Anything can happen at any time. This is the truth of impermanence. Last Sunday, some of us experienced this in a delightful way. Swiss, a one-year-old Service Dog in training, came to sit with us as we meditated. Recently, I was talking about dogs and there she stood, a one-year-old half Golden, half Labrador Retriever.
Sometimes when I give meditation instructions, I encourage people to bring the attention to the body with an attitude of gentle allowing, as if it was a good dog. Swiss, who comes from a litter of puppies named after different cheeses (Is there is a little Munster in training?), is a good dog. This means she is peaceful and loving by nature, sensitive and responsive, naturally inclined to want to participate in life. We can feel this in her fresh furry presence, and also when we close our eyes and sit. At moments, we emerge from the shadows of thought and feel sheer joy at being here.
Being young, Swiss also sometimes manifests puppy ways, a brief impulse to cuddle with someone, or poke her nose into the bell in case there was food in there. This too, is just like the body. And just like the body, she came back to the main purpose of the evening, to sat quietly and keep us company. Just by sitting here breathing, she reminded us of the basic goodness of being alive in the moment. She helped us remember that we are part of a greater wholeness.
Anything can happen at any time. We see this when terrible things happen: tornadoes, war, mass shootings in schools, in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We see the stunned look on the faces of those who lost loved ones without warning. We see the survivors who can’t fathom what happened. Nothing can be said at such a time. No practice or imparted truth can soften or distance the devastation that comes from watching loved ones and innocents taken by violence. And yet into that great suffering…comes comfort dogs.
A week before Swiss came to sit with us, I described watching a video clip of a brigade of gentle, highly trained, mostly Golden Retrievers (and possibly Retriever Labs), being led into a center full of survivors of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. They came to help just by sitting down and being with people, breathing, sharing their warm dog presence. The dogs wore little jackets like Swiss, inviting people to pet them and hug them. Many of the dogs were veterans, having shown up in Newtown, Connecticut, and other places of national tragedy.
Even when people seemed immured in pain, these gentle dogs leaned in, literally leaning on people and sitting on their feet. Think of how comforting that gentle presence would be, the sides of a soft, furry golden dog body rising and falling, soft dog eyes patiently looking at you. Those dog eyes were free of judgment and opinion and valuation. That whole gentle dog presence was just plain present.
Our own body can be a comfort dog. It can be a refuge and support. I gently encourage you to try this sometime: give your loving attention to your own body. Silently or when you are alone say to yourself (listeners may not understand), “good body, thank you for being there for me.” Think of all your body has been through, all those cigarettes or punishing diets or overwork Shut your eyes and register how loyal the body is to you, quietly breathing and pumping blood, and walking from here to here. Sense how eagerly it responds to the gift of your own attention. It can practically bring tears to your eyes, the generosity and loyalty of this poor, sweet body, the way it forgives you for all those years of neglect, the late nights or drugs and alcohol or myriad other forms of mistreatment.
As long as it breathes, the body comes when you call. Even when it’s tired or doesn’t feel particularly good, it responds to the touch of the attention. Imagine the love and kindness you would feel for an actual dog this loyal. You wouldn’t dream of criticizing its hair or pointing out that it could stand to lose a few pounds. You would express simple love and gratitude and joy at being with this good dog.
So what do think would happen if you turned this kind of loving accepting attention on your own body? When we sit down to try, a new kind of feeling begins to blossom, a feeling of being present and alive. Even if life feels completely parched and stranded when I start, my brain choked with thought and care, I have a moment when I remember that life is good. I remember that I am part of a greater wholeness, that I am supported and sustained by forces and resources beyond my reckoning. I remember that even on my worst day, I am loved.
“This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
–Mary Oliver
“Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.”
–William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“Between stimulus and response there is a space, “ writes psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl in his unforgettable memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
When we practice mindfulness meditation, we enter the conscious space between stimulus and response. We join a great resistance movement. We resist the automatic flow of reactions and thoughts, turning the light of attention towards our experience. The Zen master Dogen taught: “Take the backward step and shine the light inward.”
The usual meaning of resistance is an opposing force. It can also mean the capacity to withstand outside influences, to ward off a cold, say, or tolerate certain drugs. The English word comes from the late Latin resistere, to hold back. People speak of “the path of least resistance.” The path the Buddha brought was “against the stream,” the path of most resistance. Viva la resistance!
When we enter the still space, when we turn back towards ourselves, we discover that what we really are deep down inside is not a fixed identity, but awareness—an awareness of being alive. This awareness is direct and simple and wordless: in breath and out breath, the sense of being present in a body. And yet, it is quietly amazing. Without any words at all, it carries the sense that we are connected to Being. We can feel as if we are participating in a shared awareness. We can feel as if dust is being blown off an ancient part of our heart that knows what is sacred.
In Parabola, Viktor Frankl’s grandson Alexander Vesely explains how generous Frankl was. He once bought a radio for a stranger because he overheard the man say he couldn’t afford to buy one. How surprising this might seem in a man who endured and witnessed the lowest humanity has to offer. Wouldn’t he save his money? Wouldn’t he do everything he could to wall himself off from strangers and protect himself? Yet he explained to his grandson that buying that radio brought more meaning to his life than saving that $50.
As paradoxical as it might seem to an outside observer, sitting down and turning the light of attention to ourselves, connects us to the shared world. In the still space between stimulus and response, we remember who we really are. We go from there.
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.”
Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is that of bell ringer. Before dawn and before every meditation session during the day, the bell ringers walk around the grounds and through the halls of a rambling brick building that was once a Jesuit seminary, striking a bronze bell that is held suspended by a thick strap. I remember being curled in a little cell of a room, hearing the bell sound deep and low in the distance, echoing through my dreams like a gorgeous fog horn. As the “awakener” progressed on his or her appointed rounds, layer upon layer of reverberations built up so that the ringer literally struck a chord that touched the heart—at least this heart.
I remember walking to the meditation hall with others as the bell sounded, feeling as if I was being led out of isolation into a greater wholeness. I felt as if the bell was a torch that had been passed from the distant past to guide me onto an ancient path. The contemporary Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn speaks of waking the bell so that it can call us to our true home. We wake each other, I found that on retreat. But the home I felt called to was not a fixed abode—even a “divine abode,” which is the common English translation for the finer emotional states of friendliness, compassion, joy and equanimity. I came to feel as if I were remembering another way of abiding with life, inwardly as well as outwardly. My true home turned out to be the fluid state of seeking and following the path to awakening.
“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until I was lifted and struck,” writes Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. According to discourses found in both the Theravada school’s Pali canon, and some of the Agamas in the Chinese Buddhist canon, the Noble Eightfold Path, the way to awakening and liberation, was not invented but was rediscovered by Gautama Buddha. “In the same way I saw an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times,” taught the Buddha.
I think people from different times and cultures approach spiritual practice in different ways. At least I was influenced by the American ideal of the rugged individualist. Since the Insight Meditation Society is in rural Massachusetts, I often prepared for its rigors by thinking of Henry David Thoreau, who lived alone for several years in a tiny cabin at the edge of Walden Pond. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” I went on retreat because I desperately wanted to know what it means to be alive. But I went believing that one should be self-sufficient and wary of following anyone else’s path.
I was mindful that when Thoreau about leaving Walden, he mused about how quickly a path can be worn in the earth and in the mind: “How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! ” Somehow I missed the forest of Thoreau’s message for the romance of living in a little cabin the trees, for Thoreau follows that burst of American individualism by concluding that when a person moves in the direction of living a more real and essential life, “new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him….In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, nor weakness weakness.” It took a long time for me to register that at Walden, Thoreau found a way to abide peacefully with life—a way to live in which he was not independent and alone, but part of a greater wholeness. Through voluntary simplicity, he found a path to a greater way of living, a path to truth.
As moved as I was, I didn’t volunteer to be a bell ringer, signing up only for group jobs like pot washer or floor cleaner, seeking to be a worker among workers, another pair of hands. Although I knew that ringing the bell was really a group activity also. A friend who volunteered told me he wasn’t just waking others but himself and also the bell. We wake each other. We offer the path the living material of our own lives. We bring the path to life.
Yet I saw how quickly a moment of open awareness would attach to memories, images, and thoughts—how quickly it would be enlisted in the cause of being a particular special “someone.” Best not to inflame this tendency even further by taking on an auspicious spiritual role, I thought. In college, I read a novel based on Dante’s Inferno, about a young African-American man making his way through various hellish American cities. One image stayed with me, the young man at the end of a bar, hiding a secret purity under a ratty old coat and a cool look. For a long time, I treated being on retreat as if I were in a rough bar. I acted as if I thought it best to keep my deepest wish and my full human nature under wraps. To risk following the one was to risk exposing the other.
I misunderstood what the Buddha meant when he told his monks to abide “independent, not clinging to anything in the world.” This was not without basis. One becomes so sensitive during a silent retreat that a harsh or indifferent glance can slice right through you, just like the bell. But slowly I learned the truth of what Thich Nhat Hahn says: “But just as the suffering is present in every cell of our body, so are the seeds of awakened understanding handed down to us from our ancestors.” I began to understand that the true independence isn’t individuality, which is clinging to self (if only for protection), but falling more deeply into life and into my true humanity.
For a long time, I thought I had to go it alone. But one day I took my seat in the meditation hall and looking around at the others, amazed and touched that so many of us managed to come so far to be together—and not just from New York or California or even South Africa but through all kinds of difficulties and challenges. And all of this common effort made to be quiet together and try for a greater awareness, unattached to particular memories or thoughts or feelings, free from being a particular someone. Wrapped in shawls or yoga blankets, sitting still with backs straight on cushions, we looked like the earliest humans, at least as I thought of them. We were also like early humans in the sense of being like children again, who seem to open to reality with their whole beings.
At first, turning the attention to essential facts of life in such conditions, to the body and the breathing, felt huge and daunting, like descending into a vast cave full of unexplored forces with just a dim flickering light. Yet, I had the sense that if I just kept going, I might come upon wonders. And over time wonders were revealed, chief among them the light of conscious awareness or mindfulness itself. Although it often seemed as if it wasn’t much brighter than a night light, I came to realize that it was the strongest force in me because unlike other parts and attachments that changed, this light seemed to be independent of outside circumstances, clinging to nothing in this world. It was amazing to discover, that this little light of mindfulness—and my intermittent search for greater awareness and true liberation—turned out to be my truest home, what was most abiding.
According to the great Zen master Dogen the path to awakening and liberation is not a line but a circle. When we sit down to remember the light of mindfulness, when we sit down to meditate or otherwise seek to awaken to what is truly abiding, we are joined by the Buddha and awakened ones from ancient times. I felt enormously supported on retreat and I began to wonder if the Buddha’s rediscovery of the path of might not have been an extraordinary act of remembering that came to benefit beings in all times.
Smirti in Sanskrit, sati in Pali, and Drengpa in Tibetan. All these words mean to remember, and they point towards a quality of understanding and living that draws on our whole being. To “re-member” or “re-collect” means to have the head and heart and body all in alignment, all collected, concentrated, and calmed. I realized that Thoreau must have discovered this state, which the Buddhists call “samadhi,” when he described in his journals being in accord with nature, his mind like a lake untouched by a breath of wind, his life in “obedience to all-just laws” In a state of samadhi, the Buddha rediscovered the path to full awakening and liberation.
The Eightfold Path of the Buddha contains eight steps or trainings: right view or understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness—culminating in a higher understanding and intention. The contemporary scholar monk Bhikkhu Bodhi writes that what is commonly translated as “steps” is better described as components or strands, “comparable to the intertwining strands of a single cable that require the contributions of all for maximum strength. “Many Buddhist teachers substitute the translation “right” with “noble” or “whole.” When we are in a state of inner alignment, when we are mindful, it is natural to live in a way that is more sensitive and resonant with the life around us, where non-grasping and non-harming is not a kind poverty or weakness but nobility.
In outside life there is no bell, no sitting with allies in a big hall, no stillness in which to come upon a calm lake or explore a cave. There are storms. It can seem frustratingly circular, that the first step on the path is right understanding. It seems that all on our own, we are to come to an understanding that consists of two main strands–that all our actions have consequences and that there is no inherently fixed self.
Yet there are openings. In the wake of a hurricane, for example, we lost power for four days. I collected sticks in the yard to burn as kindling in the wood stove, and hauled buckets of water into the house to flush the toilet and wash the dishes. I performed these actions in a slow and unpracticed way. My true vulnerability, my true lack of connection inside and outside, was suddenly painfully exposed. I saw, again, that I am a collection of parts, of thoughts and dreams, and that I am at the mercy of forces outside my control.
And yet I saw that this very act of seeing, of surrendering to what is and really seeing the state of affairs, brought a new understanding. A quality of mindfulness appeared that was quicker and more sensitive than my usual thought. You might say I pulled myself together. I became aware that a house grows dark and cold at night without someone to build a fire and tend it, and that it’s good to wake up to a cup of coffee and a tidy house. I became the hearth keeper, the matriarch. I saw that while I was clearly no one special at these chores, I was engaged in something useful.
It takes a long time to cook over a fire—hours! Yet this was not an inconvenience but the center of the evening. The light and warmth from the fire, the promise of warm food, the common talk of how it was coming along, and the stories as we ate, as all of this unfolded, I realized there is always another possible way of living, a way of relating mindfully to what is elemental and crucial. I also saw that you can give yourself to a task in way that makes it an act of generosity, and at the same time a means of inner search for connection. Tending the stove, I realized that what Buddha taught may actually be possible to realize, because we and our ancestors are not separate. They live on in us in the rhythm of our breathing, in the light of mindfulness, in our capacity to open to what is. They accompany us when we seek to remember.(
One day this will happen to you: life will surprise you. Life will show you that you have been dreaming, and it will wake you. We each have countless examples. Here is one of mine.
Once many years ago, I took my young daughter on a meditation retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh—a retreat that included children. At the beginning of the first night, as the children clustered at the foot of the stage, looking up at the great Zen master, I felt as if a cool dream was coming true. Thich Nhat Hanh smiled and looked into my daughter’s eyes as few adults ever look at children. Although he sat very still on stage, the Vietnamese Zen master seemed to bow to her inwardly, offering 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. “Their faces look like flowers, their eyes, their ears…”
Alex stayed hidden under her black jacket. Surrounded by the monks and nuns from the French monastic community Plum Village, the great teacher calmly lifted his eyes from my daughter, taking in the some 1,200 people who had gathered for a five-day retreat on the wooded campus of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in upstate New York. As Thay, as he is affectionately known, kept talking about the “freshness” or openness and sensitivity of children, I couldn’t help but be struck by the way Alexandra was ducking for cover.
The great Zen teacher described freshness as one of the qualities we possess in our true essence, our Buddha nature. It appears when we return to our true home in the present moment. Yet Alexandra, shrouded in nylon, suddenly reminded me that freshness also includes those times when we feel raw and vulnerable.
What had I been thinking? Suddenly, it seemed terribly clear that I was not such a cool mom, that I had been lost in a dream. I had no clue that by bringing I risked exposing her to how we are. At the end of that first agonizing night, the great Zen master called us all to listen to the sound of the bell, calling us all to our true home. “My true home is in Brooklyn,” Alexandra whispered. It seemed like a deafening whisper to me. All around us children sat quietly. I had horrible thoughts and horrible thoughts about my horrible thoughts. I burned. And over the next five days, it got worse.
One day this will happen to you: life will open a vein of vulnerability or shame or pain that is just dazzling in its power. The force of it will amaze you. This will happen no matter who you are. When you sit with this pain, you will find that it fills you. The cup of the body and mind will not be half empty or half full so there is room for the air of mindful awareness. The cup will be full to the point of running over. And this pain will not feel universal, but very personal and defining. The ego has been called the “pain body.” At such times, you will know what this means.
One day this you will discover that spiritual practice doesn’t take you up out of the pain of your life but down into it. You will discover that freedom comes as you come to know your suffering, as you learn to hold your pain and sadness and rage as you would hold a child, as Thich Nhat Hahn teaches. If you do this, life will continue to surprise you. Help will come from unexpected places. Here’s what came to me:
All the participants of the retreat, including the children, were invited to join Thich Nhat Hanh for walking meditation, walking slowly along pathways in the woods to a lake. It was late October, and leaves were falling. Alex was walking up front with the great teacher, but she split off to scamper 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 alone, sounding to her mother like a bear crashing through the forest. I dropped my head and trudged along, instinctively creating the impression that Alex was not my daughter. Suddenly, I noticed Thich Nhat Hanh gliding along like a mountain on rails next me. His presence felt very strong and centered, yet his face looked calm and fresh. My face (and mind and heart) ached like a clenched fist. Alex raced to the water’s edge, where she stood waving and smiling at me. I felt a pang of love for her and pain, pain, pain at the welter of thoughts and feelings surging through me.
The bell calling for mindfulness sounded. I knelt down in the sand and looked down. My pain filled me, screening out the world. After what seemed to be a long, lonely time, the bell rang again, and again, and a third time. I slowly looked up to see an old man’s hand gently stroking a familiar head of ash blond hair. Thich Nhat Hahn and my daughter were sitting side by side. It slowly dawned on me that it was Alexandra who had rung the bell, calling the rest of us back to our true home.
“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.”
Yet there are openings. In the wake of a hurricane, for example, we lost power for four days. I collected sticks in the yard to burn as kindling in the wood stove, and hauled buckets of water into the house to flush the toilet and wash the dishes. I performed these actions in a slow and unpracticed way. My true vulnerability, my true lack of connection inside and outside, was suddenly painfully exposed. I saw, again, that I am a collection of parts, of thoughts and dreams, and that I am at the mercy of forces outside my control.
Tracy Cochran 