Mindfulness Reaches

"When mindfulness reaches to embrace the world around us..." 

This is a phrase that rings in my head as I think of what I want to write.  I think it's a sentence I've read before, perhaps in some of Thay's books, perhaps elsewhere.  After another blessed weekend at Deer Park, my inspiration to write lies here, in these words.

Mindfulness is about so much more than simply finding happiness... or, as I wrote in my last blog, perhaps it is about so much more than finding an easy, cheap happiness.  The kind of happiness that blocks out the pain of the world within us - and around us.  Perhaps even the kind of mindfulness that blocks out the joys and happinesses of the those around us as well. 

The week before I came to Deer Park for this second weekend retreat was bombed with unexpected and difficult to hear news.  The kind of news you don't wish to hear, ever.  But also the kind of news that you must hear.  Because pain and death are parts of life's marrow.  There is no life - no birth - without death.  This is the Buddhist cycle of Samsara.  Yet, in the Mahayana tradition, Samsara is not different from Nirvana.  If you ask where nirvana is to be found, we say "also here... in the cycle of birth and death... in the wheel of pain and loss, joy and suffering... this is also nirvana."  As Thay says: No Mud, No Lotus.  Or Nietzsche - one must have chaos in oneself to birth a dancing star.  Our wholeness is woven from the fabric of our loss... the threads of broken dreams, of hopeless nights, of unmet desires.  Andrea Gibson speaks of the hill where Hafiz "cut pieces of his soul with a knife and wove them into a blanket to protect us."  The unfortunate thing about mindfulness is that it can too easily be accosted by those seeking a sort of private happiness, a shell through which they can protect themselves from the "slings and arrows" of life.  The legitimate pain of existence.  Jung (I believe it was Jung) said that most neuroses can be traced to attempts to avoid legitimate suffering.  This leads into what I will call a sort of small mindfulness.  Small mindfulness is incapable of reaching beyond itself to embrace the world around me.  Small mindfulness cannot hold joy and sorrow side by side, and seeks to avoid sorrow by "dwelling in the hear and in the now."  But true mindfulness brings sorrow into itself to transform it.  True mindfulness cannot shut out suffering because suffering is part of the hear and the now.  Look around us.  Those without jobs suffer.  Those who have lost children, parents, spouses, or friends... they suffer.  The trees suffer... many of them die.  The air suffers, the ice caps, the atmosphere.  There is suffering around us everywhere.  But there is also liberation.  There is also release.  And this release is found only in the suffering.  Nirvana is found only in Samsara.  This is why one of the Order of Interbeing's 14 mindfulness trainings has to do with not closing one's eyes to the reality of suffering.  In fact, it is a commitment to make efforts to be with others in their sufferings, whether it is through personal contact, telephone, visual images, etc.  We must embrace these things for our mindfulness to be real.  No discrimination. We take the realities of joy and suffering as things to be held.  We learn to love the sunset while our beloved is in pain - or while we are in pain.  When the shattering pain of loss hits us, we learn to be with that pain fully... because we have cultivated the mindfulness to know we will not be swallowed up, forever.  Even permanence is impermanent.  Everything changes.  The things that feel as though they will rip out the very corners of our souls create space only for more life within us.  But only if we hold it close to our being.  Only if we let it wash over us.  Only if we pay attention.

If we practice selfish discrimination, we will only let a few things into our being.  But we also must practice a form of enlightened discrimination.  I have friends who focus only on the tragedies and injustices in the world.  They cannot see also the beauty.  They are very angry, or they are very depressed.  They are mad at the people around them who do not ever focus on the pain and the injustice.  Perhaps they feel that they need to balance this blindness with a blindness of their own.  Unfortunately the world is filled with many starving children. We hope that through our lives we can reduce the number of starving children.  Through the ways in which we live, eat, consume, spend our money, our time, and our energy.  Many of us write political letters, many of us give money to charities, and some of us go to spend time with the children who are starving.  I think this is maybe the best way. 

But we cannot forget that there are many laughing children in the world as well.  We must remember this... we must also find ways to be with the laughing children, through our time, money, energy, and attention.  The laughing children remind why we can be happy.  They remind us why we want to feed the hungry children... because a well fed child is a very beautiful thing.  They help us remember why we do not want to consume very much... because we want the children in the world to have enough.  This is when mindfulness reaches to embrace the world around us.  We see how many children are in the world, and we wrestle with the question if we should adopt rather than have children of our own.  We sit with it and let it grow in us.  We hear that someone near to us has lost a loved one, and we open our breathing to let that in.  There is deep sorrow in the life lost.  But if we look deeply there are also places to find joy and gratitude.  We hope, at least, that there is joy in the life that was lost.  But there will also be coming together of families, sharing of memories, forging of new bonds, and great generosities.  Where there are not these things, we work to create them.  We work only to water the seeds of love in each other.  Gratefully.  Mindfully. 

The most important thing is that we do not practice for ourselves alone.  In fact, this is where it can become very important to understand the Buddhist teaching of non-self.  Because there is no true way to practice for your "self" alone.  When you have insight you see that your self is not separate from the world around you.  Not separate from the land and the trees, from the starving children, from the laughing children.  You are also your friend who lost his or her beloved, you are also the beloved.  And we practice to bring this awareness more deeply into all of it.  Mindfulness stretches out to embrace the world - the people - all around us.  Because those people are also part of who we are.  If there are angry, ignorant, or over-consuming people, we recognize that we must do all that we can not to further water seeds of ignorance, anger, and over-consumption.  We seek to live in such a way to awaken love, compassion and awareness, by living with love, compassion, and awareness in ourselves.  I will leave you with the words of the song that has come home with me from this past weekend, and a blessing of the peace that lives within each of us, waiting to be nourished.

In gratitude you have watered seeds
of love in me in gratitude.
In gratitude, I will water seeds
of love in you in gratitude.