Staying with Difficulty

I think one of the unfortunate things about popular culture is that it sometimes portrays human relations as based on 'ease' or compatibility. Yet, even in the best cases, there is always going to be some difference and even incompatibility between people's styles and ways of being. Here is an example: I recently saw an advertisement on the subway where it talks about finding the perfect match through a website. I wonder, what is a perfect match? What does it mean? Sometimes, I think it's important to see challenge and even 'incompatibility' as a good sign, because incompatible or dissonant elements of people are sometimes a way to be clear about one's own self and the stumbling blocks that a person experiences.
    As I reflect on the obsession with 'perfect match', I begin to wonder if the focus should not be shifted away from this idea, and toward the idea of respecting and embracing the tensions that people can experience. I think meditation can help in these cases, because it can ease the identification a person has with a particular view ('mine') and it can thus help a person relate to others' views in the process. Because meditative practice explores the spaces 'between' thoughts, it can be a way to explore conflict  rather than shutting down in front of it or trying to retreat into a safer or more familiar role.
     It seems important to abide in the sense of difference rather than rejecting it as something that is 'incompatible' with one's comfort level. Why, though? I think it's because those moments of conflict might be opportunities to re-integrate repressed parts of the self that can get easily projected onto others. By being with a behavior which I might find unpleasant, I can start to see that the sense of unpleasantness is just the boundary I am setting between myself and the unpleasantness.
      In an anthology entitled Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education, Diana Denton refers to the compassionate practice of "relaxing into the heart" as a way to face difficult emotions. She remarks, "Feeling and seeing are unified in the suspended judgement of immediate, embodied perception, and the solidity of emergent visual and linguistic metaphors becomes a prelude to redistributed awareness, an opening and centering of the heart." (p.188).  I like this description, because it talks about how emotions don't 'feel' the same from one point to the next: their texture changes as one's awareness lights on them. An example might be the (unfortunate) experience of stubbing one's toe on a metal frame. Initially, there is a sharpness to the pain which is often exacerbated (or sometimes repressed) over one's exclamation about it. But if I stop looking for something to blame and just observe that pain for a moment, I find that it stops  feeling sharp after a while and dissolves into a kind of tingling, or even a brief period of numbness. Emotions can go from feeling 'solid' to 'liquid' and even to feeling 'gaseous', much like the states of matter.
    If I can stay with one emotion long enough, I see that it changes with new conditions. But what I also find is that the feeling of fear and avoidance I initially had can change into curiosity, because the experience suddenly seems like an adventure or even a way to look into my reactivity without judging it. There is a rich opportunity to see what seems incompatible to my comfort and transform the incompatibility to embrace, or surrender or kindness.

Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education (ed Miller, J; Karsten S, Denton, D.; Orr, D & Colalillo Kates, I) New York: State University of New York Press.