A piece from Dwight:
A couple of weeks ago The Adult Children of Addictive and Dysfunctional Families, a self help group I attend, decided to have a business meeting. I agreed to chair the meeting and minute it. Given the fact that the group consisted of ‘dysfunctional adult children’, I felt we did a good job. At the next meeting, I presented a draft copy of the minutes to the group. One person, let’s call him Mervyn, made drastic changes everywhere. He was adamant that we drop the words ‘addictive and dysfunctional families’ and replace them with the word ‘alcoholics’. I was simply furious. I expressed my unhappiness and left. I was in turmoil, I blamed Mervyn for being manipulative, then I blamed the group for being “spineless” and not backing me up and finally I blamed myself for getting the minutes all mixed up. The next week saw an explosion of explanations in my morning pages. I was caught in the ‘blame game’. The good thing was that I did not run away, I was still in touch with this underlying sense that I was ‘missing the point’.
One of the activities that Julia Cameron suggests in her book “The Artists Way” is an “artist date”; a date that I arrange with my ‘artist child’. And so, I found myself in a café on Church Street with a book by Pema Chodron appropriately titled "When Things Fall Apart - Heart Advice for difficult times." I was desperately looking for some help to escape the turmoil in my mind and then it happened ... I felt like I had been slapped hard in the face. The line I read went something like this, ..."when will you drop your own little agenda and relax into basic groundlessness."
Of course, there it was in plain view. The problem was my own little agenda. To make things perfect all the time. I realized that I cloaked my agenda with a nobility and earnestness that simply blinded me to what was really going on. Here was the “child Dwight” so sure that if everyone “only just did things the ‘right’ way”, everything would be fine. The ‘right way’, of course, being ‘my way’. I ‘know’ how things ‘should’ be. This pattern of my behaviour is a result of my dysfunctional childhood, my ‘hidden agenda’.
Samuel often speaks of watching and listening without a motive. I am now beginning to ‘see’ that I meditate with the idea that I will one day ‘achieve’ peace. To really look without motive begins with seeing how the movement for security drives our every action.
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