Monthly Archives: March 2012

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26
Mar 12

Sitting Like A Child

To paraphrase Walt Whitman:  Do I repeat myself?  Very well, I repeat myself.   I am large.  I contain multitudes…or at least second thoughts and elaborations.  We at Parabola are hard at work, pulling together an issue called Alone and Together (formerly Solitude and Community, but we have already done that in our long life). To that end, I’m expanding on some insights I had at a recent meditation retreat.

I go on retreat braced for solitude.  At first, in my solitary cell of a room, I felt like The Count of Monte Cristo, ripped from what I take to be my rightful life, my work, my talk, all means of communication and entertainment.    I was bereft.  Yet, as the days pass, I find connection and community.   The vow of silence and the solitude of the form frees up all the energy that usually goes to a false self.   My experience and what I took to be myself thawed and warmed as the days passed.  I became more fluid, more like a child.  Never have I been more aware that the simple forms of a meditation retreat can be a means of play, a means of playful, genuine discovery.

On retreat we are not as we are in life, doctors, students, professors, writers, men and women, young and not young.  Here we are fellow beings, seeking peace and freedom.  The teachers tell us the Buddha compared enlightenment to the experience of being forgiven our debts, to having a fever break, to emerging from the wilderness of loneliness and longing.  In the darkness before dawn, we gather together and bow out a new version of the Lord’s Prayer, putting down our separate burdens, seeking forgiveness of debts, asking to receive our daily bread of life, of impressions, without trespassing into future, without turning away or trampling past what is offered here and now.

After bowing, we meditated.  At times, t felt like communion, as if I was receiving the new life that is offered when we engage in the small act of renunciation that is returning to the present moment.   “Heaven and Earth give themselves,” taught the 20th century Japanese Zen master Kodo Sawaki.  “Air, water, plants, animals, and humans give themselves to each other. It is in this giving-themselves-to-each-other that we actually live.”

The Sanskrit and Pali word for enlightenment, “bodhi,” means “awaken.” Over the course of the week, I realized that awakening  is a gradual process and a perpetual practice, not a fixed and final attainment.  It is the slow process of opening like a lens to the radiance at the heart of our real lives, here and now.  It is also the practice of being with life, breathing with it, letting go and receiving.   We are enlightened as we learn to let light in, as we learn to go of longing and receive what is always being offered, always waiting to be received.

“ Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it,” taught Rumi.   In life, I come home to this truth as a last resort, in the midst of the surrender that comes a mishap or failure.   J.K. Rowling once told a Harvard graduating class that failure was the bedrock she built her creative life on, that failure granted her freedom from living up to other peoples’ expectations.  The Buddha’s awakening began with a memory from childhood.  Near death from his efforts and austerities, accepting his failure to attain liberation, he remembered being very young and sitting under a tree watching his father and the men of the village plowing the fields.  He remembered how sweet it was to see and receive life without reaching beyond what was offered.

He realized that enlightenment had to be a kind of child’s play.  He sat down under the bodhi tree and recovered the solitude of childhood.  Confronted by Mara to leave his place, to reach for more, more, more, the Buddha touched the earth, his mother.  Like any good mother, she  gave her child the feeling that he was magically powerful, that nothing bad would happen to him if he sat right there, exploring his true nature.  The retreat teachers encouraged us to see and include all the orphans of our consciousness. I pictured the Buddha confident, calm, and inquiring, fearlessly going on being his undefended self, going on seeing until he was enlightened.

Several days, I served as “practice leader,” sitting up on a stage in front of the sangha during a meditation.  I picked up a cold and as I drew in breath I swallowed my cough drop whole.  I wondered if I would be the first practice leader ever to choke.   Somehow being in this pickle, sitting up there with the big bronze bell, trying not to choke, helped me let go and open up.   We practice enlightenment in the small act of renunciation that is returning to the present moment.    Enlightenment is a process.  Sitting up there with the bell, leading the meditation, I glimpsed there is something that comes through us in spite of our thoughts, our stories.  Sitting up on the stage, I forgot about myself and felt the energy pouring in from my fellow seekers.  I noticed our expectations make a sound and when we surrender all expectations there is a very deep silence.  The question “who am I?” became “why am I here?”   I was not there to be a  someone but a seeker, an opening to a greater light and a stillness that was a search because it needs to be constantly renewed.

The English root of the word “suffer” means to hold.  When we hold our suffering—our striving, our desires, our insecurity– consciously, it can become a liberating energy, a vibrancy that opens inward, revealing deeper truths.

When I go on these silent retreats, I realize that I usually have it upside down.  It isn’t our seeming successes but our failures that are really interesting.  It isn’t when we are full of being someone but when we are no one that we are really useful.   I mean the times when we don’t know what to do, are the times when we are open. Our real strength, wisdom, and compassion are in the broken places.   Those places and those times of not knowing are where the light of that inner radiance can shine through.

The Buddha called this state “dukkha,” which is usually translated as “suffering” but which is closer to “unreliable” or “stressful.” The root of the word means something akin to “dirty wheel,” referring to the gunky oil that builds up in the hub of a wheel making the turning wobbly.  Dukkha has also been compared to the pain that comes from rubbing naked skin on a brick wall.  It may not hurt much at first, but after a time it is a torment. This is the way things it goes, taught the Buddha. Things are not stable and reliable, not really solid.  Nothing goes as smoothly as it does in our thoughts and dreams.  Reality is rough.  “I hate this.”  I think.  “I love this.”  But this grasping and those frozen images of life and self that I carry around is not the same as that more fluid knowing,  that deeper seeing that appears in the solitude of retreat

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 10 Comments
20
Mar 12

Playing At Meditation

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens,” wrote Carl Jung.

To look into the heart means to remember how we perceived and felt about the world when we were children.  On this first day of spring, it seems especially fitting to remember that.  In the course of my last silent retreat, it became clear to me that right effort towards awakening is like blooming–a gentle movement of allowing ourselves to open up and be exactly as we are.  It is a movement of stilling the pool  of the mind so that what is in the depths of us can be seen.

On the third day, I woke up utterly tired of maintaining my separation, tired of the stories about myself that I carry around like Marley’s chains.  Children can be selfish, but they aren’t haunted by self like adults are.  It’s as if a crust of protective stories form over our molten experience of life over the years.   On retreat it is easy to see how thinking protects us from direct experience, lifting us above it, extracting us by abstracting us.   But as we see how thin and repetitive the thoughts are, we inevitably drift back and become like children again.

It’s not a grand shift, like penetrating to the meaning of emptiness, just that my thinking and my fearful reactivity becomes less dense, a mist I can see through rather than a thick fog that blinds.  The attention becomes free to investigate life rather than being an indentured servant of the self, constantly called back to think about what the self thinks about this or that.  One morning, I tasted a local egg from a local farm that tasted so wild—I swear I could taste the chicken in the egg.   This doesn’t sound like much in this super exciting world, but it was really something to notice—the life inside life.   This is the kind of impression that kids take in all the time–the impressions that come with stillness.  Here is a fragment of a letter Rilke wrote to a young poet:

“And when you realize that their [the adults around you] activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own — only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it….”

During the retreat, we rose before dawn to bow and chant to Guan Yin, the female Buddha of Compassion.  Head to the floor, arms extended with hands up in a gesture of surrender and supplication, I practiced sacrificing my separate self to a greater consciousness and force of compassion.   Raised as a white Anglo Saxon Protestant in America, I found this gesture exotic, a trip to a remote part of my own humanity.  But there was also a sense of homecoming in it.  I remembered being a child engaged in a kind of serious play.  I remembered playing outside and creeping over the living room furniture pretending to move carefully through the jungle, entering a hidden kingdom, practicing being awake and aware in my whole body and mind.  I remembered how delicious it was to be alone and unseen,  sensing that I was capable of more than the adults around me guessed as I climbed trees and couches, that I was capable of courage and grace.   I go on retreat to remember what it is like to be a child.  It is not that children are unselfish, they can be fiercely selfish.  But they are not haunted by all kinds of ideas about the self, all kinds of limits about who we are and who we are not.

The teachers who led the retreat urged us to see that our understanding of “sati” really didn’t need to be limited to “mindfulness.”  It could also be called “heartfulness” or “bodyfulness” because it points towards a collected state where mind, heart, and body touch.  As I was able to drop from the head into that place, I began to perceive the impulses under the thoughts.   I began to perceive energies, not just objects.  This is not an abstract realm.  Children perceive this way and so do animals, sensing the emotional weather around them and all manner of changes, sensing trouble and danger approaching like a storm.

In Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts, the word for effort is “viriya.”  It comes from a Sanskrit word called “vīrya,“ which literally means “state of a strong man.” In Vedic literature the term is often associated with heroism and virility.  The Buddha expanded the definition to refer to a practitioner’s energy or vigor or persistence or exertion–necessary qualities for liberation.   But the effort required isn’t  necessarily the outwardly effortful  striving way we usually think of it—that’s often a way to run away from our experience, to purge ourselves of what we don’t want to see.  The effort we need to make to awaken is a gentle effort of allowing—and a child’s willingness to be alone.   Can you think of meditation that way?  As a form of serious play?

Here is Rilke again:  “What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing. “

Happy spring.

If you live in the area, please consider coming to sit with me on Sunday evenings from 7-9, at Yoga Shivaya in Tarrytown, New York:  yogashivaya.com.

Awakening / Awareness / Presence / Waking Up — 2 Comments
16
Mar 12

Remembering

When the first bell sounded, I reached for the mug of Starbucks coffee chilling on the window sill, prepared the night before to fortify me against the cold and darkness of Massachusetts in February, but also the piercing sadness that can come with solitude.   The coffee tasted bitter.  My mind hunted for something important to think about, a shard to keep me from sinking into nothingness, which is what the teachers of this silent meditation retreat seemed to want to happen to us all when they told us not to pay attention to our thoughts and “just breathe.”

In my little cell of a room, I felt like Edmund, the innocent man falsely imprisoned on an island in The Count of Monte Cristo.   “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”—this line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” repeated in a hollow way, along with the recognition that I didn’t actually read the lines in that great poem but in another  book that I happened to leaf through one day.  It was painfully clear there was nothing essential to think about and possibly nothing substantial to me, except this persistent grasping. There was a vow of silence, an intention to withdraw from the world of striving for a week, to receive what is given instead of insisting on what I want.  And there was this counterforce that vowed to defy it.

Several times a year, I go on silent meditation retreats to remember.  Smirti in Sanskrit, sati in Pali, and drenpa in Tibetan.   All these words for mindfulness literally mean to remember.   Christians speak of the “recollected heart.”   They all point towards that state of “re-membering” or “re-collecting” — gathering together  the usually distant parts of ourselves, letting the head, heart, and body all touch.   I go on retreat to remember there is more to life than I think.   As strange as it may sound, what is remembered is what it is like to be a child.

To be continued….

Awakening / Awareness / Presence / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 9 Comments
08
Mar 12

Being No Thing

“Love says ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.‘ Between the two, my life flows,” taught Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.   I am not a thing, and this is good news.  And although I am limited I have a capacity to feel unlimited, to feel  compassionate connection with everything.  This is also good news.  The bad news is that feeling like nothing in the ordinary sense of feeling like nobody is the usual gateway to letting go of a sense of specialness, of separateness from everything else.   But that is a very wobbly, stressful state to maintain.

The Buddha called this state “dukkha,” which is usually translated as “suffering” but which is closer to “unreliable” or “stressful.” The root of the word means something akin to “dirty wheel,” referring to the gunky oil that builds up in the hub of a wheel making the turning wobbly.  Dukkha has also been compared to the pain that comes from rubbing naked skin on a brick wall.  It may not hurt much at first, but after a time it is a torment. This is the way things it goes, taught the Buddha. Things are not stable and reliable, not really solid.  Nothing goes as smoothly as it does in our thoughts and dreams.  Reality is rough.   Head knowledge of this is not the same as living knowledge, human being knowledge.   But life has a way of getting around our thinking and showing us our true nature.  Here is one example of how the lesson of truth and possibilities of nothingness came to me:

The Metro North train pulled into a station, the doors slid open and a pretty young woman got on and sat down next to my then 11-year-old daughter Alex and me.  As soon as we started rolling, she turned to us and asked if we would mind watching her lunch box while she went to the restroom.  Alexandra looked at me for a clue about how to respond.  After hesitating for a moment, I smiled back at the young woman and nodded yes.  She seemed so nice, so open.  After the young woman trotted up the aisle and through the heavy doors at the end of the car, Alex asked me in a whisper how I could know for sure if this person and her lunch box were safe?

We sat facing a shiny new poster with a picture of an ominous-looking black bag sitting unattended on a seat.  It read”  “If you see something, say something,” meaning that passengers should alert conductors to any suspicious objects or activities because they might be bombs or bombers.  It was the winter after the attacks on 9/11, and fear and sadness and a terrible doubt seeped into everything like cold fog.  Just after the attacks things had been different.  There had been what one journalist called a “suspension of distraction.”  Strangers made eye contact and held doors for one another.  There was the feeling that we were all together in the midst was a mystery, and the best we could do was to be helpful and kind.

But things changed as the months passed.  Yet I utterly fogged in by fear doubt.

Pundits in the media told us we were in the midst of a great war that sounded like The Lord of the Rings, in which merciless forces of darkness were out to extinguish the light of civilization.  The major difference was that in our contemporary dark age the agents of evil might strike might they might look just like us.  The most effective terrorists we were told might look like ordinary businessmen or mothers or students, like the young woman.

We had been hearing speculation that there might be bigger and more horrible attacks at any moment, and Grand Central Station and the trains going in were always included as possible targets.   Periodically, State troopers patrolled the train cars with gas masks clipped to their gun belts.  “I wonder about the etiquette of that, ” commented a commuter friend.  I suggested they could hand out gas masks and have a collection box on the platform at the end of the ride, the way they collect 3D glasses in movie theaters.

I told Alex I thought we would have noticed if there was anything amiss.  It would have been ticking or looked strangely heavy or something.  But it looked like an ordinary insulated lunch bag.  And the young woman was so pleasant and open, not nervous or fixated on a goal.  But the technology of the terrorists could be subtle, Alex cautioned.  It could look like an ordinary lunch box and be a bomb.  And terrorists themselves could look perfectly nice and normal.  We couldn’t trust our ordinary senses.  We just didn’t know.

We were all fogged in by fear.  I thought of the way that even single-celled organisms reflexively grasp at bits of food while contracting and scooting away from other cells.  That’s what we were like then and for years to come, doubting our own senses and intuition, reflexively grasping or contracting to protect ourselves.   What had become of that sense of openness and sharing, that recognition that we were all in this together?

A new stream of psychological research is exposing how it is that sights, sounds, or gestures can “prime” the unconscious, spurring us off in pursuit of goals that may or may not line up with the intentions of the conscious mind.  Handing test subjects hop coffee warmed their opinion of a hypothetical person while iced coffee elicited chilly opinions.  In what one scientist calls a “bottom-up” decision making process, ancient instinctive areas of the brain act on such subtle cues to make decisions about our survival without waiting for input from the much slower conscious mind.  Being driven by fear is not life, I decided.  I would make a stand.

I suggested to Alex that we could open the lunch box and have a look inside.  She looked at me like I was crazy.  Hadn’t I seen any movies or TV shows in my whole long life?  If it was a bomb, opening it will make it explode.  She told me she had a better idea.  She snapped open her CD player, took out the stormy dramatic Fellowship of the Rings disk she’d been listening to, and clicked in a CD of upbeat pop music.  She explained that she was creating a sound track to go along with a happy ending.

Believing that changing a soundtrack can change reality is magical thinking, I told her.  She asked me if I had a better idea.  I did not.  At that moment, it seemed painfully clear that none of my ideas were good.  What I took to be my life was actually a stream of shallow and repetitive thoughts, images, memories, all in the past and all of it driven by a primitive tendency to grasp and contract like an ameba, like pond scum.   I felt like Dorothy, throwing back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.  The nice young woman came back and thanked us, and Alex turned to me and smiled.

The impressions of being nothing—of having no solid being—kept on coming.  I walked through Grand Central Station on Christmas Eve.  I watched heavily armed National Guard troops and police officers surround a deranged old homeless woman who had pushed her shopping cart into the terminal to take shelter from a freezing winter rain.  She’d stood clutching a broken doll, looking bewildered as the officers poked through the possessions that were spread out on the ground around her.  I noticed one young officer in particular.  His stance was stern but he had a horrified, questioning look in his eyes, as if he were having one of those nightmares where you can’t move.  Life is just like that, I thought, watching him.  We are carried along passively by forces we do not understand.  We need to face ourselves and try to understand.

Years later, some of our most distinguished journalists would write columns in our leading newspapers musing about why they had been so paralyzed during that period, confessing that what passed for investigative journalism too often had been reduced to gaining access to high-ranking officials and printing their quotes.  When had they stopped digging for the truth? If our leading journalists were paralyzed, what could I expect of myself?  In those days, I mostly wrote book reviews and interviewed famous authors for the weekly magazine.  Sometimes I wrote for glossy monthly magazines.   I worked hard to engage authors.  I pounced any bit of live insight that might break out during these brief and contrived encounters.   Still, I often saw the very same comments and anecdotes printed elsewhere or heard them repeated on National Public Radio.

I didn’t want to dig for more facts but for more awareness, I realized.  Where was the questioning and generosity that we had all shared right after the attacks?  I thought of a memory the Buddha just before his enlightenment, a memory which guided him.  He remembered being a child, sitting alone under a tree, watching a plowing festival.  He was withdrawn from the busy world of the adults, delighting in his  solitude yet receptive to the impressions that came in.  He was being nothing, and all children are very good at this.   Yet, as the legend goes, he watched some insects struggling as their home in the earth was plowed up, and his heart went out to them.  He was very limited yet he didn’t feel limited.  He was nothing yet he felt everything.

A few days before the attacks in New York, I had interviewed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in his office in the West Village.  The very day of the attacks, I had boarded the train to New York, awash in anxiety and self-pity because I had a deadline and because I was tired of doing these interviews with celebrity authors for a living.  After the lunch box incident, one story Sacks told me came back.

Sacks spent part of his boyhood in London during the Blitz.  He would come out of his house in the morning and often find that something familiar had disappeared over night.  A distant landmark would be gone, next the iron railings along the steps of his house, taken for the war effort.  This daily loss (and during the same period he lost his brother to psychosis) made him resolve to be a keen observer of life, which is what is he became as a neurologist and writer.  Suddenly what had just been an anecdote became a vital and practical bit information.  It was like having a plastic fork and disparaging it as a plastic fork and suddenly needing one and realizing the true value of it, the function over the form.

I told Alex about meeting Oliver Sacks, and about how he built a career around noticing what was missing. The Blitz was actually much harder than what happened in New York, Alex and I agreed.  The bombs dropped in London for 76 consecutive nights.  Over a million homes were damaged and destroyed, and 40,000 civilian lives lost in the U.K., half in London.  Yet it didn’t break their spirit.  And at least one kid learned that a life didn’t have to be based on things and places being solid never changing.  A person could observe, digging below the surface for deeper truths.  A person could be with change.

 

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 4 Comments
01
Mar 12

Retreating and Advancing

Several times a year, I go on silent meditation retreats.   I go to practice solitude in the company of others— withdrawing from the world of striving for a time, mindfully receiving what is given and trusting that more will be given without always leaning forward, grasping for more.  “Sati,” the Pali word for mindfulness means to remember.  I go on retreat to remember there is more to life than I think.

Yet for the first few days, I think, think, think, and in the most shallow and superficial way.  Should I wear my purple sweater or the fleece thing?  I am sick of oatmeal , etc.   I am full of the heightened self-consciousness of a traveler, eager to fit in yet maintain the boundary between myself and other.   Around the third day, I wake up utterly tired of maintaining my separation, tired of the stories about myself that I carry around like Marley’s chains.

It’s not a grand shift, like I penetrate to the meaning of emptiness, just that my thinking and my fearful reactivity becomes less dense, a mist I can see through rather than a thick fog that blinds.  The attention becomes free to investigate life rather than being an indentured servant of the self.  One morning, I tasted a local egg from a local farm that tasted so wild—I swear I could taste the chicken in the egg.   This doesn’t sound like much in this super exciting world, but it was really something to notice—the life in life.

My favorite time of day came before dawn and before the first sitting.  All of us gathered in the meditation hall to bow and chant to Guan Yin, the female Buddha of Compassion.  Born in the West and Protestant, I found this ancient practice thrilling, a trip to distant parts of my own human being.  Head to the floor, arms extended and hands up in a gesture of surrender and supplication, I offer my small self in exchange for a greater awareness, a greater compassion.   I remember that we humans are made to worship, to serve, and to seek.

Over the years, I have come to know some of the people who go on retreat, and I am comforted by their presence.  But when we bow together, we are not as we are in life, doctors, students, professors, writers.  We are fellow beings, seeking peace and freedom.  The teachers tell us the Buddha compared nirvana to the experience of being forgiven our debts, to having a fever break, to emerging from the wilderness of loneliness and longing.  In the dawn light, we bow out a version of the Lord’s Prayer, seeking forgiveness of debts, seeking to receive our daily bread without trespassing into future, without taking more than is offered.

Over the course of the week I realize that enlightenment may be a practice, not a destination.  It may be a slow process of opening to the radiance at the heart of life— not something “out there” but right here in the midst of things.  Like a puddle after the rain, nirvana appears as we learn to attend to the life that is here and now, as we learn to let go of longing and receive.  What does it mean to be present in the body?  I realize I barely know.

Up wells the ego without warning, reconstituted in a heartbeat.  I remember reading that it is impossible to kill the ego because it is not really alive.  What we usually take to be ourselve is a force of habit, a current of thought that pulls us away from life towards a separate “self.”   At other times, there are bursts of anxiety about work,  sudden feelings of deep fatigue, piercing sadness, or restlessness, as if I am trapped in heavy traffic on the highway and impossibly late for a very important date,  like the Mad Hatter. The gift of a retreat is the chance to accept all these unexpected visitors, all these orphaned children of our consciousness.

Several days, I served as “practice leader,” sitting up on a stage in front of the sangha during a meditation.  I picked up a cold and as I drew in breath I swallowed my cough drop whole.  I wondered if I would be the first practice leader ever to choke.   Somehow being in this pickle, sitting up there with the big bronze bell, trying not to choke, helped me let go and open up.   We practice enlightenment in the small act of renunciation that is returning to the present moment.    Then we see that it doesn’t need to be called mindfulness, it may as easily be called heartfulness or bodyfulness.    It means coming to a gathered state, a collected state, where mind, heart, and body touch.  Then you can begin to perceive the deeper impulses under the thoughts.   We begin to perceive energies, not objects.

On retreat, we have a chance to see that impressions can open up like a lens. Sitting up there with the bell, leading the meditation, I glimpsed there is something that comes through us in spite of our thoughts, our stories.  Sitting up on the stage, I forgot about myself and felt the energy pouring in from my fellow seekers.  I noticed our expectations make a sound and when we surrender all expectations there is a very deep silence.  The question “who am I?” became “why am I here?”   I was not there to be a someone but a seeker, an opening to a greater light and a stillness that was a search because it needs to be constantly renewed.

The English root of the word “suffer” means to hold.  When we hold our suffering—our striving, our desires, our insecurity– consciously, it can become a liberating energy,  a vibrancy that opens inward, revealing deeper truths.

When I go on these silent retreats, I realize that I usually have it upside down.  It isn’t our seeming successes but our failures that are really interesting.  It isn’t when we are full of being someone but when we are no one that we are really useful.   I mean the times when we don’t know what to do, are the times when we are open. Our real strength, wisdom, and compassion are in the broken places.   Those places and those times of not knowing are where the light of that inner radiance can shine through.

And I’m glad to be back.