Wise Woman

She wanted me to gaze into her eyes for a full ten minutes without breaking eye contact.  I'm not one of those people that has a hard time making eye contact but the prospect of doing it for ten minutes was intimidating.  It was during a weeklong workshop on the relationship between different religions and how they present a moral imperative for taking care of the Earth.  We had already covered Christianity, Judaism, and Native American faith systhems.  Buddhism was the subject of this day, and this exercise was to help us gain empathy for others, particularly those that we didn't especially like (this has come in pretty handy over the subsequent 10 years).  I say "we" but it was actually just "me" as I was the only participant to show up that day, probably because it was a glorious summer day at the beach.  But the waves didn't have as much pull on me as the workshop leader.  She was intelligent, compelling and I felt there was a lot I could learn from her.  However being the only other person there made this "gazing" exercise all the more uncomfortable.

She had long graying hair, and I'm guessing that she was in her late forties or early fifties, and as I said before, she was beautiful.  As we started the exercise and I gazed into her eyes, her image morphed into that of the stereotypical gnarled old crone.  Decidedly not beautiful.  My eyes were drying out so I had the valid excuse to break eye contact to rub them occasionally, but each time I returned to her face she was the crone once again.  Surprisingly the ten minutes flew by.  She asked me if I had anything to share about the experience and I said no.  I couldn't bring myself to tell her that she kept changing into an ugly old hag.  I obsessed over it for the rest of the day.  A nagging part of me knew that I should have told her the truth. 

The next afternoon I was talking to her and she confessed that she was struggling with aging.  Not because she didn't want to grow older, but because she didn't feel like she was ready to be an "elder" or wise woman in the community.  She didn't consider herself worthy of that honor yet and was disappointed.  I finally told her what I had seen the previous day.  That when I gazed at her during the meditation I had seen the image of the wise woman, that it was her true self.  Sometimes our job is to just pass on information without judgment.