Hope is a Choice

Recently I have been collecting images, stories and quotes that give me hope because I've come to believe that hope is a choice- something I do with intention and attention.

Somewhat akin to that Fred Rogers (1928-2003) quote from his classic children's television show
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood that aired in the United States from 1968-2001:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'

Except I'm looking for the hope, instead of looking for the helpers.

This started about a year ago when I was at an out-of-state training and I saw this sign outside the public restroom.

This was the first time I had seen any gender inclusive sign of this kind, and I was blown away with hope and gladness in my heart.

Then, on another occasion, I was at my local pharmacy looking for a greeting card, and I saw this whole new row of cards available for same-sex couples.

"Wow!" I thought, and again, a huge smile spread across my face.

Then just yesterday, I was uplifted yet again when I heard a story on NPR about a camp for girls ages 8-18 called Girls' Rock Camp Alliance.

The news story featured girls from various parts of the country (though there are camps also in other parts of the world like Buenos Aires and Tokyo) talking about how the lyrics to a 1993 song called "Rebel Girl" by a girl punk band called Bikini Kill was empowering them as young females.

Song lyrics like:

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
She's got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah...

When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her hips, there's  revolution
When she walks, the revolution's coming
In her kiss, I taste the revolution.

Or another news story I also heard on NPR called "A Tennessee Farm Grows A New Generation of Social Justice Activists" about another summer opportunity for teenagers and young adults called Freedom Schools--run by founder of the Children's Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman--that in part empowers Black youth to organize literacy campaigns in Black communities.

I know to some, these may seem like small glimpses of a larger picture that is much more troublesome, and that may be true.

However, it may also be true, that when you put all these hope-moments together, it can feel like something more.

So I'll close with these quotations by 20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet (1929) that I also have collected in the last year.

Perhaps you too may want to put them in your basket to find meaning in times that can feel confusing and hard, at best, in order to choose hope- again and again.

May it be so.

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors: if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.  And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience...

So you mustn't be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, and misery, and depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?

A Retreat with Lama Surya Das Part I: Arriving

At a time when more and more of us are ever more hostage to our beeping phones and our blinking machines--our agendas, in short, and the chatter and clutter of the world--a monastery represents a new kind of liberation. It fills up the spaces that information can't touch, and it speak to those parts of us that feel we cannot engage with the surfaces of the world until we have built a solid foundation from which to put those surfaces in place.

-Pico Iyer

As I carried my luggage from the parking lot into the monastery turned Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York, and then up to my second floor shared room, I was deeply reminded of the writing and speaking of Pico Iyer.

Though admittedly a bit of a fan, what I have appreciated most about this British-born Indian man who now primarily lives in Japan and made his early career off of international travel writing, is his ability to so beautifully articulate our periodic need to go inward.

On his website, picoiyerjourneys.com, he even has two different side-by-side tabs titled "outerworld" and "innerworld" right next to his "welcome," which to me demonstrates the equal value he places on both.

I share this need to go inward as well.

And I also have some people in my life, as Pico Iyer has also written about, who don't entirely "get" why an ordinary suburban working mom like me would voluntarily go into silence to spend 8 days in a non-air conditioned old monastery without access to electronics, and then spend her long days engaging in various contemplative practices from 6 in the morning until 9:30 at night.

(I even had some people offer a judgey kind of response to this retreat, sending a little mom-shame in my direction because I would not be taking my 5 year-old daughter and 10 year-old son along for the ride.)

But mostly it is more of what Mr. Iyer wrote in a 2006 article titled "The Secret Journey," about his decision to retreat to a Catholic monastery on the California coastline a few times a year:

My friends, a little concerned about my defection--how could I be turning my back on them, and on the smiling self who's telling them wild stories of North Korea and Tibet and Bolivia?--find ways to tidy up my betrayal, and say (I'm sure), 'He's gone off to find himself. He needs time to rest. He travels so much, the poor thing is in desperate need of peace and quiet. He's just taking a break...He just needs to unplug...'

What I don't tell them is that I don't go there just to catch my breath, to be away from the phone, to breathe in one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the world.  I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home.

Yes. 

Though not an experienced practitioner of contemplative retreats by any means, and yet having done a few, there is deep resonance in that last line in particular: I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home. 

Specifically in this last retreat, which was my first with Lama Surya Das who is a Western Buddhist teacher and writer of the Tibetan lineage, I absolutely did peel away multiple layers of self (or ego) over the course of the 8 days; or perhaps I should say, multiple layers of self were peeled away from me? 

(More on that later though...)

For now, I'll just say, as I was arriving on that first day of a retreat titled: "The Natural Great Awakening: Dzogchen Center's Summer Meditation Retreat," I fairly immediately began to allow all those outer labels, that efficiently and objectively describe "me" but for certain do not define Me, to fall away which for some, including myself, can feel like a form of liberation.

Or as Mr. Iyer wrote in the same 2006 article:

I won't necessarily call this a pilgrimage, because, as [Thomas] Merton says, I'm not off to find myself; only to lose it.

I'm not off in search of anything; only--the words soon become fanciful--in pursuit of the state that is beyond searching, of being found...

You could say it's not a pilgrimage, because there's no movement involved after I step out of my car...But all the movements and journeys I have taken around the world are underwritten, at heart, by this: this is who I am when nobody is looking. This is who I'm not, because the petty, struggling, ambitious 'I' is gone. I am as still, as timeless as the plate of sea below me.

And it is all metaphor of course.

So even as I sit here writing, finding words to describe something probably not meant to be written about, and I prepare to move into the rest of my very day-to-day routines of commuting to work, seeing clients, bathing children, watering vegetables, and making lunches, I try to allow that "who I am when nobody is looking" to come forward and perhaps be with me, at least a little, as I move through my day.

Perhaps you can too.

May it be so.

Poetry 158: You Don't Have to Slay the Dragon

You Don't Have to Slay the Dragon

(In dedication, reverence and gratitude to Lama Surya Das)

I've descended down
to where the blue
dragon flies hover,
the forest deer
take their morning
sip, and
the trout gather in a
sea they forget is there.

I've come to release
my Protector;
the oh-so-loyal
guardian who has
served me so well.

Without her,
I would not have been
able to clean house
of that which
harmed me, and would
continue to,
if not for her joyous effort.

I'll admit, she does
seem somewhat reluctant
to let me go;
sweetly reminding me
of the way my favorite
Jewish auntie mothered
me in a way I didn't
know existed.

Don't let go too soon.
Don't let go too late.
Good advice I think.

But now,
the time has come.

So let me take  your
faithful body
in my lotus hands,
and most lovingly
express all the gratitude
that one can expess
for life itself.

Then, I will lay you down,
and re-ascend into the living
world, all the while,
carrying your lessons
and love in my pocket,
as I walk and breathe
in a life closer
to my own.

May peace be in your
heart dear Protector.
Know, thanks to you,
I have more
peace in mine.

With all my
love and blessings.

-Me

Poetry 157: Parenthood

Parenthood

 

I see my young
walking barefoot in the
grass.

Pulling blueberries off

the bushes out back.
Looking for already
ripened tomatoes.

In these moments

I feel that invisible,
yet fantastically tangible,
cord between us
pull tighter.

 

I know this time
is brief,
when the borders
of our suburban half
acre will keep you in.

I know the goal

is to help you grow
in skill and wisdom
before you move out
into wider circles.

 

Yet my mammal
instinct seems
so damned hardwired
to just pick you up
by the scruff,
and carry you back
through time.

 

I don’t-

of course.

Instead, I decide

to let my animal self
sit just quietly
in the shadows of
our shaded lawn.
Carefully watching
your every step.

 

Preparing to
let you go.

 

-Me

Current Events & Vacillating Emotions

It would be very fair to describe my temperament as mercurial.

In fact, I once described it to a therapist as analogous to a singer who has an incredibly broad vocal range- like baritone all the way to soprano.

But never before has that been truer than in the first two years of the presidency of the 45^th President of the United States.

Take the vacillation of emotions in this week of current events alone.

Monday morning, I woke up and turned on the news to see the horrific image of the lifeless bodies of two Central American migrants, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria, who had died over the weekend while trying to cross the Rio Grande into the US, leading to this New York Times cover story:

Then, Tuesday morning, I woke up and turned on the news to see yet another woman has come forward (this is now the 16^th!) and reported the current President sexually assaulted her (in this case the victim reported rape) in the mid-1990’s, and this was the Washington Post’s headline on June 25, 2019:

“Latest sexual assault allegation against Trump draws muted political reaction.”

Irate.

Despair.

Breathe.

But then…Hope. 

Thursday evening, my friend texted me this image of a cross walk next to a town park with her words “A little bit of light in the dark” underneath:

Which was then followed by learning that the Supreme Court decided this week, in a close 5-4 vote, that every human being “counts” in the United States, and  therefore, when the population of the United States if formally counted again in the 2020 Census as required by the Constitution of the US,  every human being in the US will be “counted,” regardless of citizenship status, by not adding the question about citizenship to the questionnaire.

Phew! What an f-ing roller coaster of emotion this week!

I recently heard an interview on NPR with the founder of StoryCorps, Dave Isay, about a new project they are working on called: “Stonewall OutLoud.”

The StoryCorps website describes the project as:

our national effort to preserve and celebrate the voices of LGBTQ elders

as the 50^th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots (a poignant moment in the LGBTQ Rights Movement) is commemorated in the US.

And in sharing about this special project with NPR, Mr. Isay chose to quote a small section from Dr. Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” read at the 1993 Inauguration of the 42^nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

That just covers it all, doesn’t it?

Irate, despair, hope…

(And for the full poem, On the Pulse of the Morning, see below.)

Perhaps this is how it is right now- and I don’t just mean in my own neurotic head.

Perhaps, these are the times we are living in, or maybe we always were…I’m not sure.

I guess as long as I choose awareness as my preferred state of being, I’ll just have to get more used to using my broad emotional range to hold the vastness of human experience, from heartbreak and suffering to victory and triumph.

(I’ll also take breaks as necessary, and I hope you do as well.)

May it be so.

On The Pulse Of Morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
It says come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sang and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.

Plant yourself beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers--desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot ...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours--your Passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, and into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

Poetry 156: Summer Solstice

Summer Solstice


I sit by the
open screen door
and watch the fire flies
light up the
evening shade.

The moist humid
air feels heavy
on my skin,
and beads of
sweat form on
my upper lip.

My cushion
feels sturdy and
trustworthy,
as I kneel down
on the blanket,
one leg on
each side.

In this moment,
I realize
I don’t fear the
darkness to come.

My experience tells
me, darkness
is a necessary
alchemy for
transformation, and
remarkably, I trust
the process.

Because if devotion is
a prerequisite for
purification, then
I bow down
to Kali with an
open heart
and a willing soul.

Let darkness come!
I confess to the
night sky.

Let me release the
long days of
light and allow
shadows to move
into my well.

Let me surrender
to the heat
of the underworld.

For if the Gospels
are correct,
the authentic personhood
which we do
not bring forth,
can burn us alive
if left forever
in the wasteland
of neglect.

Let me not
fall into this
deadly trap.

Instead,
come. Sit.

Let darkness
envelop me
in her strong
arms, so that
the mystery
and magic
of compost and shit
can digest the half-life
of pain and
disregard.

It is the
only way
through.

-Me

True Self, False Self & 'The Second Mountain'

About a month ago, my therapist told me he thought I was beginning to climb my ‘Second Mountain.’

I asked him what he meant by that, and he went on to share with me that he had recently been reading the New York Times journalist and author David Brooks’ new book by the same title: The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and he felt what I was experiencing in my own psychological (and spiritual) development and maturation might have some similarities to what Mr. Brooks’ depicted in his memoir.

I  have yet to read it for myself (currently there is an enormous wait list for it at my public library), but I’ve still been able to lean into the metaphor of a ‘Second Mountain’ to describe this life stage I seem to be moving into all the same.

And it reminded me of another book, part memoir, that I did read five years ago when I was a 36 years-old working mom just returning from maternity leave for my second baby, called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (1999) by Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health Scholar Emeritus Stephen Cope.

This week, I actually chose to re-read the first chapter titled: “Waking Up is Hard to Do,” and I was struck by how well the chapter depicted where I was at—psychologically and spiritually—at that particular moment when I first read it- even though at the time I probably could not have fully articulated why I chose to pick such a book at my favorite used books store, and it is only now, in hindsight, that it all seems so clear.

I had forgotten too, about all of the references Stephen Cope made to the work of 20^th century psychiatrist Carl G. Jung in the first chapter alone, in regard to what Mr. Cope called “the developmental tasks of the second half of life" which I suspect is similar to what David Brooks, or more to the point my therapist, may have been meaning by the metaphor of the "Second Mountain"

In the chapter "Waking Up is Hard to Do" Mr. Cope wrote:

Jung believed that at mid-life, most of us have refined our external selves, what he called the persona, the mask we wear to assure some stable, ongoing sense of identity.  In his view, the persona represents only one limited aspect of the personality, and by midlife, most of us are outgrowing it.

I know I certainly was.

Mr. Cope also included some of Jung’s most elegant quotations about these changes or shifts that can occur at the mid-life life stage including this one:

Are there not colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce young people to knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

Thoroughly unprepared we take the step…Indeed!

Take right now.

I am a 41 year-old woman who is in many ways making some pretty stereotypical mid-life shifts and changes in her life; which is to say, developmentally right on time as opposed to the sports car or the affair.

Even to the point that one of my most poignant, and it would not be exaggerated to say life-changing, mid-life milestones occurred while I was watching my own heart beat during an echocardiogram (a sonogram of the heart) just after turning 40.

The cardiology test had been recommended after I had come up with an irregular EKG at my routine annual physical, and I ultimately ended up having a whole series of tests after which it was determined that I seemed to just have a quirky heart that draws attention on an EKG.

But before all had been concluded, and as I lay there with all those white stickers all over my body for the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th EKG, I found myself developing more and more awareness of my own biological impermanence; my own mortality.

I know most people, in the United States anyway, have enormous difficulty talking about the reality of aging, sickness, and dying without an edge (or a wallop) of anxiety and/or sadness, but for me, in the moments of all those medical tests to check the reliability of my ticker, I actually felt a stronger sense of allegiance and loyalty to my own body—to myself—because I sensed in a profoundly embodied way how much I had taken my own heart for granted.

In some ways, this transformative experience was very much like the poem "Love After Love" by Nobel Prize winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017).

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life

But there's more...

This surfacing awareness of my own impermanence, also seemed to break through my own well-defined defense mechanisms and biased perceptions to a much more troublesome reality that I had actually betrayed my own True Self some time ago.

(tavistockrelationships.ac.uk)

Now, as I write about this very specific life experience with a heart monitor a year and a half ago, it might appear to you, the reader, that I’m suggesting that some miraculous out-of-the-blue epiphany occurred right then and there on the exam table, without any direct causes or lead up.

And that is unequivocally not true!

In fact, to stay with the mountain metaphor, I would say that for most of my later 30’s I was already beginning to descend from the first mountain life stage--sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—in order to detach from, or in some cases dismantle, my concretized False Self.

(youtube)
So the moment with the echocardiogram was merely the punctuation on an chapter in my life that was already winding down.

Though I should say, for me, the False Self was not completely false because I did not feel I was ever doing something that was outside of my value system.

Instead, the False Self for me just felt very limiting, constricting even, because it was only a very partial version or partial truth of my Whole Self that could be summed up as the "Good Girl" archetype, and unfortunatey meant that the much larger, richer whole of me was either being unconsciously suppressed or consciously omitted.

And of course my reasons for living small from the False Self were just like everyone else's (e.g. self-protection, fear of rejection, difficulty with conflict, etc.) because I still did not have the skills or the confidence that I could tolerate and remain equanimous while enduring the negative reactions of the world.  So I needed to spend my 30's building up those True Self / Whole Self muscles in order to increase my own resiliency- before it felt safe enough to live from a more expansive truth. 

(Brian Andreas)

And now, five years later from when I first read Stephen Cope's book, and many significant life changes later, I find myself coming full circle again as I now embark on my ‘Second Mountain.’

It’s times like these that remind me of that most well-known quote by American-British poet T.S. Elliot (1888-1965) from his work Four Quartets (1943):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea...

May it be so.

Spiritual Lessons From Nature Part XVI: Rooting Ourselves

A couple of weeks ago on Memorial Day, I took my kayak out for the first time this year on the river that flows just down the street from my house.

The day itself was a perfect New England spring day with blue skies and warm enough temperatures that the river water didn't freeze my feet and ankles as I waded the kayak into the deeper water to get in.

My mood, however, was a little off.

This American holiday, Memorial Day, has always been a little bit strange in my family because my maternal uncle and my grandfather (his father) died on that very same day.

They both died well before I was born, but just the same, the holiday has always been obscured with a haunting feeling that emerges at the end of every May when it comes around again on the calendar. 

I think this is in part because I watched my mother grieve for both her brother and father each year on this holiday, and also because they were both so very young when they died- my uncle was 19 years-old and my grandfather was 38.

Thinking about family and family ancestry always makes you think about the image of trees and particularly tree roots, which is why, on this day, I couldn't help but notice all of the roots of the trees along the river as I paddled by.

I contemplated the way in which the tree roots sustain and ground the tree, and yet along this river in spring, many of the roots were exposed and above the water level.

Without knowing the science of it, I wondered if this root exposure made any difference for the trees? Did it make them more vulnerable? 

Yet, I also couldn't help but notice, the trees looked perfectly healthy, stable and alive- so perhaps not?

I've never felt entirely "rooted" by my own family or family ancestry, and in many ways, I have actually intentionally "uprooted" myself in order to maintain my own wellness and well-being.

So I felt quite surprised about a week after this time on the river, when I was sitting in my living room on the ottoman with both my feet planted solidly on the floor, as both my 5 year-old and my 10 year-old pig-piled on my back, and the image of the tree with its deep roots floated up in my imagination.

And in that moment, as my children giggled and laughed while they tried to maintain their balance on top of each on my back, I had this physical sensation of an image of roots growing out of both my feet and then rooting themselves into the floor of my home.

The moment was quick, 30 seconds perhaps, and yet I can still close my eyes even as I write these words, and sense the profound physical and emotional connection that I felt as I rooted myself into something greater than just small but significant me.

The Promise of Mindfulness Part III: Psychological Healing

Since I began a formal mindfulness meditation practice 8 years ago, I've found that the prospect of profound psychological healing is a very real possibility for me as a result of my efforts.

I know for some, this slightly bold statement may rub you the wrong way, and rightly so, because in many styles of meditation practice there is a core value of: non-striving.

Western mindfulness meditation pioneer, Jon Kabat-Zinn, defines "Non-striving" like this in his classic book Full Catastrophe Living:

Almost everything we do we do for a purpose, to get something or somewhere. But in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle. Although it takes a lot of work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is a non-doing.  It has no goal other than for you to be yourself...

[And], in the meditative domain, the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment. [My italics.]

Here's the irony: I agree with this statement wholeheartedly.

But I would add that, I did not start out on this path of practicing formal meditation with any particular goal in mind regarding psychological healing, it has simply been a felt outcome that I've noticed, and now welcome.

I know this opportunity for psychological healing as a by-product of formal meditation does not make me unique either.

Take Western Buddhist teacher, author, and co-founder of The Insight Meditation Society Sharon Salzberg.

In her book Faith and in various biographical articles in the magazine Lion's Roar, Sharon Salzberg has candidly shared about how her very painful and traumatic childhood experiences, including her mother's death when Ms. Salzberg was nine years-old and her father being institutionalized for severe mental illness when she was eleven, was embedded in much of her early years in formal meditation. 

Of her first years practicing meditation in India in 1971 at the age of 19, Sharon Salzberg writes in Faith:

(Sharon Salzberg on far left in early life photo taken from Lion's Roar)

I sensed deep within me the possibility of rising above the circumstances of my childhood, of defining myself by something other than my family's painful struggles and its hardened tone of defeat.

I recalled the resignation in my father's eyes at the constraints that governed his life. The boundary of his autonomy was the decision about where to have lunch if someone took him out of the hospital on a pass.

With a surge of conviction, I thought, 'But I am here, and I can learn to be truly free.' I felt as if nothing and no one could take away the joy of that prospect.

I am enormously grateful for meditation teachers like Sharon Salzberg to be so vulnerable and generous in order to share such private thoughts for the benefit of meditation students throughout the world.  As a relative newcomer to meditation, it gives me a sense of connection and understanding.

And this is true even when my experience was slightly nuanced from hers, in that, as I said, I did not start out with any sort of intention to have a deeper, unconscious, psychological healing.

No, when I first sat down to meditate regularly in 2011, I just knew I wanted to experiment with a practice that may yield greater inner and outer ease, and another way to manage anxious feelings- which largely consisted in my conscious mind.

And in the beginning, that is what happened.

I remember one of the first distinct moments, a little over 2 years into my practice, when I really felt like I was beginning to receive some of the fruits of my practice.

At the time, I was lying in the hospital after having my daughter prematurely, and I was receiving both a treatment protocol for severely high blood pressure so that I didn't have a stroke, while at the same time getting treatment for a spinal leak that was giving me the worst headache I have ever had in my life.  And all the while, trying to bond and breastfeed my new baby and support my then 4 year-old son.

To say the least, there was a lot going on.

But the thing was, I still kind of felt okay.  Like I was thinking: "This sucks, but it won't last, and I can handle this."

In other words, I consciously chose not to panic or sink into other negative emotions, and it felt amazing. It felt liberating.

It reminded me of a book I had read a couple of years earlier called Learning to Breathe (2008) by Alison Wright.

This book is a memoir of the author's recovery from a horrific bus accident in southeast Asia in which she very nearly died, but in part through the skill set of her meditation practice (and an incredible amount of grit and tenacity) she was able to survive and then thrive by mountain climbing again.

Similarly, in the medically complicated birth of my daughter, I was able to consciously use my own meditation practice and its benefits to act as a sort of psychological buffer that protected me, in part, from some of the quite understandable mental difficulty of that type of birthing experience.

Or, as the Tibetan spiritual and political leader his Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama wrote about in The Book of Joy (2016) with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in my formal practice of meditation I had built up my "mental immunity," which is to say, my psychological immune system (as opposed to my physical immune system) that I believe created greater resilience.

But, my healing journey did not end there.

In 2014 I began to go on silent mindfulness meditation retreats, and after 3 years of a growing sense of psychological healing and increased well-being in my conscious mind, it was really only when I began periods of longer mindfulness meditation practice on one-day or overnight retreats that I began to experience what I believe to be psychological healing of my unconscious mind.

Prior to these experiences of deeper levels of psychological healing I had heard the term "purification" in the contemplative literature, but I don't think I really grasped it in any sort of sensory way (as opposed to a purely intellectual understanding) until I began to experience it for myself, and this is the way I described it to my partner after one such occasion:

It felt like I had been living and moving through the world with shards of glass inside of me that occasionally caused me pain and discomfort of varying degrees. But on this silent retreat, all of the sudden--somewhere around the 3rd day of intensive meditation practice--one of the shards of glass felt like it was being carefully and safely (yet painfully) removed from my heart-mind-body.

It was  almost like a surgeon making the choice to slowly remove shrapnel from her patient one piece at a time because: a. it would be far healthier for the patient in the long run, and b. it might be the only way to have the pain of removal be tolerable for the patient.

At the moment of sharing this experience with my partner, I also experienced active grieving that included buckets of tears, when in my everyday life I am someone who can barely only squeeze out 1 or 2 tears at most.

In Eckart Tolle's 1997 book The Power of Now, he wrote:

The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become temporarily lodged in
your inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of
course the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living
past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past…

This passage really summarizes what I have experienced in these retreats that has felt like "purification" in the sense that afterward I feel somewhat unburdened from the historical load that I have carried.

And of course Eckart Tolle's whole argument in The Power of Now is that it is the practice of presence that can create the conditions for these changes to occur.  He writes:

The past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.

From another perspective, that of the Christian mystical contemplative practice of Centering Prayer, the same phenomenon has also been written about through different means (i.e. different contemplative practices) to the same end- a phenomenon referred to as an "unloading" of the unconscious.

Of this tradition, American Catholic monk and priest Thomas Keating, wrote in Invitation to Love that he believed it was:

The level of deep rest accessed during the prayer period [that] loosen[ed] up the hardpan around the
emotional weeds stored in the unconscious, of which the body seems to be the warehouse.

[Then,] the psyche begins to evacuate spontaneously the undigested emotional material of a lifetime, opening up new space for self-knowledge, freedom of choice, and the discovery of the divine presence within.

Of Father Keating's perspective as the main pioneer of the re-emergence of Centering Prayer in modern times, another author, Cynthia Bourgeault, wrote in her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening:

Keating’s teaching begins by a fundamental reposition of the pace of meditation in a spiritual
praxis. Rather than seeing it as a tool for developing concentration, relaxing stress, or
accessing higher states of consciousness, he sees it primarily as a catalyst for the purification
and healing of the unconscious…

As one sits in centering prayer with the intent to rest in and trust in God, the unconscious begins to unload ‘the emotional junk of a lifetime.’ Repressed memories, pain, accumulated dull hurt rise to the surface and are, through the attitude of gentle consent, allowed to depart.

Yes...

What I've found in my own experience, is that when I sit for longer periods in mindfulness meditation, my own unconscious is able to become so relaxed and undefended, that I'm able to access and release that which no longer serves me from the storage unit that is my unconscious.

And what's interesting for me, as a Type A personality in many areas of my life, is this process seems to happen through no striving, efforting or forcing of my own because, metaphorically, it seems my unconscious psychological healing can only emerge like a deer courageously and cautiously walking out into a field when the conditions (e.g. safety, compassion, presence) are just so.

(An actual deer I would see each night I'd take a walk on one of my silent meditation retreats.)

To come full circle, I want to just say again that I know, and do not suggest, that I or anyone else "seek out" these types of experiences; I don't even believe this type of psychological healing works that way.

As Western Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield writes in his 1995 book A Path With Heart:

Because each of us as a human flower will open in our own unique way in our own particular
cycles, we need not direct the specific energies of our body and heart. Our path is neither to
desire them nor fear them. The true path is one of letting go.

But without striving, what we can do is:

Show up and choose to be present.
Pay attention to what has heart and meaning.
Tell the truth without judgment or blame.
Be open to outcomes.

-Angeles Arrien (1940-2014, Spanish-American Cultural Anthropologist)

May it be so.

Comfort From Our Collective Feminine Ancestry

About a year ago, my then 4 year-old daughter found this statue in a thrift store, and she told me she “absolutely had to have it.”

As someone who is not Christian, this Madonna, or statue of the Mother Mary, is not something that I would have ever noticed or bought for myself. 

 And yet, soon after my daughter made this purchase, the Madonna quickly found her way to a spot right next to my bedside because, for slightly embarrassing unforeseen and unknown reasons, I find enormous comfort in being watched over by her while I sleep. 

 This mysterious experience, which is actually one of many in my lifetime, makes me believe once again in what the 20th century psychiatrist Carl G. Jung called “the collective unconscious” because it feels like I am able feel into a much more expansive sense of “Mother” that opens a space inside of me that is much larger than my own personal or familial history. 

A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, coined the term "collective unconscious," and it referred to:

Structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among beings of the same species (Wikipedia). 

 In my mind, I interpret this to mean that I not only carry inside of me my own personal and familial psychological (and biological) history, but also that of all of fictional and nonfictional, historical and archetypal human species throughout the millennia. 

 I was thinking about this very idea, of finding comfort and solace in a collective feminine ancestry, this past Mother’s Day as I was re-reading bits of two books I haven’t looked at in some time: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant and A Woman’s Journey to God by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., fiction and nonfiction respectively. 

Though not much one for novels myself, if you’ve never read The Red Tent and you have any interest whatsoever in either religion or feminine spirituality (or both!), it definitely should be added to your list, as it voices the hypothetical untold stories of the Jewish women of the Old Testament as narrated by the protagonist Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob and Leah.

Take this elegant line from the opening prologue:

If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.

Beautiful.  (And true.)

And on this past Mother’s Day, as I was reflecting on and re-reading the early scenes in the book in which the main character Dinah is still a young girl, and is graciously surrounded by and intimately cared for by her mother and 3 aunties: Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah, I engaged my imagination to sense into Dinah’s first experiences of being mothered, which allowed me to go back into my own history of “aunties” who at various times surrounded me in a feminine loving circle as well.

In contemplating this experience, which as I stated was extremely soothing to me, I re-read Dr. Borysenko’s chapter in A Woman’s Journey to God called: “Voices of Our Ancestors: Reclaiming Women’s Religious Stories,” wherein she wrote:

Archetypal stories…are like phone lines that connect us to the living Presence of ancient beings who can help us on the spiritual journey. 

I agree with this statement wholeheartedly, and I think it becomes especially significant when we as spiritual seekers may no longer have (or may have never had) actual human teachers and “aunties” to guide us through the turbulence of life’s difficulties.

In 1992, Emily Saliers referred to this very idea in a her song lyrics for “Virginia Wolf” written for her and Amy Ray to sing together in their band, the Indigo Girls: 

They published your diary
And that's how I got to know you
The key to the room of your own and a mind without end
And here's a young girl
On a kind of a telephone line through time
And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
So I know I'm all right
Life will come and life will go
Still I feel it's all right
Cause I just got a letter to my soul
And when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
The apathy of time laughs in my face
You say "each life has its place

Yes! As spiritual seekers, we need these “telephone lines through time.”

Without any spoilers, I will offer Anita Diamant’s words in closing from the last page of her novel, The Red Tent, as spoken by the heroine Dinah:

If you sit on the bank of a river, you see only a small part of its surface. And yet, the water before your eyes is proof of unknowable depths…Wherever you walk, I go with you.

To me this line represents that miraculous possibility of receiving grace and wisdom from our collective feminine ancestry.  

Or as Dr. Borysenko writes in the closing of her chapter “Voices of Our Ancestors: Reclaiming Women’s Religious Stories:”

When we are ready for change, stories can also pull the bushel off our Inner Light.  Our intuition becomes clear and insistent.  When we allow ourselves to be receptive, the voice of God and the help that is always available become potent realities.

As Dinah might say: Selah. Or, May it be so.