Working With Difficult Relationships During The Holidays

During the holiday season, many of us dread gatherings that include people with whom we have difficult relationships. When I think about my own impatience with some family members, I feel like I’m a bad Buddhist – that I lack the generosity and kindness toward people that I aspire to. The Zen master Tōrei Enji taught his students, "How can we be ungrateful to anyone or anything? Even though someone may be a fool, we can be compassionate. If someone turns against us, speaking ill of us and treating us bitterly, it's best to bow down. This is the Buddha appearing to us, finding ways to free us from our own attachments, the very ones that have made us suffer again and again and again."

He's talking about me!  When I get annoyed with someone, it’s almost always because I want them to be different from who they are. As he says, I’m attached to my preference for everyone saying what I want them to say and behaving as I want them to behave.

I have a cousin whom I dread seeing at family events. He has strong opinions on the opposite end of the political spectrum from my own, he talks nonstop, and he loves to engage in political jousting. It gets heated quickly, most of us get quiet, and many of us glaze over, hoping it will end soon.

In those conversations, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. And then I find myself remembering Tōrei Enji's lines and saying, "Yes, it's best to bow down, but I can't bow down because I'm getting so angry." I end up feeling bad about myself and even worse about my cousin. I get lost in a swirl of judgment -- judgment of self along with judgment of my poor relative.  And I sink into suffering.

Is there something we can learn from this kind of suffering that might be useful this holiday season? I often learn lessons in unlikely places, and I learned one last spring, not from a relative, but from the rabbits in my garden. We have a garden that gives us a lot of pleasure. There was a real upsurge in our local rabbit population this year. So while we were proudly watching beautiful little buds coming out of the ground in April and May, the rabbits ate them as fast as they came out. I was heartbroken. I would stand and watch the rabbits munching away. And because they have no natural predators in our neighborhood, they would calmly look at me as I tried to shoo them away. And then they would continue munching.

I found myself getting angry at these little rabbits. I wanted to be rid of them, and I started reading online about how to keep rabbits out of your garden. I read about chemicals you could use that would definitely keep them away. As I did this research, I suddenly stopped and thought, here I am, a Zen priest, thinking about poisoning bunnies. Clearly I was losing my way.

I began to understand how completely attached I was to these rabbits being something that they were not. How dare they show up as they were in the universe, in my garden, eating the things that they wanted to eat? And recognizing the absurdity of my insistence began to make me happy. I realized that they were going to eat what they ate, and the garden would be what it was, and that was that. We ended up with some very decimated plants. And of course, life went on.

I began to realize that my approach to many people in my life was not so different from my initial take on the rabbits. Consciously or not, I was asking, “How dare they be who they are and not the way I want them to be?” I began to notice how often I wanted people to be different, including wanting myself to be different. I saw that this insistence kept me from being curious about others and the variety of ways we all show up in the world.

In fact, there's a teaching from the Zen teacher John Tarrant that I call to mind when I’m worried about rabbits in my garden or difficult people at holiday gatherings. He said, "Most projects to change other people are really just projects that redecorate our interior prison. A spiritual practice is about jailbreaking." When I give up some of my projects for changing myself and other people, there is a sense of relief and release. As I bring the radical curiosity of a beginner’s mind to being with this cousin and others whom I find “difficult,” the prison door starts to open.

Let’s ask ourselves, what are we attached to? Is it a holiday gathering without a political monologue? If so, what's so important about that? Is it a coworker who treats us in a particular way? What about that attachment? And what happens if I'm able to let that attachment go? Can we change the subject or stop a hurtful conversation, but do so with kindness? When we glimpse the truth that we’re all manifestations of life, we suffer less and there’s more harmony in the world.

My wish for you this holiday season is that you bring beginner's mind to these old relationships and watch what happens. See all the things that arise as you face toward what’s familiar, as if for the first time.

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