depressing that we feel as adults is just the product of another imaginary boulder we haven’t yet debunked. Remove them all, and life becomes something vastly different, straight, tall, and radiant. Buddha nature — free from the presence of illusions (what Buddha called Maya).

[from my blog at http://improvinguponsilence.wordpress.com]