In my journey along this path of mindfulness practice, I have been unraveling and exploring my conditioning over the course of my life. In one of those explorations, I bumped into untangling this thing called ‘loyalty’. I found ‘my’ brand of loyalty to be a maladaptive behavior that has brought me gobs of suffering. That said, it also saved my bacon. An internal beacon began to illuminate how that habit pattern lived in a box of black and white, this or that, right or wrong, and is a paradox which often kept me stuck with a thick coat of scaly armor crusting over my body.
I saw undying loyalty as “integrity” in my mind’s eye, when I look back over these decades of my life. It unfolded for me that this brand of loyalty in this body has nothing to do with integrity, but a self-serving survival mechanism which I somehow cultivated as a kid. My brand of “loyalty" helped me navigate a world I certainly didn’t understand, and one which terrified me and riddled me with anxiety. Loyalty offered me a sense of belonging, and an illusion of safety. Safety from all that scary stuff called the unknown, isolation, a feeling of not belonging anywhere. It also led to the care and feeding of another beast called distrust. If my allegiance was so fierce as to keep me safe from the bogeyman, it also assumed that there was lots in this world which couldn’t be trusted. This awareness leaves me with a feeling in my chest of a giant egg cracking open with a mysterious bird emerging.
At the same time, I find myself trying to shake off this scaly skin of loyalty with as much enthusiasm as a dog shaking off the mud she just rolled in. So this sounds like I’m saying that loyalty is a bad thing altogether. Not so. This brand of loyalty lived in this body and morphed through the eyes a child to keep her steeped in an illusion of safety and protection.
A compassionate and wise MBSR teacher colleague shared with me a perspective that maladaptive coping, once it enters our awareness, is something to be deeply honored, as its intention and method is self-care. Although this kind of coping is deeply misguided, it also kept me alive and functioning to somehow navigate my world, which was without mature guidance and nurture.
These days I think I see loyalty as a capacity to trust and listen to whatever is unfolding for another (and myself) without judgment. Loyalty to the innate wisdom we each hold in this being human. As wisdom can be, and often is, buried beneath so many layers by our conditioning, I think loyalty also asks us to be patient and trust in the mystery and simplicity of deep listening, and holding what is here for one another without doing anything. Just holding hands comes to mind. Loyalty now seems to be reaching for the faith and trust in our humanity, and accepting of however imperfect and awkward my attempts may be.
