In this part of the world, they say that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. This year this is true. There were high winds and power outages here yesterday, and that wild weather seemed to mirror the fear and uncertainty raging across the land. Nothing seems safe or certain any more. It is a time of extremes. It is a very good time to practice together.
In that spirit, I interrupt the flow of this newsletter to ask you to please SAVE THE DATE! On Friday, April 19, there will be a mini-workshop and book signing for my forthcoming book Presence at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. The event will be from 6-7:30 pm. A link will be sent out shortly. April 19! 6-7:30 pm! Please come!
Also, please consider pre-ordering my book. I’m told that this is a very kind and helpful thing to do for a book, and I really appreciated it. Here is the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Presence-Art-Being-Home-Yourself/dp/1645471802/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3M7CU8TH0SVN2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DGSYxLTHGMNYVwz9ZHkbqRz1gV0Aps9Ist56dSzC5FnGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps._v-1-nDfIaH-7T0kclkQzRo_qPDbfIHw_2WCMebUIOk&dib_tag=se&keywords=tracy+cochran+presence&qid=1709575858&sprefix=%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-1
This stormy month will definitely go out like a lamb in a symbolic way. March ends with Easter weekend. I love finding the resonance with holidays and our practice, and it feels right to begin with Good Friday. We can allow ourselves to be still and sink into the part of the earth we call the body, allowing ourselves to be in here without hope of escape. The great paradox is that we find our way to a new life when we stop striving for it.
If you took a picture of a group of people meditating from the outside, it would look as if they were all shut down. Yet sitting there with eyes closed, turning our attention inward is not shutting down or dropping out but the opposite. We open up to life.
In Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts, “sati” or mindfulness literally means to remember the experience of the present moment. Remembering our experience without any story attached can seem very unpromising. Being with sorrow or fear, without hope of release feels like sentencing ourselves to something very grim. And yet as we are willing to be with these feelings we discover that they are not solid things.
It is only when we are willing to sit down with sorrow or hurt or disappointment or anger we discover that these states we dread contain surprises. Sorrow contains tenderness, and longing contains aspiration and courage, and so on. We may uncover and unexpected willingness–even a happy willingness–to be present here on earth.
The way to awaken from suffering is not up but down into embodied experience. Jesus taught his followers to be like children. The Buddha based his enlightenment on a memory from childhood.
It is also very helpful to remember that, to quote Anne Lamotte, Easter seemed like a win for the Romans. The Buddha’s awakening also took place in midst of what seemed like complete failure. He gave up everything–wife and child and job and worldly status–to go off and attain the highest yogic states and then he gave that up!
The man who would be Buddha split off from his fellow ascetics, collapsing by a riverbank, broken and despairing. A young woman riding an ox observed him and took pity. In a spontaneous gesture of compassion, she offered him food. Touching food, especially from the hands of a woman, was forbidden to him as an ascetic. But he was outside all that now. He was a failure and therefore free.
When you are really, really hungry, taking food really feels like rebirth and renewal. It feels like deliverance from the wilderness. It feels like love. Once the man who would Wake Up ate and felt this delicious ease, there bubbled up a memory from childhood. The Buddha remembered being a young child, sitting alone under a tree, watching his father and the other men from the village plowing the fields in a spring festival. He pretended to be asleep, so his nannies (he was a prince so he had several) went off a little ways to watch the festivities.
The Buddha remembered the wonderful feeling of being by himself in nature. He was alone yet not alone. He was secluded in the liberating way that children can be secluded. He was unselfconscious, realizing a deep communion with life. According to the myth, the child saw some insects whose homes were being torn up by the plowing. His heart opened to them. Secluded yet deeply connected to life, at peace yet filled with compassion for life–this was the memory and the attitude the Buddha took under the Bodhi tree until he reached full awakening.
It wasn’t an easy night, or a short one, heaven knows. The devil Mara came to him, tempting him and terrifying him. The Buddha reached down and touched the earth. There are many ways to understand this gesture. One that we might try is to remember our earliest experience, our innate childlike awareness.
I remember being a child on one particular Good Friday. It was a beautiful spring day, and I was lying outside in the grass, inside a circle of big purple and white lilac bushes. Who knows why but I was singing “Thumbelina,” a big hit of the time. I remember the warmth of the sun and the scent of lilacs and the beauty of the sky and the clouds and the budding trees that arched above me. I remember feeling suffused with a love of life and a sense of hope and possibility.
My mother called me to come in the house and be still. In those days, there were particular hours in the afternoon for being still as a way of honoring the events of Good Friday–it was unseemly that I should be outside singing to the lilac bushes. Reluctantly, I went in and sat on the couch, not at all sure what I was actually supposed to be doing. My mother wasn’t much for explanations especially about religion. For her, it was a matter of decorum. She ordered me to sit down and stop talking and eventually understanding of some sort would come or the ime would be up, either way. In retrospect, this approach had a Zen-like simplicity: just sit. So I sat there, not-knowing, trying to conjure a sense of connection with this grave event from the distant past.
I thought about what it would be like to be in such a terrible situation, abandoned, in pain, facing the darkness of the world. And then something extraordinary happened. Love and grace swooped in and everything shifted. I wasn’t sure if any of the things I was thinking about were correct. I just sat there being still, moving from resistance to wondering and after a while I was released.
This month, if you wish, notice how life moves. Notice the truth of impermanence.