Joy

Two weeks ago was the holiday retreat at Deer Park.  I left on a cloud.  I left floating in wonder and gratitude and bliss and delight.  Today, as I write this, I have joy.  Yesterday I had joy.  Last week I had great joy.  For as much as I blog about sadness, struggle, pain, and suffering, it feels good to write about joy.  It feels even better to experience it, to delight in it, to let it flow out of me and onto others.  I’ve been thinking about why the real struggle of my life – although most of what I write has to do with pain and discomfort – seems to be a struggle to accept happiness, serenity, peace, and joy.  There are so many reasons.  Some of them have a lot to do with how I grew up, but I don’t want to talk about childhood experiences here, not today.  I want to talk about the impermanence of joy.  Its emptiness (which is Buddhist for impermanence, not meaninglessness).  I want to talk about how I believe part of my struggle to experience joy lies precisely in my inability to let it go.  My inability to experience it as empty.  My compulsion to grab hold of it.  Grasping.  For so long, when joy arose, I clung to it like a desperately hungry person would cling to a piece of food.  I tried to devour it, to own it, to make sure it would not go away.  And then, when it would invariably go away, I would become depressed – sometimes even guilt-ridden.  I was suffering the painful delusion that if I lived, thought, behaved, studied or practiced “rightly” that the joy would not fade.  That I would experience unending delight.  I would pause for a moment and ask you not to bring up semantic debates about the meaning of joy as opposed to or distinct from happiness or elation or some other term.  I mean “joy” simply in a conventional sense.  Something that is like happiness, elation, rapture, delight, gratitude, love... I am not trying to have a metaphysical conversation.  I am simply trying to express what we have all (hopefully) known at various times in our life.  That non-manic delight that seems to permeate out of the deep parts of ourselves, and seems to find its end and beginning simply in our very experience of being.  Of being alive.  Of being a person.  Of being a person-in-relation.  So joy comes.  And joy goes.  Joy as a feeling – an experience.  In Buddhist terms (five skandhas) we could locate it in the realm of feelings, which, like all of the aspects of personhood, are empty.  They change.  

So joy... I always used to experience joy as the ultimate goal.  When it came, I HAD to figure out how to keep it.  And by the very nature of my quest, I chased it away.  And then I berated myself for losing it.  I was, again, seeing it as some kind of spiritual reward.  But the practice of mindfulness does not have joy as its final aim.  It has as its aim the practice of being present with what is.  So that when "what is" is joy, we can be present with that.  When I left Deer Park last week after the holiday retreat, my heart was overflowing with love and joy and gratitude.  The people I met, the conversations I had, the energy, the practice, the tofu.  It was magic.  My heart was full.  More than full.  And then it started to wane.  And I got scared.  I didn’t want to “lose it.”  But then I noticed something else in me.  An excited compulsion, underneath which was fear, to go back to Deer Park as soon as possible.  I began to feel like my joy was contingent on the people that I met and connected with.  That if I didn’t stay close to them, my joy would not last.  Or perhaps it was the place itself.  And without the monastics, without the long term lay practioners, without the white Buddha statue or the Ocean of Peace meditation hall, I would not be okay.  I thought maybe I needed these things for my joy flower to flourish.  And when I noticed the addictive pull in me to go back to Deer Park very quickly – the fearful feeling that I might not be able to live and be happy without it – I took many deep breaths.  I had to find the place in me not contingent upon Deer Park or my new friends.  “Be a lamp unto thyself,” said the Buddha.  Of course I inter-am with all of the beautiful people I met and practiced with.  But the teaching is not to rely on places or people or a group of friends.  The teaching is to find the awareness and awakening in oneself - to share and nurture that in community, but to find it in myself.  So I began to let go of my addictive clinging to this joy.  I began to accept that joy too is impermanent.  That this too shall pass.  

There’s the basic attachment theory in parenting that the safer a child feels in her attachment (connection) to her parents, the more willing and able she is to venture away from them.  She knows that when she returns, they will still be there.  Or when they go away, they will come back.  The child learns this from repeated experiences.... crawling out of the room and then turning around to see the parent is still there.  Crawling a little farther, out of eye range, starting to fuss, and having the parent respond to her fussing.  Mommy or Daddy is there... I am safe.  I can explore.  I do not need to be afraid.  Children who grow up without a healthy sense of attachment may have certain difficulties later in life.  Perhaps they seek that sense of safety and stability in unhealthy places.  Perhaps they feel disconnected from themselves and not at ease in the world around them.  Perhaps they do not feel like they can find a safe place within.  I think that my experience with happiness was always like this.  If it went away, I was never sure that it would come back.  My experience said it would not.  Or, perhaps my experience said that when it was around, I could not trust it.  Perhaps I experienced happiness like an alcoholic parent – something you learn to take with a grain of salt, never really trusting, never really accepting its word at face value.  But trying to cling to and prolong every good moment you can... because it’s all you’ve got.

 

Interestingly enough, I had to learn that I could survive without happiness.  That I could survive without joy.  I had to learn that I could face what was left when the joy went away.  And the past two years of my life have been just that.  Learning to face the pain – the loneliness, the loss, the fear.  Learning to grieve, deeply, and like I never want to again, but almost certainly will.  Learning to say I can survive whatever comes – I can be present to it.  There were times when the suffering seemed pointless... where I wanted to run back to old addictions or habit energies – where I wanted to turn away from the pain inside myself to be somewhere else.  And there were times when I did.  There are still times when I do.  When I eat or watch tv or fantasize or keep busy just to get away from the unpleasantness inside myself.  But at the core of my past two years was the discovery that I can be okay.  That I can face the pain within.  That I can be home, inside myself – no matter how hard or scary it might be.  So this past week when I felt the joy slipping away from me, after my initial impulse to cling to it with some sort of unhealthy desperation, I was able to look at it and say, “if you must go, then go, I do not need you to be okay.”  And something broke open inside of me.  I do not need joy.  I do not need happiness.  And the joy and happiness that THAT realization has brought into my life is one of the most absurd and ironic parodoxes I have yet to experience on the spiritual path.  My willingness (and ability, nurtured through painful, shitty practice) to be present with, face and experience my pain was the opening into a world that does not have to cling to joy and happiness.  Just like someone experiences profound release and freedom when they stop “needing” a relationship or a partner in order to feel okay about themselves, in order to feel “enough,” I stopped needing some experience of happiness, joy or elation in order to feel like I was okay – like I was enough.  And, the paradoxes continue.  True peace for me seems to come from being okay that I’m not always okay.  Healing seems to come from holding and embracing the wounds in me that might never fully "heal." 

Happiness comes and goes.  Joy comes and goes.  I feel a bit like the Buddha in saying this – because once upon a time it was believed that the Atman – the Self – was eternal, that this self was not other than the supreme ultimate – the Brahman.  And the Buddha woke up and said, there is no “Self.”  This does not “exist” in the ultimate sense.  And I think of spiritual teachers who say that joy is the true nature of our being.  That when we touch our true being, we touch joy, which is not dependent upon our thoughts or external conditions.  It is not an emotion, it is simply what flows when we are in touch with being.  Of course... with this description, joy still becomes a “thing” - and idea of something.  And once it’s a “thing,” like Atman, like the idea of Self, we can grab it and say “this is mine!”  So I just want to say that joy comes and goes.  It is not eternal.  And I don’t need it.  When it needs to go, it can go.  I do not need to try to hold it hostage.  Nor do I need to be codependent with it, where I think I can control its behavior with my behavior.  I am going to continue my practice of being present to the moment – of enjoying my breathing and the people around me – of looking for ways to be mindful and compassionate and open-hearted.  Then, if I experience joy, I will be present to that.  If I experience hurt or grief or loss or pain, I will be present to that.  If I experience fear, I will be present to that.  And if joy needs to leave to go somewhere or to take care of someone else, it can go.

Yes, yes, yes, maybe joy is not really that impermanent thing I am talking about.  Maybe joy the metaphysical thing I’m feeling when I let go of “joy.”  I don’t know.  I’m not too sure that I care.  All I know is that today, I don’t need to be happy any more.  I only want to be jonathan.  Today, in this moment – impermanent, empty self jonathan... opening to the world around me, coming home to the island within myself.  No coming, no going.  No birth, no death.  No arriving.  And yet... here I am.

And I want to say this:  it’s worth it.  Everything I’ve been writing about for the past many months/years.  That pain in the ass, pain-laced process of learning to be with your suffering... to not run away from it.  To hold yourself in the midst of it.  To walk into it instead of away from or around it.  It is worth it.  You need to find the practices to help you be able to do it.  The practices and the community.  But it is worth it.  Every step.  Every breath.  Because as soon as I could say to happiness, “I don’t need you”... as soon as I could say “I can be happy without you...”  everything changed.  Something has broken open inside of me, and, to sound overwhelmingly cheesy, a flower has bloomed in my heart.  And I am home.

Reflections on Sadness

It came to me recently that I had made it a goal of my current phase of life to avoid sadness.  As many of my readers know, I have gone through a lot in the past two years of my life, and I have watched those around me go through even more.  Grief, loss, heartache...  from things that "should not be" but are.  And a few weeks ago I was beset by a felt need to see someone very important to me - to spend time in her presence and reap the benefits of her company.  And then it dawned on me: more than anything I was looking for something or someone to help me go away from the direction of my sadness.  I wanted a detour - a bypass - a way out.  What I realized in this same moment is that my journey is still into the heart of my sadness, not away from it.  That any journey away from my sadness is a journey away from myself - a desire to be "not me" - a desire so aptly expressed by Po in his journey to become the Dragon Warrior.  But there is no way to be or become "not me."  There is only the journey into the heart of this sadness if that is what is being asked of me. 

And here's the thing - the sadness I feel isn't ubiquitous (not anymore).  It doesn't flood every facet of my being and drown my soul.  There are times in life when sadness does just that - and that is okay, too.  But this is not one of those times.  This time sadness is just there - sitting in the room, strongly requesting my attention.  I can either turn away from it or attend to it.  The choice is mine.  The turn toward is a turn toward myself - a conciliatory act of self-love and acceptance.  An affirmation of the thought that I am enough - all of me.  Including my grief, loss and pain.  And now, as I sit to type these words, I begin to realize that I have been treating sadness as a person I hoped - if I were nice enough to him - would go away.  Sort of a nuisance that you can't get rid of aggressively, and so it might help to become friends with him so that he will eventually leave you be and never come around again.  But that's all wrong.  Sadness isn't something outside of me - it's a part of my internal journey of transformation and becoming.  The goal isn't to befriend it so that it will go away.  The goal is to befriend it because it is an expression of my deepest self.  Just as joy and love also are.  The "goal" (if that is even a valuable word in this context) is to embrace my sadness because it's there... because it isn't going away.  And when I run away from it, it becomes a neurotic and consuming type of sadness.  The heavy blanket I referenced in an earlier post.  It sits on me as a kind of depression, or haunts me as a dissociated ghost aspect of myself.  I stop being whole because I am walking in the wrong direction.  I am reminded of a line from Andrea Gibson: we have all dug too many trenches away from ourselves.

And I am ready to be done digging trenches away from myself.  I thought I could embrace sadness in one brief (several year) span of my life and then figure out how to be done with it.  I wanted to learn my "sadness lesson."  Well my sadness lesson is that sadness is part of life's fabric.  Like the out breath.  Like the sinking of the tide.  There is no befriending it until it goes away - there is only the turning toward it each time it arises.  Knowing that it is not a threat.  Going into it so that it loses its grip of fear and suffocation on my life.  And that's the beauty.  Because when I am not frightened by my sadness, I am less likely to be frightened by the sadness of others.  When I begin to see how sadness loses its stranglehold when the light of compassionate awareness shines upon it, I begin to offer others this gift of presence as well.  It is an awful thing to live in fear of oneself.  It is an awful thing to constantly exert energy digging trenches away from oneself.  Because then, wherever I go, I'm not there.  I'm somewhere else - running and hiding from myself.  And when I am there - when I truly turn and go into the sadness - I see that it is not all that there is.  There is such joy and love and beauty and hope.  And when I'm not looking for ways or people who can help me walk around my sadness, I am actually present to myself, my experiences, and my life.  I can touch the world.  Which is scary sometimes... because the world is big and unpredictable and wild.  But it's also where the perfect moments are.  The sunrises, the flowers, the grass.  Children's smiles and the wisdom of those who have spent their lives turning toward instead of turning away.  In Buddhist terms, we only find Nirvana when we turn into Samsara.  When we look square upon it and go into it.  To see it's true nature.  To see it lose its grip upon us.  Or TS Eliot:

"only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered."

Sadness isn't that friend who I can get to go away if I'm nice to him for awhile.  Sadness is a part of myself that will always be there, sometimes more, sometimes less.  And the point of becoming friends with it is not some manipulative tactic to construct some idealistic post-sadness life.  It is so that I can become more human, and learn to walk through a world in which there is both sadness and joy.  Laughter and tears.

And that, I think, is what this journey is really about.  Touching our truth deeply.  Seeing ourselves clearly.  Not running away, but turning toward.  Embracing.  So that we can help others embrace as well.  Maybe there's something here that the world needs to hear - because something has to bring us out of this vortex of violence that we're descending into.  Some way of navigating our internal fears, and projections, and neuroses, and psychoses.  Some path back to ourselves.

I want to end with a poem by my beloved teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, who is in a hospital in France recovering from a brain hemorrhage suffered many weeks ago.  It is called "Message."

Life has left her footprints on my forehead.
But I have become a child again this morning.
The smile, seen through leaves and flowers,
is beck to smooth away the wrinkles,
as the rains wipe away footprints on the beach.
Again a cycle of birth and death begins.

I walk on thorns, but firmly, as among flowers.
I keep my head high.
Rhymes bloom among the sounds of bombs and mortars.
The tears I shed yesterday have become rain.
I feel calm hearing its sound on the thatched roof.
Childhood, my birthland, is calling me,
and the rains melt my despair.

I am still here alive, able to smile quietly.
O sweet fruit brought forth by the tree of suffering!
Carrying the dead body of my brother,
I go across the rice field in the darkness.
Earth will keep you tight within her arms, my dear,
so that tomorrow you will be reborn as flowers,
those flowers smiling quietly in the morning field.
This moment you weep no more, my dear.
We have gone through too deep a night.

This morning,
I kneel down on the grass,
when I notice your presence.
Flowers that carry the marvelous smile of ineffability
speak to me in silence.

The message,
the message of love
and understanding,
has indeed come to us.  

(From Call Me By My True Names, by Thich Nhat Hanh)

My Life is Enough

"All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was... What he was doing." - Yoda, Empire Strikes Back

"How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though it is smaller than all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and forms large branches; so that the birds of the air can nest under its shade."  - Jesus, Mark's Gospel


 There's something to be said for taking a break from riding my motorcycle to work and driving my car instead.  Today that something was (were) the thoughts that came as I listened to the words of my dharma teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.  When he likened mindfulness to the seed in Jesus' parable, something clicked in my brain.  A seed is planted; it is watered; it is nourished by the sun and the soil and the water given to it.  As it is nourished, it grows.  If it is not nourished, it does not grow.  'Have I watered the seeds and saplings of mindfulness in me?' I wondered.  'Have I tended to the soil so that it is safe for them to grow?'  And then Nhat Hanh (Thay) said "Samatha."  The Sanskrit word for "stopping."  Bringing everything to a halt so that the mud can settle and we can see clearly.  So that we can simply be.  Aware.  Still.  Stopped.  So many things in my life charge forward all of the time.  I am constantly giving my attention to how I can set up the next few days, next week, next few weeks, next year, next few years, etc., of my life so that when I get to them everything is arranged for my greater happiness.  I work hard to try to arrange the future so that I do not run into any unforeseen obstacles and so that I do not forget to plant a seed or make a plan that I "need" to make for my future to turn out how I want it to.  The problem is that I spend so much time clearing the grass ahead of me that when I get there, all I can think to do is to make sure the path ahead of me is still cleared.  "All his life he looked away... to the future... to the horizon.  Never his mind on where he was... what he was doing."

For years now in CoDA (12 step for codependency), I have recited the mantra "I am enough."  And I think I know now, at least on some levels more than I once did, that I am enough - that the person I am, the way I have been shaped and molded by life, that the gifts I bring to encounters with others - that I am enough.  What I struggle to know is that my life is enough.  See, they're different.  Who I am is who I am.  But my life is composed of what I am doing, the money I am making, the thing I am driving or riding, the friendship circles I have, the recreational activities I pursue, etc.  My life is about the faith community(ies) I have or don't have, the future I see unfolding before me, the present I try too hard to avoid.  My life is about what this me that is enough is doing.  And that is what I struggle to call "enough."

And I struggle to stop, which I find to be integrally connected to saying that my life is enough.  Because in order to stop - to truly stop - one has to let things be enough, as they are.  Even meditation or prayer becomes a kind of striving, a kind of judgment that I will only be okay when I get there, in the future.  But here is all that I have.  I am soundly in the middle of my two year program of spiritual direction training.  I am learning how to sit with individuals in one-on-one settings and let them unpack their spiritual journeys, accompanying them in the present and into the future as we discern the movements of spirit, grace, or whatever you might call it, in their lives.  This is a beautiful vocational and spiritual endeavor.  Yet somehow it is so easily not enough.  Already I think "what can I do beyond this?"  I think about ordination, about chaplaincy, about becoming a therapist, about getting my PhD, and I wonder, why is what I'm doing right now not enough?  There is more than enough where I am on which to focus - I have books to buy, to read, reflections to write, spiritual directees to find and to begin working with, supervision to schedule.  There is so much about where I am.... what I am doing that can be the object of attention, but still I am ten steps ahead, trying to clear the way into the future - trying to make sure everything is arranged just so.

[Bell]

What if where I am and what I'm doing is enough?  What if I don't need to invest all my energy looking away... to the future... to the horizon?  Finishing another book or applying for another degree will not make my life enough.  And certainly the constant nagging need for "more" constitutes a type of spiritual and emotional materialism that doesn't know how to settle comfortably in its own skin.  So I realize how much of this is fear driven.  Which brings me back to the beginning - to that seed that is planted in the garden, that seed that just needs a little bit of time and attention.  To grow.  To expand.  It is a challenge to stop to attend to this delicate seed of "enoughness."  There are so many things I can fill each evening with - so many activities to run off to - so many groups to spend my time with - so many people to see and relationships to cultivate - so much writing and journaling to do - so much to plan plan plan plan.....

What does it look like to let this moment be enough?  Because one day I will die.  And there will be no future to plan for or arrange, and if I've spent all of my time and energy in the future, all that will be left is a past to look back on.  A past that I missed because I wasn't there for it - always thinking that it had to be better... or more.

Maybe I'll end with this poem I wrote just a couple of months ago, and say, as it does, that everything (including my life) is enough.


There is no step
but the first
and every step is
the first

We walk together
because we know no other way
(but to walk together
we must learn to stand alone)

Until one day your voice -
or your body -
cracks, falls to the earth like so much passing away -
breathes again before lying still

The bruises we feel are also the blessings
the quiet voices that got us here
waiting for answers
until waiting becomes
the answer

Your silence was always enough
patiently, patiently
until I could share this stillness with you
not knowing if we were smiling
or frowning

Laughing – or crying

A ray of stillness
cracks over the effulgence of your
lips
remembering a time when we
were together
as we always and never have been

Breath moves from my heart to yours
and back
tearing down this absurd aloneness
and the fears of that first step

We are never alone -
the rivers
and the fluttering wings of hummingbirds

A quiet night.
A bright, earthy morning.
A starlit sky offering itself in splendor.

Everything is enough.

The Pond

I return to this idea again and again.  A still pond reflecting truth back to us.  Reflecting ourselves - our honest authentic selves.  So it's probably no surprise that as I drove to work this morning, Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) spoke of how important it is to do the "Flower - Fresh and Water - Reflecting" meditations every day.  And, of course, the Water - Reflecting meditation is the one that stood out to me.  Breathing in I see myself as still waters.  Breathing out I reflect things as they are.

Yet I am reminded of another time I have heard Thay say that in order to experience peace, we must first learn to enjoy peace.  Too many of us do not know how to enjoy peace; we find peace boring.  So we turn to drugs, alcohol, sex and other lesser forms of excitement to escape the simplicity of peace.  The beauty of a still pond is that you can see yourself clearly in it.  And the terror and difficulty of a still pond is that you can see yourself clearly in it.  Perhaps it should not surprise me, then, that I start to grow afraid when the waters begin to settle - when the mud and silt that cloud the clarity begin to recede to the bottom and I can see myself more clearly once again - myself and the world around me.  I can see all the grief colors painted across my face; I can see the pain of the friends and family around me learning to face their journeys through sickness, loss, pain, despair, grief, addiction, confusion, and doubt.  I can see everything just as it is.

It should not surprise me that I seek new ways to stir up the waters - to make it choppy and unclear.  Because sometimes peace is more than just boring.  Sometimes peace is painful.  Sometimes peace lets you hear the silence you don't want to hear - it lets you look around and sense the emptiness of your home, or the absence of someone you love.  Sometimes peace lets you get to know yourself in ways you have never taken time for in the past.  Sometimes the sheer unfamiliarity of my own inner landscape makes me want to stir the waters again, let the mud and silt cloud the reflection that is just a bit too clear.

But every so often I do let the mud settle.  I do just stop churning up the waters, and I see clearly.  And I see that there is actually deep beauty in everything about the way things are.  Mary Oliver writes of

the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation

We often don't want to face those fires - that river.  But that is exactly what mindfulness does.  It helps us practice being present with the way things really are - without the need for distractions from the suchness of life - the encounter with the way things are, unedited, boldly, starkly, nakedly.  It's not that this should be easy to face and we simply lack courage to do so.  It is precisely that these are extremely difficult encounters to have - this is why we practice mindfulness - why we grow it as a muscle that has never fully developed but needs to, if we are to make an honest go of this thing called spiritual transformation.

The familiar (and sometimes unfamiliar) distractions of our particular pet preoccupations, obsessions, fears, or compulsions are sometimes greatly preferable to the simplicity of facing the world in peace, as it is - because peace does not mean we are disconnected from our pain or grief or fear.  It means we can experience it much more directly - and that takes a different kind of courage.  One that takes both intention and attention.  And patience.  And the willingness to hurt.

So for today I will simply let the waters settle and give thanks for the ability to experience that clarity.  And I will continue to engage with my imperfect practice.  Tonight I will go to sleep and leave my fan off as long as possible, knowing there are nights that the silence does not overwhelm me. Knowing also that there are nights where I cannot sleep in direct contact with the nakedness of my thoughts and sensations - knowing I need that white noise to blur the clarity just a little bit so that I can relax enough to drift off.  It's funny sometimes, how much work it can take to make peace with peace.

Breathing in, I see myself as still water.  Breathing out, I see things just as they are.

Water-Reflecting Meditation

Grieving

"I've always worn my sadness like a heavy coat. This is the first time it's started to enter into me, pass through me, and change me into something from within."

This was my closing comment on a recent online discussion thread regarding grief and loss.  I think there is a threshold for every person, where the pain in our lives outdoes the amount of mindfulness we have thus far cultivated.  The pain-to-mindfulness-ratio is greater than 1.  Sometimes much greater.  Perhaps some people have trained to the point where they can handle death and loss, injustice, heartache, fear, etc.  But at a certain point it seems like everyone breaks.  Isn't this the idea behind torture?  That there is a point beyond the skillfulness we all have to cope with the pain and difficulty life brings our way.

For the past several months, and far more acutely these past two weeks, I have lived beyond my personal threshold.  I will spare you the details.  Or, more accurately, I will spare myself the process of sharing the details with an undisclosed internet audience.  I do not know if the disparity between my perceived levels of mindfulness and the pain I am experiencing says more about my level of pain or my level of mindfulness.  Probably the most accurate assessment is that the directional arrow points both ways.  There is an immense amount of pain to understand and transform, and the mindfulness I have cultivated thus far in my life also has much room to grow.  I make neither statement from shame or grandiosity.  This is simply is how it is.

Deep grief can be one of the most painful things to bear.  I think there's a reason we speak of having a broken heart.  Not a tired heart, not a wounded heart, but broken.  If we knew how to handle it, it wouldn't be broken - it might be worn down or slowed, it might be aching, but broken means it no longer works in the way it is intended to work.  Something about the heart's ability to love, open, hold space for joy, triumph, loss, hope, etc. has been undeniably damaged.  The heart simply will not work the way we want it to.

Then what?  

Today I am faced with the undeniable realization that I simply do not know how to grieve.  

I know how (as I said above) to wear it like a wet blanket or heavy coat - to be weighed down by the burden, aware of its presence, heavy under its auspices.  But to let grief pass through me - to brave the storm that threatens to overwhelm and drown me - to enter the pain that holds no promise of relief, there is no skill set I have yet cultivated sufficient strength or courage to brave.  Wednesday morning was the first time I cried in months, though every day I've wished I could - every day has been a day when tears are called for.  But the numb ache - the pressing up against the wall of grief and peering in at it - so far it's the only thing I've known with any degree of regularity.  That and distraction, beautiful sweet blessed distraction.  CS Lewis starts his A Grief Observed by saying, "No one ever told me grief feels so much like fear.  I am not afraid, but the sensation is the same.... I keep on swallowing."  Such a mundane thing to notice, but that's how it is, I guess.

I am reminded of a scene in the gospels where a group of men peel back the roof to the home where Jesus is staying and lower a paralytic into the house on a mat.  The man himself lacked the capacity to get up and come to Jesus, but his friends are there to do the work on his behalf.  Jesus cites their faith as the reason for the man's healing, and the man walks.  Sometimes I think - in the darkest times - mindfulness is like that.  Sometimes you just lie on your back paralyzed and hope the people around you know how and where to carry you.  These past few months people have asked, "do you need anything?"  I always think, "Yes, I need everything - I need so much - but I don't know what - and if I did, I wouldn't know how to ask for it."  With time, some some clarity might come.  "Yes, I need a place to go - can I come over to your home if I need to just sit - if I need somewhere other than here to read, or to stare at a wall?"  Mindfulness enters.  But not a peaceful, calm mindfulness.  A different kind of radical mindfulness.  I wonder what it would be to speak to torture victims of mindfulness.  "Focus on the physical sensations of the breath" as electricity rockets through their body to the point that the very fibers of their being feel as if they are being ripped to shreds.  Again, there seem to be levels of pain that eclipse the power of what we normally think of mindfulness.  Perhaps the mindfulness we have cultivated in our practice helps quicken the recovery time, I don't know.  Perhaps the practice lets us move through the grief more quickly.  But oh how difficult it is to dive INTO pain and not run away from it.  Sometimes it's just as well to give yourself the grace to run away for a little while.  I've been a spiritual perfectionist for so long it sometimes takes all the grace I can give myself to sit in front of the tv for three hours and enjoy some laughter and some relief.

And today, without community, without the people in my world who help me grieve - who lift the roofs off of houses and lower me into the presence of the sacred, I don't know where I would be.  More lost.  More angry.  More overwhelmed.  A week ago Monday I needed the presence of two people I knew and about 7 strangers in order to sit for 20 minutes in Centering Prayer.  Without them I could not have done it.  As much as I wanted to have it in myself without help, my sangha gave me the space and the grace to be with myself for more uninterrupted time than I had spent in weeks.  And I survived.  Maybe that is what mindfulness is all about (if mindfulness is all about anything at all) - learning how to bear the stark reality of being nakedly with ourselves.  And for the past few weeks I've had to give myself a world of grace as I have "failed" time and time again in knowing how to be with myself.  My skin is the last place I want to inhabit.  My grief is the last thing I want to feel.  The torrent that threatens to overwhelm.  I never knew mindfulness was so bound up with faith.  Not faith in a deity, per se, but faith that the rip tide will not suck you under completely - faith that you can surface from a pain that feels like it won't let up - not soon, perhaps not ever.  Maybe the goal isn't to fill the emptiness, but to make such radical peace with it that it is no longer an enemy, but a friend.  In Hannah Hurnard's Christian allegory Hinds Feet on High Places, the main character Much Afraid journeys up the mountain with her two companions, Sorrow and Suffering.  They do not seem like good or desirable companions, but as she climbs and learns to trust, she begins to realize that they are trustworthy helpers, who will indeed see her safely to the top if she lets them.  

In my own direction session last week (I see a spiritual director anywhere from 1 to 4 times per month), I came to relate to Heartache as if it were a personified presence in my life.  And I realized that this Heartache is here to help me - to lead me somewhere I don't know - and as much as s/he feels like a radical enemy, I can in fact embrace her/him as a friend.  And here is where fear begins to dissipate, just a little.  Because when the reality of your life seems to be heartache - and that heartache seems to be an inescapable enemy with whom you must contend - there isn't a lot of hope in that.  But when I can turn to Heartache and embrace her... or him... or her - and realize that though she might hurt me, she is still a friend - then I can find peace, even amidst sorrow.  Then I am less afraid of myself, because mindfulness is not supposed to get me away from this heartache.  Mindfulness is really there to teach me how to lay down my defenses and become friends with this scary helper.  I don't want to, but there is no other way.  Our world doesn't always praise things that slow us down and make our goals and agendas more difficult to reach (or nullifies their validity altogether).  But sometimes things come into our life precisely to shatter the agendas we carry with us and open us to a deeper wisdom.  Or perhaps being open simply is the deeper wisdom.  Perhaps there's no "thing" to "learn" from all this - perhaps it's just about simply being broken open - to have a heart torn open and left that way, without designs to "fix it," and all the grace that comes from that just comes, just from being open, just from learning to be kind to oneself amidst this pain and loss and heartache.  To let the grief rivers flow through me instead of just weighing me down like some kind of heavy mat pressing against my unyielding body.  

I can honestly say I don't know if anything I've said makes rational sense.  There's not a lot of rational sense to make these days.  It's just one day at a time, learning to embrace the heart's center - learning to live with loss and pain and know that it's okay, even if everything just feels horrifying.

Kindness to oneself might just be the most important thing some of us will ever learn.  And to me, now, it might just be the only thing worth learning.  On the in breath, and the out - whatever I feel - wherever I am.  In.  Out.  Present moment.  Wonderful moment.  Maybe our ideas of "wonderful" get a little fucked up sometimes.  It's good to remember that mindfulness isn't about keeping the pain out.  Thousands of people just lost their lives in the Philippines.  Thousands upon thousands more lost their homes, their livelihoods, everything they knew and held dear.  Devastation.  How do we breathe through that?  Hopefully, with grief choking us on the in breath, and tears flooding us on the out breath.  Reaching into our hearts as we step with our left foot, reaching into our lives and resources as we step with the right.  There's this moment where Jesus hangs on the cross, at the end, when his breath is almost gone from him (crucifixion kills you by asphyxiation).  "Into your hands I commit my spirit," he says.  Pneuma, I would guess the word is here.  The word that also means breath.  Into your hands I commit my breath.  

I really don't know what that means to this post - or if it means anything, but somehow it felt worth mentioning.  And hey, I told you from the beginning, I have no idea how to grieve - I'm just making this up as I go along.  Maybe we all are.  Maybe that's the whole damn point.  I guess it makes it just a little easier when we can offer each other immeasurable amounts of kindness as we go along.  Because we are all doing the best we can.  Even when we're not.  Even when the best we can really sucks.  I think it also makes it easier if we can offer that same kindness to ourselves.  Over and over and over again.

Amen.

What is mindfulness?

Thich Nhat Hanh says that we have to be mindful not only of what is going on here, but what is going on "there."  What good is it to eat a piece of fish mindfully if we are unaware that the overfishing of this species is altering ecosystems on the other side of the world?  What good is it to eat mindfully if the workers who grew my food are also exploited.  Mindfulness brings attention, not only here, but also there.  Of course we cannot always be aware of all things that are going on around us - or within us - but we can begin to practice in ways that include the world around us, not simply our own body and breath.  In the end, we all breathe the same breath - we inter-breathe, which means we must be mindful of the things that we do to affect that interbreathing.

Lately I have found it difficult to be "mindful."  How can I be mindful when there are baby bottles to wash, and I am so tired from lack of sleep that all I can think about is getting to bed.  But do I have the energy to sit... just for a few minutes... just one bit of meditation or centering prayer before unconsciousness consumes me?  I think in some ways mindfulness is also the asking of these questions.  We cannot always take one peaceful step after another.  Sometimes we must move quickly.  But can I know that I am moving quickly?  Can I be in tune with the hurry, with the anxiety that is produced when I rush?  Can I also embrace that with compassion, and seek to learn ways to reduce this hurry - to reduce this anxiety?  I think that is what mindfulness means.  Sometimes it is in the asking of questions - not in a panicked perfectionistic type of way, but in an aware, open way.  Sometimes I need more sleep.  But when I sleep so much I let slip my spiritual nourishment, my community involvement, my exercise, etc., then I have become unmindful.  When I fixate on any specific thing, I tend to fall out of balance.  Perhaps balance and the energy of mindfulness are inextricably interwoven.  I cannot find one without the other.  I can get neither ahead of myself nor behind.  "Let what I do flow from me like a river, with no forcing and no holding back."  Sometimes it is hard to walk this balance.  This too is a kind of meditation, when we do it with gentleness and self-love. 

I can't always do things perfectly.  When there's a baby or some other circumstance that destabilizes an easier environment for practice, one must learn how to adapt, to find meditation in the actions, and to give compassion when it feels like there is no mindfulness, no meditation, no "spiritualness."  Sometimes the seeking after spiritual feelings is self-indulgent.  Sometimes there is only the ordinariness.  The frustration.  The crankiness.  Sometimes this crankiness, this too is an object for awareness.  We grow even as we see it.  Even as we embrace it, sometimes tearfully.  Our ego is stripped as we see that we are not always perfect.  We are not as enlightened as we thought.

In yoga, I have learned to laugh at myself when I fall out of a balancing pose.  I used to think I needed to "try harder" or "focus more."  But I have learned that balancing poses simply reflect back to me where I am.  Today I am scattered, I am a mess, I am all over the place.  If I "try really hard" to balance - well, perhaps if I succeed in not falling out of a pose, I hurt myself more than if I let myself fall.  Because then I have this delusion that I'm "better" than I actually am.  I miss the awareness that my practice is trying to bring to me - the revelation of where I truly am in this moment.  I think it's the same way when we find ourselves responding to family or friends or circumstances with anger, irritation, or fear.  When we simply try to not be angry, irritated, or afraid, then we miss out on the chance to tend the deeper seeds - to engage our journey on much more substantive levels (of course if we get carried away with the fear or anger, we remain equally unconscious).  Too often we focus on the symptoms.  We get rid of the headache, but underneath there is still the cause - unattended.  Mindfulness is not a practice of getting rid of anger and fear.  It is a practice that begins by holding them - paying attention to them - breathing with them.  Same with panic, hurry, frustration, perfectionism, self-chastisement, or any other unwholesome mind-states.  We work to eliminate them, yes - but by dealing with them at the roots.  You cannot just trim weeds, you must dig deep - your practice must go beneath the symptoms, and this requires mindfulness.  And mindfulness requires patience.

I remember a chapel message delivered at my undergraduate institution one Easter.  The speaker was reflecting on what it takes to follow Jesus.  He said something to this effect:

"Maybe you are asking yourself this Easter, what you can do to become a better follower of Jesus.  Well, if we are to take the Bible seriously, perhaps the most spiritual thing you can do this Easter is to fail...    All of Jesus' disciples failed him in his greatest hour of need."

Everything came from this failure.  This willingness to be utterly human.  Peter had told Jesus "I will never deny you, even if EVERYONE else denies you, I will never."  Peter was the victim of hubris and self-delusion.  He denied Jesus.  Three times.  He failed.  But perhaps our failures - our falling out of a posture - in yoga or in life - have more to do with helping us grow than do our "successes."  Perhaps it is our failures that show us more clearly where - and who - we truly are.  Because we are not our images of ourselves.  We are not our posturing.  Sometimes I think I am most myself when I lose my balance and fall out of a pose.  I'm just human.  Somewhere along the line someone told us that was unspiritual.  But at the end of each day we return to our breath - we remember that we are only ever just human, and in that humanity is our spirituality.  In that and nothing else.

Wait.  That is not quite accurate.  My spirituality is also in YOUR humanity.  It is in the trees and the forests and the animals we too often mistreat.  It is in the body of the world, as Eve Ensler so wonderfully put it.  One Body, One World.  Our spirituality is there.  One breath.  One future.

Together.