Poetry 114: Uncommon Prayer

Uncommon Prayer

Underneath the water
everything makes sense.

My breath,

the light,
the unimaginable quiet.

I am more myself

in the water than I am on land.

A hilarious
evolutionary paradox
that prompts
a most knowing, Mona-Lisa-like smile,
on the lips of god
I suppose.

Because only There,

can my true self be my normal;
can my body be my friend.

Is this a prayer,
I wonder?
Though an uncommon one at best.

One that makes
communion feel obvious
and understated
because the womb-like quality is so
superbly clichéd
and delicious.

Even my own embodied body

feels more itself;
as it wriggles and twists
into its most animal-like fashion
across the sandy sea floor.

It's a virtually magical sensation,
as the streaming sunlight
shimmers against each molecule of water.

Though I've yet to meet a mermaid,
there is still no place
I'd rather be.

What if that were true

in this life as well?

Perhaps I'll have to
to pray for that.

-Me

Mindfulness, Equanimity & Spaciousness

This month I attended a funeral for a family friend.  She was only 30 years-old, and it appears she may have died from a drug overdose.

Watching her mother sob heavily while kneeling in front of the urn that carried her daughter's ashes, I silently wondered, "how will this mother possibly be able to make space for this?"

Then, a moment later, I began to think about mindfulness.

In his book, Heal Thy Self, the Director of The UMASS Center for Mindfulness, Saki Santorelli reminds his reader in his chapter Quiet Mind, Open Heart that in many Asian languages that use characters for words, the word for "mindfulness" may be more accurately translated as: bringing the heart-mind to this moment.

He writes:

Sometimes people confuse mind in the word mindfulness as having to do with thinking about or confining attention to cognition, imagining that we are being asked to engage in some form of introspection, discursive self-analysis, or mental gymnastics. Simply put, mindfulness is bringing a fullness of attention to whatever is occurring, and attention is not the same as thinking...

The artist and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi describes the Japaenese character for mindfulness as composed of two interactive figures. One represents mind, the other, heart. Heart and mind are not imagined as separate.

When I first began formal mindfulness practice--whether it be yoga (asana), sitting meditation or the body scan--I do not think my narrow view of mindfulness would have allowed me to have had a deeper understanding of what Mr. Santorelli was actually saying here. 

But now, many years later, watching a bereaved mother grieve at the funeral of her eldest daughter, my conceptualization of mindfulness has grown far more expansive. Now, I can appreciate the aspiration of the Buddha when he said:

Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space, which cannot be pointed, cannot be marred, cannot be ruined.

A mind (and heart) as vast as space...Could that be possible?

Because, sometimes, when I am flowing through a yoga sequence, or I open my eyes at then end of a 20 minute sitting meditation, I actually do feel more expansive- like my insides have somehow stretched wider during the practice so that I can, nearly literally, hold more.

Western Buddhist teacher and author Sharon Salzberg might say this is a gift of equanimity.

In a dharma talk called Equanimity and Faith given on January 13, 2010 at the Insight Meditation Society that is available on a Dharma Seed podcast, Ms. Salzberg talks at length about the relationship between mindfulness and equanimity, and equanimity and spaciousness.

She describes it this way:

Equanimity is known as the balance of mind...Equanimity is the voice of wisdom, it is the articulation of wisdom...I think of it as a kind of spaciousness. It is opening to something bigger than what we might find right in front of us...One of the ways of deepening equanimity is through mindfulness.

After listening to this talk (several times), I began to imagine a sort of algorithm:

mindfulness increases equanimity -----------equanimity increases spaciousness,

in the mind and the heart.

So when a big event occurs that may feel tragic or unpredictable, the mind and heart say to you, "I don't like  this. This is terrible!  And, I can still make room for it." 

It would seem, this organic process of making space for the undesirable is what allows us to adapt, shift and ultimately integrate during times of distress rather than fragment and decompensate.

I say organic, because I've been wondering lately about the relationship between the biological term called "allostasis," which is often described as maintaining stability through change (Bruce S. McEwen, Neurobiology of Aging, 2002), and the possible over-lap with mindfulness, equanimity and spaciousness.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines allostasis as:

the process by which a state of internal, physiological equilibrium is maintained by an organism in response to actual or perceived environmental and psychological stressors.

So does that mean allostasis is to the body as equanimity is to the mind-heart?

Unitarian Universalist preacher and Maine Game Warden Chaplain Kate Braestrap suggests in her book Here if You Need Me, which is based on years of being the actual person who tells the family member that their daughter, spouse, parent has died in some god-awful tragedy, that we (human beings) already have the wisdom of how to do this; how to make space for the impossible.

She writes:

It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when your child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in them - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held.

Is that the mind-heart so filled with love it resembles space? Is that mindfulness?

Later in the same Dharma Seed talk described above, Sharon Salzberg tells a really cute story about some advice she gave her then 8 year-old goddaughter about how to practice mindfulness, equanimity and spaciousness.

She says that one way to relate to a hurtful experience is to allow your mind-heart to be

really, really big like the sky...your heart is so open, and maybe that is different than maybe when you feel like a sponge...when every mean thing someone says to you comes into you and fills you, and you get all soggy and yucky.

I like this very relatable version of dharma that even I can understand.

But more importantly, with continued formal mindfulness practice, I feel like I could actually apply it to my life.

It also makes me wonder about all of the exciting scientific research currently being done on resiliency and post-traumatic growth, and their possible relationship with mindfulness.

Sitting back at the funeral, I longed for her mother to have some sort of method or practice to allow her access to the wisdom within that would help her hold the enormity of her suffering in balance.

May it be so.

"In this, there is that" Part III

Sometimes it is easier to talk the talk in a dialectical philosophy, than it is to walk the walk.

Though I do try, I find that holding two opposing truths is actually quite difficult at times.

I remember the moment this challenge became really apparent to me: it was April 15, 2013.

This was the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, which was also the day I learned I was pregnant with my daughter.

I had been trying to get pregnant for some time, and had already had one miscarriage.  But on April 15th of that year, the pregnancy test finally said "positive."

I remember the feeling of pure joy inside me as I excitedly carried my pee stick around the house, but as the television was still on in the background reporting the news of death and carnage at the marathon finish line, the despair and fear was quite visceral as well which made the feeling of joy almost wrong.

I do not share this as a story of self-criticism, but rather as a matter of fact on account of growing up in the west, where we like our tidy headlines and simple narratives (i.e. in our politics), even if the numbers just don't add up.

Because to have confusion, ambivalence, conflict, and uncertainty is just so messy. 

And messy is so...messy.

The unfortunate reality is, western culture just doesn't do a very good job at teaching our communities how to hold two opposing truths like life and death, joy and despair, friend and enemy in our hearts and minds at the same time.  And this leads us to solely rely upon trite phrases like "everything happens for a reason," that, at best, can be quite invalidating of the very real complexity at play.

This is why I always liked what the Unitarian Universalist Minister, author and Maine Game Warden Chaplain Kate Braestrup had to say about the tragic death of her husband (who was a police officer and the father of her 4 young children):

I can't make those two realities -- what I've lost and what I've found -- fit together in some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.

On a deeply personal note, I recently learned someone I knew attempted suicide by jumping off of the same bridge that I have done an annual summer solstice yoga day each year, and now, every time I drive by that bridge, I think of the suicide attempt and yogis doing sun salutations.

I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.

On a far lighter note, my husband and I were chatting this morning before work about a recent vacation that did not go exactly according to our expectations- expectations that were based on well over 10 years of the exact same summer vacation. 

Yet we both agreed, even though there was, shall we say, messiness, there were also beautiful moments--beautiful moments with our children, beautiful moments by the ocean--that were intertwined with the less-than-beautiful moments.

Nearly three years ago I was introduced to a phrase: "In this, there is that."  It was written in a now favorite book of mine, One Buddha is Not Enough.

When I first read this phrase, made up of a mere 5 words, I did not realize at the time how important it would become to me as I tried to skillfully navigate the quite often disparate roads of life. 

Now, this phrase has become more akin to an unofficial mantra for me, just as dialectics and dialectical philosophy has become more of a personal philosophy.

I think rare moments like these can happen when you fall upon a truth that deeply resonates as a core truth- a truth that seems to have existed before you even had the words to articulate it or the wisdom to comprehend it.

And it is only in retrospect that you are able to see the trail of bread crumbs that led you to this exact space in time when the phrase "In this, there is that" seems to cover, well, everything.

I was reminded of one of those bread crumbs on my own trail toward dialectical thinking just this morning while listening to NPR on my drive in to work during a radio interview with author Sherman Alexie.

For those of you who do not know this fantastic National Book Award winner and writer of short-stories, novels, poetry and now memoir (his newest book just out this month is called You Don't Have to Say You Love Me), I have found him to be the literary embodiment of dialectical philosophy.

From my first read of his 1993 book The Lone Ranger and Tonto FistFight in Heaven to his more recent works, I found Mr. Alexie's ability to validate the messy complexity of culture, relationships and existential awareness to be profoundly soothing to my at times restless soul. 

Listening to his interview, I was in turn reminded why it is we need--and are starved for--not only phrases and philosophies, but also the arts in the form of books, film, song, paintings, poetry, and plays, to act as containers in which we can learn, explore and imagine the possibility of skillfully mastering the wholeness and integration of actually holding these two (or three or four) opposing truths safely, or even, maybe, artfully.

May it be so.

Kindred Spirits: Father Greg Boyle

God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole [God]. The minute we think we've arrived at the most expansive sense of who God is, 'this Great, Wild God,' as the poet Hafez writes, breaks through the claustrophobia of our own articulation, and things get large again...

God's unwieldy love, which cannot be contained by our words, wants to accept all that we are and sees our humanity as the privileged place to encounter this magnanimous love. No part of our hardwiring or our messy selves is to be disparaged. Where we stand, in all our mistakes and imperfection, is holy ground. It is where God has chosen to be intimate with us and not in any way but this...

It is certainly true that you can't judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter- even if that chapter is twenty years long. When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can't hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God...

God, I guess, is more expansive than every image we think rhymes with God. How much greater is the God we have than the one we think we have. More than anything else, the truth of God seems to be about a joy that is a foreigner to disappointment and disapproval. This joy just doesn't know what we're talking about when we focus on the restriction of not measuring up.

From "God, I guess" in Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
by Father Greg Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries.

For more on this kindred spirit, you may want to check out his Tedx Talk: "Compassion and Kinship" or his interview "The Calling of Delight: Gangs, Service and Kinship" with Krista Tippett on the radio show On Being.

Poetry 113: Holding Forgiveness

Holding Forgiveness

Like a wounded warrior
who clings to battles
where souls were lost,
I used to think
forgiveness was elusive-
for me.

Yet,
I'm learning,
forgiveness seems to come
when you stop trying.

Though not overnight,
for sure.

No, the armor must peel away
one small, brittle piece
at a time-
all on its own.

Then, when you least expect it,
the hot storm of grief,
as familiar and a part of me
as the lines of age around my hazel eyes,
cracks open
like the fault lines of the earth,
revealing a spacious inner dwelling
of cool emptiness.

This expansive interior
is so breathtakingly vast,
yet so unknown,
and so unknowable.

As it was paradoxically
pure effortlessness that gave light
to the fiercely tender wholeness
of the human heart,
when it came brilliantly alive
to hold more pain and more sorrow
than I ever narrowly
imagined.

It could even hold,
it turns out,
forgiveness.

-Me