For a time during my high school years, I tried to make a psychedelic sanctum of my bedroom, declaring it a separate place from the rest of the house. I asked my father to bolt a three-foot ultraviolet black light to the ceiling. He did this to make me happy, and understanding that while it did make everything look enchanted, I would soon grow tired of seeing purple spots in front of my eyes from looking up at it from bed. I was striving to create a special atmosphere where transformation was possible.
I lined the bedroom walls with fluorescent Day-Glo posters that glowed in molten sunset colors when the light was switched on. The posters depicted winding pathways through trippy forests, mandalas, a psychedelic Jim Morrison reaching out a hand with smoldering eyes. I played cool music in that purple haze, as if I could make the counter culture rise like a whale from the depths of the past and carry me away to a bigger life. I read The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, seeking a path with heart. I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and later Be Here Now by Ram Dass, longing to go on similar journeys. During my high school years, I vividly remember sitting up in that room and on similar rooms with other kids. It was as if I thought that just the right lighting or reading or music would open the door to lasting change.
In the years that followed, I gave up trying to stage manage conditions in quite the same way but I kept trying to force change, hoping that just the right course of study, or diet, or exercise regime would help me change. Along the way, I discovered meditation. I tried to meditate my way to freedom. It didn’t work.
There was something wholesome in all this longing and trying. Even in my faux hippie years, I sensed that I needed to find a way that wasn’t in my head alone. Along the way I learned that trying to eat well and exercise helps, that meeting deadlines and commitments helps. Showing up helps. But I also learned that real change cannot be forced or controlled and what it feels like to be a little more free cannot be predicted. I learned that what is needed for real change is radical but not in the way I thought. What is needed is a willingness to see things just as they are. What is needed is a gentle surrender, a letting be, an inner movement of availability. We have to allow change to happen.
The week before Christmas is here. Whether we celebrate Christmas or not, during the days and weeks ahead we will experience a suspension of the usual pace and routine of our days. It is the Christian season of Advent, a time of waiting for what has not yet come. As I sit writing this by the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, there is a feeling that something wonderful is coming, something beyond my ordinary thoughts and expectations.
The seasonal darkness reaches its depth today with Winter Solstice, which deepens the sense of suspension of the usual, the sense of waiting, the sense of suspense. It’s natural to seek signs of the return of the light, to shake the packages under the tree, to seek an end to the suspense. But this can be a wonderful time to practice peaceful abiding…or patience. Our whole iPhone culture is arrayed against this word and the state behind it. If you wish, join me in daring to explore it.
It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black. It’s natural to seek signs of the returning light but can we also be present for what is without always toppling forward, seeking relief or resolution, the next thing? The ancient root of patience is suffering. It means tolerating what is happening without adding anything—no argument, no wry commentary, nothing. But being patient doesn’t mean being passive. Patience can make us quicker and more sensitive—when you aren’t toppling forward you can be grounded and open. You can see and hear more.
It’s very natural to want suffering to pass, but we can soften in the midst of it. Sometimes (often) we try too hard to let go and be present. This can feel effortful and laden with self-judgment. I’ve found that asking myself to be a little softer at moments creates a pause in my usual functioning. A space opens up and I can be open to receive what is waiting to be received. There is a presence beyond our ordinary thought that comes when we are soft. When we are re-membered– body, heart, heart and mind. It is not here yet but it will come.
“Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. Do not 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.”
The dark time is here. This brings a feeling of drawing in. This can be a good time for reflection. In the ancient Buddhist dialect of Pali “reflection” has the same double meaning that it has in English—it means to be like a mirror or the surface of a calm lake, to receive an impression and hold it without adding anything. It also means to contemplate or consciously consider.
Years ago, at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York, Bhikkhu Bodhi spoke of this, and of the Buddha’s advice to his 7-year-old son Rahula. The Buddha told his son about the importance of honesty, telling young Rahula to practice reflection—to reflect on the inner and outer consequences before, during, and after doing something. Please consider trying this. The results are subtle but quite amazing. Consider how you feel before you perform an act of generosity, during, and after. Also consider how it feels to do something less than noble or NOT do something—not to eat or drink to much or be angry or stingy, to ungrasp the hand of habit. What is amazing is that this practice of reflecting on the quality and consequence of our lives is a way to expand time by opening and deepening and enriching the time we have.
In the space of meditation, we can allow ourselves reflect on something that has already happened. We can allow a memory or experience to arise, being like a calm lake reflecting the moon without fighting it or fleeing from it or freezing it or adding any commentary. Remember that the ancient root of “understand” means to stand under, to allow the truth of something to soak in. It also suggests holding and supporting, standing under our own experience, receiving it. Think of the lake under the moon.
Think of Scrooge on Christmas morning. So much unfolded in him during a single night of reflection on the consequences of events past, present, and future. He woke up transformed, free from the heavy chains that held him separate from others. Here he is, out in the street, encountering a man he had coldly rejected the day before, when the man had come seeking donations for the poor:
“My dear sir,” said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both hands. ‘how do you do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was kind of you. A merry Christmas to you sir!’”
“Mr. Scrooge?”
“Yes,” said Scrooge. “That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness—‘ Here Scrooge whispered in his ear.”
“Lord bless me!’ cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away. ‘My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious!”
“If you please,” said Scrooge. “Not a farthing less. A great many back payments are included in it, I assure you. Will you do me that favor?”
“My dear sir,” said the other, shaking hands with him. “I don’t know what to say to what munifi—”
“Don’t say anything, please,” retorted Scrooge. “Come and see me. Will you come and see me?”
“I will!” cried the old gentleman.”
The word was “munificence,” meaning great generosity. As we learn to hold our own experience into the light of our own kind presence, we become able to share this generous presence with others. And here is a secret: presence can change our future, as it heals the past.
The truth cannot be thought, a great teacher once told me (or I was in the room when she said this). The real truth is not a secret formula or any other kind of privileged knowledge that can belong to a particular group or tradition. It is a living thing that must be glimpsed and lived. It must be understood in the ancient sense of standing under, letting it rain down on you.
The search for this truth has motivated Parabola since the beginning. And in this spirit, I offer a contemporary, Buddhist and Mindfulness-inflected reflection on the meaning Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Scrooge’s business partner Marley visits him one night, wrapped in chains made of cashboxes, ledgers, and other tools of his life-long trade.
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost.“I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”
In Buddhism, the fetters are mental bonds, grasping habits of thought that radiate from a belief that we are an isolated little self that must work and strive and defend itself, a fearful, driven self that doubts there can be another way to relate to life. “In life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole,”Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge. By spirit he means his awareness, his potential to lift up his eyes and open his heart and live in a wise and compassionate and generous way. Naturally, Scrooge doesn’t understand. He reminds his old partner that he was “always a good man of business.”
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”
If Marley was a contemporary of ours, he might have said this: “The happiness of all beings everywhere was my business; generosity, compassion, equanimity and loving kindness were, all, my business. My job and professional identity were but a drop of water in the vast ocean of my human possibility.”
How horrible it is to realize that you have missed the chance to live the life you might have lived. I once read that what the dying reporting regretting the most is that they weren’t present more often. Too late they realize that the seemingly small act of being present to life in the moment is actually huge and essential. “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness,” writes Mary Oliver.
Marley moans and shakes his chains and tries to terrify Scrooge into seeing that he is not fully paying attention, that he is passing his whole life in his reptile and reward-seeking systems, fighting for survival, and consumed with personal comfort and gain. But Scrooge can’t take it in. He is as “self-contained and solitary as an oyster”– self-absorbed and shelled off from the world. He is stuck in the deep groove of instinctive reactions and making the chains that bind him ever stronger by being “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous.” He will need a bigger shaking up. He will need the teachings of the Three Spirits.
Yet before he leaves, Marley’s ghost leads Scrooge to an open window where he sees “the air full of phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.” All of them are fettered, all of them suffer terribly. They realize that the way out of the chains that bind them is to open the heart and mind to life one moment at a time…but it’s too late.
The good news is that for us, as for dear old Scrooge, it is not too late.
On the first night of my seven-year-old daughter, Alexandra’s, first Buddhist retreat, Thich Nhat Hanh smiled and looked into her eyes as few adults ever look at children. Although he sat very still on a stage, the Vietnamese teacher seemed to bow to her inwardly, offering her his full presence and inviting her to be who she really is.
Alexandra threw her jacket over her head.
“Children look like flowers,” said the man who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967. His voice was soft and bittersweet. “Their faces look like flowers, their eyes, their ears…”
Surrounded by scores of monks and nuns who had traveled with him from Plum Village, the French monastic community that has been his home since his peace activism caused his exile from Vietnam, he lifted his eyes from the little flower who was huddled, hiding her face, in the front row. Before him sat 1,200 people who had gathered in a vast white tent on the wooded campus of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in upstate New York. Thay, as he is affectionately known, had convened us for a five-day retreat dedicated to cultivating mindfulness through practices such as sitting meditation, walking, and sharing silent meals.
As the master talked about the “freshness,” or openness and sensitivity of children, I couldn’t help but be struck by the way Alexandra was ducking for cover. He extolled freshness as one of the qualities that each of us possesses in our essence, our Buddha-nature. Alexandra, shrouded in nylon, was reminding me that true freshness isn’t limited to those moments when we feel happily and playfully open. It often means feeling raw and vulnerable. I wondered if it had been a mistake to bring her here, to risk exposing her to the way we really are.
During the retreat, children and adults came together during different parts of the day. In addition to sharing meals and a daily mindfulness walk, the children clustered at the front of the stage for the first twenty minutes of Thay’s dharma talks, which he carefully framed in simple, poetic images that children could remember. I brought Alexandra hoping that contact with Buddhist practice would stimulate her imagination and awaken her own wisdom. I thought she could be inspired by the various techniques Thay described, such as listening to the sound of a bell that can call us back to “our true home.”
“My true home is in Brooklyn,” Alex whispered. She had peeled off her covering and lay stretched out on the floor with her head in my lap, jittering her foot to convey how bored and impatient she was. On the first night, most of the other children nearby were sitting cross-legged, quietly, and listening with what seemed to me preternatural attention. Alexandra was muttering to herself and writhing around on the floor like a big, unhappy baby. I wondered if she had some mild form of autism that had escaped detection.
Seventy-three-year-old Thich Nhat Hanh was sitting directly above me, embodying a mountainlike stability and compassion. A monk on the stage winked at Alexandra, a pretty young nun dimpled up in a fit of silent giggles. The people around me were friendly and relaxed. I felt like a terrible mother to be judging and comparing my daughter in these gentle conditions. It was almost as if the spirit of nonjudgmental acceptance that surrounded me was triggering a perverse reaction, drawing out my darkest, meanest thoughts. I felt like a vampire who had stepped out into the sunlight.
As we made our way back to our little cabin, the power went out all over the Omega campus. And a light turned on inside Alexandra. We stopped on the path, unsure which way to turn. I had left the flashlights behind. Alexandra took charge.
“Let’s go back to the visitor’s office,” she said, leading the way. A kindly man on the Omega staff gave Alexandra a candle and walked us to our cabin.
“You knew just what to do,” I said as I tucked Alexandra into bed. “That was good thinking.”
“I hated to think of you wandering around in the dark,” she said, beaming in the candlelight.
The next day Alexandra asked, “Mommy, is Thich Nhat Hanh a man? Like, does he have a penis?”
Yes, I offered, he was an ordinary man but he was a monk. That meant that he lived for the happiness of others, so he might seem different.
My answer felt vague and wimpy, not as real as the question.
The following day in the dinning hall, I discovered how deeply traveling with your own pint-size Zen master makes you feel aware of yourself, and how apart. The majority of the people there were moving about with a kind of underwater grace, practicing silence. We parents struggled with the task of filling tray and settling children while trying to remember to stop and breath consciously when the mindfulness bell sounded.
Alexandra and I sat at a table in the dining hall facing a table decorated with pumpkins.
“Mommy!”
I whispered to her that we were supposed to try eating silently together.
“This is not my experiment,” Alexandra reminded me. “I don’t want to do it because I have a question.”
“What’s your question, Alexandra?”
“Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?”
“A vegetable.”
“Why are you being so mean? Aren’t you supposed to be happy?”
The interconnection of all phenomena is a constant theme of Thich Nhat Hanh’s. He speaks often of “interbeing,” the actual state of reality that, once recognized, nurtures compassion and empathy. As people ate in silence around us, I remembered an incident that had happened several weeks earlier. Alexandra was going through a phase of pondering how she was related to the first person who ever lived and to all other people.
“Every living being is connected,” I had told her as I was putting her to bed one night. “The whole universe is alive, and what you put out in the world is what you get back. If you put out love and kindness, you tend to get love and kindness in return.”
Alexandra and I had decided to put the little purple bike with training wheels that she had outgrown down on the street for someone to take. She crayoned a sign that read, “Whoever takes this bike, please enjoy it, love Alexandra.”
She had been full of anticipation. The next morning she bolted out of bed and ran to the window.
“Mommy, my bike is gone!” she’d said, as radiant as on Christmas morning. “Somebody took my bike!”
The concept of the web of life was alive and breathing that morning. But by the end of the day, not surprisingly, she had moved past the shimmering magic and was applying the cause-and-effect practicality of a kid.
“So when do I get something back?” she asked.
David Dimmack, a longtime student of Thay’s was the volunteer in charge of the children’s program on the retreat. He taught the kids the “Flower Fresh” song, the theme song of the Community of Mindful Living. At the beginning of a dharma talk one morning, they all got up on the stage together and sang to Thich Nhat Hanh and the rest of the sangha.
“Breathing in, breathing out,” sang Dimmack and the children. “I am blooming like a flower, I am fresh as the dew. I am solid as a mountain, I am firm as the earth. I am free.”
When I stood in the back of the tent, watching the children on stage, it was impossible for me not to compare it Sunday school.
Dimmack had called the songs, “entertainment,” matter-of-factly acknowledging that sometimes teaching just comes down to presenting ideas in a way that gently and gradually makes an impression, like water wearing away rock. At the same time, though, he emphasized that there was a constant creative tension in the children’s program between teaching and allowing, between imposing structure and letting the kids be.
Mark Vette, another student of Thay’s, works as an animal psychologist and lives on a ranch in New Zealand. Vette had the inspired idea of teaching the kids to use dowsing rods made of bent coat hangers and pendulums made of little pieces of wood.
“Here’s the dowsing prayer,” he said to the group of us gathering on a big meadow in the center of campus. “May I let go of the things that are known and embrace the things that are unknown.” After the kids tired of looking for water and chasing each other (“Lead me to a dork!”), many of them settled down to find their place of “inner power.” (The kids liked the word “power” better than “peace.”)
“Pendulums and dowsing rods seemed to be a perfect way to introduce them to their own intuitive sense,” said Vette, a sandy-haired, athletic man who by the end of the week had completely captured my daughter’s heart. “In the bush, these thing work because we really already know where that lost animal is or where north is. And the kids can use it in the same way to learn to meditate, to find their center or their true home.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
One day, during walking meditation, I began to get an inkling of what it is to find my true home. Every day the children, who left the dharma talk after the first twenty or thirty minutes, were invited to meet up with Thich Nhat Hanh and the grown-up students as they flowed out of the dharma hall to walk to the lake. On one beautiful azure day in late October, those of us who were with the children watched Thich Nhat Hanh walking toward us from the dharma tent, leading his multitude: 1,200 tall American dressed in bright Polartec colors following a small figure in brown.
No sooner had Alexandra and several other children joined to walk up front with Thay than she split to scamper off to the top of a leaf-carpeted hill.
“I’m going to roll down this hill!” she shouted to another girl. “Come on!”
It actually awed me that she was so unselfconscious about shattering the silence. Alexandra rolled down the hill, sounding like a bear crashing through a forest.
I dropped my head and trudged along. Suddenly. I noticed Thich Nhat Hanh gliding along, like a mountain on rails, almost next to me. His face looked calm and fresh, while mine ached like a clenched fist. Alex had raced ahead to the water’s edge, where she stood waving and smiling at me. I felt a pang of love for her and really experienced how the voice of my heart was being drowned out by a welter of negative thoughts that seemed to come from somewhere in my brain that didn’t even feel organic—more like a robot, a split-off part of me mechanically repeating bits of old programming.
Aware as I now felt, I was haranguing myself that really good mothers didn’t get swamped by nasty reactions. Good mothers, my mind chided, were capable of unconditional love.
The bell calling for mindfulness sounded. I knelt down in the warm sand. The bell rang again, and a third time. I picked up my head to see an old man’s hand gently stroking a familiar head of thick ash-blond hair. Thich Nhat Hanh and my daughter were sitting side by side. It slowly dawned on me that it was Alexandra who had just rung the bell calling the rest of us back to our true homes. Thay had been inspired to pick Alexandra, the loudest kid there that particular day, to sound, or “invite,” the bell that called everyone to silence.
At that moment the ideal of unconditional love seemed nothing but a brittle concept, a fetter. I felt I finally comprehended what Thich Nhat Hanh meant when he said that acceptance is understanding and understanding is love.
“I was throwing sand and I looked up and he was looking at me,” she explained later. “He was kind of smiling. He waved for me to come over and sit by him. He didn’t say anything he just showed me how to ring the bell.”
Back in Brooklyn, as Alexandra and I slipped back into our daily routines, I wondered from time to time what effect, if any, a week of mindfulness training might have. Then, one night many months later, I was fuming with frustration.
“Breathe, Mommy,” said Alexandra. “Just relax and breathe and return to your true home.”
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.
Tracy Cochran 