Hair, hope and being human

During a recent online meditation class, the Zen teacher talked about raga, which roughly translates from the Sanskrit as greed, lust or desire. My first thought was: I’m not all that greedy. Among my less savory characteristics, I’m judgmental, impatient, unforgiving and grumpy – but not usually greedy.

Greed is for oil barons and tech bros. It’s for that family in India that just spent $300 million on a wedding. One wedding! That’s greed.

But the teacher explained that raga can also be interpreted more widely – not just in relation to desire for material things, but simply as a desire for things to be different than they are.

This caught my attention. I’m definitely raga-ing these days.

I’ve spent the past few weeks achingly dissatisfied with the cool, damp weather here in the UK, and wanting a ‘proper’ summer with hot weather (those of you experiencing extreme heat are probably shaking your heads … thus is the nature of raga, of dissatisfaction with what is).

As I chewed on the teaching about raga, I could see all the ways I’ve been lusting after something different than what is: warmer weather, longer hair, perfect and better health, and a life that doesn’t include cancer.

While everyone occasionally thinks the grass is greener somewhere else, when I was faced with tough things, like cancer, it was hard to accept that anything was okay in my life. When Denise was coming to terms with her hair loss she asked:

“If I ‘accept’ hair loss as it is, how does hope come into play?”

I grappled with this question a lot during cancer treatment. One of my daily practices was guided imagery, which involved imagining my immune system destroying the cancer cells, and then envisioning the new me: healthy, cancer-free, with long wavy hair, standing on a beach in Greece (I even drew pictures of this).

How I pictured myself years after successful cancer treatment (I looked a lot better in my head!)

As much as I wanted to stay in the moment, in line with all the spiritual teachings I’d read for decades, I wondered:

If I don’t have hope that I’ll get better, does that mean my current misery is all there is?

Learning how to not know

Fortunately, I was also learning to be really kind to myself at this time, and I realized that imagining a better future is really, really human. Turns out, I was just a normal human being going through something tough, and sometimes I wanted to be somewhere and someone else.

So letting myself off the hook about my raga-ing was a good first step.

I also learned a remedy for raga: curiosity and not-knowing.

Denise and I don’t really know if having Pantene™ hair would make us happy. She didn’t know if getting her extensions removed would make her hair look awful (it didn’t). And I didn’t know if having cancer was going to be only misery. In fact, I never felt more loved by more people than when I was going through cancer treatment. I had one of the most joyful moments of my life on a beach in Devon, in the south of England (right before a seagull swiped an ice cream cone out of my hands). And I now have the big 80s hair I longed for in my teens.

Buddhist nun Pema Chodron was right:

“When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.”