When I was younger – much younger – I went through physical abuse at the hands of various adults.

I was raised by a series of nanny-housekeepers because my mother was a career woman, working in the high end of ladies fashion for her father, and my father was away in the Royal Air Force. The last nanny before my mother gave birth to my sister and became a stay-at-home housewife carried the quaint name of Ellie Appel. There was, however, nothing quaint about her. She was mean and unloving and had the habit of grabbing me by the arm and shaking me. I was seven years old.

I complained to my mother and she fired Ellie. Although I think the main reason for doing so was my mother’s outrage that Ellie’s idea of a meal was a plate full of home-made French fries (or chips as we called them in the UK). That was actually the only thing I liked about Miss Appel. I was not sorry to see her go.

I attended an excellent public school literally around the corner to our house. The headmaster, Mr. Mathews, loved music and singing as much as children and the three Rs. Most of the teachers seemed to dislike children, but there was the occasional exception. But then at age 9, I went into Mr. Williams’ class. For two years.

Mr. Williams was a thick-set, very short man with an equally short fuse and yellow teeth from smoking too much. He reigned supreme over his class of 45 children by instilling fear into us. Unless you were his favourite, he was a terrible bully. I saw him make boys cry before he even laid a hand on them. He roared his rage, and hit us with a ruler, or gave us a good shaking. We had the old-fashioned school desks where the wooden desk and the wooden seat were connected to each other by an iron frame. One day he was shaking me and kept hitting the iron part of the desk with the outside of my thigh. I ended up with a long, painful, purple bruise. Somehow I determined I was going to let him know what he’d done.

Inappropriate and horribly non-PC though it seems now, back then schoolgirls did sports wearing thick knickers – underwear essentially. Anyway, that served my purposes, as my big bruise was plainly visible. I made sure to be around him as much as possible on the sports field. It worked. He inquired how I got such a bruise. I replied brightly, “You did it, sir!” Silence.

Speaking of silence, towards the end of the SGI Buddhist silent prayers that are part of gongyo (meaning assiduous, challenging practice) there’s a prayer for the deceased. Some months ago, I began praying for the eternal happiness of Mr. Williams and Ellie Appel. It seemed obvious to me that I had a strong karmic link with them and that they had been unhappy people who could use my help.

At some later point, I added to this sad group the man who abducted and raped me when I first arrived in Canada at age 21. If you want, you can read that story, told in a poem, here.

This event deeply damaged my sense of self. Not because of the sexual act I consented to to make the violence stop. I’d had meaningless sex before, I’m both sorry and glad to say. (Sorry because how sad to waste something so special meaninglessly; glad because it enabled me to come to terms with sex imposed on me by a stranger fairly quickly.)

No, what was so very damaging was how utterly helpless and hopeless I was that night. Trapped in the dark in the middle of nowhere, entirely dependent for my survival on an animal of a man who had terrified me. Just this stranger and me in the close quarters of his car in the pitch-black countryside.

No matter how bad a situation is it will change. No misfortune is permanent; no evil insuperable. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

Over the years I tried many times and methods to expunge my psyche of that terrifying night. They scratched at the surface of the scar. But that fateful night when I was lost and made the terrible mistake of accepting a ride from a stranger dogged me relentlessly.

So when I started including him in my prayers I didn’t particularly expect anything great to come of it. Especially since, because I didn’t know his name, I described him to myself as “the man who abducted and raped me.” But that put me back in the victim’s seat. Even just calling him “the French-Canadian truck driver” put me back in that car with him, in my mind.

Until yesterday morning.

I chanted longer than I usually do in the morning before I got to the silent prayers. I prayed for deceased family members, and people who loomed large in my life for various reasons, and Mr. Williams and Ellie Appel. Then I prayed for… the man I met that night.

That’s how my subconscious mind delivered him to my conscious mind: “The man I met that night.” This seemed so simple, and so silly, I started to smile. Then I chuckled, and finally I laughed out loud! What a hoot! That’s all he was! A man I met one night. Sure, bad things happened, but I survived and walked away from it.

After 50 years, in a single moment, the spell was broken.

I can’t help wondering if a new prayer I added to my chanting as of yesterday morning has something to do with this inner-powered liberation, this human revolution. The prayer is: “I give myself permission to regard and treat myself as precious.”

I think that prayer, coupled with my compassion for the man’s life, unlocked a healing power deep within me, part of my Buddha nature that had lain dormant, waiting for me to awaken to the preciousness of my life, so it could swing into action for me. And change everything in one single, blessed moment.

Photo by Tycho Atsma on Unsplash