Spiritual Lessons From Nature Part VI: Life, Death, Resurrection

As the rhythm of our natural world reminds us, the most sacred and simple christian philosophy that I hold close to my heart in times of suffering: Life, Death, Resurrection. 

Photos by Claire Olsen

Poetry 104: Bittersweet Awakening

Bittersweet Awakening

When you begin to wake up

the illusions begin to fade.

The myths,

the stories.

What we told ourselves to be true and real

all begins to unravel.

There is a grief that reveals itself

when the veil is lifted.

Leaving a residue of hope

that tastes harsh and bitter on the tongue.

Pure,

bare,

reality

can feel like a distant, frozen

Antarctica-

leaving space for doubt to thrive.

In frustration,

the head raises upward

to boldly question the universe:

How will this practice bring connectedness

to the heart?

With that demand,

a deep sigh arises like a warm wave through the body,

as from a well-spring inside the earth.

Without thinking,

a  tender palm moves to the naked skin of the chest,

and delicately whispers,

“just keep going.”

-Me

An Antidote to Helplessness: Spiritual Protest

Following the Orlando Shooting at the gay nightclub last month I wrote a blog entry entitled: “In Moments of Despair: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr” to contemplate Kingian strategies that I might use to manage the overwhelming feeling of despair that can penetrate my being following a human on human tragedy.

This week, in light of the shootings of more African American men by police that took place in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the shooting of police officers in Dallas, Texas last night, I can feel the weight of helplessness making her way into my body.

This is dangerous.

When I slip too deep into helplessness, I become silent and frozen.  I hold my breath and I shut down.

Lately, I notice this feeling and body state each time I see someone who I perceive as more vulnerable walking down the street. For example, a Transgender twenty-something. A teenage African American boy. A woman wearing a head scarf or burka.

When I see these folks I notice my whole body tightening up as I nervously scan the environment for possible perpetrators who would do them harm.  And then that's when it happens. Helplessness sets in.

I remember once as an adult being at an arcade and seeing a group of children who were probably 10 or 11 years-old bullying another child because the child was obese.  I remember the feelings of both anger and disgust I felt toward the group of children who were teasing and laughing at the child who was overweight. 

I also remember my feeling of helplessness.

I knew I wanted the bullying to stop. I wanted to protect the child. I also wanted to help the children who were bullying to see how cruel and mean their behavior was so that they could understand and grow themselves.

But none of this happened. I couldn’t find my voice.

At one point I squeaked out something about the bullying behavior being “not okay.” But it wasn’t enough. Not by a long-shot.

Today I still feel shame about that day.

I believe with privilege and power comes responsibility.  I was the adult in that situation.  I could have chosen to use my privilege and power, that goes with adulthood, to stand-up for that poor child who was being bullied- but I didn’t.

Buddhist teacher, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh says the purpose of mindfulness is to cultivate understanding, compassion and healing.  In order to do this he says we must “look deeply,” in a non-judgmental way, into the present moment.

He also says in Living Buddha, Living Christ "meditation can help."

"Meditation is not a drug to make us oblivious to our real problems. It should produce awareness in us and in our society. For us to achieve results, our enlightenment has to be collective. How else can we end the cycle of violence? We ourselves have to contribute, in small and large ways, toward ending our own violence."

Hanh then recommends that each human being "look deeply at our own mind and our own life."  He assures that this process of "looking deeply" will bear fruit. 

"We will begin to see what to do and what not to do to bring about a real change."

If I were to “look deeply” into that day when I chose not to stand up for a child, I would see intense feelings of helplessness inside of me in that moment.

Helplessness probably generated from my own experiences being bullied as a child, the enormous fear I still have when I speak-out against a majority point of view (even when the majority is a group of children), and the god-awful “witness feeling” of being overwhelmed by a scary situation that feels out of my control.

Putting helplessness in these terms—past experience + fear + witness + overwhelmed + scary + out of my control—it makes absolute sense that my behavioral reaction might have been one of Fight, Flight, or in my case, Freeze.

And yet, that is not acceptable to me.

Understandable, yes. But not acceptable.

In the type of psychotherapy I practice I teach my patients a skill called: Opposite to Emotion Action.  This skill is to be used when the individual recognizes that it would not be skillful or effective to act from the emotion that they are feeling at that moment.  In fact, what might be most skillful or effective would be to act opposite.

For helplessness, acting opposite might be spiritual protest.

What do I mean by spiritual protest?

In Buddhism there are two ideas that I really find helpful to get closer to what I imagine spiritual protest to be for us non-Buddhists: engaged Buddhism and the bodhisattva.

Engaged Buddhism is a term popularized by Thich Nhat Hanh through his roots as an anti-war activist in Vietnam, that is also sometimes referred to as “Humanistic Buddhism,” and it is the intention of emphasizing the Buddhist teachings for the purposes of addressing situations of social, political, environmental, and economic suffering and injustice.

A bodhisattva is a Sanskrit word for an “enlightened being” who makes a vow “to forego complete enlightenment until he or she helps all other beings attain enlightenment” (taken from Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh).

In an interview with Journalist and television host Oprah Winfrey, Thich Nhat Hanh said he once told Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the Vietnamese people referred to King himself as a living bodhisattva. 

He then added in a saddened tone of voice, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I thought the American people had produced King, but they were not able to preserve him.”  I like to think if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were still alive today, he might say the same about the 80-something year-old Vietnamese monk as well…

But where does spiritual protest begin?

For me, lately anyway, it begins on the cushion with daily meditation.  As Hanh says: “Peace begins with yourself.  Understanding and compassion begins with yourself.”  Learning and practicing mindfulness, non-violence, deep understanding, forgiveness, and compassion with myself on the cushion is my first step in spiritual protest.

Next, I try to bring and cultivate these same qualities in to my daily life.  Which is to say, in to the home I share with my husband and two children.  In to the department I share with 6 colleagues at the hospital.  On to the road I share every morning and afternoon, 5 days a week, with thousands of commuters.  In to the therapeutic space I share with a patient.

On this topic, I heard founder of Off the Mat Yoga, Seane Corn, say in an interview on NPR once:

“I ask myself this question all the time: where am I living an interpersonal war? Where am I creating some sort of psychic terrorism between me and another person or my own form of oppression? And if I’m not dealing with that which is within me, then I’m a part of this problem.  And I don’t want to be a part of the problem, so I need to go into myself and see where are my shadows.  Where am I not seeing that there is a bigger picture, a mystical picture? We can perceive things as bad or we can perceive things as opportunities.”

I also try to think about my dollars in terms of spiritual protest. 

Where, when and how do I spend my money? To whom do I donate my dollars and to whose organization do I help fund?

Currently the Unitarian Universalist Church I attend is sponsoring a refugee family from Syria- a husband, a wife and 3 children under the age of 10.  Knowing this important work of my church, I joyfully put my check in the donation basket on Sunday morning.

But here’s my question, when is it time to push myself further?  When is it time to (compassionately) confront my helplessness head-on in a way that steps outside my fairly narrow, and overtly defined, spheres of influence? 

Is it now?  Is it through a broader and bolder act of spiritual protest?

What is your antidote for helplessness? I’d love more ideas.

Soul And Spirit

At the beginning of this month I went to a Unitarian Universalist Church, not my own, to hear Thomas Moore speak about the importance of soul work.

Thomas Moore is the author of many books including Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

and more recently, A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World. He is also a Jungian Psychotherapist and lived as a Catholic Monk for 12 years.  An interesting guy to say the least.

In his talk, Mr. Moore asserted that it is vital for people to embark on both spiritual journeys and soul journeys, and it was his opinion that these two journeys were distinctive to themselves.

“Try to remember, we are whole humna beings,” he said.

He spent the remaider of his talk discussing what distinguishes soul work from spiritual work- though not in an “us” vs. “them” kind of way.

Mr. Moore defined the soul as far more than one’s biography, and actually limited to the point in which we (human beings) could ever really know or understand it.  “You can never go deep enough” to fully fathom the depth of the soul he said.

He then paradoxically added, “there is [also] something about the soul that is ordinary,” and he made comparisons with writings by classical Zen Masters who discuss an “ordinary” nature to the mind.

Mr. Moore encouraged his listeners that evening to consider soul work as something that can happen in the world.  Reflecting on his years as a Monk, he affirmed his belief that “deprivation” is not necessary or a must in both soul journeys and spiritual journeys, and in fact, “soul and deep pleasure go together, think about that.  It’s not about going crazy, it’s not about hedonism. It’s moderation.”

Mr. Moore also stressed that the language of the soul may not be the same as the language of spirit.  True to a Jungian Analyst who has a strong interest in mythology (frequently naming the Goddess Aphrodite herself), he spoke of imagery and metaphor as opposed to prose as a means to communicate the needs and wants of the soul journey. 

Giving the example of a chocolate craving, Mr. Moore suggested that perhaps this craving is not literally the soul’s desire for chocolate, but rather “more sweetness in life.”

At the end of the evening, Mr. Moore summed up his talk with this: “We all have to be poets.  You have to be a poet to your own life [so that you can] read poetically, not literally...All life is symbolic.

I left the talk with Thomas Moore with more questions than answers.   

After stopping at the grocery store to pick up a late dinner of tortellini with pesto (my soul’s favorite dish!), I drove the 45 minutes home in the dark, and the symbolism did not escape me.

As I traveled along the road  I could feel the, perhaps too rigid, spiritual paradigms that I had created for myself beginning to rearrange in my mind.

I recalled a quote by author, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, who said in a podcast on Dharmaseed that “we must be tender with both our social security number and our buddha-nature.”

Remembering this quote led me to reflect back on a blog entry I wrote back in February of this year called: “Loving-Kindness & the Small self,” that I had coupled with a picture of the Small self as a circle inside a larger circle labled the Big Self. 

All of this left me wondering: are the Small self (or “social security number”)and the soul one in the same?  Is the Big Self (or the “buddha-nature”) and the Spirit one in the same?

And if so, do I give more space, attention and tenderness to what I perceive to be my Spirit or Big Self, thereby neglecting the vital core of my being, my soul or Small self?  Are not both valid?  Are not both true?

What would it mean to live spiritually and soulfully?  Cultivating both.  Nuturing both.

Though possibly a cop-out when my pea-sized understanding of the universe can just go no further, I decided to stop pressing the questions any further in my mind, and I decided to fall back on the ‘ol quote by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926):

“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.”

Okay Mr. Moore. Okay Mr. Rilke, I’ll hold tight for now…Living the questions until “some distant day.”

How about you? Do you have any answers?