The Living Trellis of Identity
We are sharing a series of journal entries that the author, JH, contributed following an invitation from Insight Myanmar for publication on our website. She includes the following message: The following entries from my journal along the Burma-Thai border were first shared more than 18 years ago. On the advice of a respected teacher, they were distributed only on paper, so as to protect involved parties while raising awareness. Later, when the Internet became available, many of us still hoped in our hearts that these descriptions would soon become obsolete. Finally, I offer these words here in realizing that certain details remain far too accurate. May they bring benefit. Please forgive my youthful ignorance and arrogance. Errors are my own.
“So, in these camps for families obliterated by brutal killings, hunger, forced labor, sex trafficking, and fear, form becomes that much more important. There needs to be a tangible vehicle that is not so uncomfortable.”
Burma Border Journals #10
Identity. Fresh white lab coats bearing the clinic insignia, young men and women stepping into their own authority. Refugees educated and serving their people with dignity and benefit. They rise to the invitation. What if I had been born into their situation? Could I have borne this life? Can simply living be called courageous when there never was much of an option. Regardless of the purely clinical aspects of the work, the clinic represents a continuously becoming scaffold for the developing ego. When I was eleven years old I began to swim on a team and run races on the weekend. Not only did this particular foray into athleticism strengthen the physical body and demonstrate firsthand the value of both diligent practice and optimal nutrition, it supplied me with a concept around which the self could crystallize. My daily activities included donning some race-earned t-shirt and running shoes with my Levi’s Shrink-to-Fit jeans before heading off to the public fifth grade. I ate healthy foods and periodically recalled a recent 5K or looked forward to some upcoming 10K. I pushed my physical limits and felt special knowing that I participated in some collective endeavor larger than my solitary self. Of course, these were optional activities; no one died. Nonetheless, I was part of something seemingly important at that age, and thereby I too was important. Later, in the seventh grade, I was given an MTV shirt by a friend, and I wore that proudly too. Not to promote walking billboard behavior, but the nascent self drew confidence from displaying inclusion in the popular youth culture and felt buoyed by connection with those who were breaking out of childhood roles. The stakes are higher here.
Many cultures offer some challenge or rite of passage at the onset of adolescence, some task requiring the budding young adult to draw upon previously untapped inner resources. An assignment, capable of making or breaking a being, dependent upon strength of character as much as physical prowess, is presented by community elders within a ceremonial context that supports success with integrity. Even today there are vision quests, walkabouts, fasting, and prayer. When non-violent, adult-sanctioned initiation is not socially scheduled, young people will create their own rituals for coming of age, for incorporation into society in a role of greater autonomy. In the setting of developed nations, we can recognize such phenomena in certain sports contests, fast cars, unsafe sex, loud music, unsupervised hallucinogen ingestion. There is an organic drive, a readiness for testing the package we have been born into, with which we’ve achieved a certain degree of basic functional familiarity. In peoples at war there is ample external validation for this process to manifest in the form of physical combat.
Of course it eventually becomes apparent that life is much more than affiliating oneself with some material object, some job, activity, or behavior, that mental or emotional states are not a person, that the accumulation of any knowledge or achievement must ultimately be surrendered. Identity confused with what we want to attract, with who we tend to push away, is ultimately only a decoy. Our true self is much more inclusive than that around which we temporarily choose to constrict, and it is a choice. In each moment it becomes easier to recognize that choice. It grows painful to see sweet fellow humans narrowing to the truth that the human spirit, human intelligence, arises directly in proportion to the magnitude and beneficence of our intentions. One feels into the widening field of the heart as responsive to ways of seeing and to what gets planted.
The point, however, is that after constructing the ego, it can be dismantled. The advertising of identity is a phase; we move through it. There cannot be nothing without something. Without solid attachment, in the absence of relatively predictable parenting, unless communities are at least somewhat intact, necessarily honoring the maturation of their members with a sense of belonging, then humans who are so evolved intellectually get stuck at infantile stages of psychosocial development. Just watch and we see such individuals trapped in imagined isolation, acting out patterns over and over again until conditions conspire to nourish the healthy ego. Only then can that notion of a unique self be assimilated into some vaster interplay of form and emptiness, one in which we serve the whole world. Then that world becomes self, and the self is revealed to be none other than the whole universe as we perceive it. We serve tirelessly.
So, in these camps for families obliterated by brutal killings, hunger, forced labor, sex trafficking, and fear, form becomes that much more important. There needs to be a tangible vehicle that is not so uncomfortable. The clinic, with its trainings, its graduations, living quarters, and divisions of labor, is like a living trellis upon which beings once again grow, and blossom. Its residents receive this external structure until they re-unite with their own beauty. Yes, they apply medical protocols memorized according to the guidelines, and there is artwork on exhibition, cooking of feasts for funerals, beautiful music played for weddings, embodying each person’s rich mystery in celebration, loving to the fullest extent possible, decorating the lives that have been reclaimed, in exile. This is the medicine that is not taught in medical school, and although I prefer emptiness to suchness, practicalities on this level are what I came here to behold. If I’m going to bother with engagement, I want to see clearly where and how such an approach is useful.
May this writing heighten awareness about the plight and great beauty of the people from all parts once called Burma. May it bring benefit to all who are described herein and to all who read it. May you be truly happy.