Today's dharma talk was about fooling ourselves with our identities and labels, and being unable to see through them to who we really are. Something deeper unites us. Getting hung up in being a "wife", "mother", "woman", "teacher" makes us struggle to fit ourselves into these labels, and we smother ourselves often. I've often felt like a fraud, as if I wasn't a good enough "grandmother", when that is really because I'm not that label, I am a stack of labels, fluidly ebbing and waning, but the fit is not right and comfortable with any of them.
And then he told us never to call others names and not to criticize others either. We're all guilty of those uses of speech and I felt very guilty when he mentioned it. I'd just been saying some critical remarks about a third party to a friend, and I immediately regretted my speech. It's unfair, and I am disturbed at the very thought that someone would try to sum me up or judge me in the way I was judging this person. My Buddhist teacher told the story of a man who called another a monkey, and karma made him endure 500 lifetimes as a monkey himself. My teacher realized as and adult that the story was metaphorical, but as a child he worried he was going to turn into a monkey if he slipped and called others names. It caused him to be very careful of his speech. As I'm resolved to be more careful of mine. Lest I begin swinging from trees.
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