Tag: Tracy Cochran
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On Being Nobody…and No One
Notice how it feels to do nothing. Set aside a certain period of time to shift your attention to the experience of being present–not meditating in a formal way but noticing the gaps between thought. Our deepest insights often come when we are not doing, including thinking in a focused way, but just being. Ultimately, awakening takes willingness, not will. We must be willing to leave the known world of the thinking and rest in open awareness. We must let go of our incessant attempts to do and be How deeply we fear being nobody. One way to think of the ego is as a defense against pain, particularly the pain of being no one. It shores us up, reminding us that we are somebody. We update our internal resumes and narratives constantly. We seek new skills and go on self-improvement regimes of all kinds, including the practice of mindfulness meditation. And we may improve a little. We may feel a little more peaceful, a little more resilient and less quick to anger. This is good, and for many people good enough. Yet deep down we may sense that even in the name of spiritual practice we are seeking to plant a flag in ground that gives way under our feet. Nothing we do can stop time’s passage and all the things that keep happening that we don’t want to happen, like aging and loss. Even with a very deep and well-established practice that has grown new neurons and reduced stress and accomplished everything else that scientific studies promises, even then we still touch the sadness of life. We touch darkness and pain. And that fear of being no one. It may come as a relief that in ancient times, when people first heard of Buddha’s teachings on emptiness or no self, it was considered most auspicious to feel not joy but terror. One classical explanation is that to feel fear is to intuit what must come. The ego must volunteer to abdicate the throne in the center of your life. We must leave the skull-sized kingdom of our thinking and be no one, just presence, at least some of the time. We may begin a mindfulness practice just hoping for a little more peace or inner spaciousness, a better brain, and so on. But slowly, slowly the practice leads on to the realization that real peace and freedom come in those moments when we are no one. We notice that when we are more awake we are not thinking about a self–or not just thinking. We discover that being no one, or no one in particular, is not diminishment but expansion. It is awakening to our human nature, our shared nature, noticing that it isn’t frozen. It flows. We yearn to be part of a larger life. Yet sometimes, especially in winter, we discover that the way to a larger life is to be still. We want to be in a place where anything can happen at any time, yet in our own “Fortress of Solitude,” as Superman called his polar retreat. We yearn to be in the world, but not of it. Superman, Spiderman, Batman, the quintessential New York-based comic book heroes, swoop in to perform astonishing deeds at crucial moments, but they also retreat into protective identities, becoming Clark Kent, a mild-manner reporter at the Daily Planet, the philanthropist Bruce Wayne, or Peter Parker, a high school student living in Queens, who anguishes about teenage themes, rejection and loneliness and belonging. These heroes dazzle with their superhuman strength or resourcefulness and agility. Yet none of them want to risk being unmasked. It’s so interesting. They don’t want to risk the very human pain of vulnerability. We all fear being vulnerable, exposed as less than solid or coherent, changing with changing conditions. At one point in the unfolding saga of Superman, he tells Lois Lane that Clark Kent is just two words, a simple fixed identity. In reality, he is “The Blur,” the term used by a bystander who witnessed him in action. If we could see ourselves from out in space, we would all be blurs, streams of experience. Batman became a masked crusader after the murder of his parents. He vowed to avenge their death by dispensing justice. He trained for years, creating his identity as a positive form of revenge. Peter Parker became Spider Man after being bitten by a radioactive spider. We are all like this. We make do. We compensate. We learn. And sometimes, our wounds become our great strengths. Maybe superheroes express a universal yearning to soar above it all–to help this suffering world but then return to a comfortable perch. Many of us turn to spiritual practice in the first place, hoping for a way to smooth out our bumpy lives, or at lease find a bit of respite. For a long time, I thought of meditation as a portable fortress of solitude. But most of us also yearn to draw closer to life., including our own experience. It turns out that the real gift of meditation may be to allow us to be with exactly what we are and what is arising. We learn to take off the cape and the mask, trusting that along with the vulnerability that appears we discover an awareness that is very still yet also very open and suffused with a power greater than our personality. Allow yourself to notice–or remember–times when you let go of control, trusting that you could meet life with presence, moment by moment.
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Be Straw
Once a poor miller was summoned to meet with a king. The summons itself must have filled him with terror. Evolutionary biologists tell us that we fear public speaking and other ways of being on the spot because we are all wired to link survival with acceptance by the tribe. And this king was the absolute ruler of the miller’s tribe. He held the power of exile and even of death.
No one knows the official purpose of the meeting. A good guess is that it was about how things were going down at the mill. A king wouldn’t ask a miller to tea or to ask his opinion about foreign affairs. At some point in the conversation, however, he must have asked the poor man about his family. We know this because all subjects were trained never to speak to kings and queens unbidden.
But what an answer! It reverberates through the ages. The poor miller boasted that he had a beautiful daughter who could spin straw into gold. In some versions of the story the miller first spoke of a beautiful daughter with golden hair. Probably, this sparked zero interest. Possibly, the poor miller felt like no one in those cold, royal eyes, and as if his daughter was no one too.
What we know for sure is that the miller spun out, as we say these days. He left the earth of his living, moment-by-moments experience and thought of something that he thought the king would find more fantastic. This is perfectly natural, of course. Our brains are well equipped for flights away from our immediate embodied reality. And our egos and personalities are built to help us survive and be someone special in this world. Imagining, especially in children but not just, can be a way of exploring the world.
When I was a little girl, for example, I used to pretend that was a jungle princess in primordial India, padding around with an invisible panther consort named Striker. Striker was super intelligent and super strong. We both had powers of telepathy and teleportation, which helped us when we were dispatched on various spy missions in the capitals of Europe. In reality, of course, I was an ordinary child playing in a backyard in Northern New York. Yet imagining I was an amalgam of Mowgli and James Bond, helped me run and climb trees and hide behind bushes in a way that helped me play and explore how wonderful it was to be in a body.
But as fun and natural and bolstering as our fantasies can be, they can also take us away from the real magic of being alive on this earth. When we get pulled into an orbit of thought, we can forget the real grandeur and scale of seemingly simple things: breathing, walking, being part of life. We can get so caught up in the fantasy world of thought that we forget how good it is to be alive. We forget who and what we truly love.
We can only imagine how the poor miller felt when he came to his senses and remembered his love for his daughter and how much he valued her life on its own terms. By then the damage was done. She was imprisoned in a dungeon in the royal palace, sentenced to spin straw into gold. I can’t think of her plight without remembering what it was like to sit up at night in college, writing papers. I remember the pressure I felt to spin the straw of my own impressions into gold. I remember layering my papers with learned quotes from far more distinguished people, demonstrating my learning but also something not so good: I left my essence, my native impressions and heart and mind, for a shinier, wittier version. The practice of coming home to the experience of being in this body in this moment, opening up to the life inside and outside, is a way of turning all that acquired gold back into the straw of what I really am.
Sometimes we remember what is really essential and precious. In the wake of a loss, we feel the true size of the presence of a person. In a time of famine or calamity, we remember what really has value. Milling grain, for example, is an ancient human occupation. Even hunter-gatherer societies had millers. I once visited Gandhi’s ashram in the heart of India once. There is a big mill wheel on the porch of his humble dwelling. The great leader and everyone else on the ashram spent time every day turning the wheel, which I couldn’t budge. But I understood the value. Feeding people is inherently finer and even more magical than spinning gold. Just think of how it feels to eat when you are really hungry. It can feel as if life itself is pouring back into you and supporting you. It feels like love.
The miller’s beautiful daughter was thrown into a royal dungeon piled high with straw and given until daybreak to spin it all into something shinier. Most of us know how it feels to believe that our parents and culture need us to be more than we are, faster, smarter, better in every way. How radical it feels to let go for a moment and just be. I gently encourage you to try this. No judgments, no notes to self, no to-do-lists in the mind. Be like the lilies of the fields, as the saying goes. Be straw.
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Holy Swiss
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
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Spring as a Practice
“The trees are coming into leaf /Like something almost being said,” writes the poet Philip Larkin.
Walking outside in spring can feel like walking into a big green, murmuring party. And it can bring a twist of longing. We want to be part of the conversation but we can’t quite hear what is being said. We are delighted that winter has passed at last, and that new life is bursting forth. It seems a miracle, every year. And yet, we can also a little wistful. Larkin’s poem continues: “The recent buds relax and spread,/Their greenness is a kind of grief.”
Why grief? Spring brings a surge of hope and energy. But it is also a pretty flashy demonstration of impermanence. Life is beginning again, no matter what happened in your life last year. If you have experienced a big loss, this can be wrenching. We want life to hold back just a little. “April is the cruelest month,” writes the poet T.S. Eliot. “Breeding lilacs out of the dead land.”
But deep down, we don’t really want to be onlookers at the party, dressed in black, clinging to old stories, old selves.
“To study the self is to forget the self,” taught the 13th Century Zen sage Dogen. To forget the self is to let go of our fixation on certain opinions and beliefs about ourselves. It means seeing into everything that arises, feeling into everything, refusing to banish or judge what we deem to be “negative” or “bad.” It means opening to our experience with honesty and with kindness, discovering that our so-called negative emotions and mind states is actually our life force, our creative force, our deepest wisdom.
Our practice is not to censor but to transform by seeing–being with what arises with compassionate, allowing awareness.
We long to begin afresh. Under all our transitory desires, under our endless if repetitive thoughts and resistance, there is a love of life and a wish to be part of the great green flourishing. This longing can feel wild and unseemly. But it is as much a part of being alive as our beating heart.
Why not go ahead and invoke another great spring poem? “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” writes Dylan Thomas. “Drives my green age.”
We share the life force with all beings that live. This can be clear in the spring, and at other times. I had the flu last week, and when I felt stronger and better it was as if the life force was pouring back in.
We rarely recognize this longing to be part of life for what it is. We try to fill it with all kinds of things: coconut ice cream and money and expensive shoes or vacations. But even when we attain all those things and more, deep inside there is still an inextinguishable homesick feeling. A marvelous old teacher of mine called it “a nostalgia for being.” We want to be here. We want to come out of our separation and be part of it. As shy and introverted as we may be, we long to peel ourselves off the wall and join the dance.
Strange as it may sound, the way towards this freedom is to shift from unconscious to conscious suffering. The root of the word suffer means to bear or tolerate. The aim of practice is to see, to hold what arises in consciousness without judgment or commentary, without clinging or pushing away. Just that. Just the sunlight of nonjudgmental awareness.
As we do this, one moment at time, something slowly miraculous begins to happen. We stop clinging to the life force that flows through us as if it is strictly ours, as if I somehow created it and must affirm and protect it at all costs. Something deep inside begins to soften and open and unfurl like a seed becoming a shoot. We begin afresh. We bloom.
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Pickpocket Sutra
Last time, I wrote about practice as a way of return, of recollection, of remembering—coming down out of our thoughts and memories and dreams to experience of being in a living, breathing body here and now. I wrote about how this movement of return can feel like a last resort, something we turn to when all our thinking and distractions fail.
This week the universe taught me a deeper lesson. On Saturday, I taught a meditation workshop at New York Insight in Manhattan. A wonderful big group turned out and it was a wonderful experience. Afterwards, I practically sprinted to Grand Central Station (and those of you who know me well enough to know that my childhood nickname was “Pokey” know how rare an event this is). I was so happy! I felt so blessed to be able to share the wonderful art of meditation, the art of return, to a big, diverse group of people. I felt with life, in perfect agreement with it.
I took my seat on Metro North, and realized I had been pickpocketed! The envelope with all the money that had come to me in that beautiful spirit of dana was gone! In an instant I felt bereft. The city had been beautiful and full of light and now it was all in darkness. Hurt battled with rage and even embarrassment. Decades before, I had been pick pocketed (twice) which spurred me to write a story for New York Magazine about pickpockets that involved following around a N.Y.P.D. pickpocket squad. I felt like a friend’s mother who once shouted on a subway after she discovered she was robbed: “I’m a life long New Yorker!” As though only tourists deserve to be robbed.
Then hurt and self-pity took over. All that effort, only to have the dana snatched from me! I began to tell my story about how unfair it was, how cursed I was….Wait…what was I say to myself? The awareness seeped in that I had been teaching all day—all week—about the way spiritual practice allows you to be with life as it arises, about the way it allows you to find a freedom and happiness that isn’t welded to what is happening.
Practice opens up the space between stimulus and response—from the minute level of the stimulus that is constantly streaming in, car horns, sirens, indigestion to the macro level of robberies, floods, Academy Award nominations or bad reviews. The movement of return, of recollection, of breathing and sensation helps us remember that we have a choice. I realized that I couldn’t change what happened—life is quite surprising, in spite of our best efforts. Yet I didn’t have to go into a story about it. I could choose not to believe I was cursed or assign blame or any of the rest of it I did not have to make an identity out of it. I could simply relate to it as something that happened. Before it happened, I had been soaring along, with life. Was I not still with life?
Whoosh, in flowed a vibrancy and light and freedom. I saw that things happen. I once had the strangely unique experience of having my wallet stolen during a Family Week at the Insight Meditation Society. Reporting the theft to a State Trooper back home so I could get a new driver’s license, I mused to him that what was strange was that the theft happened at a place where nothing bad ever happened. He looked at me as if I had just dropped in from Mars. Good and bad things happen everywhere. Life goes up and down. The gift of spiritual practice is that our deeper peace and happiness, our sense of connectedness to a greater whole, doesn’t depend on what happens. It gives us a capacity to open to a deeper truth, a greater whole.
Later, I looked up the word “bereft,” and discovered it comes from a root that literally means to be robbed or have something snatched from you–not just money or property but deeper qualities like dignity, freedom, happiness. This is what injustice feels like, I realized. This is what many beings feel every day. Bereft. I also realized that the feeling among the group of us—the feeling of mutual dana or generosity—could not be stolen. This is not hippy delusion. If we are a little bit more free inside, we can see more.
When something shocking or upsetting happens, when loss or blame –or wild good fortune happens—where do you turn? If you are like me, there are favorite stories you can slip into like old sweaters, cozy but ugly, stories about being unlucky or unloved or cursed. And what is it like not to put on the sweater of failure? What would it be like to dwell in the space between praise and blame, stimulus and response. To listen to the silence instead of the old stories?
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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.
Tracy Cochran 