Tag: a refuge

• Winter Solstice 2017

  Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day when the North Pole is tilted farthest from the sun. Ancient people observed this day, watching the stars and the shortening days, patiently abiding and taking note until one day…it changed. They learned that the darkest day is followed by a little more light.

  Left to it’s own devices, the thinking mind tends towards pessimism. The light will never return, it tells us; it is always darkest before it is pitch black, this kind of grim prediction. We are desperate to think of a solution, to speed up the process, to turn on a light. And yet another possibility is to wait peacefully in the darkness.

  “The true light never hides the darkness but is born out of the very center of it, transforming and redeeming,” writes Jungian author Helen M. Luke. “So to the darkness we must return, each of us individually accepting his ignorance and loneliness, his sin and weakness, and most difficult of all consenting to wait in the darkness and even to love the waiting.”

  In Newgrange, in the east of Ireland, there is a mysterious Neolithic monument, a huge circular mound with a passageway and interior chambers. Tests reveal that it was built in 3200 B.C.E., which makes it older than the pyramids in Giza and older than Stonehenge. No one can say exactly what it is for, a tomb perhaps, or a place of rituals. But this is what is extraordinary: it was built so that the light of the rising sun on the winter solstice, on December 21, floods the chamber. Just as the sun rises, sunlight pours through an opening above the main entrance, shining along the passage and illuminating a carving of a triple spiral on the front wall.

  Today, there is a decades’ long waiting list to witness this marvel. But imagine the impact it must have had five thousand years ago. Imagine how dark it must have been in a world lit only by fire. Imagine being gathered in the dark chamber with others…and then the light. Also imagine the effort and skill this project required, and register, again, that it was undertaken five thousand years ago, in what we call prehistoric times.

  A Buddhist definition of faith is the ability to keep the heart open in the darkness of the unknown. And remember there is no hard and fast distinction between heart and mind. Can we admit the possibility that new light may come? Notice that this subtle act of admission, of consenting to open the door of the mind (heart mind) lets new life and light enter. Maybe it’s not a blaze, maybe it’s just our eyes adjusting to darkness, but we breathe easier, find our feet, and begin to see.

  December 21, 2017

  2017, A Light in Dark Places, a refuge, Awareness, Body, holidays, Solstice

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• The Art of Returning

  Dear Noble Friends,

  I’ve been away a long time.  Now it feels good and right to come home.  Late yesterday afternoon, a group of us gathered to practice mindfulness meditation and do a bit of yoga and talk in a beautiful yoga studio in Tarrytown (Yogashivaya.com).  The yoga studio was filled with the golden natural light of late summer.

  We spoke about the gifts of practice–and especially about the power of return.  “Sati,” the Pali word for mindfulness literally means to remember or recollect.  On the most practical level, it means to come down out of our thoughts and memories and dreams to focus again on the immediate, present-time experience of breathing in and out, of being in a living body here and now.  All of us who meditate know the quietly momentous quality of the shift from concept to experience–the feeling of awakening from a dream, of returning to our senses.

  People who don’t meditate sometimes have the false impression that it is a way of spacing out or floating away from the real world.  But those of us who practice know it can be like sitting on a hot stove at times.  You can feel like the Buddha facing the armies of Mara.  Waves of desire and anxiety and complex knots of long-suppressed feeling can come, compelling us to get up and do something, go to the refrigerator or the computer, do anything but just sit there and fry.  But if we stay on that seat, if we keep practicing the art of return and remembering–literally pulling together or collecting all the disparate parts of ourselves, body, heart, and mind–there comes a moment when  new power of awareness is released.  There is a feeling of opening and expansion, as if a door or window has opened and fresh air and light come in.  There is the feeling of being met by life.  Suddenly we remember that we are a part of a greater whole–a mysterious but very real and vibrant whole that has been waiting for us all along.

  Sitting can feel like a last resort.  We return to ourselves often when all else has failed, when all our thinking and other efforts to escape suffering can’t bring us peace.  Yesterday, a number of us spoke about times when we have been hurt and confused by our children or other loved ones, times when we are shocked and sad and unsure what to do beyond being triggered (and then bearing the ripples that come from being triggered).  In those times, and in so many other difficult moments in life, the art of returning can remind us that there is always a deeper truth.  We remember there is a truth that cannot be thought, that must be experienced.

  Heartbreak and disappointment can open the door to deeper insights, deeper seeing, truer passion.  Returning to our senses because thinking is leading us nowhere, we remember that each moment, each breath can be a refuge and a resource.  Surrendering to what is instead of what we wish can invite a power greater than our own ego.  Returning to the moment, we can rediscover the light of awareness that is always inside us.  Surrendering to what is, giving up all resistance to reality, giving up every argument, every last hope, we can experience the way the light inside us seeks the light outside us.  We can experience the perfect momentary peace of giving ourselves up like an offering and being received.

  August 25, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, Letting Be, Liberation and Letting Go, Presence, Radical Acceptance, Samadhi, Satipatthana, Seeing, Stillness, the Unknown, Tracy Cochran, Waking Up

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• The Sunlight of Awareness

  “The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty, “ taught Mother Teresa.  “Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.”

  Every year in Japan, the ancestors are remembered and hungry ghosts are fed in a ritual called Oban.  I once experienced a Western Soto Zen version of this practice, including among the hungry ghosts all those beings that society rejects and those parts of ourselves that we forget or abandon or try to hide.

  But how are we to feed the hungry ghosts? Early Buddhist tradition describes the use of spells and also service to the living.  Last week, after I had tea with an extraordinary Japanese woman named Masami Saionji, I realized that we greatest nourishment we have to offer, the salvation that we ordinary mortals can extend to one another, is the light of our own caring attention.

  The chairperson of three international peace organizations and a descendent of the Royal Ryukyu Family of Okinawa, Masami Saionji glowed with kindness as she looked at me, inviting me to see how everyone can make a difference, can be a force for peace and oneness rather than suffering and separation.  She described feeling surrounded by hungry ghosts in her ancestral homeland after the war, despairing that she could help them until there came a deep experience of receiving the light of a greater awareness, a greater force of wisdom and compassion.

  “Sati,” the word for mindfulness in Pali, the ancient language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, means to remember.  To re-member is to pull together or re-collect all our parts, all our members, to be one in all our diversity (including our inner diversity).  “Metta” or loving kindness has the quality of sunlight, shining on all without exception. “Bodhi” mind is heart and mind together, no separation.   May all beings, living and dead, inside and outside, be embraced by the sunlight of our own kind attention.   May all beings be seen, be met, be free.

  May 14, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Angels, Awakening, Awareness, Bodhicitta, Happiness, heart, Heaven, Seeing, Stillness, Waking Up

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• Life Preserver

  I dreamed I was being carried along by life like a leaf on a stream.  In the dream I was wearing the royal blue dress I wore at my daughter’s wedding in England last November, which seemed strange because moments before I was holding my daughter’s tiny hand as we walked down steep brownstone steps in Brooklyn.  As I floated by someone standing on the shore told me my hair looked good and that was nice but hardly enough to make a life.

  Here’s the kicker:  I woke up realizing that I hadn’t been dreaming and that I actually am—that we are—being swept along by life, being lived rather than living, helplessly reacting to circumstances and conditions vast and microscopic, outside and inside.  Interconnected and impermanent we may be, subject to ceaseless change, but I wanted to add my conscious “yes” to life.  I wanted to live deliberately, to actually read and sign the contract that bound me instead of travelling blind.  I wanted to feel it before it passed by.

  It turns out that being present is a courageous act. It involves discerning what we cannot change and changing what we can.  We cannot change other people or the forces that act on us—we cannot change the relentless force of change.  But we can change the quality of our presence here and now.  We can turn away from the old thoughts, pull ourselves out of the deep groove of habit, and be here now.

  We have a special potential the Buddhists call “bodhicitta.”   This isn’t a very graceful metaphor but think of it as an inflatable life raft or vest implanted in our hearts and minds (heart/mind).  “Bodhi” means awakening and “citta” derives from the Sanskrit root “cit,” which means “that which is conscious”—consciousness or mind.  Bodhicitta means “awakening or awakened mind” or “mind of enlightenment.  Bodhicitta is an expansive capacity of awareness and compassion, allowing us to be with change, connecting rather than being swept away.

  April 30, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, be an island, Bodhicitta, Climate Change, Embodiment, Presence, Seeing, Tracy Cochran, Waking Up

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• From “I” to “We”

  “‘Each one, on his own, wouldn’t be able to do it,’” said a policeman whose job it was to guard some 7 million people bathing in the icy Ganges last February, 2013.  “‘They give each other strength.’”  Can being with others–even in conditions of dense crowding and pollution–actually be good for our bodies, hearts, and minds?  The quote above is from an article in a recent National Geographic by Laura Spinney, who followed psychologist Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews in the U.K., as he explored how being part of a crowd can help us in tangible and intangible ways.  “‘They help form our sense of who we are, they help form our relations to others, they den help determine our physical well being,’” Reicher told Spinney.

  Reicher echoed a theory that originated with the 19th-century French  sociologist Emile Durkheim, who called the positive energy that can come off a crowd “collective effervescence.”  This idea fell into shadow during the mass violence of the 20th Century, but was he on to something?  To find out, Reicher and colleagues traveled to the Maha Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival in India that drew at its peak 30 million people.  In spite of rough conditions, unheated tents, crowding, solid evidence that the Ganges is neither drinkable or safe to bathe in, the mostly elderly pilgrims reported feeling rejuvenated.

  How can this be?  Scientists speak of an “urban advantage” when it comes to health, and not just health but the development of art, knowledge, wealth.  The key to the positive benefits seems to reside in the shift from a mere physical crowd to a psychological crowd–in the shift from “I” to “we.”  Indeed, after the great Hindu religious festival broke up and people were headed home, there was a stampede at a train station that killed 36 people. They stopped being in a state of “we,” and shifted back to “I” (or maybe “me first.”)

  During the festival proper (which drew 70 million people over 56 days!) there were no outbreaks of serious disease and an observing Harvard professor of planning and design was amazed at how clean and beautifully organized the whole thing was.  Most mysterious intriguing, the people interviewed reported feeling better afterwards–for a long time afterwards.

  I can’t help thinking about how well I felt in India–not that I did any bathing in the icy, polluted Ganges or dwelled in an unheated tent in such a huge crowd.  But I did glimpse what it can feel like to shift from “I” to “we.”   Home again, I can’t help thinking about how it feels to sit with others as opposed to sitting alone.  There is an energy that appears and supports us all.  And even sitting alone, I feel (at least sometimes) as if I am with others, and with God.

  I can’t help but think of the generous and accomplished woman at the party in Mumbai who said that in the end no one matters, that it is only passion, love, a certain quality of feeling that matters,  I think of the people I met there who were actively shifting from “I” to “we” — shifting from high-earning careers to living in a shared world.   It is beginning to dawn on me that the passion that matters–the quality of mind the Buddha called “ardent” or “long-enduring mind”–comes to us as we shift away from ourselves.  It is beginning to dawn on me that there may be a way out of this global crisis we are in, that there may be a vast renewable resource available with the flip of a switch, from “I” to “We.”

   

  March 11, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, From “I” to “We”, Grace, Happiness, Moved By Love

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• India, At Last

  From the time I was a little girl, I dreamed of being in India. I remember creeping around the living room on a bitterly cold day in Northern New York (no kidding about the cold, as I write this it is -23 degrees, F. in Watertown, -37 degrees factoring in wind chill). I remember knowing that was driving my very neat mother crazy with all this leaping and knocking sofa cushions off and so on, knowing my twin brother really wasn’t into my game, that he was just along for the ride letting me narrate an adventure in an imaginary India because it was too cold to go back outside.

  I didn’t care what they thought. I was seeking something, padding through a gorgeous jungle going towards something I couldn’t name, my black panther consort by my side. Are there black panthers in India? Who knew? It was as if I was practicing something–practicing for something–that I somehow knew without knowing in any literal way. I was practicing another way to be in this world. In that grand and innocent way that children have, I knew I could be brave, free, and noble way that I didn’t actually know. For me, nobility didn’t reside in Middle Earth or English kings and queens and or any rugged American superhero but in India. And it had something to do with being in tune with the beautiful life around me, fully embodied, a regal little island unto myself, yet having the whole jungle including all the animals on your side.

  Many decades later, I sometimes feel an echo of that childhood knowing. While meditating or walking or sometimes in nature I sometimes fleetingly sense there is a finer sensation to be sensed, an energy in us that belongs to a greater life. This energy is not separate from awareness, from knowing, from the light that surrounds us and is always seeking a way in. This is what I’ve learned since childhood: the light takes us as we are, broken and uncertain as we are. The light does not judge us as we judge ourselves. It seeks us, and it blesses everything it touches.

  Right I am now actually packing to fly to India on Sunday, and I have to smile at how un-noble and un-princess-like I really am. There is seemingly no fear beneath me: I imagine losing my passport, my connecting flight, my companions, that I will have all the wrong clothes (gasp). Worst of all, I imagine being on retreat at the Gandhi ashram (where I’m bound, for “Gandhi 3.0”) and being revealed to be…myself. Worn down by jet lag and away from my cozy nest of habits, I will break down and show my wonderful Indian hosts and companions just how small and spoiled and un-noble I really am. Than I remember the light, and that just as we are we are invited to see and feel and be the truth.

  January 23, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, be an island, Gandhi

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