Making a mistake, say several spiritual teachers including Byron Katie, is not possible.
What a foreign concept to so many of us. Not possible to make a mistake? How could that be?! I myself have made mistakes over and over again! Other people have made mistakes throughout history! We’re one big pool of mistakes, falling short of perfection, peace, or love!
No Mistake is deeply meaningful to me as an idea when it allows us to look at what has happened without deep guilt, regret, anguish, shame or embarrassment.
What has been done is over now. There is no going back to “un-do” actions, words, behavior, events, choices.
Something happened….there is the “scene” like in a movie, and people behaved as they did, including us. We experience stress, fear, or grief as a response IF we are believing that bad things can happen and people can get hurt.
It feels so foreign to contemplate the idea that no one can truly get hurt at the core level.
What about war, Hitler, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, divorce, people hitting each other, car accidents, tripping, failing a test, forgetting ones lines on stage, telling a lie or a secret, getting angry or terrified, not understanding the homework?
We want things to turn out nicely. We really want peace, kindness, love, detachment, freedom. Lots of things in the world don’t look to us like these, they look instead like war, meanness, hate, attachment and imprisonment.
Recently it turns out that something I said made someone very upset.
The way I automatically tend to think about this kind of incident and exchange is with acute sadness, wishing I hadn’t said it, calling myself thoughtless, scared that it was my fault.
This thinking is so full of blame and attack that it brings this dark cloud into the body and mind… guilt, shame, nausea, fear, sleeplessness.
The idea of No Mistake is not to relinquish responsibility. It is to stop the repetitive drum of thinking we were Wrong, they were Wrong, it was Wrong, or that we wish we could rewind history and do it Right.
That desire to change the past is hopeless. It is full of despair.
The only thing that really works is looking at what beliefs were present in that moment where a mistake was apparently made.
So for me, some of what was happening when I said something that turned out to be upsetting was “they don’t care about me, they are ignoring me, I need communication, I want to be funny, they are dismissing or disregarding me, it doesn’t matter what I say…”
Without turning the attack on to the self, I can sit with the scene I see in my mind and replay it with an intent to bring peace to it, and not get stuck in the groove of That Was A Mistake.
The paradox of it all is that when I sit with the situation in my mind that caused pain, I discover complete and full responsibility in a way that has nothing to do with shame or self-criticism.
I discover I am 100% responsible. There is no one else here, just me and my thinking. I was believing a big story.
I discover that I was believing a thousand assumptions that were all stressful, including that it was possible that I could be ignored or mistreated.
I was being a regular human being with a little mind that is worried, protective, and punchy, and thinks it knows the truth.
Suzuki Roshi once said the life of a Zen master is one continuous mistake.
As it turns out, I am the one who has ignored others and myself, mistreated myself. I am the one who has hurt myself by thinking I needed something from someone. I am the one being limited, thinking things can go wrong.
One continuous mistake, one continuous perfect series of events, for awareness and expansion. One long life of seeing only part of the whole, since that’s all I can see in that moment.
“Everything happens FOR me, not TO me.” ~ Byron Katie
Be gentle with yourself. Allow this exploration to be pleasurable, not grueling. Not that life will always be pleasurable. It won’t. Unpleasant things will arise, and when they do, it’s an especially rich opportunity for stillness and attention….Sometimes we think that spirituality is about being calm and blissful, and losing our temper is something else. But actually, life gets MOST interesting and MOST juicy at precisely those moments when things seem to be getting the most difficult….they are doorways to truth. They are sacred moments.” ~ Joan Tollifson
Love, Grace