Welcome, dear reader, to another month of taking metta off the meditation cushion and out into everyday life.
Last month, the wheel of Dharma finally turned after months of stalling in a toxic workplace, as described in my article “Metta Pulls the Plug.” This month, metta helped me exhale enough to take in my new surroundings in every sense.
I ended my previous article with my transfer to another property of the walking holiday company I’m still working for as live-in staff, likening it to a piglet slowly testing its new boundaries after discovering that it is no longer penned in by electric wiring.
Despite all that had happened, I chose to continue working for them for two simple reasons: the first was that I wanted to give the company I thought I had applied to and the grand-boss who later took my concerns seriously a second chance; the second was that I was frankly feeling too squashed to apply anywhere new. At least if I wobbled in the coming months, there would be some context should I need support.
The day before I boarded the train to the new property, a friend wisely suggested that rather than put undue pressure on myself or the new team, I simply view this second chance as an experiment. I may well discover that I was truly nuts or that the company was thoroughly corrupt, but I couldn’t possibly know until I got there and experienced some contrast.
After months of short staffing, the new workplace was warm and welcoming. For my inner piglet, though, every shift was an inner case of two trotters forward one curly tail back. It’s one thing to walk away from a harmful situation, it’s another to then slowly weed out the seeds of self-doubt that got sown along the way.
And that’s where hefty doses of self-metta helped in the form of meditation, extra sleep, reaching out to friends for sanity checks as needed, signing up for a local book group and choir, and enjoying walks amid the falling autumn leaves.
As I slowly got to know the new team I would be working and living with, I discovered two common threads: many were artists of some kind, and several had just moved on from jobs where they too had experienced bullying. Some were half my age, others older than me. Some had worked for the company for years, others started after me. Some were local, others had come from the other side of the world.
If I had to pinpoint what it was that calmed my inner piglet the most, it was the team’s size and diversity. After months of not fitting in in any way, shape, or form in an extremely competitive environment, I suddenly found myself fitting in with those who didn’t fit in either. I secretly laughed to myself that we had all somehow found our way to this Dharmic halfway house.
I was slowly rebuilding my confidence when, three weeks in, I dropped a couple of wineglasses while setting up for dinner service and unexpectedly burst into tears while sweeping up the shards. When one of the managers stopped by and offered to help me, the contrast with how managers had treated me at the previous property compared with this simple act of kindness was too much and my tears escalated into sobs. The poor man had no idea he was walking into an inner storm nearly half a year in the brewing, and that would last the better part of that evening’s bar shift no matter how much he tried to comfort me.
As I quietly filled dinner drinks orders and polished glasses, I observed wave after wave of post-traumatic stress pass through me and the tears kept coming. During dinner service, the new team sweetly took it in turns to check on me whenever they could, bringing me chocolate and helping me with closing tasks. And I later found sweet notes of encouragement under my door when I returned to my room.
My outsides had definitely moved on, but my insides clearly still needed to catch up.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night as I relived painful memories, cursing myself for thinking that continuing to work for the company was a healthy choice, and seriously debating whether to persevere. The next day, two things helped: speaking hard truths with my new manager and hearing hard truths from a coworker who had worked there the longest.
I leveled with my new manager, placing all my cards openly on the table: they heard me out, fielding my questions and concerns, and telling me how welcome I was. They offered to adjust what could be adjusted, setting some new boundaries around my rota to prevent more triggers, sketching out where team roles were headed overall, and assuring me off the record that the business was now taking a long hard look at the previous property after all that I had reported. It was only after we concluded our conversation with a hug that I realized that rather than breaking down, my inner piglet finally felt safe enough to feel all its feelings.
When I later listened to my most longest-serving coworker, I sadly discovered that what I had experienced wasn’t unique. While I was awed by all they had survived and their stories provided me with the ultimate sanity check, the conversation also left me with a lot of bigger-picture questions. My new manager felt sincere, but they were also relatively new to the company.
As I sat with my feelings and the conflicting feedback from the old and the new regimes, it dawned on me that all I could realistically do was to take things day by day until further notice.
A clarity-of-sorts began to emerge a few days later when I attended a performance by the choir I was planning to join. They sang a gospel song about putting one foot in front of the other and leading with love, which found me crying and laughing this time. And then a group of blind guests stayed the week, humbling all us staff with their creative workarounds to enjoy a hillwalking holiday.
At the bar one evening, a guest shared her plans to go skiing in Canada next year to celebrate her 70th birthday! I couldn’t resist asking about the logistics of skiing blind, and was told it was really quite simple: just follow the music. Apparently, a companion skier hangs a radio around their neck as they blaze a safe trail for the blind skier to follow down the slope.
And so, dear readers, in the face of whatever traumas may still sometimes find us taking two steps back or feeling unclear on what next step forward to take, please remember to let metta—rather than outside influences—lead the way. Especially down life’s black diamond runs.
Or, to metta-morphose Melanie DeMore’s “Lead with Love:”
Lift up your eyes
Don’t you despair
Look up ahead
The path is thereYou gotta put one foot in front of the other
And lead with metta
Put one foot in front of the other
And lead with metta
Related features from BDG
Book Review: Happy Relationships by Kimberly Brown
Love, Celebration, and Self-forgetting: What Matters at the End of Life?
Rebirth in Real Time: Navigating Mental States with Mindfulness
Cultivating a Buddhist Perspective on Life
On Relationships, Greed, and Generosity
