It had been a long time since I had been in the small Chinese village at the foot of the Himalayas. After dropping my suitcase at the only inn in town, I headed to Li Tzu’s house. The bonsai garden was in bloom in consecration to spring. Midnight, the black cat who also lived there, looked at me lazily from atop the refrigerator and went back to sleep. The Taoist master wasn’t in the kitchen. I found him in the meditation room with some students. An inspiring melody invited a warm conversation with the soul. I took off my shoes and joined them. At the end, when I opened my eyes, Li Tzu offered me a welcoming smile. Everyone left, except for Teresa, a young and beautiful woman from Lisbon. It was the first day of the course on the Tao Te Ching. People from all corners of the world came to learn about the ancient poem of Eastern wisdom; there were many layers of interpretation in the enigmatic words left by Lao Tzu. The young woman expressed her desire to speak with Li Tzu. She admitted she was feeling sad. She understood that she needed to find the true cause of the sadness; otherwise, she would be unable to dissolve it. The Taoist master nodded in agreement, as if to say that such a fundamental understanding would ease the success of the existential journey she was embarking on. He introduced me to the young woman and said that, like her, I had come from afar. We had been friends for a few years. He asked Teresa if I could join the conversation. Very kindly, she said she had no problem with that.
We sat at the kitchen table. While Li Tzu placed some herbs to infuse for tea, we talked. Teresa worked as a journalist for a Lisbon newspaper, while her husband, Ricardo, was a photographer for National Geographic magazine. They shared a passion for showing the world to people. They had been together for almost a decade. The enchantment of the early years, the joy present in the simple details of everyday life, like sharing a potato soup with a glass of cheap wine by candlelight bought from the corner market, enough to make dinner an unforgettable event, had vanished. Those were times when they laughed at any silly thing, shared secrets, and revealed themselves to each other without special effects. The transparency was enchanting. Love simply happened. It was no longer like that. Dialogue seemed to have dried up along with intimacy. Unlike before, she confessed to preferring the days when Ricardo was away on business trips. She didn’t understand how love had been lost in such a way. She even doubted whether she had ever truly loved or been loved.
We listened without interruption. In the end, Li Tzu filled the cups with tea and asked, “Is there any moment you can identify as the one when the rupture occurred that led to the distancing?” Teresa said it was when she had an involuntary miscarriage. They had wanted to have a child, to form a family in the traditional sense. Due to some complications from the spontaneous abortion, she could no longer conceive. This saddened her deeply. At the time, she received affection and support from Ricardo. However, two weeks later he travelled to Alaska to photograph at the request of the magazine. She confessed she felt abandoned and disappointed. She said her husband lacked empathy. The Taoist master said he wasn’t familiar with the term. The young woman explained that empathy was the ability to put oneself in another’s place, to feel their feelings and their pain. Li Tzu looked at her gently and asked, “Does empathy truly exist, or is it a fictional concept in which we deceive ourselves, demanding from others an impossible task and, therefore, inviting a generous distribution of blame?” Teresa asserted that it was a feeling capable of changing the world. The Taoist master seemed interested: “Have you ever felt empathy for someone?” The young woman assured him she had. She said she used to volunteer at a refugee camp for Africans, trying to understand what they needed, bringing food and medicine. Li Tzu sincerely praised her: “Without a doubt, an action filled with the most beautiful kind of love. You did for those people what you would like others to do for you if you were in their place. A sacred movement because of the light it reverberates.” He paused to emphasize his next words and said, “However, does understanding someone’s need or feeling qualify us to say we feel their pain? Or, even more profoundly, does it give us the right to believe we are truly in their place and know what they desire or need?” Teresa said she knew hunger; she came from a very poor family. She had gone through severe financial hardship in the past. The Taoist master reflected: “Having experienced a similar situation, or even possessing the sensitivity to identify suffering without having lived it, does that allow us to feel another’s pain as if we were the one suffering it?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued his thoughts: “Offering our best means charity and solidarity, forms of love that transform the world through their ability to comfort and provide healing to those who suffer. When practiced with goodwill, they reveal a high level of awareness and sensitivity. However, claiming to embody another’s pain seems to me an exaggerated stage of spiritual vanity or emotional imbalance.” He then concluded: “The hunger of the body is not hard to understand. The hunger of the soul, most of the time, not even the person themselves is capable of fully comprehending. Let alone someone else.”
I admit I was disconcerted. So was Teresa. The existence of such a beautiful and celebrated feeling in today’s world was being called into question by the Taoist master. Seeing our disappointment, he explained: “Within each consciousness exists a universe formed by distinct levels of perception, sensitivity, beliefs, assumptions, experiences, and expectations. No two are alike. I use the ruler that serves me to measure the size of others; I weigh others’ needs with the scale I have in a world whose standards I do not know. These will always be inaccurate measurements. Therefore, the greatest lesson is to do for others what I would like done for me. And only that. I can and should try to place myself in someone else’s shoes during moments of great difficulty. It won’t be hard to understand the most basic needs; and if I can meet them, I will have performed an act of unspeakable love. However, the most substantial lacks I will never be able to identify, because they are beyond my view. They are deep layers hidden beneath veils of numbness to anesthetize ancient pains, many of which we still aren’t ready to face.” He made a gesture with his hands to stress his words and added, “I can’t even unravel the secrets of many of my own misunderstandings, despite a whole life devoted to that pursuit. Believing I can reach the most distant corners of someone else’s heart without first conquering my own is a sad mistake.” The Taoist master looked at us with compassion and murmured sincerely: “I can practice charity and be supportive to the extent of my consciousness. If you ask me for empathy, I will disappoint you. I am willing to offer all my love to you, but I will never be able to give exactly what you need. Not because I don’t have it to give, and maybe I even do. But because I am incapable of fully understanding all the needs of a universe different from the one I inhabit.”
He took a sip of tea and said, “The origin of many emotional conflicts is the illusion of empathy. Believing that the other person didn’t want to or didn’t care to give us something we needed is a trap. We see them as insensitive when, in fact, we are the ones being harsh by demanding an undue payment. No one has the power or the obligation to uncover the deepest secrets of someone else’s heart. Especially because many of those secrets are still locked away in impenetrable drawers; yet, the consequences of those poorly processed experiences already echo on the surface of the consciousness, manifesting as fears, assumptions, and expectations. In situations where we can’t identify or deal with the true cause and origin of suffering, we end up projecting and transferring the causes. We are unfair to others because we don’t fully know who we are.”
Li Tzu looked at Teresa with gentleness and asked, “Have you ever been abandoned?” From the shock of the question came the sobs. The beautiful woman wept uncontrollably. It lasted several important minutes. Tears have the power to release old emotions and make room for new feelings to take their place. She said she had been abandoned by her mother as a child. Although her father was affectionate and did his best to meet all her needs, she carried the bitter feeling of those days for a long time. Even though she never said it, no matter how hard he tried, it was impossible to make up for the absence of her mother. After wiping away the tears, she claimed it was a suffering she had already overcome. Wishful thinking. It was a pain swept into the unconscious, the basement of the house we live in. Each of us lives within ourselves. The basement is where we store things we cannot throw away, but also don’t want to look at so as not to evoke unpleasant memories. There’s no way to discard memories.
Believing that hiding painful memories frees us from suffering is a recurring mistake and the cause of lasting imbalances that are difficult to detect. It’s as if the object stored in the basement were to rot over time, filling the house with a nauseating smell. We get used to the odour to the point of believing we don’t notice it anymore, but we remain altered in a way that becomes familiar and that we start to consider normal. Normal doesn’t mean good, nor does common mean true. Although the painful memories are hidden in the basement, the fears, assumptions, and expectations they generate are sitting on the living room couch, being the first to step outside whenever the door is cracked open. All it takes are situations with faint similarities for the past to distort the present, influencing the mind’s ability to see reality clearly. Without realizing it, the unconscious plays a larger role in our choices than we dare to assume. Yes, the basement interferes with the functioning, organization, and well-being of the house.
Since they cannot be discarded, painful memories, especially traumatic ones, need to be reprocessed so that pain can be transformed into learning, transformation, and healing. No one can do this without self-love, the primary fuel on the journey in search of truth, virtue, and growth. To varying degrees, we all have memories rotting in the basement, decaying because they are kept in a poorly lit place. Reprocessing failed experiences is like opening the windows to let in the sunlight of new ideas; otherwise, we’ll never be able to see the mess of misunderstood emotions. In a disordered house, when looking for one thing, we’ll find another. When Ricardo travelled for work two weeks after the miscarriage, Teresa found her mother’s abandonment sitting on the couch after having escaped the basement. The belief that the issue had been resolved turned out to be a trap that kept her locked in her own misunderstandings. Expecting her husband to behave in a way he himself didn’t understand, because his wife didn’t even know herself, let the past come screaming into the street as if it were the present. When a sense of abandonment resurfaced that even Teresa thought no longer existed, the strangeness and discomfort made her transfer the pain’s responsibility to her partner. Even though he had been loving, supportive, and attentive for many days, he was labelled insensitive for not doing the impossible. A fictional virtue was demanded of him: empathy. The mind has more imprisoning power than penitentiaries.
The memory of abandonment began to take charge of the house and its order. The windows were shut, the darkness made it hard to see, and every day at lunch and dinner, a dish with a bitter taste was served. Not because of the husband, who would return home after that trip as he always did, but because she refused to reprocess an old experience in order to allow a new, different, and deeper understanding. Poorly constructed beliefs and expectations drag assumptions behind them in an attempt to fill the gaps of uncertainty. The assumption that he was an insensitive person led to the gradual distance the couple could no longer manage. “Before returning to the outer house, it will be necessary to tidy up the inner house. The outer one will never be well while the inner one is unwell. Without properly making peace with your past, you won’t be able to understand and accept that Ricardo wasn’t responsible for your feeling abandoned,” Li Tzu pointed out.
Then he concluded, “Within relationships lie some of the greatest existential and, therefore, evolutionary challenges. For two universes to coexist in harmony, daily doses of love and wisdom are indispensable. Within each consciousness is a universe distinct in experiences, perceptions, sensitivities, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations. Worlds in constant turmoil due to intense movements of ideas and emotions, not always fair, balancing, or freeing. A lack of understanding of who we truly are, a mistaken interpretation of others, and a narrowed perception of reality make love vanish in the midst of so much misunderstanding. We become strangers to those we love and, sometimes, even worse: enemies.”
Teresa drank her tea slowly. Li Tzu’s words had taken her by surprise, as often happens when we are confronted with a truth that has been waiting for our understanding. With humility, the young woman admitted she didn’t know how to make peace with that memory. Being abandoned by one’s mother is an extremely difficult situation for a child, she argued. The Taoist master agreed and reflected, “No doubt. But we can’t stay still. Often, improving the understanding of old painful experiences requires deconstructing old beliefs. We believe in many things that brought us to this point. To move forward, it will be necessary to reformulate those beliefs so we can see both ourselves and the world with clearer, broader vision.” He turned his attention to the sound of Midnight stretching on top of the fridge, smiled, and then returned to the seriousness of the topic: “For example, people who are deceived in emotional or business relationships tend to beat themselves up for seeing themselves as fools or suckers. This is the prevailing belief in the world. However, it’s a shallow and narrow view. If you look from above, you’ll see that the real fools are those who failed to live up to the trust placed in them, for they abandoned their own dignity. We must have compassion for those who lose themselves due to a lack of principles and destroy themselves in the absence of values.” He emptied his cup and warned, “Along with patience, tolerance, and compassion, we draw closer to the indispensable forgiveness, a movement without which the definitive peace with each of our unpleasant memories will never happen.”
The beautiful woman asked him to speak a little about the virtues he had mentioned. Li Tzu explained: “Patience arises from the understanding that life will not unfold according to our desires. Tolerance is expressed in the respect that, as long as my fundamental rights are not taken, people are free to make their own choices, even if I disagree with them. Compassion is summarized in the sincere acceptance of others’ difficulties, with the same humility with which I recognize my own. Only from that point do the doors of forgiveness open. Only forgiveness has the power to free us forever from all suffering.”
Teresa understood the theory, but said she didn’t know how to make it reality. The Taoist master curved his lips in a slight smile, as if he had expected that comment, and pointed out: “It’s necessary to understand the plot.” The young woman said she didn’t understand. Neither did I. He invited us to return to the meditation room and said: “There are many ways to do it. Each person has their own, and all are valid. I will share the one I use to heal myself from the past by finding in unpleasant experiences the teachers of my evolution.”
We made ourselves as comfortable as possible. A soft meditation melody, together with the words of the Taoist master, led us into an altered state of consciousness. “Silencing the multitude of voices that speak in our mind at the same time is essential for us to hear the voice of the soul. Anxious and anguished people get lost in the conflicts of their inner dialogues. It is essential to quiet the mind in order to find unimaginable solutions,” he explained. He waited a few minutes for us to make that shift and then said: “In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu warns us that returning is an essential movement on the Path. In the sacred book of the West, we were told that the sacred is both within and outside us at the same time. How do these teachings interweave to help us?” The question was rhetorical, and he continued: “In short, they guide us to return to the soul’s laboratory after each lived experience, so that the fact may be processed, filtered, and understood, transforming the event into knowledge that will from then on manifest as inner strength and balance. Then, return to the world in search of new existential challenges and further inner elaboration. In this endless back and forth, with each transmutation, someone I used to be dies, and someone I’ve become is born, fuller and more evolved. There is also the understanding that both texts refer to the reincarnatory process essential to the evolution of the spirit, the true traveller toward the Light. These understandings do not contradict or cancel each other out, they complete and refine one another.”
Addressing the young woman, he clarified: “Teresa is not who you truly are, but a character placed within a plot suited to developing attributes and virtues still in potential. There is nothing wrong with this, on the contrary, it is a wise and effective method of learning, transformation, and evolutionary accomplishment. Difficulties are forges that mold character and refine ethics to keep one on the path of goodness despite tempting deviations. They also serve to foster love, not the easy love that springs from friendly relationships, but the kind that grows like an unlikely flower that overcomes the dryness of the soil to bloom among the stones. So it is with me, with you, with everyone. One plot is never the same as another because no one is the same as anyone else. We inherit the achievements and the lacks of the last character when the previous plot ends. A new plot is constructed with the aim of making the most of the experiences to come, always with the purpose of illuminating and deconstructing fears and sufferings inherited from the past. In truth, we are spirits living singular scripts of inner battles to illuminate the dark corners of the house we live in. No one will be fully ready while they deny themselves the task of cleaning the basements of consciousness. The past comes back to hurt so it can remind us of the wounds we still need to heal. Forgetting is not an effective therapy, just as closing the basement won’t make its contents disappear. Confrontation is necessary.” He paused so we could connect the reasoning before continuing: “Each of us is the right character for the plot that needs to be lived in each existence, with the specific circumstances, among the necessary difficulties and advantages for our best development. There is nothing to regret, but to be grateful for and to make good use of.”
Without asking permission, Midnight entered the room and settled on the young woman’s lap. Without opening her eyes, she smiled upon sensing the cat’s presence and caressed it. Li Tzu continued to explain: “Any person, as an existential character with the ego in charge, will find it very difficult to overcome deep suffering. The reason is simple. The perspective will be shallow and narrow because it prioritizes mundane matters and limited beliefs over essential values. However, when someone perceives and accepts themselves as a spirit on a journey of learning, transformation, and accomplishment, their vision rises and lengthens. To do this, step away from the stage and the actors to observe and analyse the plot as a lucid spectator, more focused on the message’s content than on the apparent outcome of the drama, and, just as important, detached from the painful emotions that restrict the expansion of the character’s thoughts. What matters is your spiritual development; everything else is secondary.” Then he used an allegory to expand and clarify the understanding: “Before a wall, the ego is like a caterpillar that, being stuck to the ground, sees itself facing an insurmountable obstacle. The spirit, however, by emphasizing the importance of immaterial values, detaches from the world of fears like a bird that, flying high, sees that same wall as no more than a chalk line. The perspective shifts from dense to subtle; the source of suffering loses significance, and a new level of understanding becomes possible. There are more valuable aspects to consider. Everything begins to change. This happens when the priorities and virtues that once drove a person forward but now prevent them from going beyond themselves, and thus they suffer without understanding the true cause of their pain, are replaced with more refined and evolved ones. From obstacles come teachers; truth expands, the doors of life open, and the individual earns the right to move forward. Virtues, as problem-solvers, prove perfect for rebuilding oneself; new priorities reestablish a fresh routine for this work. The character frees themselves from fears and suffering; anxieties and sadness melt away for lack of reason to exist. In short, it is a process in which the ego detaches from the character to merge with individual eternity. The ego becomes enchanted by the authentic power of its true personality, the soul. The change in perspective transforms reality; the gentleness of one’s steps reshapes the path.”
That afternoon, the progress was almost imperceptible. For both her and for me. We all have neuroses and traumas stemming from experiences we couldn’t emotionally process at the time. For a week, after the classes, when the students had said goodbye, we went to the meditation room to practice detaching the spirit from the character in an effort to understand the beauty of a plot full of challenges. I felt as if I were in an internal arena where light and shadows duelled within me for belonging and liberation. The result was fantastic. In the end, through tears and laughter, Teresa revealed that she now understood the greatness of the story life had offered her: the experience of loving a child conceived in another womb as her own, a love just as sacred as all love. Only a spiritual vision allowed her to be enchanted by such an opportunity. Families are formed in many ways, but only love fuses their members into a single heart. She was grateful for this understanding. Then she said that although she didn’t agree with it, she would respect her mother’s desire to travel the world with the guitarist of a rock band; her mother believed that life’s wonders were to be found in worldly things. Love understands without needing to agree; love respects so it won’t become imprisoned. To feel affection for her mother again brought an indescribable sense of softness and lightness. She commented on how good it felt to like people again. Then she confessed that, since childhood, she had felt guilty, believing her mother’s departure was due to her own mischief. She had never told anyone. A basement secret. She had been unfair to herself for many years, letting that mistaken idea take hold. She loved her mother so much that she couldn’t understand that her departure had everything to do with her own choices and nothing to do with the daughter’s playful behaviour. She realized that the greatest form of abandonment was immersing herself in bitterness while expecting someone to offer something they didn’t possess. Nothing and no one would be exactly how she wanted them to be; only Teresa could be fully according to her own design. She offered one of the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen and said she had tidied up the house. It was time to return home. With Ricardo, she longed for potato soup with cheap wine by candlelight from candles bought at the corner store. The love that doesn’t exist is only the love that hasn’t been created yet. The best part of the story was waiting for her. Each challenge served to embellish the person she was becoming.
She thanked the Taoist master and left on that afternoon’s bus. Thanks to her understanding of the plot, the Teresa who left was not the same as the one who had arrived in that small Chinese village. She was a much more beautiful woman.
Translated by Cazmilian Zórdic.
