A dear friend was visiting and talking about how much her daughter is struggling in school—she is downright depressed– and yet she is super reluctant to change, to do something else. As my friend spoke, I considered the daughter’s position and thought her misery and struggle seemed odd, after all, the daughter has choices: There are other schools to which she could apply, she has plenty of financial support, emotional support as well. Still, she feels stuck.

My friend and I chatted about how hard it is ‘at that age’, the expectations we have for ourselves, the fears of how others will judge us, that create such a trap. Eric said, “It’s like being locked in a room with the lock on the inside, having locked it yourself, and yet believing you are stuck”. His comment really hit me, and I remembered a video Mae Neecha sent a while back.

In the video there was a cute little dog with a box on its head. As a result of the box, the dog just kept running around running into things around it. Neecha asked me, “Why don’t you just remove the box?” Easier said than done I had thought. But Eric’s comment really got me thinking about this question again, about how we create our own traps.

Our traps are born in our minds, from our wrong views. Obviously being born, continuing to strive and cling in samsara is the ultimate trap of our own making. Still, starting a little smaller…

I have another friend, with a newly born obsession with sending her kids to private Jewish school. A few months ago, she and her husband were fine with their life, with the way things were going and the school choices for their kids. Then suddenly, in the wake of the Israel Palestine conflict, my friend became convinced the kids needed a Jewish education.

With no easy options in her small town, the struggle was on: She had to look at schools further away, try and dig-up the money for them, move to a totally new place, buy a new house. It pains me to see how much stress her and her husband are taking on. How they are tossing away an old life that they seemed to enjoy, for something new, uncertain, and much more difficult. All because of ideas in their mind about ‘Jewish identity’ , ‘what it means to be a good parent’, ‘what will make children successful’. 

These are ideas and beliefs, they aren’t fixed  — in fact, in my Jewish friend’s case,  they can change almost overnight, in response to a geopolitical conflict thousands of miles away. Still, as they foment in the mind, these ideas, these identities and visons for the future,  begin to feel solid. A new Atta is born, we get stuck, blocked by them.

Trust me, COMPASSIONATE ALANA knows all about this.

If there is such a thing as being a “compassionate person”, I have to determine the value, the reward, of becoming such a compassionate person myself. As soon as I assume that being a compassionate person is both possible and desirable/rewarding, I have to try and become one.

To do so, I have to first create criteria of what the identity actually entails and then I need to imagine the qualities and behaviors that will prove that I am on the right track, that I can look to in order to measure and mark my success. In essence, I need to define compassion –some one who is willing to sacrifice desire, pleasure, self, for others –and then create markers, qualities and behaviors of said ‘compassionate person’ and follow them unwaveringly.

 Compassionate Alana doesn’t eat animals, never mind the hardship that puts on herself and her care givers. Compassionate Alana pretends she can just endure difficult relationships, stressful moves, for the love of others. Never mind that the endurance is grudging, imaginary really, considering the hurtful temper-tantrums she throws in those relationships, new cities, burdening those very same loved ones the whole time. Compassionate Alana hugs homeless people, till for fear of disease she doesn’t, and she melts down at a retreat, crying about her failures to be the compassionate person she wants to be, she said herself was worth it to be, she grew stuck on becoming and proving, till of course she wasn’t…

This here is a trap. This is the locked door I locked for myself, from the inside, bag over head hitting shit. Looks like its not just a problem for those of a ‘certain age’…

Never mind that, in addition to being a self-created trap, this is also utter nonsense. Like the blue eye/brown eye experiments,  in which kids simply started to believe that eye color corresponds to intelligence and worthiness, just because they were told so in the service of some sociology study, it is totally arbitrary, devoid of meaning outside of the minds of people who believe it.

My beliefs about being a compassionate Alana, a strong willed Alana, a healthy Alana, a good Buddhist, or wife, or employee, or student Alana, a beautiful Alana, a cultured Alana, a deserving Alana, a wise Alana, a worldly Alana, etc. Those beliefs are based on nothing substantial or absolute at all. Arbitrarily decided qualities ‘proven’ by arbitrarily decided actions. This is just shifting 3s and 4s, fabrications.  It is not a path to meaning or identity, it is just a path to suffering. Once I affix these ideas, these absolutes, in my mind, I become slave to them.