I have developed a mistrust of lawyers over the years. They have always been the people thrust on me by people of dubious character, with harmful intent. Used as the kryptonite for others to distract and overpower me, they have been the pawns in wars fought against me. I am not unscathed. So, when my son declared matter of factly in the car one day last year that he had registered to study BCom Law, the horror I felt bordered on outrage. I stammered. I had no words. Not this intelligent, kind, conscious young man! My thoughts whirled and my heart pounded. Brainwashed, I thought … sucked into the system, I gasped … poisoned by his private schooling and narcissistic parent. I am fortunate that words do often escape me. I am not often succinct, let alone silent, especially when indignant and stupefied. Yet here I was … silent … gaping and dumbfounded … and I was still. I was driving. It was a blessed saviour. Because I was wrong. 

There is good and bad in everyone and there is good and bad in every profession. Not all lawyers should be vilified because of the bad people who hide behind them. And every profession with a bad rap needs another good person to step in and shift the perception. My great grandfather was a British Judge in Colonial India. The India I love where my paternal grandmother, Diana, was born and grew has a karmic hold on me. This karmic bond that made her an activist—and unwittingly caused me to rebel against the construct—has created an aspiration in my son to unwittingly go back to source. 

I have spent many hours and healings pondering and deep diving into the possibility—however unlikely—that this ancestor of mine, caught in a paradigm of horrendous crimes against this land I long for, was one of the good guys. I have spent many hours and healings pondering and deep diving too into whether his Indian-born redhead fought the South African Apartheid because of the example of good she was shown or in reaction to the bad. Because some people don’t evolve into anything other than the kryptonite others require to become a superhero. And some people’s parents are that kryptonite.

Having spent so many years moulding myself to fit a system; to fit a society; to fit a community of people who value structures of control above all else, I remember with shameful distaste looking out from my cool marble double-volume Investment Banking office block at protests against capitalism taking place in the street below and feeling contempt and pity for these ragged unemployed mongrels with too much time on their hands. I felt they must envy me in my branded clothes with my Toni&Guy crafted hairstyles. How wrong I was. Anarchy is also a system with its own set of rules and dogma. Karma is the vehicle that can either transport you or run you down.

It took me years of accumulating and aspiring to a dysfunctional norm before falling from my wobbly pedestal in divorce and disillusion to begin finding those threads that brought me into a more harmonious weave with Diana’s legacy of simplicity, lightheartedness, gravitas, integrity, creativity, and strength to live outside of dysfunction which, in her day was a whole lot more difficult than in mine. I admire her with deep bows of gratitude as I see how my son too is following this thread, and weaving together the tapestry of activism and consciousness with the clear-headed pragmatism of a Virgo birth with Libra rising under a Sagittarius moon. 

Watching me fight annually to retain custody against a man—and the legal system he used for this unjust endeavour—also contributed to the shaping of my son into the young man who seeks this path of knowledge towards understanding of justice and its shadow side. Even the bad ones are in their way the greatest teachers. It’s as erroneous to discard the systems because of the people as it is to discard the people because of the systems. If a bad person hides in the jungle, it doesn’t make the jungle bad for shielding her. My reality is a construct of my own mind.

There is a saying that anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. I cannot be harmed by a vengeful person imbibing poison she expects to kill me. I cannot find someone else’s inner peace. But I can find my own. I observe my inclination to lean in too far, too soon. To feel safe. I act first. Too terrified of a surprise attack, I walk straight into the wall … or a fist.

If life is suffering then my pain resides solely in my resistance to said suffering. Breathing into it and accepting its natural and necessary occurrence, I can breathe out the struggle and no longer feel the pain. Two weeks ago during a visit to a dentist in Chandigarh, I worked with this theory. Using only the breath and mindful awareness, I allowed the dentist to remove an old crown one day and fit a new one the next. With no anaesthetic, I used the experience to deconstruct my brain’s narrative that the nerve pain was dangerous or detrimental and I gave my brain the opportunity to cut through habituated patterns and see another reality and truth not based on past stories. This is how I learn to feel safe.

So this framework has filtered into other areas of life as I breathe through my reluctance to tap into the construct I discarded. I have befriended the pawn a recent perpetrator/victim (look out for another post on The Drama Triangle) has used to create her own smoke and mirrors drama and I have befriended my requirement to recruit a lawyer who will be as good and honest and trustworthy as I give her the credit and integrity to be. And I use these data points to shift my perspective of the karmic bond my son has to entering this field: to change the paradigm and to heal the ancestral line; to blend the yin and the yang, the creative and the pragmatic, the gentle and the bold.

I use my self-development as a glider and, from a place of eagle-eyed vision, I acknowledge the duality that guides the river of self knowing through the safety of foreign terrain as I place a Lawyer as one bank and a Sangoma as the other. This is the weft and weave that makes the tapestry come alive on the loom … the poise and pause of musical notes … the margins of the page.

There is no happiness without the transmutation of suffering and all superheroes have their nemesis.  Without the kryptonite Superman would not have his superpowers; without challenge there is no Superhero. The systems and the shadows have shaped me too. So I befriend the jungle once more and know that I am safe there … and also not … but mostly I am.