Being Skillful with Painful Emotions

This is a photo of the wall at my children's pediatrician's office.  I've seen this wall and these words more times than I care to count in the last 5 months because my children have had back to back to back illnesses.  I've started to wonder if maybe the doctors and nurses put these words up for the parents and caregivers, not the children.

Because lately I've seemed to need these words of encouragement more than them.  Children have this marvelous capacity for resiliency, perseverance and genuine optimism. But adults, me anyway, are vulnerable to difficult emotions, of the suffering variety, like feeling defeated, inadequate and conflicted.  For me these tricky emotions can be like the quick sand in the forest scene in the 1980's movie The Princess Bride. Meaning, when I'm walking in a dark and scary place, I really have to keep my head up and regularly scan my environment for holes in the ground that are camouflaged.  Holes that have the potential to swallow me up if I fall into them and begin to struggle and resist against the will, pull and sheer force of the emotion.

I was recently re-reading the work of Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield in his book Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are, and he suggests in his chapter called "The Near Enemies of Awakening" that these painful emotions are okay, even necessary. He says:  

"Opening ourselves to all aspects of experience is necessary if we want to make a difference.  To look at the world honestly, unflinchingly, and directly requires us to also look at ourselves.  We discover that sorrow and pain are not just out there, external, but area also within ourselves.  We have our own fear, prejudice, hatred, desire, neurosis, and anxiety.  It is our own sorrow.  In opening ourselves to suffering, we discover the great heart of compassion."

I don't know about you, but I find these words reassuring for two reasons.  Number one, when I read from the book of someone who has walked further down this spiritual path than I have, and that person says the challenges I am experiencing are completely expected and normal--versus obstacles and a sign that something is wrong or misguided--I find myself letting out a long sigh of relief.  Then, the "I'm not alone" thought arises and I feel more at ease with my uneasiness. In other words, more hopeful, and less hopeless.

And the second reason I find Jack Kornfield's perspective to be helpful, is because he is also suggesting that there is purpose and meaning to these difficult emotions.  For me, it is important to be reminded that painful emotions and experiences have the potential to serve a function in our lives.  Because even though I know this on a cognitive level, like I recently wrote in my blog Forgetting to Remember God, I easily forget, like, within seconds.  Which is why we, I, need to engage in compassionate mind training like a meditation practice, or even more formally a Tonglen Practice that Buddhist nun and author Pema Chodron often describes in her writing and speaking, to increase my ability to open myself to these painful emotions and accept them as part of the human experience. To see them as a means to an end of feeling more interconnected with all others- in my work doing psychotherapy with patients, with friends and family, and even with strangers.

When I remember these two truths that Jack Kornfield has written about, I am able to then remember to interact with my suffering differently.  I am able to perceive the pain as an emotional wave that I am riding- whether it be a Long Island Sound 1-2 footer or more like a Hawaiian 20-30 footer in a rain storm. 

I was recently reminded of this wave analogy when watching Jon Kabat-Zinn, author and co-creator of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, give an interview with Oprah Winfrey on her show Super Soul Sunday- a show that has become my I can't-get-to-church-but-I-still-really-want-to-be-spiritually-uplifted-on-a-Sunday strategy.  He described the internal emotional and cognitive turmoil that we all experience as a wave in the ocean that is variable to light or harsh weather conditions, and the trick is to be intentional and aware when the wave is moving through us so we can be skillful with it to avoid getting pulled under or knocked down.

One strategy I have always liked with this analogy is to use image of going under the turmoil, under the wave.  I have written before since childhood I have loved swimming under water with my eyes open.  To me, the underwater world has a quiet, calm and safe atmosphere like no other.  So, when the difficult emotions come up, like feeling defeated, inadequate or conflicted in regards to my children's health or any other stressful situation, I can remember to dive down, underneath the suffering to the serenity that is always lying inside of me underneath the surface.

That is some of how I get through painful emotions, how about you?

Forgetting to Remember God

I forget to remember god several times a day, do you?  It’s like I just can’t seem to hold god in my mind for any length of time.  No matter what my intention, however earnest, one minute I have this conscious awareness of god’s presence, and 30 seconds later I’ve lost it- again.  The thing is, it is kind of like the same experience as sitting meditation, in that, you don’t realize your mind has drifted off until you catch yourself- sometimes seconds later, sometimes minutes later, sometimes more.

Some of you who read this blog know already that I am a psychotherapist by day, and I am currently working with a patient who has this same difficulty, except it is me she cannot hold in her mind/heart, and I feel for her.  At this phase of her treatment she still gets so lost in relationship with me, and has to  repeatedly ask with anxious worry, “are you still here with me?” I truly get how hard it is to want to be able to maintain an internal representation of something safe, compassionate, loving and meaningful when the mind/heart just does not seem to be cooperating.  From a psychological perspective, some might call this Object Relations Theory.

In Trappist monk Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation this ability to hold god's presence is a virtuous flexibility.  He says:

"The best thing beginners in the spiritual life can do, after they have really acquired the discipline of mind that enables them to concentrate on a spiritual subject and get below the surface of its meaning and incorporate it into their own lives, is to acquire the agility and freedom of mind that will help them to find light and warmth and ideas and love for God everywhere they go and in all that they do. People who only know how to think about God during certain fixed periods of the day will never get very far in the spiritual life. In fact they will not even think of Him in the moments they have religiously marked off for ‘mental prayer.”

I remember the first time I was really conscious of this habit of forgetting to remember god.  It was in 2013 when I was pregnant with my daughter.  By that time I had, for the first time in my life, a consciousness of my relationship with god, and for that reason it felt important to me that I remember to remember god during the birth of my daughter; if only I had had that awareness for the birth of my son 5 years earlier…

But to do this, to remember god, I felt I would need external help to have the experience of noticing god’s presence during a moment of profound difficulty and physical pain.  So I emailed the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church I had been attending periodically and asked for a meeting to talk over some of these things together.

Then, on one rainy evening in October, we did.  I asked Reverend Jan: “How can I remember to remember god during the throes of childbirth? Because I have a feeling I am going to forget again, and I don’t want to because I could really use god’s presence during that moment.  My first childbirth experience was really painful and difficult, and I’m scared.  It would help so much if I could feel god’s presence to coach me through the second time.”

The minister, god bless her, responded with compassion and kindness.  She said to me that we all forget to remember god, all us imperfect humans with all our unfinished parts.  That is why multiple religions and philosophers and writers and poets and theologians and prophets and ordinary men, women, and children have come up with all kinds of spiritual practices to bring our consciousness back to god again and again and again.  Within a minute. Within an hour. Within a week. Within a year. Within a lifetime.

Since that October evening, I have thought about my spiritual practices differently. I think of it like a meditation practice.  The fruits of the meditation practice are not the 20 minutes of sitting.  The benefits come in the ripple throughout the day.  Like a pebble thrown into the middle of a pond that causes ripples all the way to the shoreline.  In other words, if I regularly engage in spiritual practices each morning, afternoon and/or evening where I consciously open myself up to god’s company, then I manifest the possibility for a warm, loving presence throughout the rest of my day.

What might some of those spiritual practices be where you show up in person to your relationship with god? Here’s a list of some of mine to name a few…

     Reading about god through spiritual memoir

     Reading about god through poetry

     Talking to god on my walk from my parking lot at work to the building where my office is

     Sitting meditation

     Yoga

     Lighting a candle to invite god’s presence into the room I’m in at the time

     Praying to god

     Taking a large or small pilgrimage

     Going to church to sit in a pew

     Going to church to listen to a sermon

     Standing or sitting in front of some body of water (river, lake, ocean, stream)

     Walking in a forest

     Reading the works of formal and informal theologians

I know there is nothing here that is rocket science.  It is all about concentrated intention though.  And  I think the heavy lifting comes in with the necessary discipline.

For me, in the last two days I’ve been going back to poetry.  Yesterday was a little Oliver.  This morning was little Rilke.  Here’s one that I’ve loved for some time… “Go to the limits of your longing”

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

So what is the take away message of all this? To me, it is to embrace the forgetting.  Forgetting to remember god is just what we humans do; like the mind generating thoughts during meditation, which is just what minds do.   And god does not judge this. God is not shaking her head in disappointment.  God is smiling at us when we unnecessarily burden ourselves with worry about such human traits and biology, and she kindly says “of course you forget me. Of course.  That’s just what you do.  It is not a problem for me, I just wish it did not cause you so much suffering.” So she humors us while we concrete and literal ones light our candles. Go to the ocean. Sit in the pews. “Okay she says, if that’s what you need to do to remember me. Whatever works for you, I’m still here.”

I will end here by including the email I sent the UU minister after I had my daughter, exactly one month after that rainy October evening when we had met in her office of the church.  It was a first for me.  How do you remember to remember god?

Dear Rev Jan,

It is 2:34 am. I am at the hospital. I wanted to send you a note to tell you that I finally remembered to remember god.

My daughter Grace was born 11/24/13 at 3:28 am by storm, not by calm sea.  And you were right.  It was sacred.  36 weeks just, and all not ready to go.  She did and does very well.  5 lbs. 12 oz and a strong hearty soul I can tell. I had more complication, or my body did. But after now 5 days here I just got transferred to the lowest level of care and I feel more clear than I had through the many tests and procedures.

And as I lay here, with my 4 year old sleeping soundly at his grandparents, my 4 day old sleeping soundly in the nursery, and my husband sleeping soundly in the chair-bed in the room, I know everything will be ok.  God is with us and with me.  I don't know what will happen next.  But for now, that is ok.

This probably seems strange or weird, but i wanted to say thank you.

Blessings to you.

Nature Teaching Spiritual Lessons

I took these photos in the last two weeks. I am calling them Spring One, Spring Two & Spring Three. The snowy picture was one week in to spring. The second picture with the little crocuses peaking their heads out of the ground was two weeks in to spring. And the last shot I took yesterday; three weeks in to spring the sun was shining, the grass was greening, the crocuses were blooming.

I sometimes imagine my life broken down into spiritual tasks.  Like when I had a difficult boss for several years, I tried to ask myself what the spiritual task of that moment in time might be for me.  But I've come to the conclusion that the over-arching spiritual task for my life as a whole is the practice of surrender.  Because I seem to always want life to flow my way, in my timeframe no matter how much my reasonable mind says "it just doesn't work that way though."

For me, nature helps me to remember to surrender.  To keep my hands off of things that are just not mine to get in to.  To be patient.  To allow things to unfold as they will.  To let go of fighting reality.  To remember, as writer Anne Lamott titled one of her books, Grace, Eventually, things will turn out okay in the end.

Flexible Discipline: Spiritual Practice in Motherhood

The longer I walk this path of active spiritual practice during my time as a working mother of 2, the more I realize the key to not giving up on the whole thing is flexible discipline.  It requires acceptance from deep within of the paradox that the more flexible I am in my spiritual practices the better, and the more disciplined I am in my spiritual practices, the better.  The trick though, or maybe the miracle, is balancing the two.

I remember the first time this paradox was brought to my attention.  It was 2004, and I had just bought my first copy of Jon Kabat Zinn's now famous book on mindfulness Wherever You Go, There You Are.  This book is jam packed with 1-2 page chapters on all things useful for getting a beginners understanding of mindfulness.  But in the very back of the book, 2 of the last four chapters are titled: Parenting as Practice and Parenting Two.  Now when I first read this book I was still 5 years away from having my first child, and honestly these chapters didn't make a whole lot of sense to me then.  However, I know a seed was planted at that time, because many years later, I remembered those little chapters tucked away at the back of the book on spiritual practice while in the throes of parenting, and I went back to them. 

Those two little chapters were expanded upon in Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, a book Jon Kabat Zinn wrote with his wife Myla.  One story from this book that stays with me is when they are talking about the need to roll from one mindfulness practice to the next within the context of working parenting.  As in, right now I am engaging in mindful, contemplative writing  while my 17-month old naps, but she  may wake up in about 60 seconds, which would then call for me shift into the mindfulness practice of holding-baby-while-walking-up-and-down-my-hallway.

It's hard sometimes though to make the shift.  For me it is reminiscent of learning to drive standard. It was 1994. I was sixteen years-old practicing in the parking lot of my high school in a Chevy Astro Van. When I think back on those trial runs I can vividly remember all of the stalling and grinding and huge amounts of frustration when I tried to shift from first to second gear. But as with most things, practice was the primary solution. I think the seamless shift between formal spiritual practice and day to day life as a working parent is probably no different.

There are other obstacles and possible solutions to make this shift less painful though.

A biggie that makes it difficult for me is attachment.  Attachment to what I am doing. Attachment to my time.  Attachment to my objective.  Attachment to space with just my own body.  Attachment to things unfolding in my preferred timeframe.  I want, what I want, when I want it. The central chorus of the song of Ego, right?

I think that is okay though. I think that is human, how we're made. 

So the question is not: how do I get rid of attachment? As if it were something bad or wrong that needed to be thrown out with the trash.  The question  is: how do I work with this?  I know I want to and am committed to regular mindfulness meditation practice, yoga, mindful eating, spiritual reading and writing, and times of noble silence.  But all of these practices are being inter-woven into a life also filled with roles and responsibilities of motherhood, marriage and a professional life.  So how are we to be disciplined in our practices while allowing for the flexibility of day to day life?

A phrase that helps me is from James Finley's book Christian Meditation, and it is called "a monastery without walls." To give you some context, James Finley introduces himself in the book as a former Trappist monk turned clinical psychologist with 2 daughters who had studied closely with the now very famous Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton.  He says in his book about bringing spiritual practices into his life and lifestyle outside of the Kentucky monastery that he had to: "once again discover that secret passageway into the interior landscape of oneness with God that I first learned to enter in the monastery. The unbroken continuity between monastic life and meditation practice led me to realize that meditation is a monastery without walls."

When I first read that phrase I remember thinking "YYYYeeeessss." Those 4 words (a monastery without walls) resonated so deeply with me in a way that I had not yet been able to put words on. It was like taking in a big breath of fresh clean air into my congested lungs.  And when I am feeling lost and unbalanced in my life as a spiritual seeker who wears all the different hats of mom, wife, professional, etc, I try to take in another of those deep breaths as a way to remember all of this "stuff" of life is grist for the mill.

Take the last 4 weeks for instance.  In the last month I have had the stomach flu go through my house I don't know how many times.  My son has gotten sick 3 times. My husband twice. My daughter twice. Me, once.  It is no sooner that I have washed all the bedding and scrubbed down all the surfaces of every counter top and door knob, that someone else is throwing up again.  When I told my son's pediatrician this fact on Friday, he just calmly smiled (as he always does which is why we love him) and said in the most annoyingly unalarmed way, "yeah, it's going around..." I wanted to punch him, how's that for serene?!

I didn't of course.  And the pediatrician's decision not to join my pity party was probably the best thing for me because god knows (literally), pity parties never help me, or anyone else that I can see.

But there are some other things that do help.  Another that I like to use  is the concept of bells.  In mindfulness practice it can be helpful to think of events of the day (including the most mundane) as a bell to remind you to wake up to the moment.  So imagine yourself going through your day on autopilot, and all of the sudden a sight, sound, smell, touch, taste catches your attention in such a way that the autopilot switch is shut off, and it's like you are back from that kind of distant place you go to when you are not living your life in full whole hearted mindful attention.

This one I really like because you can do it in kind of a formal way or informal way.  For example, when my husband and I took a trip to Rome, Italy we got a hotel room that happened to have a church right next door that had church bells that rang every 30 minutes.  So in this case, quite literally, we could have a bell ring to bring us back to the hear and now like clock work.  At home, it could be things like each time the hour strikes- 7  o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, wake up.  Kind of like a GPS, it can be a time to locate yourself- where am I? What am I doing? Who am I with? What am I thinking? Feeling? Sensing? Am I fully present?

The idea of the mindful bell can be informal too, especially during times that mindful practice is more difficult for you.  Like for me, for some reason the transition time between work and home in the evening has always been difficult for me.  I think it is a combination of being all filled up with the stories of my patients who I saw that day at the hospital, general fatigue in my body as the day is drawing to a close, and my over-all distaste for driving in thick traffic. 

But this one day I'll never forget.  It had been a particularly challenging day at work, and I was definitely operating from auto-pilot.  I was knee-deep in  a nasty combination of misery, irritation and self-pity, and I was sitting in a parking lot of traffic.  But then, I turn my head to the left to see the car next to me, and what do I see but a dancing pug (that cute little dog with the smushed up face) in the window of the car next to me.  I burst out laughing and smiled to the passenger in the car next to me who was providing this dancing dog show amidst wall to wall traffic.  And just like that, the bell rang, auto pilot was turned off, and I was awake again.

I think the trick of flexible discipline in a life-long spiritual journey is to keep these tools like nonattachment, meaningful phrases like "monastery without walls," and formal and informal mindfulness bells in our toolbelt throughout the day so that when we need to shift gears to mindfully-walking-up-and-down-the-hallway-holding-baby, we can do it more effortlessly.

What helps you hold the paradox of flexible discipline?

Radical Compassion

I have begun to think of holidays as a time to focus on a particular virtue that I want to cultivate, nurture and celebrate.  For example: Christmas: joy and kinship, Valentine’s Day: love and friendship, Thanksgiving: gratitude and simplicity. I have also contemplated and sometimes included the virtues I value during the passing of holidays I do not myself celebrate; like devotion for Ramadan and forgiveness for Yom Kippur. 

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday.  As you may know, I am not a Christian, but my husband and his family are, so I will be feasting with them.  But while enjoying the yummies (candy, mashed potatoes and the like), I will also be holding up the virtue of compassion in my heart- a virtue embodied by Jesus Christ.

I saw Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hahn say to Oprah Winfrey in an interview that he thought of Jesus Christ as the “Buddha of the West.” I found this to be an interesting statement in the context of compassion as both Jesus Christ and the historical Buddha both arguably exemplified and modeled compassion as a virtue to be refined through spiritual practice.

For me, I used to think I was beginning to grasp and practice compassion too.  In my work as a social worker and psychotherapist.  As a parent. As a Unitarian Universalist.  As a bleeding heart liberal. Any and all of the above.

But this week I listened to stories of individuals who seem to be practicing compassion in a totally different league than I am.  These folks have taken the idea of “suffering with” to a level I deeply admire and respect, but have not yet touched upon myself.  Which, in all fairness to Jesus Christ and the historical Buddha, based on the stories told and retold, it would appear they did as well.  Therefore, it seems fitting that I call what they do, versus what I do, by a different name: radical compassion.

What is radical compassion? Well, for me, it is one of those concepts that “I know it when I see it.” Compassion itself could be defined this way as described by Judith Lasater in her book  Living Your Yoga in regards to compassion towards our children:

It is “To be willing not to judge their behavior, but to try to see the situation from their points of view.  This does not mean I forfeit my opinion on the most effective course of action they might choose. Rather, I have the intention to truly feel the situation from their narrow views, thus stepping back from my own narrow view.”

I like this pragmatic, rubber meets the road definition for compassion.  And I like that it starts with: to be willing, because, honestly, I think that is half the battle with compassion practice.

But now let me share some examples of what I see as radical compassion that I learned about this week.

The first example was seen in a video of a father who had had his first grade son killed in the Sandyhook Elementary School shooting in2012.  Earlier in the week I was looking over a new website on mysticism and I was led to a video link of this father in a retreat setting interview asking Thich Nhat Hahn how acts of violence like the one that had taken his son be prevented in the future.

There were several aspects of this interview that were amazing to me, but one of them was the sheer timing of it.  This conversation took place in August, 2013 which was only 8 months after the school shooting.  I myself will have a 1^st grader in the fall, and I can tell you with near certainty, if god forbid I was put in that father’s shoes, I would have nowhere near his capacity to be as radically compassionate with himself (as to bring himself to a meditation retreat which he actually said was his first ever), but then to be willing to use the sacred time to discuss the prevention of more violence and suffering was astounding to me.

Thich Nhat Hahn of course had a response that was equally compassionate, but after reading many of his books and watching him or listening to him speak (in videos), I’ve grown to expect that level of radical compassion from him. Sorry Thay…

The second example of radical compassion from this week came from my favorite radio show that I’m always writing about, On Being from NPR.  It was an interview I had actually listened to before with Father Greg Boyle who talked about his ministry working with gang members in Los Angeles.  I found this time though, the second time, I was even more moved and impressed upon with Father Boyle’s capacity for radical compassionate action- even beginning with his take on what compassion is in the context of his ministry.  He said:

“the measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship. So that means the decided movement towards awe and giant steps away from judgment…How can we seek really a compassion that can stand in awe at what people have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it?... You're trying to imitate the kind of God you believe in. You want to move away from whatever is tiny-spirited and judgmental, as I mentioned. But you want to be as spacious as you can be that you can have room for stuff and love is all there is and love is all you are, you know. And you want people to recognize the truth of who they are, that they're exactly what God had in mind when God made them.”

To use Father Boyle’s words, I experienced “awe” in listening to his perspective that was clearly so much more than that to him, more akin to a mission, which was deeply inspiring to me.  As I consider how I might embody these words in my work and in my parenting, the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” comes to mind.

But then, within the same NPR interview, there was another example of radical compassion.  In the interview Father Boyle tells the story of one of the young people he works with named Jose who was once at a training of social workers with Father Boyle as a co-presenter.  And in that training, Father Boyle said Jose shared these words to a roomful of 600 social workers:

“I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn't want anybody to see them. But now my wounds are my friends. I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my wounds…How can I help the wounded if I don't welcome my own wounds?"

To me, this is another clear example of radical compassion that is compassionate toward self and other.  This is someone who has come to such deep reconciliation of all things within (and without) that he is now able to give of himself generously and freely in a way that does not jeopardize the balances internally. I think that level of penetrating radical compassion toward self is a reflection of deep radical acceptance of self which in turn leads to an ability to go further and deeper with others without losing yourself in the process.

I know I’m not a Christian, but in the end, isn’t that what the life of Jesus was there to teach us?  All of us, Christian and non-Christian alike.   As Father Boyle concludes in the interview: “Well, if you presume that God is compassionate, loving-kindness, all we're asked to do in the world is to be in the world who God is.”

On that note, how might you honor and celebrate radical compassion this weekend?

Waking Up from Ignorance

I like this image of The Tree of Contemplative Practices. Probably because I have found it so helpful to remember that this spiritual journey as a whole is comprised of many many moments of practice.  For me anyway, the awakening process is not something that will just happen on its own.  No, without practice, I tend to return, rather quickly, to the automatic thinking and action that was the blueprint of my younger years.

Most recently, I was reminded how writing, including writing in this blog, and reading are contemplative practices for me that help me wake up from ignorance. 

Here I am defining ignorance as used in Buddhism which Lama Surya Das defines in The Awakening of the Buddha Within as

the age-old problem of delusion and confusion. Until we reach enlightenment, we are all at least a little bit ignorant of the truth or out of touch with reality.  We don’t perceive the truth of how things actually are directly, without distortion or illusion.  Instead, we insist on seeing things as we would like them to be.  We tell ourselves stories, and we live in our fantasies.

What is toughest about ignorance though, is that we don’t know we are stuck in it until we wake up from it. I suppose that is why the Ah-ha moments are so breathtaking.  But this reality leaves us with little other option than practice to remedy the human condition and limitation of ignorance.

The other day I wrote about my agnosticism regarding how the universe does or does not conspire to support us on our journey.  What I found though, is in that process of writing and reflection I further woke up to another way of perceiving reality and god. It was like I peeled away another layer of film on a picture window to reveal a clearer worldview.

To me, this is the process of awakening, and it reminds me of an eye exam.  You know where you stand about 12 feet from a poster that has rows of random letters of all size fonts, and you cover one eye and then the other to try to read the smallest font that your particular eye is able to see.  Each time I feel like I’ve gone through another moment of waking up, it is like I’m able to see an even smaller font on the eye exam that was only moments ago completely unavailable to me because I literally couldn’t see it.

There is currently a YouTube video on the internet called “Test your awareness: do the test” that I encourage you to try because it makes this very point in a fun game.  If you have the time, stop right now.  It only takes 1 minute and 9 seconds to do, and I’d recommend you not read any of the descriptors of the awareness test before you click on the link, it kind of ruins the fun if you do.

So stop now, and take the test.   

Did you do it? Isn’t that fun? I love that awareness test because it really makes the point that we human beings are limited.  We do filter out information with one part of our brain without the other parts of our brain even knowing that we are doing it.  That is the reality of ignorance, and its burden.

In my recent blog called “Universe Conspires?” I mentioned the story of Kevin Hines and his suicide attempt off of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, and when I consider the role of ignorance, as in what are my blind spots that I plainly am not able to see right now because my perception is skewed or distorted or hyper-focused on this other thing over here, I wonder about what he missed in his line of sights on the way to the bridge.  Yes we know afterward all the factors that played into his survival, but because we are dependent on his small and limited view of reality prior to his jump, we will never know what acts of grace or kindness were completely missed because of his blind spots- just like the moon walking bear on the YouTube video.

It’s not his fault of course.  Its nobodies.  Saying I or someone else is being influenced by ignorance is not an accusation or a judgment, it is just reality.  It is like the old parable about the 4 men who are all blindfolded and told to touch a spot on an elephant, and none have an idea of what an elephant is.  One blindfolded man is told to touch the ear, the second the tail, and so forth.  Then each is asked “what is it that you are touching?” Of course the joke is each man gives a very specific description of his area of the elephant, but none comes to the conclusion about the larger whole, the elephant itself.

In the story, none of the men are wrong.  Their perception is true for them based on their limited senses, understanding, knowledge, and history available to them at the given moment.  This is how ignorance works, we don’t even know when we are under its veil.  But then wait five more minutes, and all of that could change as our awakening continues to unfold each moment of each day of this spiritual life. That’s the gift of practice. The buried treasure.  As Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton said, “There is in all visible things...a hidden wholeness.”

I love to watch this process unfold in my spiritual reading too.  I had blogged a couple of months ago about a book I was reading by Barbara Brown Taylor called A Geography of Faith: An Altar in the World.  Well, I had put the book down for a little while as I sometimes do with nonfiction- read a chapter here or there and then return to it.  

But then a week ago I wrote a blog on March 22^nd called “Gratitude for the Body,” and the next day I picked up Barbara Brown Taylor’s book and turned to a chapter called “The Practice of Wearing Skin” in which she talks about the very same struggle of embodying my body that I had just written about.  And in the book she offers some fabulous suggestions for practices to shift into more gratitude for the body like praying naked while standing in front of the mirror- please let me know if you are courageous enough to try that!

For me, this is an example of awakening from ignorance.  I did not see that chapter or read that chapter on the body until I was able to see that chapter and read that chapter with a fresh set of eyes, eyes that were able to see the smaller font on the eye exam. 

Yoga expert Seane Corn says this awakening process can also be a gift of a regular yoga practice.  Something that will be freely given if you keep returning to your mat again and again and again.

So for me, I will keep writing, among other practices, because it helps me wake up from the places I don’t even know I need to wake up to.  It’s a paradox right?  The more I accept and observe my limited nature of being human, the more I will experience and observe the infinite vastness of reality and the universe.  It makes me wonder, is human ignorance a design flaw on god’s part or part of what makes human beings so uniquely beautiful and capable?  I suppose in the end it doesn’t matter. The reality is, it is thus, and so I keep practicing.

Do you?