Tag: Liberation and Letting Go

• 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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• 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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• Wait

  

  “The first rule in answering, if there is one, is to wait,” writes Lillian Firestone in the new issue of Parabola, “Liberation & Letting Go.”   This brief, powerful essay stopped me in my tracks when I first read it because I happened to be on the train coming home from teaching a beginner’s meditation course.   I had just answered quite a few questions.  “The part of our brain that has the ‘right’ answer for everything is a dull place, built of endless chains of associations, everything we knew in the past.  This knowing may be factually correct but there’s a problem with it.  It is dead.”

  To respond in a way that is alive takes courage because it means waiting, not saying the “right” answer, but sitting there open and vulnerable and not knowing, hoping a response unique to the moment might arise.

  Riding home on Metro North that cold night, I realized Firestone was right.  And more.  It dawned on me that liberation does not consist in letting go of our connection with others and with the world around us, but in letting go of our separation.   Liberation begins when we can be still and know that if we restrain ourselves from saying any old thing that happens to stacked up under the dust in the kingdom of our own mind, there will be more.   A fresh response from a new impression from the living world will come from a deeper place.

   

  November 15, 2013

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, Liberation and Letting Go

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• Big News!

  

  In May 2001, in a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, a Tibetan Buddhist monk donned a cap studded with hundreds of sensors that were connected to a state -of- the- art EEG, a brain-scanning device capable of recording changes in his brain with speed and precision.  When the monk began meditating in a way that was designed to generate compassion, the sensors lit up in a way that registered the shift to regions of the brain that activate in a state great joy.  “The very act of concern for others’ well-being, it seems creates a greater state of well-being within oneself,” writes Daniel Goleman.  When I read that and wrote about it in Publishers Weekly about fourteen years ago,  I pictured the monks brain sensors lighting up like those photos of the earth from space that show twinkling lights in the darkness.   Hard scientific proof that compassion leads to joy!  This was the kind of news flash I wanted to help spread!

  Before I came to Parabola, I was a journalist and book reviewer for big mainstream publications, including The New York Times and Publishers Weekly.  I kept at every chance to write about books like Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman.  I lobbied to make sure the book review received a special tinted box and a big red star, the better to draw attention to a book about then-new breakthroughs in the neuroscience of emotion, the scientific study of consciousness, the fruits of collaboration between leading scientists and Buddhist monastics including the Dalai Lama in a still-ongoing series of dialogues called Mind and Life.

  Reviews for PW, which then went up on Amazon, had to be compact so I worked really, really hard (too hard) to drive home how awesome it was that Western Science and Buddhism were joining forces.  My mission as I saw it was to make Goleman’s important book stand out before it could be lost.   This was my final sentence:  “Goleman travels beyond the edge of the known, and the report he sends back is encouraging.”   Thanks to the magic of the internet that review is still up there on Amazon (isn’t it strange to think that everything we write , every little exclamatory burst, is still out circulation like space junk or stored in vast unknown repositories).  Over the years, I came to meet and admire Daniel Goleman, his wife Tara Bennett-Goleman, and many more leading Buddhist thinkers and teachers.  Yet the almost panicky urgency about helping get the word out began to ease.  As I practiced, just the simple daily practice of sitting down, breathing, being still, I began to see that the deeper truth is always here, waiting for a chance to arise.

   “The mystery of seeing.  This is what Meister Eckhart brings for our edification,” writes David Appelbaum in Parabola’s new issue “Liberation & Letting Go.”   “The gateway is to be found in the releasement from what Eckhart calls the ‘me and mine.’”   I love “releasement,” a firm, solemn, formal word, as if a prison door is swinging open, allowing us to walk out into a bigger world.  A friend in my weekly sangha once shared this insight about wisdom:  it is the same in every tradition.  This is because wisdom is not a formula–it is truth seen in the midst of life, live, wild truth.   Wisdom must cannot really be given.  It is a way of seeing that must arise in your own life.  Yet there are guides and timeless guidance.  It is all there in already.  We just have to actually DO what is said.  (This is why I love Parabola so much.   It treats the timeless like news).

  Seeing is the way.  Seeing lights us up inside.  No detail is too small.  For example, we may think it’s very unremarkable, not really worth noticing at all–the way we automatically tag every impression with “I, me, mine” or “like, dislike, neutral.”  Yet it turns out that this incessant automatic tagging, this involuntary clutching at our experience–especially our feelings–is what keeps us imprisoned.    In a timeless collaboration, the Buddha and Meister Echkart take us beyond the known.

  November 12, 2013

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, Liberation and Letting Go, Parabola, Seeing

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