The Lion and the Hyena

The lion, in Shambhala Buddhism, and the Tibetan tradition more broadly, represents one’s path to mindfulness and a present awareness of one’s immediate environment. The lion must be ever aware, to avoid predation and to vanquish prey. But I am out of the predation cycle in the traditional sense. My current predators are ethanol and whatever the hell are in those Juul pods.  My predators are vehicles of slow death but also vehicles of escape, vehicles to what in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is referred to as experiential avoidance. One could say that this is the antithesis of mindfulness. Perhaps it is the state of being the hyena, a scavenger.

I was less the lion and much more the hyena when I felt trapped in an unhappy marriage. In the times of deepest unhappiness, with her, with us, with myself mostly I now realize, I acted very unlionly. When yet another fight reached its fever pitch, which for me was the familiar territory of unregulated anger and name-calling, and which for her became an increasingly familiar land, I was quick to flee. I could sense the familiar rugged road we had traveled down many times before and just wanted to say fuck it, I’m out.

It helped that I always had my friends, a collection of three of them at a shared apartment in particular, to take me in, smoke me up and feed me cereal. It was like my safe haven from the biggest and most constant threat of my environment, my doomed relationship. The gazelle found safety in a perch with its pack. I couldn’t be aware of that aspect of my life because to be aware of it would’ve meant its demise. And clearly, for some reason, despite the toll it was taking on me, I just had to stay in. Call it what you will, comfort, familiarity, companionship. Perhaps it was my desire to show the world I could be stable, that I could be married. It could have been all of those things. But an uglier word for what it also could have been is codependency.

Escapist, or self-soothing, behaviors mentioned above, binging, using substances, and what wasn’t mentioned, masturbation, were familiar to me, conditioned responses used in times of relational threat. Times in the past such as my parents’ codependency and messy divorce, as well as my sister’s heroin addiction. There were others, too. In hindsight it’s almost baffling to reflect on the nights I went to a mountain to go snowboarding by myself. It was freedom, free from the constant source of judgment I perceived from my wife, free to be me. I have my own shame, quite a great deal of it, but no doubt was the shame intensified by our unhappy arrangement.

It’s too bad. We both wanted so desperately for it to work. Clearly too desperately. But it doesn’t mean that there weren’t glimpses of happiness, even greatness. Junot Diaz writes of a relationship, “Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit, either.” There are times when you just have to defer to better writers.

Now that I am in a perpetual state of freedom, one that does not require a trip to the mountains, I am feeling more and more like the lion. It is easier to be me because I am learning self-acceptance. I am not allowing myself to go back into the box from whence I came, because in that place I wasn’t myself, and I was ashamed of aspects of myself. That’s a dark, uncomfortable place to be. It’s good to be out.