The Stories that Heal Us: a buddhist tale of acceptance
Practical plans are great in working through the process of separation or divorce, here’s The Dad Resource Plan if that’s what you need. To compliment the practical, sometimes the soul needs story to make sense of things. Here is a buddhist teaching story of finding acceptance when we wish things would be different than they are.
Years ago, I was on a meditation retreat in Colorado and the teacher shared a Buddhist parable about a woman named Kisa Gotami who has lost her son and is seeking a way to bring him back to life. She sought out the buddha because she heard that he had helped many people to heal their pain.
The buddha wanted to help the grieving mother, so he gave her a quest: find a mustard seed from a family that had not known loss or death. Kisa Gotami set out immediately, believing that with such a magical mustard seed, the holy man could revive her son. So she went door to door through the whole region.
Finally, after a time, she returned to the buddha and explained that, even after searching far and wide, she had not found a single family unfamiliar with grief.
She recounted that in searching for the mustard seed, her desire to alter fate and revive her son had given way to a sense of compassion and acceptance for what she could not change.
In the end, it was not a magical cure that healed Kisa Gotami, but the stories shared by the families she visited, which assured her that she was amongst others who understood what she wrestled with.
Healing after divorce is a lot like the search for the mystical mustard seed. There's no magic bullet. But you'll find some good people who get what you're going through. And their stories will offer guidance on the way through.
It’s curious to me as well that it was a mother in this story who was willing to ask neighbors and strangers for the cure to her grief. Had the protagonist been a man, would he have done what so many guys do, and tried to face the challenge on his own? Or would he have found his own way to connect.
I’ve never asked anyone for a mustard seed, but the other day I borrowed some bolt cutters from our neighbor to open up our trailer, which I’d absent-mindedly padlocked the keys inside of. I’m never excited to admit when I get myself in a pickle, but in this case the reward was getting to know our neighbor better, and learning that he’d been a pit crew mechanic for the Jaguar racing team.
And I’ve listened to many tell their stories of relationship, the beginnings, middles, ends and new beginnings. Each has wisdom in it.
The truth is, divorce has affected nearly everyone in the US, either in their own relationship, as children of divorced parents, or by being in proximity to friends or loved ones who split up. Many people vex over why that is, or what to do about it, but for the time being, it presents an opportunity to venture past the small talk and get to know how others in our lives have met the challenge of caring for what is important in the imperfect (and beautiful) human lives we live.
A challenge to act on: ask someone in your life who went through divorce and is open to talking candidly what got them through, and how they’ve grown from the experience.
photo credit: Alyona Yankovska
