“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.
This is the dark time. December is the month of the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day when the North Pole is tilted farthest from the sun. Our ancient ancestors observed this event, 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 its own devices, the ordinary thinking mind tends towards pessimism. The light will never return, it tells us; it is always darkest before it is pitch black: that kind of grim prediction. The thinking mind can’t help it. Educated as it may be, it is wired to a reptile mind that wants to take swift, crude action, to fight, flee or freeze. The ordinary mind needs to come down out of its skull-sized projection room, where it sits screening movies about what happened or might happen, and enter the world of the body. The body is the realm of fresh observations and sensations and possibilities. When we sit down to meditate or spend time in nature, we rejoin the living world.
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, a place of rituals. But here is where it gets 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 astronomy, engineering, and creativity this project required, and register again that it was undertaken five thousand years ago, in what we call prehistoric times.
Why did these ancient ancestors undertake such a vast and exacting project? Some speculate that they were ritually capturing the sun on the shortest day, as if they could help make the days grown longer. We tend think of our earliest ancestors as if they were very primitive in their thinking and feeling, capable of little more than magical thinking. But the monument they built is evidence of the fineness and depth of their attention and intention.
It is amazing to realize that these bodies we inhabit come to us from ancient ancestors. It is astonishing to register that since prehistoric times, human bodies, hearts, and minds have been the same. Even though our relationship to outer nature isn’t as close, we have the same human nature. We can have the same potential to bring mind and body together, to be still and patient, to notice the slightest lightening of the dark.
In Buddhism, a definition of faith is the ability to keep our hearts open in the darkness of the unknown. The root of “patience” is a Latin verb for “suffer,” which in the ancient sense meant to abide or tolerate. Being patient doesn’t mean being passive. It means going on seeing, going on noticing how things change. When we aren’t wishing for something to be over, when we aren’t shaking the packages to see what is in them, when we aren’t freezing around an idea about what is, we see and hear more. We notice that nature has cycles, cold and darkness pass, that it really is darkest before the dawn.
Still, what do these words about meditation and ancestors have to do with our messy and often painful contemporary lives? Here is one example:
Somewhere between the baggage claim and the car, I noticed my wallet was gone. It had been a long trip and a long flight, and I pictured snuggling into the car and soon my own warm bed, a returning warrior, battered but enriched by my experiences. That bubble burst. I took everything out of my bag and examined the interior, and then I did it again, unwilling to accept the gaping absence of something so essential.
I cycled through the expected reactions: panic and disbelief, the desperate hope that some honest citizen had turned it in, then rage and self-blame, that psychic technique we use to ward off the greater pain of feeling vulnerable, preyed upon in a moment of unconsciousness. Later at home, I lay in bed in the dark, wrestling with the dark angel of why. Why did this have to happen? A chorus of witch-like voices chimed in. I felt like a blind and wounded giant lurching around breaking things: you weren’t paying attention, that’s why. This has happened to you before, and you have been bereft just like this. The universe is definitely trying to get your attention.
And under all this noise, there lurked a darker, quieter truth. In spite of all of our plans and precautions (and I do plan to get a good cross-body bag), life is unpredictable and subject to change. But no matter how hard we work to shore ourselves, to achieve and become someone, there will be loss. Things will not turn out the way we dream. The big underlying truths come out in the face of a challenge.
At about 1 a.m., the iPhone on the bedside table lit up. A band of light flashed across the screen in the dark, a message from my daughter in England. Mom, I’m so sorry this happened to you. In the light of day and in smooth times, such a message would be no big deal, nice words. But that night it was a candle in the darkness, a reminder that there was kindness compassion in the world, that there are forces that shine out steadily in the face of loss.
I felt a little blip of love and gratitude. I answered her message and another flashed back. This exchange felt wiser and more alive than the dire and dramatic racket in my head. I remembered once telling my daughter that being kind is more important than being right. It turns out it is wiser too. I’ve heard compassion defined as responsiveness, the quivering of the heart in the face of suffering. Lying in bed in the dark, watching my iPhone light up, the insight dawned that the meaning of life, the real purpose of our presence here, may be this responsiveness. In the end, practice is about being available to life, about opening our hearts to the passing flow of it, knowing that those hearts will inevitably break because life will always exceed our plans.
There are studies that reveal that people remember coming through hard times more vividly, and value them far more, than unimpeded good times. Why is this? In the middle of night of the darkest season, I realized that sometimes suffering opens the door to deeper qualities of heart and mind. Sometimes a little sunlight floods the darkest chamber.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger, something better, pushing right back.” –Albert Camus
“If we could surrender to Earth’s intelligence, we would rise up rooted, like trees.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
When most of us think of determination, we think first of imposing our will on the world, insisting on a particular outcome, our vision. Yet real determination appears when we keep going, surrendering what the ego wants, which is always to look good, to sound good, to win. Real perseverance is willingness, not will. Really determined people are willing to give up what the ego wants and to go on, no matter what is going on around them. Persevering does not mean being rigid and fixed, but flowing like water, willing to meet the conditions at hand yet never giving up.
I boarded the train, headed for a true unknown. Naturally, at times I was gripped with uncertainty. In those moments, I discovered how fear narrows the focus. When I shifted my attention away from my thoughts and projections about others to my own experience in the moment, my tunnel vision broadened and softened. My view became more generous. By myself on the train, practicing without witnesses, I experienced how giving space and acceptance to my fear brought courage and grounded me.
Things happen all the time in this world that can make you feel as if the ground is giving way beneath your feet. Things that you think are solid and unchanging are not. The body that seemed so reliable, the relationship you thought would last for life, the narrative about your life you took to be reality, everything is subject to change. What can we trust in such a world? It turns out we can trust our deeper wish to wake up and see just this. It turns out that under the ego there is an earthier essence that wishes to be part of a larger world. Touching this earth allows us to open and be more aware.
At the Rubin I was met by kindness. Someone fetched me a cup of tea. Another provided a powerful hand microphone rather than the lapel microphone I usually use. After the introduction, I mounted the steps to the stage and took my seat, focusing on my actual moment by moment experience, not my thoughts. I accepted the fearful images that flitted through, nothing coming out of my mouth, Anne Boleyn treading softly to her execution, whispering prayers as the blade came down. I once heard that generosity is best practiced in private. Determined to show up and give what I could, I became generous with my own experience, not identifying with my fears but embracing them as I might my child or my dog. I discovered the courage of being with what was happening without fighting or freezing or running away.
I encouraged people to use my breathy voice to listen as if the speaker was on her deathbed and about to impart the secret of life. The secret wasn’t in me but in the listening. The more closely we listen, the more we hear, especially the wordless aspiration and knowing in ourselves. All but one person stayed. Afterwards, more than one person assured me they could hear me very clearly. Partly, this was the excellent sound system. But it was also because of the way they listened. More than one person told me they were more touched by my willingness to show up than by anything I might have said about determination under other circumstances.
In the great myth of the Buddha’s journey, there comes a point when he is completely overwhelmed. As he sits meditating under the Bodhi tree, the devil Mara sends temptations to distract him from the wish of his deepest essence. Mara flashes images of the Buddha as a great leader, as a huge success in business with mountains of money, surrounded by beautiful women. He shows the Buddha that he can make India great again if he would just give up his quest to awaken, and get up and do something. The Buddha will not move.
When temptation doesn’t work, Mara tries fear, conjuring visions of terrible armies howling for his blood. These armies are external and also internal, legions of anxieties and fears. But the Buddha does not flinch. Slowly, he reaches down and touches the earth. The classical explanation is that he is asking the Earth itself to bear witness to his many life times of effort. Not his blinding brilliance or his unique talent, mind you, but his effort, his perseverance, his willingness to show up no matter what. His willingness to fail and fail again. “Ever tried. Ever failed,” writes Beckett. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The Buddha understood what the Christian author G.K. Chesterton meant when he wrote, “Everything worth doing is worth doing badly. “
Touching the Earth symbolizes humility, coming down out of our thoughts, out of the busy hive of ego, to join the rest of life. The Latin word humus, the rich living earth, is related to the word humility. When difficulty arises, it creates a clearing in the deadening trance of habit. We remember that what really matters is not the list of worries and desires we spend so much time thinking about every day. What matters is much more essential. Being alive, for example. Taking part in life, having a chance to give and receive in the most elemental ways, taking in the beauty of the world and giving back where we can.
At moments when the ground gives way beneath our feet, it’s good to remember the power of touching the earth, descending from our racing thoughts and fears to an awareness of the present moment. When words fail, we can sometimes discover a new voice and a new kind of determination. We can rise up rooted, like trees.
The Buddha had no plans to teach after he became enlightened. Isn’t that interesting? He planned to abide peacefully and at ease. Undoubtedly he beyond pleasant when someone happened to cross paths with him. But he had no plans to try to convey the great shift that had taken place inside him. And who could blame him? Have you ever tried to convey fully your state of mind?
Undoubtedly, the Buddha was radiant. In one famous story, someone crossed paths with Buddha just after he achieved awakening, and asked him about this radiance. Are you a god? I am awake, answered the Buddha. That was all he said and the man was like, whatever, and walked on. How are we to understand this awakening, this enlightenment, this lighting up and lightening up of all burdens?
We have all seen radiance in the face of babies and those newly in love and sometimes in the face of those who have been spared. One day, as I was walking down a road near my home, intermittently listening to the birds and feeling the air on my skin and sinking back into the dense cloud cover of my own problems and concerns, when a woman rushed out of her house. “My husband is alive!” she exclaimed. “He just had a liver transplant and he is going to be okay!” Her face and eyes were shining. “I just had to tell someone!” She smiled at me and smiled back and agreed that this was wonderful news, stranger to stranger, human to human.
The woman’s face was shining with relief, with wonderment at being alive and out of pain and danger. One definition of “nirvana” I once heard is the breaking of a fever. Sweet cool relief. And yet as we stood there smiling, I wondered if it would last. There was unalloyed happiness at her release from suffering, yet this little edge of anxiety. Can it last?
Sometimes the Buddha is called the Tathagata, which roughly translates as one who has gone beyond, or one who has come and gone. One who has attained a state beyond words, a peace beyond all conditioning, all fretting about can I hold on to this state. This can mean something cosmic. But it can also mean something very human and down to earth.
After his awakening, the Buddha became the designated driver at the wild and sweaty party of life. He went beyond by becoming extremely calm and collected. Recollected, to be exact. The ancient word for mindfulness means to remember, literally re-membering or re-collecting all the different parts of ourselves, body, heart, and mind. This state of recollection, of bringing head, heart, and body all together brings a rootedness and a freedom and a presence that people who are carried away by one part just can’t know.
Have you ever tried to reason with someone who was drunk on alcohol or their own political views or swept by some other raging passion? Suddenly, or not so suddenly, you see that that it is just futile to try to talk with them and just stop. “Never argue with a fool,” writes Mark Twain. “Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”
After his awakening, the Buddha was still physically present in the world. In fact, he was radiantly present. He wasn’t blinded by his own desire or aversion or delusion. He was sober and relaxed and how can you transmit that to another? And yet according to legend, Brahma, the god of creation, came to the Awakened One and implored him to teach, asking him to see that there were at least some beings without too much dust in their eyes.
What are we to make of this story? Did a divine apparition really appear and have this exchange with the Buddha? Or did the whole event happen inside the Buddha? In a sense, the question is irrelevant. All great myths convey living truths. They are organic and accessible to us, and always changing as we change. The god of creation may not touch down before us but at one point or another life itself will challenge us to make a stand for our deepest truth. Situations will come along that cause us to remember who we really are. At certain times and in certain places, we will remember our deepest wishes and intentions. We remember that what we really, really, really want is not to be self contained and away from it all but to participate in life freely and without fear. In our sanest most awake moments, we don’t want huge conquests. We don’t want to take at all. We want to share our moments of lightening, of light.
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.
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.”
Tracy Cochran 