This story is about yet another event that occurred on my trip to Teotihuacán (“Teo”) with don Miguel Ruiz and his apprentices. In this instance I was working as part of a “men’s group” on the grounds of the hotel. This was a group of thirty or so men, with five or six male leaders helping us to move our assemblage points. We did a number of strangely impactful activities, such as be “born” from a nagual woman, and other exercises.
The event that made the biggest impression on me was associated with recapitulating a parent. I picked on my father as the focus of my attention for the activity. I went as far back as I could go in my memories of him and found that he was a frightening and not very loving figure in my early youth. I recalled the times that he would beat me with a belt: including the last time, when I finally refused to react and he just put his belt back on with the comment that he guessed that approach of discipline would no longer work. He didn’t physically beat me very often, but when he did it certainly made a huge impression. What he mainly did was give me “tongue lashings” that consisted of lengthy, heated, highly insulting lectures. I suppose he must have started that approach after he found that the belt no longer worked. During these lectures I would wish that he would just go back to the belt and get it over; especially when he would force one of my friends to attend one of his tongue lashings. It was bad enough for me to endure the humiliation, but it was almost intolerable for him to do it in public, and lash out at my friends in the same way.
My clearest memories of him beyond that were often things like his loud and outrageous arguments with my mother. He would accuse her of things that she had clearly not done, and then refuse to listen to her side of the story. Instead, he would continue to hammer at her for imagined actions or words. It was so frustrating that it made me want to shout or run away.
However, as I sat there thinking about him I found that I had many good memories too. I have fond memories of times we went boating, camped in the mountains, explored ghost towns and abandoned gold mines, and many other things. It was really a mixed bag of good and bad, but for the purposes of the exercise for the day I focused on the negative aspects of our relationship. I did this partly in an attempt to better understand my brother’s relationship with Pa; which was a difficult one based on my brother’s negative experiences as a child. I could not fully understand the difficulties. Maybe I happened along after the bulk of the negative feelings had dwindled and we did more family things together, so it wasn’t as bad for me. I think my brother missed out on most of our fun outings because they started happening after he was too old to attend. He is six years older than I am, and we probably starting taking more outings when I was nine or so.
I had been sitting on the ground with my eyes closed, recalling my memories of my father. It had gotten pretty emotionally charged, I was close to tears and becoming very angry at my father for treating me like he did, and for treating my brother like he did. I was angry about being beaten, I was angry at the tongue lashings, I was angry at being insulted in front of my friends, I was angry at his treatment of my mother, I was just plain hurt and angry at him.
As I sat there in my anger, all of a sudden I felt a change in myself. It was a very odd feeling of change, one that I have never experienced before or afterward. It was as if I had turned into a flexible, hollow cylinder – shaped into a circle like a donut. I then turned “inside out”; somehow thoughts and feelings that were inside of me, bent, turned, and flexed. I literally felt like I was turning inside out, being pulled or pushed through a small hole. I finally popped through that little hole and found myself whole again, but with a totally different point of view about my father. I now realized that he had done the very best that he could at all times. It wasn’t that he was trying to be mean, nasty, or anything like that – it was just that sometimes the best that he could do wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. My anger about him had nothing to do with him, it was entirely to do with me. I wanted him to act in a certain way, and when he didn’t (or couldn’t) I was angry with him for that. I then felt that all of my anger was gone. I no longer had any reason to judge him. All that I could do was appreciate what he did right and feel slightly sorry for him for the things that he didn’t do right.
Once I got past the trauma of going from anger and fear, to love and compassion, I opened my eyes. Ted (one of Miguel’s teachers) was sitting in front of me with his face about two inches in front of me. I opened my eyes to look directly into his eyes. This happened several times on the journey. It seems like whenever we were asked to close our eyes and do something, when I opened them there would be Ted’s eyes, inches away from me. Even when I didn’t think he was anywhere around it would happen. I talked to him about it and he didn’t seem to realize that it was happening, but I noticed because it was such a shocking and repeated thing during that week. It was nice because he has a way of looking right into my soul, but it was always a surprise. I felt that he was guiding me deeper and deeper into myself during that week.
From that moment on I have found that I have much more patience with people. I now believe that people almost always do the best that they can at the moment, given what they have to work with. There is no reason to get angry, or feel insulted or anything like that. They are doing their best, sometimes it is less than either they or I would like, but it is still the best that they can accomplish. This strange turning inside out was one of those changing points in my life. It felt like a physical event, not just an imagining of a shift of point of view. I not only turned inside out with respect to my feelings about my father, but it has changed my worldview.