My Own Prison by Shari Burke

I’ve been listening to a series of lectures by the late theologian John O’Donohue that have been collected in a CD series entitled “Wisdom from the Celtic World.” In these lectures, he touches on many themes, including those of suffering and the inner prison. His thoughts on these topics got me to thinking about how these issues affect our lives so profoundly, yet we do not want to think about them. We spend a great deal of time and energy trying to avoid them, but since we will all have to face suffering and our inner prisons at some times in our lives, our avoidance can leave us ill-prepared to deal with them.

It is often said that a central tenet of Buddhism is that “life is suffering.” Most Buddhist writers I have read say that this is an oversimplification. It is not that we will drag ourselves through life enduring constant suffering. Rather, we can find ourselves suffering needlessly due to our attachment to certain people, things, or outcomes that we have no control over. Furthermore, every life will include some forms of suffering and we will have to learn to deal with this. This Buddhist view fits in well with O’Donohue’s views about Celtic traditions.

The thing is, our suffering can be a great gift. None of us would consciously choose suffering, but I believe that we sometimes choose unconsciously either by clinging to outdated patterns of behavior, by allowing ourselves to act or become paralyzed by fear, or by making ourselves small. In these ways, we build our inner prisons brick by brick. We may not even be aware we’re doing it until one day we wake up and realize we feel trapped.

I once heard a story about how elephants in India are trained to become work animals. After the elephant is captured, it is chained by the leg to something sturdy. It tries to escape, but cannot. After some time has passed, a thick rope replaces the chain. The elephant doesn’t try quite so hard to escape now. The rope is replaced by a thinner one and later a thinner one still. Finally, a tendril from a lotus flower is placed around the leg. Once in awhile, the elephant thinks about leaving and moves her leg, but feels the tendril there and stops. At this point the only thing imprisoning the elephant is her belief in her own imprisonment. I don’t know whether this story is factually true in terms of the elephants, but I do know it is true for each of us.

We believe wholeheartedly in the prisons we build for ourselves. And we do a great job of prison building. After all, who knows our personal vulnerabilities better than ourselves? We trap ourselves with limiting ideas. I’m not smart enough. I could never do that. I don’t have enough money, time, training, experience, knowledge, confidence…. People just don’t do stuff like that. Who do I think I am anyway? If it’s not a struggle, it’s not worthwhile. What makes up the bricks that built the walls of your prison?

The point is, we get stuck. This leads to a certain amount of dissatisfaction, frustration, and unhappiness. We may end up busying ourselves in a flurry of activity either to avoid looking at our prison walls, or to knock them down. We can exhaust ourselves this way. The thing is, unless we dismantle the prison brick by brick, the same way we built it, we will remain stuck inside it. But this is truly hard labor and all too often, it’s a task we decide we don’t want to undertake. After all, even though it may feel limiting and confining inside my personal prison, it is mine. It’s cozy, somehow comforting, and quite familiar. Who knows what’s on the other side of these walls? No, I may not like it all of the time, but I know what it’s like here, so I think I’ll stay. And here is where the big suffering begins.

Sometimes we have to go through times of great suffering because it’s the only way God can get us to quiet down enough to listen to her. In my own life I have found it totally amazing to realize that the healing I needed came at the darkest moments. Would I have chosen to enter that dark and terrifying place? No way! But when I fell into the darkness. I let go of a great deal of the junk that led me to that place — stuff I did not need or even want, but carried around because I felt like I should or because of some misguided notion that I was helping someone else. I just never knew how to get rid of it all until I no longer had the strength to hang onto it anymore. Then letting go was pretty easy. Falling into suffering makes you so tired. I no longer had the energy to cling to my old ways of thinking. They fell away. And there it is — this kind of pain opens us places within us by scouring away the stuff we no longer need, but were afraid to let go of. When you are broken and utterly exhausted, you can only hang on to what you absolutely need for survival, and this creates open, fertile ground for the seeds of possibility to be planted.

We can only see this in hindsight, though. As John O’Donohue points out, when we’re in the midst of the suffering, we cannot analyze it, make sense of it, or be grateful for it. All of that can come later. No, while we’re in the darkness, our job is to experience it and keep walking through it. We have little energy left for anything else during such times.

What we may discover, though, as we begin to heal and see the newly planted seeds of possibility sprouting, is that we’ve removed a great many of the bricks that comprise or prison walls. Most likely the hole is big enough to catch a glimpse of what could be happening on the other side. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can even squeeze through and find the courage to experience life on the outside.