Author: Tracy Cochran

• Falling Back to Move Forward

  To move forward with a great resolution we must first fall back.  Recently, I read this bit of New Year’s Resolution wisdom on Facebook (our endless forward-rushing stream of adages and quotes and clips and quips).   It struck me that there was deeper truth here, beneath the well-worn nuggets about regrouping for a great battle or backing up for a running start.

  To move forward on a path, we must dare to go down inside ourselves.  The Buddhist path began with the Buddha sitting down under a tree, sensing the body on the earth, and the first step on the path that he discovered (or rediscovered) is intuiting the weight or  consequence of our actions, registering that what we do and think matters, even if no one is watching.  Moving forward on the path means going inward and down, daring to open to our deepest and most primal experience–opening not just to our childhood wounds and conditioned reactions but to our animal instincts. And we must open not just to our warm-blooded mother bear instincts, but also to the reptile brain and further back…to single-cell creature, membraned to know the difference between inside and outside, self and other.

  We must see how we are triggered, how we are made.  Holidays have a way of showing this to us.  As Ram Dass famously said, if you think you are enlightened go spend time with family.  But there is a gift to be found in falling back.  As we learn to embrace the whole of ourselves with the kind of equanimity and compassion we wish to extend to our own children, accepting that certain experiences will trigger tears or rage or an impulse to grasp and not let go–well, this is the movement of awakening.

  There is really not separating the heart and mind in the mind of awakening (in Buddhism the awakened heart/mind is called the “body mind).  And yet it is very helpful to extend a welcome downwards, backwards–to occasional little freak-outs and tears of frustration–not to identify but to manifest qualities of the heart including generosity and courage towards the parts of our brains that are less evolved, less sanctified, conscious let’s say in other ways.

  I’ve been reading lately about opening to a broader view of consciousness, including an “Integrated Information Theory” of consciousness.  In other words, the more integrated the information, the synergy between the parts, the more complex the illuminated jewel of any particular brain/mind.  In other words, acceptance enriches and deepens our consciousness.  And acceptance can help ease the pain, tame the beast…liberate energy for that resolution.

   

   

  January 8, 2014

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, Heart Qualities, New Year’s Resolution

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• Refiner’s Fire

  Hearts can change.  Given enough time and the right conditions, even the most battle-hardened heart can learn to take off the armor, stop contracting into a fist, dare to be soft and exposed.  This process of opening can take a long, long time–a big piece of lifetime or even many lifetimes according to the Buddhists.   Knowing this can bring an easing in itself, a sense that it is alright to take time, to take off the armor and let the wounds heal.

  But it’s important not to stop in our healing, to realize the human heart comes to us with innate capacities for opening and connecting with the world, for expressing it’s strength in profound and beautiful ways.  The early Buddhist tradition composed a list of ten “paramitas” or “perfections of the heart.”  Please note:  this does not mean perfection in the sense of an ideal but in the sense of “that which has been accomplished”–that which has been lived through, understood through long and often challenging and sometimes bitter experience.   Here is the list of capacities:  generosity, morality, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, lovingkindness, equanimity.

  For a long time, I thought heart qualities were wonderful but also maybe a little secondary to this crystalline vision of awakening.  Or maybe they were kid stuff compared to the grown-up stuff of enlightenment.  But recently something struck me, dots were connected, a key turned in a lock.  According to legend, the Buddha meditated and searched for many years, observing the habits of mind that cause suffering, finally awakening and coming to a penetrating understanding of the way things go, the Dharma.   But/and legends abound about the many, many, many previous lifetimes of the Buddha, including animal lifetimes, in which he practiced generosity or patience or truthfulness–lifetimes cultivating the qualities of heart that would support his awakening.

  Lately I’ve been wondering why our moments in the light tend to be so brief, and now I think I know why.  We must learn to become vessels, to open, to receive.  The other day, I say a kind of slogan I typically would dismiss–to go forward to have to fall back (or some such).  Now I think it’s based on truth.  To aspire to the higher, to awaken, we must first tend to the qualities of the heart.  This year, instead of fighting fire with fire, I want to try letting my unruly and often aggravating life be a refiner’s fire, making my heart a new kind of vessel.

   

  January 3, 2014

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, heart, paramitas

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• Hoo gah in the Kali Yuga

  I write this as snow is blanketing everything.  I am cozy not just in the physical sense of being indoors and warm and in front of a fire after a cold walk.  I am cozy in the sense of well being, feeling relaxed and present and close to life, not separate.

  I’ve been reading that in Denmark there is a concept called “hygge” (pronounced HYU-gah or HOO-gah).  Although hard to translate, some words offered up “coziness,” “togetherness,” “well-being,” but emphasizing that it is not a physical thing (or not just) but an attitude.  It’s like the atmosphere that is created at Christmastime, around candles, food, family–an atmosphere of intimacy, a special dedication to savoring shared connection.  Only this attitude isn’t just reserved for Christmastime (I really like it as one word).

  The Danes contrast this way of being with the typical American way always rushing, eating on the go, being overwhelmed all the time.  We Americans have reason to be more stressed, lacking Denmark’s social safety net, but still.  There is an undeniable ethos in the culture that the end justifies the meanest means.  What gets sacrificed in fight for survival?  Just a great big chunk of our real lives, minus some of better moments, like at Christmastime. Our capacity to have an intimate, cozy, REAL relationship with the life inside and outside usually gets pushed aside, weak things, unlikely to survive. There is no time to be ourselves.

  “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing,” said Groucho Marx.  “If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”  And here is another great American mantra from Jay MacInerney:  “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you look playing the game.”

  This New Year I vow to spend more time being cozy, to create coziness–to “hygge,” to HOO-gah (it is used as a verb) in the Kali Yuga.   Coziness is radical now, just as patience is radical, softness over brightness is radical.  It occurs to me that even meditation is an act of radical coziness with ourselves and with the world.

  May all beings be safe.  May all beings be cozy.  May all being hoo-gah in the Kali Yuga.

  December 17, 2013

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, Christmas

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• Letting Go is Light

  The dark time is here. Every year I marvel at the way tiny twinkly Christmas lights make a big difference in the darkness.  The decorated houses feel like a extraordinarily generous gestures, pooling together at create an illuminated village, transforming this suburban New York place.  Even the giant inflatable “lawn art” seems jolly and American and well-intentioned (Although I know those giant snowmen and cartoon characters can be oppressive after a few weeks…or months).

  I was told the warmth from a single candle is enough to keep you alive.  The same is true for light.  In true darkness, the tiniest light is visible for miles.  A great man died this week and I have been marveling at his greatness—his capacity to maintain a connection to a greater truth in the most oppressive circumstances, to open his heart and forgive.   What sparked that flame?

  In my experience, for even the smallest act of forgiveness to take place we need have to have an inkling that something greater is possible, a peace and freedom that waits for us beyond the boundaries of our own sometimes righteous anger, our own pain, our own understandable desire to push back.  Real forgiveness means letting go.

  As Mandela’s life demonstrates, this takes confidence–a word that literally means with faith.  We have to have faith in our ability to be aligned with a power greater than ourselves, even if we are in prison. We have to confidence that there is more to reality than we think and that we can connect with it wherever we are.  To actually practice forgiveness, as opposed to just think about, may turn out to be a small, careful, demanding daily work, not a grand gesture of heart or mind.  Yet think of how visible a tiny light is in the darkness–that’s how palpably different an act of letting go is from our usual way of holding on to the story of who we are.

  In the words of Mandela’s fellow great being Gandhi:

  Your beliefs become thoughts

  Your thoughts become your words

  Your words become your habits

  Your habits become your values

  Your values become your destiny

  December 11, 2013

  Awakening, Awareness, Christmas, Forgiveness, Liberation and Letting Go, Mandela

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• Boom!

  I am just back from London and  Oxford and the huge and very happy event of my daughter Alexandra’s marriage.  As often with great things, it’s best to ease in by way of a few seemingly minor or even unrelated observations–and not just the expected ones, that at moments this Mother of the Bride (or M.O.B.) felt brashly, heart-on-my-sleeve American in the English setting.  As I rose to make several longish narrative toasts, I felt how true it is, that placing ourselves in new surroundings gives us fresh impressions of how we are–that what we take to be true is really just our small perspective. What rises to the top this morning is a detail heard and glimpsed the day before we went up to Oxford for the great event.  Alex and her now-husband Anthony took her parents for a bit of London sight-seeing, a walk over London Bridge, a trip to Borough Market (http://boroughmarket.org.uk) for some amazing food, the the most delectable grilled cheese sandwich I have ever had, and finally a tour of the Globe Theater on the south banks of the Thames (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre).  And here is the detail.  Gesturing around the open-air Globe as the sunset, commending the way the theater (theatre) was rebuilt to be as nearly like the original as possible, our actorly guide  explained that a real canon was fired in one of Shakespeare’s productions.  The playwright hoped for a grand effect but the blast caught the thatchy roof on fire and burned the Globe to the ground.  Shakespeare retired shortly after. Later, as we walked back across the Thames on the beautiful Millennium Bridge, watching the twinkling lights of London, Alex and I marveled to think of poor Shakespeare retiring, thinking that this unfortunate incident would shadow his legacy–that people would concede that he wrote some amazing plays but wasn’t he also the guy who burned down the Globe? What has this to do with marriage, or indeed with liberation and letting go, the theme of Parabola’s wonderful latest issue?  I come away from taking part in this wonderful trip more convinced than ever that our greatest deeds don’t consist in what we have done but in what we have consented to take part in.  Real liberation doesn’t come in kicking over the traces, breaking away from yoke of convention and doing something wild, like firing a canon in a theatre full of people.  It comes when we consent to take part in a greater truth.  In Shakespeare’s immortal words, “The readiness is all.”

  December 5, 2013

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness

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• Take Off the Bubble Top

  One November day awhile ago, I was dispatched by Publishers Weekly to Washington, D.C. to interview the famous newsman Jim Lehrer, who just had a novel out.  My editor insisted the interview take place at his home not far from the National Cathedral, not his office.  This to create a feeling of intimacy, including details about all the bus memorabilia he collected in honor of his father, a bus driver, etc.  Lehrer kindly complied, rushing from his office in Arlington, VA, where he was preparing to interview the Assistant Director of the FBI.

  Sitting in his pretty, unwashed living room, Lehrer gave the impression of having stopped on a dime.  Lehrer’s famous face, as ordinary and noble as a farmhouse on a Western plain, composed itself in a look of alert waiting.   His way of being with me, forthright and decent, was a lesson in how to conduct interviews–and also in how we can be with one another.

  Lehrer was used to living in the present moment under intense scrutiny.   He was used to asking questions designed to draw out the truth without shouting or intruding, without the questions screaming for attention themselves.   He recalled driving his daughters to one presidential debate he was moderating:  “I told my girls in the car, if people remember the questions, I haven’t done my job.”

  It was excruciating to watch the trampling of time limits, the ignoring of questions to “stay on message,” the blatant lying, in the last presidential debate Lehrer tried to moderate.  I felt like I was watching a decent man witness the seeming loss of our ability to have a civilized (not to mention honest) exchange in this country.

  But this is beside the point today.  The point is this singular memory that Lehrer shared.  He worked as a young newspaper reporter in Dallas in the late 1950s and 60s.  On November 22, 1963, he was dispatched to ask the Secret Service man in charge of security President Kennedy’s motorcade whether the President would be riding with the bullet-proof bubble-top on his limousine on or off.   As fate would have it, it was a beautiful day.

  “Take off the bubble top!” Lehrer heard the man command.  Later, inside the Dallas police station, the shattered agent whispered the same words to Lehrer again.  Lehrer wondered how many times the poor man had thought of those words since.  May he have found peace.

  Our lives are made of moments, some indelible, but each dependent on causes and conditions beyond fathoming.  What happens to others and to ourselves, what arises in a moment, binds us to each other and to a greater whole.

  November 22, 2013

  1963, Awakening, Awareness, Dallas, JFK, November 22, Waking Up

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