(This is a post that I wrote on and off through my stay in California, battling my grandmother’s virus-addled PC.  Hope you don’t catch anything!  - MamaDharma)

Tonight I read a stunning interview in The Sun Magazine (excerpted online but really worth reading in its entirety) with Kittissaro and Thanissara, a couple who lived as Buddhist monks for years before abandoning the monastery to live in the world together.  The interviewer included a quote that held quite a charge for me:

“Being in a relationship is the razor’s edge of Buddhist practice.”

I agree with this in principle, but as Kittissaro noted, for some the practice is learning “to be still or to be alone.” 

These days I feel so far from that. 

I’ve always said that I do my best work in relationship, but I don’t know how true that is.  I know that I feel safe in relationships, and I know that I intensely dislike the sense of vulnerability I feel when on my own.  Yet I know that both of these, safety and intense vulnerability, are illusions.  They are veneers that I paint onto life, a technicolor stream of “wanted” and “unwanted” events. 

Today I spent some time with my best friend from high school.  We vainly tried to keep our preschoolers from crawling under the table as we attempted to catch up over breakfast.  We are both single moms, intelligent, educated, attractive women, and almost all we talked about was men.  The exes who had devastated us; the exes who are the unflagging targets of our anger and attraction; their deadbeat ways; the search for “the one” while knowing that neither of us would probably have the energy for “the one” if he rode up to our front doors on a white, gleaming, steed; the merits of free online dating sites vs. paid ones; the pluses and minuses of having a FWB in his 20s, as she does: (better performance vs. the potential for falling in love with someone, well, in their 20s).  

Perhaps we spent a tenth of the conversations on our careers and our goals.  We did talk a bit about our kids, but in general relation to our exhaustedness, physical and emotional. 

I saw in her a mirror of my own frustration, longing, dissatisfaction, and self-loathing, tempered by a hesitant certainty that I am better than all of that man-related cavorting and disgust.  In some ways, neither of us have changed all that much since high school.  We’ve learned and grown and gotten stronger, made mistakes and accomplished amazing things, but 20 years later, we’re still trying to figure out how to find love.

Yes: good for me.  I see it.  But I don’t stop it.  I can whine and make excuses: that I am helpless to stop it, that I have a lot of unresolved father wounds, that I don’t have time for therapy or practice.  But the bottom line is that I am unwilling to stop.  I keep up the hunt for a man to save me and/or distract me from my general dissatisfaction with the way things are.

What can you say to that?  Awareness alone is not enough.  One of the aspects of the Eightfold Path in Buddhist practice is “right effort.”  One explanation of right effort that I found interesting was this: “Without effort, which is in itself an act of will, nothing can be achieved, whereas misguided effort distracts the mind from its task, and confusion will be the consequence.”

I feel that I have been spending a lot of time involved in “misguided effort,” which lately has been using much of my non-working, non-parenting, non-writing energy on prowling online dating sites, feeling depressed about not getting more “attention,” feeling disappointed about the dating experiences that I do have, and pursuing men for ahem, unskillful reasons, such as the fact that they remind me of my ex.

As 2009 approaches, I am not interested in making a whole slew of New Year’s resolutions, except for one: to the extent that I am able, I hereby set an intention to direct my effort and energy in ways that nourish me and enrich me as a person, in ways that allow me to be of service to my son and to others; in ways that enhance awakening rather than keep me asleep.

It is the oldest cliche in the world, but if I put a tenth of the effort into loving myself as I do into trying to find a new lover/SO, I would be a much happier, more balanced, and more evolved individual, perhaps of more benefit to the planet.

Here’s to a right-effort filled 2009!