I pinned my guru, so where's my enlightenment?
Look, I know playful wrestling at a party isn’t an official bout or anything, but I’m pretty sure my guru was surprised (and delighted?) when I pinned them briefly. Not being a trained wrestler or grappler or whatever different martial arts might call it, I wasn’t going to move into any kind of decisive choke move or lock. It was enough to see both shoulders pinned to the ground briefly. Of course, my guru immediately called for a rematch and when they pinned me (easily because they have trained for years in the martial arts), they put a forceful forearm firmly against my throat. Maybe that’s why I’m not feeling enlightened, I’ve got to win best two out of three? At any rate, I felt it prudent to stop there before anyone got hurt–we were messing around on a wooden floor in street clothes and I kept feeling tempted to pick my guru up (I found them surprisingly light, as if they have hollow bird bones) and pull some kind of WWE pile driver, which would surely have resulted in physical mayhem in those conditions, probably to me because there was no way they’d let me pile drive them.
I’ve read a fair number of dharma books, graduating 10 years or so ago from the nice consensus buddhism nightstand type self-help ones to more electric practice manuals, and none of them ever suggested the path to enlightenment ended at “pin your guru in a wrestling match.” So I didn’t suggest we wrestle in order to wrest my enlightenment through some kind of feat of strength. In fact, they offered to wrestle after I shared that many of my graduate school parties ended in drunken wrestling in the front yard (I forgot to mention that these were typically preceded by group ballet lessons from the former dancer in our crew). But once we were wrestling, and I got the W, there was a rush of something, like, “here it comes, total enlightenment!”
This was the proof, of course, that I had not stepped into a fully different way of being, which was the invitation of the overall event for the weekend. Seeking to win, to achieve safety and acceptance through performance: this is my most distilled default state. These are the reference points written into the deep firmware of my nervous system.
Once again I am learning the lessons that I keep trying to teach my writing students. Lecturer, lecture thyself!
“Failure,” I declare sanctimoniously at the front of the classroom, “can often result in even more learning than success. I’d much rather you took a big swing and end up with a paper you regard as a failure than that you play it safe by using all the shortcuts you learned in high school for writing a competent paper.” So here I am eating my words, having not taken a big swing and still ended up with a failure.
During the event I had experienced some lightness, a sense of increased possibility, perhaps some extra freedom from my traditional scripts, but also a suspicion that I was refining my default ways of being rather than stepping into something truly different and unfamiliar. This suspicion was upsetting because, you guessed it, it meant that I had not “won” the event nor performed best at it. I had failed to step into a different way of being, and I guess I am fucking learning from it.
And what I am learning is the difference between seeing a pattern of thought and behavior (even one that seems “bad” like being a mansplaining know-it-all) and really seeing your shadow served on a plate in front of you and feeling like you’d rather puke than touch it or even look at it. Through meditation and interpersonal practices with like-minded folks I’ve come to see that finding the puke feeling exhilarating as well as disgusting is possible and even sometimes available, but these are topics for latter missives.
Pinning my guru showed me how fun it has been to be me, even if those spontaneous qualities may be exhausted from a career and raising children and show up a lot less often. These are ways of being available to me that I can still access and feel great. Pinning my guru also showed me that some of these ways of being are tinged with unskillful compulsions: to win, to dominate, to perform best. Yet, seeing these patterns didn’t make my stomach turn over, they kicked off yet another pattern: self improvement. I told myself: “Let’s find ways to be more spontaneously fun and drop the compulsion to win!”
Later, in describing these patterns to a partner in a zoom course, I felt my stomach turn as she asked: “and what kind of person finds it necessary to win, to be right all the time?” And there it was, the nausea rolling in my stomach and my immediate thought to pull away, shift the topic. I’m still not sure yet what name to put on this shadowy set of feelings I’m determined to avoid, but I do know there’s really no comparison between my intellectual interest in the lightly neurotic patterns that I had been working with and this embodied sense of complete revulsion.
As a degenerate practitioner, I won’t spin some tale of complete devotion that explains how my guru set this recognition in motion through orchestrating our wrestling match (they did note later that they let me win the first bout, but I still think I saw real surprise in their eyes after getting pinned). Instead, I’ll end with deep appreciation of their ability to meet me wherever I’m at and for being the type of teacher that will likely be both annoyed and amused at me calling them a guru throughout this piece.