How to Avoid Abandoning Joy

I used to imagine the uninvited emotional visitors such as envy, resentment, disappointment, and grief as the emotional hijackers of my moments of joy. Like a street posse, this band of unpleasant emotions would break into my home of contentment leaving me to feel victimized and angry that my state of equanimity had been stolen away.

That was then.

Now, I try to imagine each emotion as an essential part of me- whether I like it or not—that has its own sacred place within me.  Similar to John Kabat Zinn’s suggestion in his classic book Wherever You Go, There You Are to consider each and every character in a legend or fairy tale (the princess and the witch, the prince and the ogre) to be a small or large part of the whole that makes us, I try to see each and every emotion in the same vain.

However, I’ve found lately that just desiring to embrace each and every emotion, does not help me in fact radically accept it- totally and completely.  When the rubber meets the road, I often still resist.

Take this morning for example.

This morning in meditation I experienced a sensation of intense of sadness wash over me.  It reminded me of the weather patterns that are so frequently talked about in the meditation literature.  One minute you are sitting in your boat on the flat calm water with clear skies overhead and a feeling of contentment throughout your whole body, and the next, a dark cloud rolls in from the east leaving you instinctually holding your hand to your chest to acknowledge the weight of the wave of emotion that has just knocked the wind right out of you.

I know there is nothing to do or change about this aspect of meditation practice.  I know there is nothing wrong with discomfort in moments such as these. I know this is all part of my practice. And the meditation literature has helped me to see this.

However, afterward I was left wondering two things:

1.)   Am I as accepting of these types of emotional weather patterns when I am off the cushion in my day-to-day life?  Which I’d have to honestly answer a firm: no.

And,

2.) Is it more that my emotional hijackers steal me away from joy? Or, do I actually habitually abandon joy the moment any kind of distressing emotion presents itself? To which I’d have to say a qualitative: yes.

In fact, it happened just the other day.

The other day I was at a Yoga Festival with my 6 year-old son, and it was undeniably a fantastic day.  We laughed. We danced. We ate yummy food. We hugged. We talked about silly and significant things in the same breath. It was wonderful.

Then came the hour drive home. 

My son was asleep in the back, and I decided to make a quick phone call (hands free of course!).  I had thought the phone call was fairly innocuous; just firming up plans.  Before I knew it though, the conversation took an unexpected turn, and I was knee deep in the sticky mud of emotional discomfort. 

And boy did I get stuck! The phone call itself was all of 10 minutes, but my own distress level went on for several hours.  And I must tell you, that pissed me off to no end.  I went from a state of bliss stemming from that fabulous yoga fest with my beloved, to grief and sadness on the phone call, and then, to anger about the grief and sadness “ruining” my day.

Yes, if you are wondering, I could see I was definitely struggling with what some Buddhist practitioners might call non-attachment. LOL. 

Interestingly though, I was struggling with both nonattachment to the pleasant emotions and the unpleasant emotions.  Yet in retrospect, I now see that I did not recognize my own role or accountability in the moment. I felt like something had been done to me.

Some people confuse non-attachment with being unfeeling, apathetic, or neutral.  But I do not view non-attachment that way.  To me, non-attachment is an open-hearted, unconditional friendliness.  Therefore, non-attachment toward emotions, all emotions, would be a warm and curious loving- kindness.

When I am formally sitting on the cushion in meditation, I am able to practice non-attachment to my changing weather patterns of emotions with relative ease.  It is certainly not effortless, but it does not throw me for a loop anymore either. 

Off the cushion however, I am playing in a whole other league, and one that I am not completely ready for despite my regular practice.

Something that has helped me though, both on and off the cushion, is to imagine all my emotions as my dear children. 

Now, if you have children of your own as I do, it can be quite easy to move from the concrete image of your children, to your imagined emotional children.  But even if you don’t, you can use the images of nieces, nephews, god sons and daughters, or any other child you love. Or, you can always exercise those imagination muscles which work marvelously as well.

This use of imagery is similar to what several patients of mine have been recently telling me in bits and pieces about the new animated movie Inside Out.  I have not yet had the opportunity to see it myself, but based on their descriptions about these movie characters who are personified emotions (Sadness, Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear), in this one area, Disney and I may be on the same page. And like John Kabat- Zinn says, legends and fairy tales as told through modern day Disney movies carry timeless truths (or mirrors) about ourselves that is applicable to all ages.

What is interesting to me though, is out of all of the emotional characters or children that I wrestle with, joy may in fact be the most challenging.

To me, joy is like that well-behaved child who just sits quietly and does what she is told.  She is the child who is able to dress herself and get a snack independently. She is your go-to girl.

Unfortunately though, because joy will not make a fuss when you are busy taking care of the other emotional children who are the squeaky wheels--who for me are: grief, disappointment, envy, resentment-- joy is the emotional child who can be easily overlooked, inadvertently ignored, or even neglected at times. 

But maybe, like children, it is no one’s fault. Maybe there actually is no one to blame or to be mad at.  Emotions, like children, all have different idiosyncrasies and needs.  So to engage in reactive, willful behavior like yelling, screaming, or stomping your feet will only be ineffective and make the situation 10 times worse.

Therefore, this reality requires more radical acceptance. The reality that the needy and dependent emotional children will continually make attempts to steal my attention away from joy requires more accountability on my part to engage in mindful awareness when my attention has been distracted.  In other words, I need to stop referring to them as hijackers.  Additionally, I need to make a concerted effort to spend more quality time with joy so that she does not get abandoned as often.

How do we do that though? How do we respond skillfully to these very tricky emotions where, like Alice in Wonderland, one minute we feel fine and the next we have slid right down the rabbit hole?

Here are a few ideas that I have gathered from the wisdom of others:

Compassion: Instead of viewing these intrusive emotions like emotional hijackers straight out of some overly dramatic 747 airline movie starring Harrison Ford, consider the image of seeing them as a teenage gang in the neighborhood. 

Now, you may be thinking, “what is she talking about?! That still seems really scary.”  Well, that’s true, and you know what, painful emotions like grief can be scary too.  But when you boil it down, a teenage gang is made up of a bunch of traumatized kids who have, what Jesuit Priest and author Greg Boyle calls, “a lethal absence of hope.”

And if you can remember that, then you can begin to engage with these challenging and at times scary emotions as you might a group of traumatized and hopeless kids who are messing up your day or your neighborhood. It may help you navigate the moment from a foundation of compassionate skill rather than fear and anger.

Blessings: Consider blessing these difficult emotions.  Minister and author Barbara Brown Taylor shared in her book A Geography of Faith, the story of a friend who used this practice to manage the intense emotions associated with a recurrent bad dream.  In the book Ms. Taylor writes:

“I have a friend who did not sleep through the night for years because of a dreadful dream he had. He did not have it every night, but he feared it every night, so that even on his nights off he stayed on guard.”

And that is the struggle right? That is how we can begin to have an aversive or even aggressive reaction to uncomfortable emotions because the timing can feel so intrusive, inconvenient, and in the extreme, a betrayal.

However, the aversive and aggressive reactions in the case of Ms. Taylor’s friend only made the situation worse, and was not improving the sleep. So instead, her friend tried a blessing.

“One night—in the dream—it occurred to him that what the demon wanted from him was his blessing. That was the only thing that would end the demon’s agony. That was the only thing that would make it go away. So he opened the door with his guts on fire and his hands in front of his face. ‘I bless you,’ he said to the demon, ‘and I bid you go where God wants you to go.” But saying it once was not enough. He had to say it over and over again, as many different ways as he could think of to say it, for what seemed in the dream like close to an hour. It was as if the demon could not get enough of the blessing. It was as if no one had ever blessed him before…’Now go in peace.’ Making a sound like a kitten, the demon turned around and never came back.”

This is by no means easy.  This practice is not for the faint of heart. 

Invitations: Consider inviting these hard to handle emotions to dinner, or at least to tea.  This one, like the blessing, is counterintuitive because you are essentially embracing the difficult to then be able to return to the experience of contentment or joy.

Buddhist teacher and author Tara Brach wrote in her blog on June 12^th of this year about a story from Buddhist literature that is over millennia old in which the Buddha himself interacted with the Demon God Mara through compassionate mindfulness rather than aversion and aggression. She wrote:

“Instead of ignoring Mara or driving him away, the Buddha would calmly acknowledge his presence, saying, ‘I see you, Mara.’ He would then invite him for tea and serve him as an honored guest. Offering Mara a cushion so that he could sit comfortably, the Buddha would fill two earthen cups with tea, place them on the low table between them, and only then take his own seat. Mara would stay for a while and then go, but throughout the Buddha remained free and undisturbed.”

Though we may not be able to follow this model all the time when we experience discomfort, Ms. Brach reminds us we can try to remember:

“When Mara visits us, in the form of troubling emotions or fearsome stories, we can say, ‘I see you, Mara,’ and clearly recognize the reality of craving and fear that lives in each human heart. By accepting these experiences with the warmth of compassion, we can offer Mara tea rather than fearfully driving him away.”

Love: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. modeled a loving practice to be used in the face of adversity and hate. 

Of course, like the other more enlightened beings like the Buddha, we everyday people may struggle to practice this type of advanced Kingian practice with the types of aggression and oppression of the likes Dr. King faced and was ultimately assassinated by.  But even still, we can engage this loving practice with challenging emotions like dread, shame and rage.  Emotions that have the potential to drown out the sound of all the pleasant feelings like calm, affection and pride.

Dr. King believed a loving practice was “the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” Could you imagine making dread, shame and rage into your friends rather than your enemies?

Dr. King also did not buy into the myth that there are people in the world who are either all good or all bad.  He believed there is always some of one in the other. 

He said: “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” When we apply this same assertion to our emotions, maybe bliss is not all good and we should consider taking her off of the pedestal, and in so doing, avoid devaluing distressing emotions like betrayal to the confines of the unwanted basement.

Mindful Awareness: Going back to our Buddhist teacher and author friend Tara Brach, in her book, True Refuge, she generously gives us an acronym of RAIN to help us remember how to allow each moment of discomfort, which may or may not present itself during a moment of joy, to move through us like a wave in the ocean.

RAIN stands for:

R             Recognize

A            Allow life to be just as it is

I              Investigate inner experience with kindness

N            Non-identification.

When applying RAIN to our lives she writes:

“RAIN directly deconditions the habitual ways in which you resist your moment-to-moment experience. It doesn’t matter whether you resist what is by lashing out in anger, by having a cigarette, or by getting immersed in obsessive thinking. Your attempt to control your life within and around you actually cuts you off from your own heart and from this living world. RAIN begins to undo these unconscious patterns as soon as we take the first step.”

Another similar approach to RAIN that is taught at Kripalu yoga and wellness center in the Berkshires of Massachusetts that is also about riding the wave of discomfort is BRFWA which stands for:

B             Breathe

R             Relax

F             Feel

W           Watch

A            Allow.

Author, yogi, and resident Kripalu scholar outlines this technique in his book, and one of my personal favorites, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. He says when we use this technique:

“We don’t try to control our energy experience, we’re free to surrender to the wave of sensation, of feeling, and of energy.  In these remarkable moments of freedom, we can let life as it is touch us, because at our core we know that ‘everything is already OK.”

Gratitude: This suggestion comes from social researcher and author Dr. Brene Brown, and she says it is particularly useful when the emotional hijacker of joy specifically is fear.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey on Super Soul Sunday, Dr. Brown said, “If you ask me what’s the most terrifying, difficult emotion we feel as humans, I would say joy.”

Calling joy “terrifying” may seem strange, but if you are a “waiting for the other shoe to drop” type of person, then just when you begin to relax into joy, you may notice your whole body tense up, as if to say: “no! Don’t let your guard down, something bad could happen.”

In moments like these, Dr. Brown suggests we intentionally move ourselves into a practice of gratitude to avoid that slippery slope from joy to fear that can happen in .2 seconds.

 

So, that’s it. That’s all I got.  But what about you? How do you stick with joy to avoid getting hooked on the bait of negative emotions?  How do you avoid abandoning joy?

God is Beauty

I once heard it said by a Muslim social justice worker in inner-city Chicago that the Quran says "God is beautiful and he loves beauty."  These words have always stayed with me. 

I myself am not Muslim, but the idea that aesthetic beauty is something holy and sacred deeply resonates with me.

I recently went to the coast of New England in celebration of my wedding anniversary, and experienced absolute awe at the natural beauty all around me. 

And, as I walked along the pathway that followed the curvature of the rocky ocean coast, stopping along the way to take a closer look at each wild flower that grew up out of the cliff wall, I was reminded of the modern day poet and theologian John O'Donohue who frequently wrote in both prose and poetry about the godly beauty of nature- with particular love and awe for the landscape of his homeland, coastal Ireland.  I believe Mr. O'Donohue preached, in the best sense of the ministerial word, that "beauty is the illumination of your soul."

I suppose it makes sense then that I feel most at home when I am surrounded by that phenomenal scenery that is god itself because it is like the best of homecomings.

Age Old Wisdom

Something that routinely gives me a deep sense of gratitude is age old wisdom.  The fact that someone took the time to write down or tell someone what they have learned about the art of being human is an incredible gift to me.  Whether they be words from the 20^th century or the 14^thcentury, I am very willing to seek out and learn from the insights gathered through the spiritual awakenings of others in order to help me in my own.

Sometimes this journey of seeking and spiritual awakening can be a rather lonely and uncertain path.  It is like walking through a dark tunnel by yourself and using only your intuition, senses, and blind faith guide you.  

But then, then, you come upon these words of others who have walked through this exact same tunnel.  And thankfully, these fellow travelers generously chose to leave their hard won wisdom right out in the open for you to read so that you may consider if and how it may help you to continue to walk safely through the tunnel on your own.

I’ll give you a recent example.

In the last week I had been contemplating the challenges of distractions in a meditation practice in a blog post titled “Working Parents: Skilled Meditators?”  Later that same week I came across these words by 20^th century Christian theologian, monk and author Thomas Merton where he talked about the inevitability of distractions in both prayer and meditation that he talks about interchangeably in his book Seeds of Contemplation:

“If you have never had any distractions you don’t know how to pray…A man whose memory and imagination are persecuting him with a crowd of useless or even evil thoughts and images may sometimes be forced to pray far better, in the depths of his murdered heart, than one whose mind is swimming with clear concepts and brilliant purposes and easy acts of love…That is why it is useless to get upset when you cannot shake off distractions. In the first place, you must realize that they are often unavoidable in the life of prayer…You would profit much more by patiently resisting distractions and learning something of your own helplessness and incapacity…The chief reason why [people who pray/meditate] suffer is that their hopeless efforts to put a stop to this parade of images generate a nervous tension which only makes everything a hundred times worse…There is no real danger in these things…”

I can’t tell you what a huge relief it was for me to come across these words of wisdom about the life of the spirit, and as always, perfect timing.

When I stumble upon holy guidance it’s like I literally feel my whole body exhale and soften as my eyes move across the page because suddenly I am not by myself in the tunnel anymore.  A visitor has just met me along the way to share their map or flashlight so that I might catch myself before I stumble, walk into a wall, or get turned around in the wrong direction. Their words are like a compass to keep me pointed toward true north so that I might then continue the journey on my own again.

And the funny thing is, I feel a particular sense of solace from the words of those individuals who are deceased that is unique from the gratitude I feel from the shared experiences of those who are living in my time.

For example this morning I read these words by living author Anne Lamott from her book Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair:

This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.

This is a very moving statement, and one that I personally abide by in my work as a psychotherapist.  But, something happens inside of me when I read the same type of meaningful words written by the hand of a seeker of another time.

I think this is because I experience a sense of connection and interconnection from the validation that the most intimate aspects of the human experience have not changed all that much in thousands of years.  In this case, I like hearing that my own experience of being human is not unique to the particular moment of time that I am living in.  And in fact I find it comforting to hear that men, women and children of all century and millennia, all over the world, have thought and felt and sensed the exact same thoughts, emotions and body sensations that I have.  Regardless of nationality, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, hemisphere, or even century, human beings continue to grapple with the same questions, and I love that about us- it may be what I love most in fact.

So, just for fun, below, I have included a journey back in time with 4 golden nuggets from the over-flowing treasure chest of wisdom of the sages through the ages. 

 Jesus Christ , 1^st century Middle Eastern Jew: 

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, 13^thcentury Sufi mystic born in present day Afghanistan

                And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

Meister Eckhart, 14^th century German Christian mystic:

There is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.

Henry David Thoreau, 19^th century American Transcendentalist:

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. 

What are some of your favorite words that have helped you through the dark tunnel of spiritual awakening?

Working Parents: Skilled Meditators?

About a month ago I was sitting around a table at a summer BBQ listening to a group of guests talk about meditation.  Most were not people I knew very well, so I was more sitting on the sidelines of the conversation, but listening intently nonetheless as this is a topic I am, obviously, quite interested in.

The main theme of the discussion was: What makes meditation impossible!  One by one each person shared his or her experience of taking a shot at developing a meditation practice, only to be forced to resign due to all of the hang-ups that presented themselves.

If you already have a meditation practice, all the obstacles that were mentioned on that summer evening were not new- all the usual suspects like:

·         restlessness,

·          too many distractions in the house, 

·         too fidgety, 

·         not enough time, 

·         too busy, 

·         too many people interrupting me to ask me to do something,

·         can’t stop the mind from racing, no space to do it,

·         other mindful activities like gardening are more helpful,

·         etc. etc.  

Nothing new, right?

I opted to not take part in the dialogue because  of two reasons: one: I’m generally shy person who is never fighting for a spot light at a party, and two: the group was in absolute consensus that  meditation is just not humanly possible in a fast-paced 2015 American life, and therefore not right for them at all.

Since this BBQ, I’ve gone back in my mind several times to this exchange, and I have come to believe this truth: working parents are actually well-positioned to begin a meditation practice if they so choose. In fact, we are primed for it and uniquely qualified.  Let me explain.

Whether you are a working parent or not, my supposition may surprise you.  After all, every single one of the stumbling blocks mentioned in the conversation at the BBQ is not only true for working parents, but x’s 1000.  “Too busy.” “No space to do it.” “Too many distractions in the house.” Are you kidding me?

But here’s the thing:

A.      I believe these hurdles show up for every beginning meditator.  This is meditation 101.  There is no other way through to the other side.  This is it.  And I’m learning, the only difference between a beginning meditator and a more experienced meditator is not the absence of hindrances, it is the knowledge, skill and willingness to work with them.

Which leads me to:

B.      The knowledge and skill set necessary to work with these difficulties is already a part of working parenthood 101, a skill set we already have.

Imagine it: It is 5:45 p.m.  You are standing in your kitchen trying to configure a somewhat balanced dinner from the meager ingredients that happen to be in your refrigerator.  Then, the phone rings.  The dog barks. The children want a snack before dinner. Your spouse is trying to tell you about his meeting with his boss.  You decide to kick everyone out of the kitchen (in a nice way!). You figure out what pans need to be washed so you can start to cook the meal.  You turn on Pandora to Alison Krauss while you cut squash and zucchini for the pasta sauce. Children try to re-enter the kitchen. Your spouse tries to talk to some more.  You fill sippies. You give snacks. You say, “I can’t believe he said that.” Then you return your attention back to the task of cutting vegetables while humming to “When You Say Nothing at All.”

You’ve been there, right? And remember what those obstacles to meditation were: “Too busy.” “No space to do it.” “Too many distractions in the house.”  That is just any ordinary Tuesday night in my house.  Maybe yours too.

My point is, if you are a working mom or dad who has ever thought that a meditation practice would be beneficial to you, try it!  Because yes, you will encounter all of the Meditation 101 challenges just like everyone else, but if you remember that you already have a magnificent ability to roll with the punches, you will more likely stick with it because you will be less likely to get all flustered and flabbergasted.  You will be less likely to give up so quickly.  In fact, you might even embrace the obstacles as par for the course.

Imagine it: You are sitting down for meditation on the living room rug. It is 5:30in the morning and you have just closed your eyes after setting the timer on your Insight Timer App.  Immediately you feel the cat climbing up on to your lap.  You decide to just let her just sit there and re-focus on your breath.  In and out. You hear your spouse moving from the bedroom to the bathroom to take a shower and the dog is following him. He closes the door.  You continue to breathe, in and out. Five minutes later, the baby begins to do a soft cry from her bedroom. You listen closely to determine which type of cry it is.  Is it: an I’m-going-to-fall-back-asleep cry or an I-need-my-pacifier cry. She falls quiet again. You return to your breath, in and out.  And so forth, and so on.

See, we working parents already have the skills required for meditation.  We already have a lot of practice at mindfully return to our breath, nonjudgmentally, in the present moment, again and again when distractions arise.  In fact, we are really skilled at it.

I’ll close here with a funny story. I once read an anecdote by Buddhist teacher and author about a guy at a meditation retreat who was super agitated because he had paid all this money to attend a retreat of several days and he ended up sitting next to this person with a terrible head cold. For days this guy was distracted by coughing, sneezing, blowing noses, and he became just furious that his meditation experience has been ruined.  That is until he goes to have his one-on-one conversation with the teacher, and the teacher exclaims that he believes this guy’s meditation retreat is goingmarvelously, and would not change a thing about the environment (or move the guy with the head cold), but would recommend some technique for the agitation.

What’s the moral of the story: embrace the interruptions, in life and in meditation, and keep moving forward.  The victory is not the silence, the victory is the returning home.

Poetry 101: The Calm Inside

The Calm Inside

There is a space,

underneath the madness,

where I reside. 

If I am still,

sometimes,

I can feel myself slip beneath the surface

to the calm. 

Like slipping between clean sheets,

it is a delicious slide. 

My body begins to tingle. 

The light begins to fade into darkness. 

I feel suspended in mid-air

in absolute safety. 

I am utterly alone,

but not lonely for certain. 

I am me and You at once. 

Then, the crow caws. 

The dog barks. 

The light shifts from whence I came. 

I am back. 

I am gone. 

-Me

Poetry as Grace

Have you ever noticed the serendipitous nature of poetry? In my life it seems that certain poems have crossed my path at the exact moment that I needed them.  I can’t explain this.  I don’t try to.  But I have come to think of it as grace- which I suppose is a catch all for everything that has been an unexpected loving presence in my life.

For example when I was on maternity leave with my daughter I remember a day just prior to my return to work date in which I was distraught.  I was beginning to experience that severing that one can feel when a being which had been a part of your living body begins to move away from you.  I called my friend that morning sobbing.  I told her I needed to problem solve a way to be able to extend my maternity leave or work part-time.  I asked her through my tears to generate some fabulous unknown idea that would allow me to have more precious time at home with my two children. I asked herthink me out of my intolerable feelingsand come up with some answers.

She didn’t of course.  She could not have. And I knew deep inside that’s not what I actually needed in that moment.

What I did need was to just be with the intense loss as it was.  Not to figure out the future. Not to problem solve to get the answers, but to just exist in the space in between all that certainty.

Later that same day, I came upon these words  by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Granted, it is not from one of his poems, but rather his work Letters to a Young Poet. Yet, it reads just like poetry does it not? And more importantly for me, these words acted as a container to guide my heart safely through a sorrowful place and time.

Recently, I came upon another poem, or rather it came upon me.

It was a couple of weeks ago when I was in a place of deep contemplation of my new mantra: “In this, there is that;” a mantra I have written about previously.  During that time I tuned in to a podcast of a Dharma Talk by Christina Feldman called The Wisdom of Disappointmentgiven at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts in 2007.  In the talk, Ms. Feldman cited the following poem by a woman named Rashani:

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole,

while learning to sing

Isn’t that just beautiful? And isn’t the truth of that poem so true? 

After I heard the poem I had to look it up myself of course, and have now read it several times privately as well as to some colleagues who also work in the mental health field.

As a seeker, I find it reassuring somehow that in this one area, poetry, I don’t have to do all of the work to seek things out.  In this one small area of my life, poetry seems to seek me.  And for that, I am grateful.

More Blessings...

A week ago I wrote about my intention to turn my mind toward counting my blessings, and I included my recent camping trips to the beach on that list.  Here are some pictures from those same trips.  I always feel a gorgeous sunset is a blessing from god, and here I was able to capture it.

Play as Spiritual Practice

I was talking to my friend yesterday about work-play balance.  She is a full-time working mom like me, and we both agreed that 2 day weekends are just not long enough to do (or not do as the case may be) all that we’d like to.

Like my friend and I, if you work regular business hours Monday through Friday in the United States and have children, then you already know the weekends are when you try to squeeze in every activity that just won’t fit during those 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.after work hours during the week.  It’s when you need to get the kids to soccer or baseball depending on the season, get the oil change on the car, do the grocery shopping for the week,  pick up the gift for the next birthday party,  clean the bathtub, empty the litter box, visit your aging parent or relative, and so on and so forth.

But, it’s also the same 48 hours when you want to bring the kids to the park to play on the jungle gym, go to an early morning yoga class, listen to a sermon at church, lay on the couch or in bed and watch whatever show you put to DVR series recording this week,  enjoy the actual process of spending a couple hours to cook a meal that is delicious and balanced (and maybe drink a glass of red while you are making it too), or to talk with your spouse in a more meandering, conversation-like way versus the usual: What? When? Where? type of exchanges.

And that’s what can happen isn’t it? The needs vs. the wants start to shift into adversarial positions like an internal tug of war.  Our lives become an overly simplified duality of work versus play where one is linked with efficiency, responsibility and livelihood, and the other represents quality of life, what matters most and the sustenance of our souls.

I’ve seen this dualistic struggle on a very personal level through the lives of my two grandmothers.  Their names were Ruth and Alice, and both are long gone now. Ruth died at the age of 52 after having 6 children on a very small budget and an often out of work husband.  I’m told though, while Ruth lived, she had this underlying passion for singing, both in a choir at church and in community theater, that never quite got off the ground.  Alice, on the other hand, died at the ripe age of 85, yet she seemed to be a woman with a whole long trail of regrets that came from not living the life she had dreamed of when a young girl at the University of Michigan.

When I look at my grandmothers lives, it seems each woman was greatly challenged with the demands of work-play balance, and each died before ever finding that sweet spot when the two are in concert.

On a more historical level I think the same difficulty is seen in the contrasting of two classic 19^th century figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson versus Amos Bronson Alcott.  Both have fascinating biographies outright, but in contrast, I find the two captivating and illustrative of this very theme.

For to me, Ralph Waldo Emerson is an example of someone who made effort to have a more balanced life including the spiritual, intellectual, familial, andfinancial.   It is said that he would go on speaking tours around the United States and abroad for income, and that was his way of earning money.  However, he also gathered brilliant men and women in his home for hours upon hours of conversation.  He also wrote poetry that never really brought him any fame or money in life. It is also said he spent mindful time with his children giving them his undivided attention.

Amos Bronson Alcott on the other hand, never quite found the balance. A man of the same century, and according to some biographers Emerson believed Alcott to be more brilliant the Emerson himself.  But, quite simply, Alcott just could not get his act together. He dreamed up ideas but could not figure out how to keep his family financially sound at the same time which included the famous author Louisa May Alcott of his 4 daughters. This led Emerson to frequently lend or give money to the Alcott family to help them stay above financial water.  Some biographers say Alcott would sit quietly on the road of Concord, Massachusetts where the all lived and just wait for a passerby to come so that he could strike up a conversation with them about politics or philosophy for fun.  Unfortunately for Alcott, he shifted the pendulum too far to the side of play and too far from the side of sustainable work.  He was unable to achieve the same balance that Emerson appeared to experience in his own life.

For me, unlike Amos Bronson Alcott and my grandmother Alice, I think my difficulty has been with the play part of a more balanced life because, in all honesty, I’m just not very good at it.

Play makes me very uncomfortable, which then makes me feel totally awkward and tense.  Sounds like a lot of fun, right?! 

Work on the other hand (employment, household or task completion of any kind) is quite comfortable for me. I could do it for hours.  I happen to be someone who likes her work and doesn't hate housework, but I don't think that is what makes it more comfortable than play.

I think my discomfort with play is somewhat based on the circumstances of my upbringing and my generally Type A Personality, but it also stems from American culture.  Americans as a group, and I know this is an over-generalization because we are a highly diversified bunch, do not often do activity of any kind that is not outcome, product driven.  Productivity is a highly valued virtue in the United States that unfortunately got tied to our individual sense of self-worth.  Therefore, to engage in play has the potential to jeopardize one's self worth or value. 

This particular nuance of American culture is picked upon in the movie Eat, Pray, Love Starring Julia Roberts.  In the scene when she is sitting with her new group of European pals in the barbershop, 2 Italian gentlemen try to explain to Julia, the sole American in the scene, about “La Dolce Far Niente,” the sweetness of doing nothing, which they clarify is not getting in to our pajamas, drinking beer and watching reality tv all weekend.

Perhaps though, we Americans, and maybe others too, could wrap our brain around making more time for play if we found a sacred quality to it? 

Though there is a small part of me that says by trying to convert play into something sacred, we might just still trying to repackage the same thing (productivity) by using fancy lawyer tricks… And by god, we should not have to do that, right?

But like I’ve said before, those darn should  statements never seemed to have helped anybody.  So, maybe for us, for me, it is more like what Mary Poppins said, we just need “a little sugar to help the medicine go down,” and ironically, in this case, the medicine, the prescription, is play.

Mary Poppins is in fact a terrific example of both work-play balance and leaning in toward play as a spiritual necessity- a need not a want.  If you are not familiar with Mary Poppins, she is the lead character in a set of 20^th century children’s books and a movie of the same name.  The story, that is beloved by many, is one of a nanny who flies in to help a British family who is caught in a crisis between the values of work and play.

Now, I must confess here, I have never read the children’s books that the 1964 Disney movie is based on by P.L. Travers.  So my reference point for the fictional character of Mary Poppins is the film alone- and what a wonderful film it was, all Hollywood and all.

Recently though, I saw the more modern Hollywood movie Saving Mr. Banks which dramatized another piece of the Mary Poppins story, the life of the author herself, P.L. Travers. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to do so and I won’t ruin it for you, but I’ll just say here I love how the theme of work versus play from the 1964 movie made it into this updated 2013 take on the story.  In this movie you see the author herself depicted as a little girl battling out the push and pull of how to spend her time; for instance when she is pulled between  imagining herself as a hen laying eggs  versus doing a chore like setting the table for dinner.  The author’s internal clash is then exacerbated (or perhaps initiated) by the role her conflicted alcoholic father had in this struggle as he, like Alcott, never quite found the balance between work and play.

I think this theme of difficulty trying to balance work and play keeps resurfacing  because the theme  itself is as timeless as human existence itself- and in the United States it is just in Technicolor.

Ever since the hunters and gatherers figured out means to store food for more than 6 hours and protect themselves from wild animals, we human beings have had more time on our hands.  And ever since, the big questions have been: How do we use our time? What is the right way to use our time?  And, does carpe diem mean getting all our work done to be employee of the month or skipping work altogether to go to the beach?

While I was pregnant and nursing my second child I read a book by Karen Maezen Miller called Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood. It is a fantastic book if you haven’t already read it, but she touches on several of these themes of efficiency and responsibility in the context of consciousness of what matters most in parenthood. 

I remember one piece in particular where she wrote about the challenges of trying to hold in our minds that walking a baby for hours while she sleeps, nurses or cries in our arms is as important as emptying and loading the dishwasher. Yet, because the task of holding a baby does not have a concrete way to measure its productivity (a.k.a. usefulness) like a clean plate or cup, it does not seem to hit that task completion reward button in our brains in quite the same way. A point that I found so true.

Of course motherhood conundrum of balance is not quite the same as work-play, but does share some of the same challenges of prioritizing our values.  And Miller makes the suggestion that we consider the day to day activities of motherhood, that can on occasion  feel mundane, as sacred.

The Benedictines have been doing the same for centuries with simple household monastic tasks like washing dishes and mopping the floor.  From my understanding, in this Christian order each monk is assigned work within the monastery that is part of the general upkeep of their home.  However, what’s interesting is the “work” is not thought to be something outside of or less significant than the hours of prayer and meditation that one may also do to cultivate religious devotion and relationship with god. All the activity one does during the day in and outside of the monastery, work or prayer, is intended to be completed in the same vain, in contemplation.

Certainly other groups and spiritual traditions have similar approaches to treating work as sacred.  When I went to an ashram in India in my early twenties, I was first introduced to the idea of sevawhich is considered selfless service and a staple of most short-term or long-term ashram experiences.

But this is still all about work as sacred…What about play? Could play be sacred too?

I once had someone say to me that the opposite of responsible is not irresponsible, it is carefree.  Such a simple statement, but one that made a deep impact on me and all my hard won attachment to what it means to me to be a “good” person (or substitute in any other word here: mother, friend, employee, wife, daughter, therapist, sister, citizen, human being).  And believe you me, I was attached!

So I think the first step is to begin to release (and relieve) ourselves from all these attachments to what it means to be “good.”  This would free us to then consider the possibility of seeing our household chores as sacred, not responsible.   And we could try to see play as carefree and sacred, not superfluous. What would that be like? Would it change the experience? Would it change the way we experience the experience? For myself, I believe it would.

So today, when I get home from another day of important and sacred work at the hospital, I will go home to my family, and spend time between the dinner-making , baths and story time, playing.  Maybe it will be with my children. Maybe it will be after they go to bed.  And I don’t mean the kind of play described in Eat, Pray, Love where the American is in her pajamas, drinking beer and watching reality tv. It will not be that.  But it won’t be for productivity or accomplishment either- there will be no end to justify the means.  Just process. Just play. And it will be sacred to me.

How can you engage in sacred play today?