Last Sunday, a group of us talked about how meditation is like Halloween. This was understandable since we were sitting in a yoga studio that happens to be just up the street from the legendary cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, now ablaze with jack-o-lanterns. But no matter where you are autumn and Halloween in particular brings a shiver of anticipation—a sense of the presence of unknown.
Halloween is typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an or sow-in), celebrating the end of the lighter half of the year and the beginning of the darker half. This is how it can feel to enter the stillness of meditation. We can sit down not knowing what to expect—and often not expecting much. Slowly and often very reluctantly, we let go of our usual thinking and drop into the sensation of being present in a body, breathing. Sometimes dropping into the body can feel like dropping into a vast cave to be explored with the light of the attention.
The ancient Celts believe that the border between this world and unknown worlds became very thin at this time of year, allowing other presences to pass through. Ancestors were honored and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off, often by the wearing of costumes and masks (think of times when you have dressed up and put on a special face to ward off danger). Bonfires played a huge part in Samhain festivities—and there is beautiful symbolism here. In some places, all individual fires were put out (imagine how that looked in a world lit by fire). The hearth in each home was rekindled from a great common bonfire. When we sit and allow ourselves to be still, especially when we sit with others, we may notice something similar. The fear is that it we will be plunged into darkness if we give up our thinking, as if our thinking is our internet connection and without it all our screens will go dark.
And yet…there is light. As we relax, sitting still or being in nature, there can be the feeling of coming out of the isolation of our thinking to be warmed by the light of a greater awareness—not great thinking, mind you, but a light to see by and the warmth of life, of literally feeling that we are alive and connected to a greater life. It’s strange to think that we could ever forget this but we do. This awareness allows us to engage directly with life in the moment, life in the body, the way we did when we were little kids. But it is an unselfish awareness, an awareness from a source greater or deeper or other than our usual commentary.
A great teacher of mine once wrote that to know life “we need to die to the known and enter the unknown.” As a culture and on a daily basis we tend to think that we know most everything, and it’s astonishing to remember that we don’t. Often it takes a great shock—a personal or major catastrophe or a scientific discovery that turns everything upside down.
Yet we can also enter the unknown by entering the present moment fully. To enter the moment fully means to be still, without striving or seeking or running away in any way. In such a moment we know very directly what life is—and what love is. And by love, too, I mean a state we surrender to, let go or give ourselves up to. Sometimes (especially n the midst of great pain) it can be an enormous comfort to go away and be still, to walk in nature or be alone in our own stillness. In these are moments when we die to the known–dying because a person or a relationship or a dream of ourselves turns out to be impermanent–we discover the real scale and value of the present moment. And we discover that we are not alone in this unknown but met there by a greater awareness that is not separate from love and compassion–an awareness that lends us light and warmth from a greater source.
The Beauty issue of Parabola featured an Inuit tale of Skeleton Woman. An Inuit fisherman pulls up a horrifying mass of bones in his net. He wants to fling this frightening catch away, who wouldn’t ? But his humanity gets the better of him. He take the bones to his house and sets them aright, handling this tortured and broken mess with great care. Responding to this loving attention, the bones knit themselves overnight into a beautiful woman. When we dare to sit down and face the unknown we discover that awareness itself can heal and transform, bringing light and life to the darkest places.
There must be more to me than this. Have you ever thought this? It’s a little moment of awakening rather than an ordinary thought—a clearing in the clouds, a a distant memory, a knowing that there is more. More to life. More to me. This realization can feel like hitting bottom.
It can arise in the middle of an argument–especially one of those terrible repetitive arguments or one of those obsessive thought loops, times when we desperately try (and fail) to use the same old logic or way of thinking or word to solve a problem or soothe a worry or pry open a heart or mind. Often in those situations we end up getting upset and losing our balance and slipping into words and thoughts that are harsh and heavy, dragging the conversation down still further. Part of why we get upset is because we have this claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in this low and grindingly mechanical state, weighed down and limited, as if we’re trying to run in our sleep. Something in us is casting around desperately for a rock to break the lock because THIS IS NOT REALLY THE WAY I AM!
Not surprisingly, this rock throwing never works. It just escalates the negativity. Negative emotions are very addictive, and you know what they say about addiction: it’s doing the same old thing and expecting a different result. It just strengthens the habit.
But once in a while, right in the midst of it we turn and look at ourselves and see how we are spending our precious energy and time. How does this happen? It happens because we suddenly see ourselves from another place—in the light of an awareness that is greater than thought. “You can’t seem to stop your mind from racing around everywhere seeking something,” teaches Zen master Lin-Chi. “You must right now turn your light around and shine it on yourselves, no go seeking somewhere else. Then you will understand that in body and mind you are no different than the patriarchs and Buddhas, and that there is nothing to do.”
In other words, we need to stop running around searching high and low and be still. The Buddha taught “the four foundations of mindfulness” – mindfulness of body, of feeling or sensation, of mind states and/or emotions, and dharmas or observations of how reality works. He wanted to show us that we are liberated as we take in impressions that come from the whole of ourselves, not just our repetitive and self-referential thoughts. We need to rest in the body, allowing the thoughts to calm down so better influences can enter. This can be as gentle yet as revelatory as if we are walking out of a cold dark house into the warmth of the sun. Slowly, gently, one moment at a time, we dare to leave our isolation and find creation is waiting for us. How? Return to the experience of being a body on the earth.
“The cosmos is our home, and we can touch it by being aware of our body,” teaches Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn. “Our home is available here and now.
In January 1925 Carl Jung visited the Taos Pueblo, and talked with an elder of the tribe named Mountain Lake. The elder told Jung that whites looked cruel to them, “their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something…We do not know what they want….We think they are mad.”
[Jung] asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
“They say that they think with their heads,” he replied.
“Why of course. What do you think with?” [Jung] asked him in surprise.
“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.
The heart connects body and mind. It is the seat of the Bodhi mind, the awakening mind. It is the more we deep down know we are. How can we change our lives? How can we know a greater destiny? We must leave the isolation of the thinking. We must go outside in nature or sit down and be still. We stop all striving and come home. We must see and receive from a greater place, from the whole of ourselves. We must allow new life in.
Verity climbed down from the scaffold and stood with me, looking up at his work. I murmured something about how otherworldly the statue looked. “I look for something other when I carve them,” he said. “They’re not connected to this world. They’re in another place, in their heavenly robes.” I was wearing the clothes of a Brooklyn-based writer, but I was also looking for clues about how to be above this world, connected to that “something other.”
Stonemason finishing an angel, 1909
From 1988 until 1997, the British sculptor and master stone carver directed the carving of the West Portal, also known as the Portal of Passion. Assisted by six apprentices and since 1993 by Jean-Claude Marchionni, a master stone carver from France, Verity spent eight to ten hours a day, from spring until fall, up on that scaffold slowly carving a procession of thirty-two matriarchs and patriarchs from the Old and New Testaments.
Verity explained that these holy figures lead churchgoers through the portal we are staring up at just twice a year, on Easter and in October, on the Feast of St. Francis (when elephants and a glorious parade of animals enter for blessing). The great bronze doors, also engraved with scenes from the Old and New Testaments and the Apocalypse, are called the “Easter Doors.” On Easter, church goers are guided through the portal by the biblical guides Verity carved, led in to experience the miracle of the empty tomb, the highest truth, the deathless.
But Verity explained that the portal he was working on and the cathedral itself are not just a random if interesting work of architecture covered with sculpted biblical metaphors. It is all a work of sacred technology. The portal is a great funnel, drawing people into a carefully designed sacred space and sending them out again, transformed from their contact not just by words and images but by the finer energies that collected and circulated within. I made an effort to maintain a journalistic detachment, but this touched me, spoke to the secret agenda. There was a higher truth that was an actual finer energy, that could be felt, not just thought, and Verity knew it.
“In the thirteenth century people used geometry to describe God and the cosmos,” said Verity. “They understood that we’re all connected and that life is connected.” I loved visiting the cathedral. I felt as if I were under a higher order in that vaulted space, mysterious but real. I remembered the amazement in the eyes of some of the animals as they entered through the vast bronze doors on the Feast of St. Francis. Since they have senses far more sensitive and acute than our own, I wondered if animals could feel the finer vibrations of the sacred, if they can sense true goodness the way they can sense fear. I wondered if Verity could sense these vibrations. These were questions I vowed to myself not to actually ask Verity, questions that might seem naïve, or as if I was a spiritual seeker rather than a professional journalist. These were cards to be held close as I observed the man.
Handsome, with thick, wind-tangled hair threaded with silver and a friendly, self-deprecating manner, Verity wasn’t otherworldly in any obvious outer sense. He was (and is) a busy and accomplished man with work in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the American Academy in Rome, and in the private collections of the Prince of Wales, Sir Elton John, and Lord Rothschild. Yet there was something otherworldly about him, or about his calling. His very name meant Truth, and he carved in stone. I pointed this out to him, adding that he might have heard this before. He laughed with good-natured agreement, adding that he always had an interesting relationship with his name, and that it probably did influence his decision to become a contemporary version of a medieval artisan.
All the way up to the Upper West Side from Brooklyn, I had been prepared to meet a different kind of man, someone in touch with his body, working in a practical physical way, yet who was in alignment with something beyond his own experience, with a vast body of tradition. I had the idea that what he did might be close to devotion. I risked saying this, reasoning that devotion had a secular meaning as well as sacred, and Verity didn’t disagree. He felt a connection with the body of this church, with all those who helped build this vast space, with the bishops, deans, and pilgrims who worshipped here. He believed that even those who lived and worked nearby were part of the life of the cathedral.
In fact among these otherworldly beings were the faces of friends and neighbors of the Cathedral. Verity’s friend Naomi became the face of the Old Testament Naomi. A Tibetan woman in exile became the face of Hagar, while a member of the Cathedral staff and the owner of the Hungarian Pastry shop, the coffee shop across the street, became Jonah and Simeon. This made sense to me listening to Verity talk, especially after we crossed Amsterdam Avenue to the Hungarian Pastry shop to buy coffee. There among the clusters of students and other locals sat Verity’s stone carving partner, Jean-Claude Marchionni, who smiled and shook my hand. But it also made sense to me as a seeker of the sacred. The same presence or energy or power that transformed those lives might transform mine.
Verity and I settled on a bench near a biblical garden, looking up at the gigantic Gothic revival cathedral, contending with Liverpool Anglican Cathedral for the title of largest cathedral in the Anglican Church, the fourth largest Christian church in the world. St. John the Divine is a sacred space, Verity explained. Just as in medieval cathedrals, the proportions are intended to fill us with a sense of the presence of God.
I wanted to feel this presence. I had traveled here on one of those stirring blue-sky autumn days in New York when everything seems to be illuminated, beautiful, charged with impending change. It was 1994, in the middle of decade of prosperity and innovation. I was a mother, a wife, a writer, living in a brownstone on a tree lined street in Brooklyn, all seemingly solid and fortunate things. But I knew there was a heartbreak in the center of life. That day there were changing leaves edged with golden light, excited baby-faced students wearing bright new Columbia University sweatshirts—and no escaping the knowledge that life was fleeting, impermanent. Nothing stayed. “When people came together to build these extraordinary structures, there was a sense of everybody coming together for a common purpose,” said Verity, who received some of his training at the beautiful medieval Wells Cathedral in England. “People were building blocks in a greater whole, and individual egos weren’t so important. What I’m trying is part of this medieval tradition—working with a sense that we’re all connected in a unified whole.”
Verity spoke of how much he learned from the extraordinary people who visited the cathedral—just recently he had heard an amazing talk on the universe by the cosmologist Brian Swimme. A shadow passed over the garden as the sun slipped away. I sipped the hot coffee against the chill, liking Verity’s easy openness and unpretentiousness yet disappointed with our talk, with myself, realizing that what I was seeking might not be found in any words he could say but in the quality of concentration I glimpsed in him as he worked on the scaffold.
“A real teacher teaches with his back.” I heard this from a wise old painter and author I once interviewed, not far from where Verity and I sat. The old man heard it from a Zen master in a monastery in Japan, just after the last world war. I pictured the Japanese master walking upright and serene through a country devastated by war, demonstrating an inner stillness and steadfastness that didn’t depend on what the Buddhists call “the eight worldly winds”—gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, the up and down way things go. On his face, I envisioned gravitas and grace, the qualities Verity carved in the faces on the portal.
I wanted to know what Verity clearly seemed to understand in his body, with his hands, how to connect with a greater wholeness, how to be in alignment with something changeless, beyond the rush of life that carries us along like leaves on a stream. My secret mission had to do with gathering clues about how to be more alive. I asked Verity if he actively felt a connection with a greater presence while he worked—not just thought about it but actually felt it.
“I’ve had moments of real connection with my work,” said Verity. “I feel as if a spark has leapt and then it’s gone. These moments aren’t continuous. I keep trying to get more of a flow, to allow more without trying to control so much. How can we extend these moments of connection? That’s the question and that’s what’s so painful. You have the sense of this opening, this other energy passing through, and it’s utter bliss when it happens, but it’s transitory. I think this is what any artist is searching for. What drives you on is that it’s there and it’s just a question of getting out of the way. “
In the same way that meditators use the breath as an anchor of attention, he drew his attention to two square inches of limestone. “There’s something in the repetitive action of the work, “he said. “I’m hitting that stone once every second for two hours, and then I stop work for twenty minutes, and then I begin again, and for eight or ten hours a day, that’s what I do. That’s extraordinary, isn’t it? And I’ve been doing that for thirty years. And that’s a very strange thing to be doing.”
Life rushed on, but I never forgot what Simon Verity said about repeatedly hitting the stone. It took a long time for the true import to seep in, as if I was made of stone—and I was, in a way. As one inclined to big sweeping answers, to searching with my mind but not my body, the admission by this creator of otherworldly statues that he created them by bringing his attention down to small, simple, finite actions rang true, and like many true things it was hard to process, a code I had to learn to break on my own.
In 2004 Verity was commissioned to design and build a hand-carved map of the United Kingdom as part of the British Memorial Garden in New York’s Hanover Square, commemorating the sixty-seven British victims of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. In the wake of this horrific evidence of the impermanence and unpredictability of life, many New Yorkers discovered a version of Verity’s truth.
Collectively for a time, people in the city practiced that small but momentous change, pulling the attention out of our usual state of distraction and bringing it to the present moment, to the sensation of being here, meeting other eyes and opening doors. We discovered it opened up everything. In that simple act, we invited the outside world in, the better angels of our nature, God. Time passed and people forgot, including me, but when I meditated or walked in the morning, I remembered. This is how you can feel connected to a larger life: focus on one finite task, two square inches of granite, one conscious breath, and you open to the infinite, to reality.
Very slowly over many years, I learned that consenting to be with what is, body, heart, and mind, without judging or seeking to change anything in any way, allows a new energy or vibration or feeling of life to appear—and this is the truth I was searching for. This truth can be found only in the moment. One moment we are fully embodied beings, sensing and feeling the world around us and inside us, opening to perceptions of reality that lead us towards a living unknown. The next moment, we contract into thought, into stories about who we are and what the world is like, splitting off from the whole to claim our little portion of the life force as our own. But from earliest childhood, that same energy in us seeks the greater energy, seeks to be part of the greater whole.
I slowly came to accept that the drama of being a self and being no self plays out over and over again without end. I remembered it happening from earliest childhood. I remembered one day in particular, a day that ultimately may have inspired me to seek Verity and the cathedral. Johnny and Joey, the boys from next door, rolled around in the ruins of my snow fort, oblivious to the devastation they wrought. Writhing around in shiny dark snowsuits with the hoods drawn up tight, barking and diving into each other, they seemed more like seals than humans. Suddenly and passionately, I knew who I was: I was not like them.
As a child I didn’t think in terms like “ego” or “self,” but I knew the reality behind the labels. I knew the act of contraction, as if a fist were closing around a jewel, as if gates were drawing closed to protect a town, as if I were armoring myself against the world. One moment, I was being alive in the world, enjoying the hush and blue light inside my burrow, marveling how warm snow could be. The next moment I was crushed under stinging snow, then lying exposed and stunned under ice-colored sky. I was hurt, furious, but then suddenly sure I was not like them. One moment there was no self and then suddenly there was.
I remember going inside to play, to nurse and elaborate my sense of being special and not like Johnny and Joey. I padded around the living room in bare feet, pretending I was a princess in a primordial forest in India. The sense of self is born of contrast, and the living room after the snow felt like a jungle. I believed that I was not just an Indian princess in ancient times but also, inexplicably, an international spy who were summoned to various world capitals on a moment’s notice. The sense of being a spy, of having a secret aim and identity, was both a product of the Cold War times I grew up in, and an expression of an instinct that life could be deeper and richer and more meaningful. This was an instinct and a wish that would persist.
Children use their bodies, the whole of their sensate experience, along with their imaginations, to experience the world. The world is alive to them, full of surprising possibilities. But children are also engaged in that other drama. From the outside, I might have looked like an ordinary little white girl creeping around the living room of a brick ranch house in northern New York, in the depths of winter. But I also sensed there was a life inside that was deep and wild and powerful, and connected to something vast. Like most children, I secretly sensed I was capable of very great efforts and deeds, like say, carving otherworldly statues on great cathedrals. It would take me years, decades, to realize that connecting my energy with a greater energy came down to a simple repetitive action like being present and striking stone.
Later that day, I was taken skiing at a local hill, no doubt to stop me from climbing over the furniture talking to an invisible animal in what I hoped was a regal Indian accent. I loved the solitude of skiing, the way it let me be alone with what I preferred to think of as a mountain. I remember resting on my ski poles on top of the hill. The air had the cold metallic smell of coming snow. The sky was heavy with bruise-colored snow clouds, giving everything the hushed intimacy of a cathedral. Just for a moment, I felt that I was part of something exalted and marvelous.
I knew I was in a world that was vast and mysterious, but there was an order. I knew I did not know enough, that I needed to know more.
It would be many years before I discovered that what I needed to know was not to be found in some singular and extreme act of bravery or brilliance, but in the small repeated act of coming back to the present moment, letting go of who I think I am. As the stone carver Simon Verity told me, a connection with the infinite can appear in the midst of attending to something very finite. It can feel like doors swinging open, even like great bronze Easter Doors, allowing us to sense and feel how good it is to be here, creating a spark that can leap, as Verity said, a wish to join a greater good.
Things happen. This is what the Buddha taught. Sometimes they creep up slowly, as aging does, or sometimes suddenly and without warning, out of a clear blue sky as they say(when they come you understand the meaning of these expressions). Here is an example of the latter. A few winters ago, I picked up a case of laryngitis that wouldn’t go away. I tried cough drops and tea with honey but the hoarseness persisted, so I saw a doctor and more doctors. Finally it was determined that I have a rare condition that makes my voice hoarse. It’s no big deal, really. Except that three times a year, I have a treatment that reduces my voice to a whisper for a couple of weeks.
And this is what I learned from it. When you can’t talk, you listen more—you notice more. When you leave the world of words, you notice more. Have you ever spent time in a country where you didn’t speak the language? An observing, real-time intelligence that is usually in the background springs to life. P.L. Travers, a founding editor of Parabola (and the author of Mary Poppins) wrote about this open, real-time “unknowing” intelligence in the 1985 “Body” issue: “It is not ignorance. Rather, one could say, a particular process of cognition that has little or no use of words. It is part of our heritage at birth, the infant’s first primer.” I experienced this infant awareness on Sunday, when I dared to show up at the sitting without a voice. Naturally, I felt incredibly vulnerable—words are the usual way of spinning a story, a protective shield, a self. Reduced to a whisper, I touched what Travers called in that essay a baby’s “aboriginal heart” – a wonderful term for that wordless awareness can bloom into a “cosmography of wonder.” Noticing and wondering is the opposite of ignorance. It attunes us to others and to life.
It turns out that waking up may be a slow and subtle process of noticing what is always there but not always seen. One small moment at a time, we softening and relaxing and abide peacefully in the present moment, being ourselves without fear. These moments can feel wildly daring. Returning to the image of the baby, the “good enough” mother doesn’t just hold and mirror and demonstrate kind attention. She also grants space, giving her baby the crucial gift of feeling safe to hang out with their wondering, aboriginal hearts and wondering minds. Contact without space, is like talking without listening—controlling, oppressive, even crushing.
Very few people are lucky enough to receive this kind of mothering the first time around. The good news is that this practice of meditation, this simple practice of bringing kind attention to our present time experience without judgment, giving ourselves the space to just be, is a way to mother ourselves. Given the space, given freedom from comparing and judgment, we remember the wordless way we used to wonder, the deep and sensitive aboriginal heart.
Last week, a group of us talked about what happens when we face obstacles and difficult situations. We agreed that no one escapes such things, and that often what happens is inside is fear, which has a powerful undertow. Signs at ocean beaches warn swimmers not to try to fight their way out of a rip current but to swim with it and parallel to the shore. In the same way, it’s best not to try to fight your way out of a rip current of primal fear and reactivity—those triggered times when you are raging inside (or out), bracing to fight or fly away. If you keep watching with kind awareness, swimming along without fight with it, sooner or later you will wash up down the beach.
And you may find that something else is quietly happening when we face obstacles. Under the mind that is freaking out or shutting down, we may find another mind, a vastly more quiet and responsive mind. And within the body that ordinarily seems so limited, so lacking in energy or strength or beauty, we may find a doorway to another body—an inner body of sensitivity and intuition that feels as vast and wise as the earth (the body is of the earth). In times of great crisis or great loss or great obstacles, we may discover that we contain our own ancient teachers. We discover that inside we are wise and caring teachers caring for terrified children, even (and I mean this in a kind way) crazy maniacs.
In times of crisis, we may find ourselves responding without a single thought interfering—seeing what is needed and meeting that need, as sensitive and aware and sure footed as an animal (the body is an animal). In the face of obstacles, we may discover new ways of being intelligent. In 1980, in the “Obstacles” issue of Parabola, a much younger Dalai Lama told an interviewer that obstacles draw out qualities that can’t be known in any other way.
This is one of those deceptively simple statements that open like Aladdin’s cave in the face of difficulty–suddenly we behold hidden treasures. There is patience, who knew that was so valuable? And determination—who knew what that was? Not forcing but working with reality, showing up again and again, swimming with the current, not losing sight of the shore. It turns out that faith is a willingness to let go of our ideas and see what is, trusting that swimming along seeing itself is a way to break free. It is often in the midst of big trouble that we discover that the universe is responsive if we are.
Also in the cave of treasures for hard times is the insight that the most precious and useful feelings are not really single feelings at all but intentions, orientations, directions. Courage, for example, turns out to be the intention to go on. It is spacious enough to hold all kinds of emotions, fear and a powerful wish that we didn’t have to be caught in a rip current, desperation. Compassion, it turns out, is not empathy or sympathy or certainly not pity, but an objective or conscious wish to respond with care. And love turns out to be an action, an active verb–an aim to live as if we were one (and we are).
Often, the last diamond in rough is the discovery that we were all made to be broken, made to let go of all we think we have and know, we are made to surrender to a power greater than we possess in what David Foster Wallace called our skull-sized kingdoms. Meditation (and prayer and spiritual practice) has been called death in life. We are meant to die into a greater life, to heal into a greater wholeness. (in English the words “heal” and “whole” are related). We need not be in a monastery or on a mountaintop to experience this dying. We need not be like Milarepa, the great Tibetan Buddhist sage whose great teacher Marpa made him build up and tear down three towers to show him that the real aim is not the tower but the qualities that break open in the building and tearing down. Ordinary life offers us many opportunities, many obstacles and unwanted tasks. Try noticing this in small things. We fret and fret and fret about an upcoming event. Finally we get so tired of all the fretting and projection and tension that we just give up.
At least for a moment or two, we die into the state Buddhists call non-self or emptiness. Other traditions may call it salvation or the quickening of the spirit or touching the higher Self. This turns out to be a state of great peace and simplicity right in the midst of things. As I’ve said before (and no doubt I’ll say it again), this is the state of slipping under the electrified fence of the ego. In such a state, we feel the crisp fall air and hear the birds without the background hum of the story we are constantly telling ourselves about ourselves, without the force field of ego, of self and other. We feel stillness. In such a state, we lose ourselves only to find ourselves present and miraculously alive and even grateful…this is how it feels to wash up on the beach.
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” writes Emily Dickinson. “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.”
After a great shock or loss or change, a stillness comes. We sit still and receive life without leaning forward to grasp at it or commenting on it—think of the way a king or queen receives visitors. We have moments of this noble repose when we sit down to meditate, leaving the bustling little kingdom our thoughts to attend to our own breathing. This may the smallest action we can take to return to nature, following the breath, remembering that we live in a body that is open to vast forces outside itself.
“You are held within the web of life, within flows of energy far exceeding your own,” writes Joanna Macy in the current “Intelligence” issue of Parabola. When we first learn about mindfulness meditation, the practice can seem a little, well, mindless. We’re instructed to just sit there and observe what arises moment after moment without attaching the usual commentary—how is this not idiotic and artificial, a kind of willful amnesia.
Yet it turns out that observing with acceptance and without the usual commentary can lead sometimes to making deeper connections. These deeper connections are not just thoughts but fresh observations, moments of seeing a deeper truth or lawfulness overlooked before. Often these impressions (they do literally impress or mark us in a deeper way) give rise to a deeper feeling–not more passionate and dramatic than our ordinary emotions. What appears is a wish and a willingness to be still and know more—to know something beyond the kingdom of self, to know a greater web, to be part of it and serve it.
This deeper feeling for something greater than ourselves is always here like the breathing, just overlooked in ordinary times, the way candlelight and firelight seem like no big deal with the lights on. We notice their power in the dark—not just how far the light can be seen but how it warms us and reminds us of that web of life. After great pain, the emotions we usually have can seem not to have been true feelings at all but dust kicked up over nothing, reactions flowing from thoughts inside the head and fueling them in turn, endless drama, liking and not liking people, places, and events, all in relation to the self. Yet sometimes we discover that under all that thinking and striving and emotional reacting, there is good will, gentleness–a willingness to let go of all that thinking and emoting to receive what is constantly being offered.
“Intelligence communicates simultaneously with intelligence,” writes Anthony Blake in the “Intelligence” issue. We can discover this also in small moments in ordinary life, walking in nature, seeing ducks glide across a lake, hearing bird song. At those moments, it can be easy to let life in. At other times, not so easy, yet those are the times that reveal the true power of seemingly soft actions and feelings, love, acceptance, the wish to be part of something greater.
Consider times of pain or shock or loss. Once, for example, I learned that a loved one betrayed me. I was plunged into disbelief. Every cell in my body wanted to shut out this unwelcome news. It was like being in a car crash—the body and mind shut down instantly, as if we are conditioned not to take in too much reality. I watched every cell in my body wordlessly scream “I do not want this experience, close the gates!” Yet the experience rushed in, overcoming all my defenses. There came a feeling of immense vulnerability, and as much as I was conditioned to defend against this, I knew on some level that this was a moment of extraordinary opportunity, of opening of the body and mind. It’s important to note here that the thinking mind and the emotional reactions that come it will try to come back.
The thinking mind can be as relentless as Seal Team Six, tracking and taking aim, ready to kill or be killed in the effort to protect us from our true vulnerability. At first after I the shock of betrayal, after I went cold, I started thinking and thinking and talking and talking about this news, as if words and theories could shoot before I was pierced through by the true wildness of reality. A great teacher of mine once said the ego can never be killed because it was never really alive—meaning it is a constellation of habits and conditioning, especially the habit of being a particular self.
Yet there are deeper ways of knowing and feeling and sometimes—often when reality is so strong it overcomes all our defensive efforts—we remember this. Finally, the pain of betrayal and loss settled in. In the middle of the night, I had the sensation of being pulled from sleep by a strange new (or maybe very old) sensation in my body. I felt very still inside. There were no thoughts, just the physical sensation of being alive and the sense that I was radiating an energy. I thought of Mary Oliver’s beautiful phrase about “the soft animal of the body.” It was clear that the only thing to be done was to be still and allow my body to feel this energy—a more pure, direct form of attention than the thinking part of the mind can know. I grew more and more quiet, allowing the shy animal of the body to open more and more. I kept holding this energy that wasn’t separate from wisdom and compassion until the thoughts slowly came back.
It was clear to me that night that spiritual practices are meant to cultivate such an energy—that faith, love, understanding are not concepts to be learned but actions to be performed. Prayer and meditation and contemplation is a way of opening the heart and mind to hold these energies—to literally behold the life in us and offered to us. I realized that if I grew quiet enough, my heart–shut tight against hurt–might also open.
I thought of the Buddha touching the earth when he was confronted with the terrifying armies of the demon Mara. By connecting with the earth of the body, we can keep from being swept away by thoughts and emotional reactions, we can be still and allow the shy animals to appear. With a very quiet shock, I realized that I was not just comprised of my outer thinking mind and reacting heart and body, that there are also subtle energies, bodies–that this is not a mystical or poetic metaphor but real.
There are initiations you can’t sign up for (and who would want to?) Yet from time to time, we must dare to go beyond thought. We must be still and open to the darkness of the unknown. We must sit ceremonious, like Tombs, allowing new kinds of feelings to come.
Tracy Cochran 