The Cocoon

By Sam Gerber

The following is a weekly reflection paper written for a Buddhist Psychology class at Naropa University.

The idea of the cocoon, the way in which we continually return to our habitual ways of being and relating, resonates with what I've been working with in myself since I was fourteen, and more recently, since I moved to Boulder a month and a half ago. Jeremy and Karen Hayward (1998) describe this cocoon as "... this stale, familiar place, patched together with habitual thoughts and emotions ..." (Hayward & Hayward (1998) Sacred World. Shambhala. p. 42). Since I've been here at Naropa it has become brilliantly clear that my lingering, trailing-edge ways of relating to myself and to life can no longer be allowed authority. And, while I don't agree with Buddhism when it comes to the source of these patterns, I do feel the ways in which a part of me needs to continually return to them.

There's a stale, passionless, energy sucking suffering that a part of me learned to do a long time ago. He learned that in order to live and protect my vulnerable and porous heart from the closed hearts of my parents and of the world, he had to turn everything into suffering. By doing this, he got attention, his parents continually saved him from having to go out into the world, from having to be vulnerable, and in so doing, they supported his suffering and validated his position that there's no way a person can live on this Earth and have an open heart. So, being in Boulder, alone, on my own, with a life that only I could make, I've started to say "No" to this part of me. I've started to break the bond he's maintained between himself and my parents, and subsequently, I've felt more joy and more connection with myself and my passion than I ever have.

I've come to find that there's a living quality to emotions. Beyond our passing moods and feelings, beyond what we think we feel, there's a underground reservoir of emotional reality that's so off our radars, that no amount of searching can help us get there unless we know exactly where to look. I've found that there's a part of us whose sole job is to keep us from getting there, and that only in confronting him or her, can one actually begin to access the emotional ground from which all of those passing moods and feelings arise. I see that part as my living cocoon. It's a part that can't be transcended, can't be mentally deconstructed, and can't even be seen through. By finally getting to this place of finally having a Me separate from this part of me, I've just begun to feel what he's been protecting. There's a little guy underneath, that's so unworthy, that just sweetly feels wrong at a fundamental level. It's the wounded vulnerability that had to be hidden away from the world a long time ago.

So, while I agree that we all have a cocoon, I know that if I had used meditation to heal, I would have never come across the part of me that would have been using meditation to in fact keep me from this place. I know that I would have never found this aspect underneath. In my opinion, our cocoons can't be transcended away, or perspectivized, or deconstructed into their non-dual energetic source. They have to be deconstructed on an emotional level, slowly, as they are held in the safe space they thought would never come. They have to be seen as the living beings they are. Our cocoons love us. They were created to keep our open hearts from being destroyed. Only in negotiating with them for our vulnerability, can we truly regain our selves. I think this is why spiritual teachers continue to act immaturely in their personal lives even after enlightenment. No matter how much one expands one's consciousness, no matter how much one lives and breaths with the non-dual, these emotional parts of us linger. They sit underneath the enlightenment and act as the true motivational ground. It's my opinion, that all of the misdeeds that beautiful and gifted teachers permit in themselves, are due to their unhealed emotional landscape. I feel it. It's like a current that runs underneath even the greatest disciplined awareness.

This is my picture, and I think I'm mostly writing this for myself, both as an avenue in which to express my passion, and for the part of me I can feel right now that would rather hide because he still doesn't trust that his heart is safe.

But I know it is.