Poetry 133: Wanted: Spiritual Teacher

Wanted: Spiritual Teacher

I’m looking for a teacher

who understands—and even appreciates—

a well-timed swear

like shit or fuck

in a moment of frustration.

Someone who gets it

when I say:

Getting out of

bed this morning

felt absolutely impossible.

I need a teacher

who recognizes

what an accomplishment

it is to not only get

the dirty laundry of

4 family members

clean AND dried, but

also actually put away.

(I mean, trophies should

be given for that, right?)

And I need someone

who has suffered

such a great wound

(or two or three)

that they never really quite

recovered.

I want a teacher who will say

it to me straight, if necessary,

like a nail hammered

right between the eyes:

Oh yeah,

life is fucking hard sometimes,

and,

I love you.

Someone who can

sit in silence for hours if need be-

because that

is how long it

takes me to break down

my layers of armor,

bullshit and

defense mechanisms

in order to squeeze

out one single tear.

I need a teacher

who loves god

as much as I do,

and would spend hours

gazing at the way the morning

light plays on the

the dew of an indiscriminate

blade of grass at dawn,

just because.

And a teacher who’s sense

of god is

so expansive

that I would

never feel a need to make

myself smaller than

I am in order to fit

into her loving arms.

Yes, this is

the spiritual teacher

that I am

looking for.

If you know someone

who fits this description,

please give them

my number.

-Me

Inherent Worth of Every Human Being

In Unitarian Universalism there are 7 Principles that guide, or inform, our religious denomination.

While certainly not dogma or prescriptions for beliefs per say, they are what could be understood as a common set of values that guide our faith.

Personally, I take refuge in these principles, and recently, I have been spending time contemplating the 1^st Principle: The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person; which, according to the Unitarian Universalist Association website:

“is a given of faith.” It is “an unshakeable conviction calling us to self-respect and respect for others.”

You know how when you learn a new word or decide to buy a new car, you suddenly hear that new word in every conversation and see that type of car every time you take a drive?

Well, as of late, that has been my experience with the 1^st Principle of Unitarian Universalism- it seems to be reflected everywhere.

Take for example the novel I just borrowed from the library by American author Chris Bohjalian called The Sandcastle Girls (2012) that has the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 as the background to a story that we now know leads to the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians by what is now present day Turkey.

 

Or a poem I heard for the first time the other day by Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea called You Who Seek Grace From a Distracted God that has several powerful and eloquent lines including the following:

You, who seek grace from a distracted God,
you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know
in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it,
you, good son of a race of shadows—
your great fortune is to have a job,
never ate government cheese,
federal peanut butter—
you, jerked to light from secret dreams under your sheets,
forgotten by 5:15
false dawn—

you, who sleep where you fall, sleep
beside women not yours who keep you warm, sleep
in spare rooms of your brothers, sleep in the old
bed in the back of your mother’s house, sleep
where you are closest to a bus line—
you, who can’t believe your ma rose at 4:45
to fry one huevo and a slice of bologna
laid on corn tortilla—border benedict—
here’s your chance to drag home
eighty dollars a week, for her electric. Food.
What’s left you spend on used paperbacks,
a matinee, amigos, bus fare—
pay the ticket back to work…

…7:00.
Same old downtown street. Same day every day, unchanged.
You blink on Avenue C—fog
disembarks at the docks,
follows sailors drunk and whoring before breakfast
down Broadway. Strange days. Echoes flee the county jail cold beside you:
voices: hymns of rage: inmate and trustee, some of them your cousins,
sing matins, night’s vigils over: offer hosannas of longing: Patri et Filio:
in tedium you walk silent, counting your manifold sins,
to the plaza, stand
in the crush of your family—these children heading for trade school,
the wheelchair man, the woman and her shopping cart,
the nodding hooker with blue tears on her cheek, paisanos
y borrachos, Ticos, Boricuas, Xicanos, Apaches,
Tainos, Habaneras, cariocas, Mayas,
tattooed cholo Samurai’d and inscrutable leaning back,
hushed as he watches
you. And you want to, you
really want to, you are bursting with it, you
are burning with it, you
who have no words
want to cup their cheeks in your hands,
you want to hold their faces between your palms,
you want to say it—say it, you have nothing
to lose—say it: say

I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you.
I love you.

The inherent worth and dignity of every human being.

A truth that profoundly pierces my heart, and actually pushes me towards what could be an even higher value which is probably more akin to the philosophy or morality of some Christians who imagine every person as Jesus Christ or some Buddhists who believe Buddha-nature is in everybody.

This is a radical belief that goes far beyond what could be argued is a real bare minimum of “worth and dignity” into something much more glorious and world changing because it challenges me, the individual, to not just be “decent” and “non-harming,” but rather instead to be “kind” or maybe even “generous,” or maybe, dare I say it, “loving.”

There is an ancient story in the Judeo-Christian tradition (though I believe it has many different versions) that is sometimes called “Hidden Among Us,” about this very idea.

I found one version of it in the online magazine, America: The Jesuit Review by Peter Feldmeier from December 17, 2012 that goes like this:

The story goes that from a medieval English town Rabbi Isaac, known to be a holy visionary, traveled to the baron’s castle to see him and his wife. “I have been given a divine secret and commanded by God to share it with you,” he told them. “You may never speak of this again.” They agreed. “The secret,” said Rabbi Isaac, “is that the messiah is hidden among us. That is all I am permitted to say.”

The baron knew that Christ had already come, so this must mean that it is the end time. He had one request: “Please Rabbi, tell the monks of our monastery, for they must hear this great news.” The rabbi agreed, and when he met the monks he swore them to secrecy: “The messiah is hidden among us,” he repeated, “but you must not speak of this again, even among yourselves, until he chooses to reveal himself.”

Now this monastery was not in good shape. The monks were fond of quarrels, of gossip and of striving for authority. “Who is he?” they wondered among themselves. Given the humility of divine love, some thought perhaps it was the strange brother who tended the garden. Others imagined perhaps the abbot. It could even be the monk next to them who sang off key day after day. Speculation ran everywhere. So they began to treat each other as though he could be the hidden messiah. You never know.

The baron and his wife privately speculated too. They wondered about each other, about the stable boy, the village fool.... It could be anyone! Not surprisingly, the baron lived quite well, while the peasants’ lives were little more than hardship. He and his wife sold their tapestries, fine clothes and many sets of dishes. They shared their proceeds with those most in need. They also transformed part of their castle into a hospice to care for those most dangerously ill. Who knows if that peasant they washed and cared for might be the hidden messiah.

The people of the realm had never experienced such generosity by their lord and lady. They in turn became even more loyal, and they began to treat each other differently. Thefts became unknown, doors remained unlocked, and strangers no longer found suspicion but hospitality.

News of the monastery got back to the people. The brothers never prayed or worked with such love and devotion. They were so happy, so blessed, knowing that the messiah was hidden among them. Some people even said that on a dark, clear night, you could see the monastery itself seem to radiate light.

The monks aged and died, to be replaced by other young men, some zealous and others less so. The baron and his wife died and were replaced by their children and grandchildren, as was the case with all the townspeople. Rabbi Isaac died and was replaced several times over by other rabbis.

Generations came and went. Bickering returned a bit, and suspicion sometimes replaced trust. The baron’s grandson was not the man his grandfather was. And they all looked back to that time, now many years ago, when it wasn’t that way. “Why has all this changed?” they sometimes wondered. “What secret did they know that we do not?”

This is the secret—but you mustn’t tell anyone—the messiah is hidden among us.

I really love this story, and think of it often because it captures so perfectly the fact that as human beings our attitudes inevitably and predictably manifest into our actions.

The inherent worth and dignity of every human being.

What if?

What if we all truly engaged with ourselves, each other, and the world from this one UU Principle, which is to say, human principle?

May it be so.

Spiritual Lessons From Nature Part XI: Growth

My garden is finally beginning to grow.

I planted it late this year, and it seems the soil has needed a lot more care with fertilizer and tending than in past years.

As someone who has the fortune to not be completely dependent upon her own crop (though some might rightfully make the opposite argument about whether it is "fortunate"), my reason for keeping a garden has more to do with pleasure and hobby than it does productivity or output.

Part of that pleasure simply comes from the pure joy that I get to bear witness to the absolute miracle of growth.

In fact, it feels like sheer delight when I walk, almost giddy, to the back of my yard, and notice that my tomato plant has grown an inch taller or my basil has ten new leaves, and in that moment I am filled with awe and wonder at the way mother nature does her work.

I recently came upon this passage from a book I picked up called Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Spiritual Life From Scratch (1999) by a Western Buddhist teacher named Lama Surya Das (aka Jeffrey Miller).

It reads as follows:

"Gardening helps us realize somatically, viscerally, the laws of growth and gradual unfolding. We can't pull the plants up to make them grow, but we can help facilitate and midwife their blooming, each in its own way, time, and proper season.

I have learned a little about patience and humility from my gardens.  It's so obviously not something I'm doing that creates this miracle!

I also like to reflect upon and appreciate the exquisitely evanescent, transitory, and poignant nature of things in the garden.

Growing a garden is one of the best ways to grow ourselves and cultivate our true selves.  Then all the daily shit we go through can be transmuted into manure on the spiritual field of Bodhi flowers- flowers of awakening.

Everything becomes useful and has meaning and purpose regardless of how it seems to us at the time because it's all grist for the spiritual mill.

If you love the Dharma, you have to farm it."

I love these ideas and these words like: midwife, humility, purpose, and even shit.

I love the concept of gardening as a somatic and visceral experience in our body, and the possibility of cultivating spiritual values such as patience and wisdom through such an ordinary and ancient human activity as gardening.

And of course as a Seeker and a Psychotherapist I love a good metaphor, and Lama Surya Das offers several.

One metaphor was already familiar to me through the writing of Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh in regard to gardening or composting as a symbol for the possibility of using our suffering or difficult emotions as an opportunity for transmutation or creation into something beautiful (remember the lotus).

The second metaphor, however, had not yet occurred to me.

This metaphor is also in regards to gardening, and was written by Lama Surya Das in the same chapter of Awakening to the Sacred that resonated deeply with me as a parent of young children.

"What is the garden in your life? What do you want to watch grow and flower?

It may be a standard garden with dirt and flowers, or it might be something else. Some people tiptoe into their children's bedrooms at night to watch them sleep. Their children clearly are the flowers they love best.

We find our natural meditations in those places and ways of being that we love best. There is great peace in cultivating and gardening all the things that we hope to nurture in our lives, from our work to our families."

Perhaps you might also find a garden (real or metaphorical) to tend today in order to bear witness to the unfolding growth in your own life.

May it be so.

A Path to Mindfulness Through DBT

In Spring, 2017, while getting a mindfulness “booster” for myself and for my meditation practice at an all-day silent Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) retreat at The Center for Mindfulness at UMASS Medical School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, I was introduced to a poem entitled “The Way It Is” by William Stafford (1914-1993) that brought clarity to my own personal path to mindfulness.

The first 2 lines of the poem are as follows:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.

Hearing this poem was a catalyst for a well-deserved, long-overdue, moment to pause to reflect back on how I got to this very moment in my journey of mindfulness that began fourteen years ago in the Fall of 2004 in an outpatient Dialectical Behavioral Therapy group for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

I was 27 years-old at the time, and in my first full-week of my second-year internship as a Master's level social work student.

As part of my internship, I had been assigned to a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (or DBT) group to learn how to co-facilitate a weekly 90 minute Skills Training group with a senior clinician named Mark, who had been trained in this form of treatment for BPD, offered at a local Community Mental Health Clinic where I was doing my practicum.

I remember feeling nervous as I sat down for the first time amongst clients who had already had checked in with the therapist and the group about their progress and challenges with  discontinuing behaviors like non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal thinking, and using alcohol to numb, escape or avoid their own exquisite sensitivity to their emotional landscape.

But then, Mark began to talk to the group about something called “mindfulness,” and I was brought out of my own self-conscious internal dialogue, and into full, present attention.

It started simple enough: Mark asked the clients to bring their attention to one particular melody in a piece of familiar classical music. 

He used words and phrases like “observe,” “non-judgmentally,” “one-mindfully,” and “turning the mind,” to describe what quality of attention the group members should bring to the activity, and amazingly, all of the clients seemed to know exactly what he meant.

This simple exercise became my very first experience with mindfulness, and I distinctly remember having these two after-thoughts:

1.) “This is amazing!” and

2.) “This makes total sense.”

Since 2004, William Stafford’s “thread” of mindfulness has continued to weave in and out of DBT as I have worked in a DBT Program for nearly a decade.

The thread has also thickened with new colors weaved in from MBSR that I first took as a class in 2014 and then steeped into further with the Teacher Training Pathway at The Center for Mindfulness, and then added new dimensions with 5-Day Silent Mindfulness Meditation Retreats at The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA and The Garrison Institute in Garrison, NY as well.

And now, at this point, mindfulness is so thoroughly weaved into both my professional and personal life in such a beautifully-complicated way, that I would not be able to un-do it even if I wanted to.

(I don’t.)

But why does any of this matter?

Why does it matter where we started our mindfulness journey?

 

 

What I realized is for me, like Dr. Marsha Linehan who created DBT and noted in an article in Mindful Magazine in June, 2011 in an article entitled: “Linehan Turned a Struggle Into a Therapy,” that the roots of my mindfulness practice being originally based in my offering of DBT to clients with BPD has absolutely informed the way I think about and practice mindfulness meditation.

You see, I am becoming part of a third generation of Western mindfulness meditation practitioners and teachers-in-training who’s roots in mindfulness are completely secular, and originally rooted almost exclusively in healthcare, which has unquestionably contributed to my particularly broad and egalitarian sense and a sensibility of mindfulness which I know is objected to by many.

But as Mr. Stafford writes:

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

So in the end, I think there must be both acceptance and flexibility about our path to mindfulness, but most certainly: awareness.

Perhaps you too might reflect on the roots of your own mindfulness meditation practice and how it has informed your practice as well.

Spiritual Communion in Nature

This past weekend, I paddled down my favorite New England river for several hours in the evening in the company of just myself. 

It was wonderful, and, I might add, quite spiritual.

It was the first time I had been out in my kayak since last summer.  Not because I have not wanted to-badly.  It's just been, you know, life.

I've had my kayak for about 10 years now, and though with work and young kids I don't get out on the water nearly as much as I'd like to, but when I do, it almost always feels like coming home.

I'm not sure exactly why.

It could be the womb-like symbolism of the water. Or the quiet solitude of the minimalist "sport" of flat-water kayaking.  Or the sensation of being carried and held by something larger than myself.

Or maybe some combination of all three.

However, yesterday, what really pulled me into that deep sense of interconnectedness--an experience that for me is one of the most "spiritual" of them all--was my sensation of communion in the moment of sharing breathing space on that particular river on that particular evening with so many beautiful herons, turtles, and purple wild flowers- which always reminds me of the famous Alice Walker line from her 1982 book The Color Purple:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.)

But what do I mean when I say, communion?

It this case, it was communion with nature, which for me is communion with god.

It is a feeling of joining or together-ness. A oneness. An intimate, authentic presence, and sometimes even a conversation.

It is also an unquantifiable sensation of being cared for, cared about, and deeply accepted, or, in other words, an experience of feeling like a valued part of the grand whole.

And this most recent experience of spiritual communion in nature, reminded me of the brilliant 20th century African American theologian, author and professor Howard Thurman who wrote in his 1953 book Meditations of the Heart:

The impulse to align oneself on the side of that which is whole is a natural one.  Sometimes it springs from the desire to cover up, to take refuge in the strength of another so as to shun the necessity of dealing with one's own weakness. Sometimes it springs from the desire to discover a way by which to understand one's own needs and to do something about meeting them.  The Other-than-self reference is a necessity for peace of mind and spirit.

I, most literally, could not have said it better.

Below are some more photos from my evening of communion with the much, much larger Other-than-self.

Perhaps you too might find occasion for such an experience today.

May it be so.