eat the blame

someday this pain will be useful to you

My maternal side of the family has specialized in darkness going back at least four generations. What I mean by that is the tentacles of unlovability, powerlessness, and shame curled deeply into that line and the people, therefore, became traumatized and traumatizing.

I am relentlessly curious, and being up close and personal with black holes in the psyche made me knowledgeable about fairly common subject matter like trauma, resilience, the power of belief, and meditation, as well as uncommon subject matter like sociopathy, apex predators, and the evolution of evil. I don’t talk about the latter at parties, and the books I read before bed are often at extreme ends of a spectrum:

But my life is also at extreme ends. My mother is being investigated for homicide, medical child abuse, and insurance fraud, while my business partner and I continue to build the most nourishing Center we can—and I sense it’s going to be quite beautiful. However it may seem, these things are not paradoxical. The dark material of our origin stories forges character and the purpose of our lives. You’ve seen Star Wars; you know how this works.

Stumbling forward, I found a story I wanted to share because it’s powerful and useful and real. It’s a Zen story so it tosses general reality, leaving you confounded but with a gem in the palm of your hand. Here’s a summary of the tale:¹

In ancient China, an abbot was eating with monks in a meditation hall when he discovered a snake head in his soup. Zen monasteries are vegetarian so this was most certainly a mistake. The abbot assumed a farmer-monk in the field had accidentally cut off the head of the snake while harvesting, and the soup-cook monk hadn’t noticed. The abbot called for the head cook and when he arrived, the abbot held up the head of the snake and said, “Look.” The head cook did not say a word. He made no sound. He made no excuses. He blamed no one. He felt neither guilt nor shame. Instead, he snatched the head of the snake and swallowed it. It was very nourishing for him.

‘Eat the blame’ comes from a Zen expression: Drive all blames into one. Before you protest, in no way does it mean to blame yourself for difficult circumstance. A healthy spiritual tradition would not suggest that. To eat something is to obliterate it. It is to consume it in its entirety and, by doing so, transform it. In this way, it becomes no-blame. It becomes blamelessness. To eat the blame is to blame nothing and no one for what happens, even if you can easily find fault.

For me, blame-eating requires sensing into the beginningless cause-and-effect that manifests all things sacred and profane. Believe me, I long to point at one nemesis and one cause. But point to one cause, and it leads to another, then another, and another. Look for a Prime Mover, an ultimate scapegoat, an original gangster. They all dissolve under scrutiny. In his latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, my favorite neurobiologist² came to the same infuriating but sane conclusion: When something occurs, it might be disastrous, and there may even be someone you can point to, but there’s nothing to do but make use of it. Turn bad circumstances into the path.

This man is eating the blame.

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My brother and I will pursue a criminal case against the woman who gave us life on behalf of our sister whose life that woman extinguished, and on behalf of her daughter who is still in danger. As we do, we are eating the blame, each in our own way, doing the most difficult work of our lives: Holding a lethal person accountable, while not blaming her, ourselves, or anyone else, while not enabling her and stumbling into idiot compassion, and while metabolizing all emotional poison that comes with the territory. Threading this needle is among the hardest things I’ve ever done. But if we live long enough, we will all face things we don’t want to face. We will all reckon with things we wish were not happening. Resisting and blaming only causes more suffering. It feels nourishing and empowering to ask instead: What can we do with this?

I trust that if we eat the blame—if we work to embrace a view of no-blame, accepting all that arises and nurturing whatever wisdom and compassion we can muster—someday, this pain will be useful to us. Somehow, it will show us the way.

1. From Norman Fischer’s book Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong.

2. Dr. Robert Sapolsky