wonderful reminders

I often find myself returning to the amazing dharma book "Radical Acceptance" by Tara Brach. Ms. Brach is a compassionate, insightful and wonderful teacher - I really can't recommend the book enough. I was looking at some old interviews with her the other day about her book, and came across this wonderful teaching, which I am reprinting in full, because it is just so good :). This is her response to a question about working with depression and anxiety, or other painful emotions. These gateways she discusses are powerful tools to use in our daily life and practice, and gifts we could give with great love to our children. Enjoy:

We suffer because we have forgotten who we are and our identity has become confined to the sense of a separate, usually deficient self. All difficult emotions-fear and anger, shame and depression-arise out of this trance of what I call false self.

I’ve found that whenever I am really suffering, on some level I am believing and feeling that “something is wrong with me.” Over the years I’ve been drawn to three primary gateways for awakening from this trance. In the Buddhist tradition they are referred to as the three refuges:

One (called “sangha”) is loving relationship-both live contact with loved ones and also meditation on the love that’s in my life. In the moments of remembering love, there is an opening out of the sense of separate self. For me, reflecting on love has included prayer to the beloved, to what I experience as the loving awareness that is my source. When I feel separate and stuck, that loving presence might seem like it’s apart from me and “out there.” But by reaching out in longing and prayer, I’m carried home to the loving presence that is intrinsic to my Being.

A second gateway (“dharma” or truth) is taking refuge in the present moment. The training of meditation is a gift as it has helped me to pause, wake up out of thoughts and contact my moment to moment experience. When I am no longer running away or resisting what is happening inside me, I reconnect with the space and compassion that has room for whatever is going on.

A third gateway (“buddha” or “buddha nature”) is turning towards awareness itself. Most of the time we are paying attention to the foreground of experience-to our thoughts, feelings and sensations. What we are missing out on is the background of experience, the formless dimension of Being itself. By asking questions like “What is aware right now?” or “What is knowing these sounds?” or “Who am I?” we begin to intuit our own presence or Beingness. The signs of this presence are space, stillness and silence.

For myself and so many I’ve worked with, becoming familiar with this formless dimension of who we are makes it possible to open with love to the changing expressions of life within and around us. It allows us to make peace with living and dying, and to live our moments fully.

Wishing everyone connection with your own Beingness today and every day. Much love to you all - you are all Buddhas!

this is what we practice for

I have been waiting for my body to miscarry. I learned last Thursday that the baby didn't have a heartbeat, but my body wasn't ready yet to let go. Finally, yesterday, the process began, accelerating this morning, until the little being passed out of my body.

The waiting was an experience of consciously bringing myself back to the present moment, over and over. And when the process finally began, it was the conscious letting go, the noticing when I was resisting the process, and opening back up, just like in birth. This is what we practice for, with the little stuff. With letting go of our agenda of getting something done, or being right in an argument, or wanting our living room to be clean, or a person to like us, or our child to behave a certain way. With the letting go of our little hopes and fears in daily life with our children and in the world - so that when we are faced with the big stuff, with the letting go of a child, a loved one, a big dream, our own life itself - we can do it without suffering. Or if we do suffer, we can work with that, rather than being totally overwhelmed and stuck in our grief. We can face the moment, we can notice what we are feeling, and we can accept it. All of it.

It doesn't mean we don't grieve. It doesn't mean we aren't angry or sad or afraid. It means we accept all of that, fully. Once we do that, we can also accept that those emotions change, just as this moment is constantly changing, changing, ending, beginning. Never static, never still. That is the flow of life and death. It is in constant movement. This is what we are practicing for. To let that movement flow through us, and not resist it. If we resist it, we will get knocked down and pulled under.

So today I am trying to put all my years of practice to the big test of letting go of this brief little life. Of being present to my other children, who need me very much to be with them, and not distant or distracted. Practicing diving into the flow of life.

everybody's in trouble

"Everybody's in trouble. Everybody, every minute, is tortured, suffering a lot. We shouldn't just ignore them and save ourselves alone. That would be a tremendous crime. In fact, we can't just save ourselves, because our neighbors are moaning and groaning all over the place... We can't just try and go to sleep. The rest of the world is going to wake us up with their pain." -Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

This is a useful quote to contemplate when you are feeling stuck. Stuck in your own stuff, your own obstacles, unable to access a wider view. When we can raise our gaze from our own claustrophobic ruminations, it can be amazing what we see, heart breaking, shaking. It can definitely ventilate our own little situation. This quote came to my mind today when reading a terrible and terribly important article in the New York Times over the debacle of "care" in New York state's institutions for disabled children. I won't link to it, as it is a very triggering piece, containing descriptions of abuse and worse. But it is there if you would like to read it, on their front page. I read it this morning, and wept aloud, as my two little boys played at my feet.

There is so much suffering in the world. How do we not turn away? How do we not turn away when we can't even stay with our own suffering, or that of our children? How do we turn towards it, and stay with it? Because if we can do that, we can maybe, possibly, help someone else. Help our children. Help our family. Our neighbors, our friends, our enemies. Help those who we secretly might believe can't ever be helped. This is our task.

We can learn by helping our children. We can learn by staying with their suffering, holding them when they cry, acknowledge their hurts, large and small, instead of covering them up with the quick "you're ok, you're ok" as we shush and shush. What's that about? That "you're ok?" Is that what we want to hear when we are crying? Someone telling us that we are really alright, that it isn't a big deal?

I had a friend who very tragically lost her husband at a young age, in a very sudden, abrupt way. People tried to make her feel better. They tried to cheer her up, to distract her, to tell her it would be ok. But she wouldn't do it. She wasn't ok. She wasn't going to be ok for awhile. And even then, it would be a different sort of ok, not the kind people mean when they say it. She needed to grieve. She needed to really feel her hurt, her deep, wrenching pain, and to cry. Some friends could not abide it. Some friends dropped her, feeling she was indulging in it. I would go and visit and just sit with her while she cried and cried and cried. I didn't say very much. There wasn't much to say. I just sat, and tried to stay open, until the tears stopped. It wasn't easy. It was scary. Her grief reminded me that everything is impermanent. That none of us can escape pain.

We can breathe with our children, being present with them, noticing when we want to shush them or brush over their hurts, so that we can "get on" with our day. We can instead acknowledge that what is happening, right now, is our day. We can open to our own discomfort with their tears. Acknowledge our own fear, anxiety and old hurts that can be opened when witnessing their pain. We can practice tonglen, or maitri.

This willingness to stay with suffering takes bravery. And we can take this brave heart out into the larger world, and by doing so, our children will in turn trust their own bravery. Everybody is suffering. Everybody, everybody. We can't ignore their pain. As Chogyam Trungpa writes, their pain will wake us up. Once we are able to find the courage to peek out from our own stuckness, our own unwillingness to open, and begin to breathe in some fresh air and relief, we can somehow find a way to bring that same relief to others, in any way we can. It might be a very small way. That's ok. In fact, that is stupendous. Just finding the bravery to hold our children when we would prefer to stifle their tears - that is enormous. Or the bravery to smile at our neighbor. That is huge. Who knows where that step will lead? We are watering the seeds of bravery, compassion, opening. A smile can lead to total transformation.

These little, small seeds we water can grow into mighty trees. Trees that extend the shade of compassion and liberation to many, many beings. Let us practice not turning away. Let us work to stay, just stay, and open, to everybody. To their pain. That can be enough. To just sit there, open, and let their pain in.

sick and mindful

Well, we are all sick here in the gesbaby household. A summer bout of influenza has sneaked up on us and laid us low, and the timing is, to be honest, just terrible. We were all supposed to be in New York City this weekend, celebrating the upcoming birth of my brother's baby girl, and hanging out with some very dear, old friends who we rarely see. So, in addition to being ill, we have had to be mindful of indulging in our disappointment.

This can be tough for me. Disappointment is just so juicy, isn't it? And when I am physically sick, I sometimes feel justified in letting go of mindfulness practice, because, well, it can be hard work and I just don't feel like it- I'm sick after all. I want to focus on the negative - how my house is even messier, wholesome food scarcer (my husband doesn't cook), the babes are needier and I can't get the rest I need. Add to that a cancelled vacation with loved ones and things are simply bleak. We spend our lives trying to get everything to conform to our wants and needs and illness upends that applecart entirely!

Which is why maintaining mindfulness, even during illness, is one of the most nurturing things we can do for ourselves and our families. I find it helpful during these times to keep letting go whenever I notice myself engaging in thoughts dwelling on the illness or my frustration/disappointment that I am sick. I try to come back to the present moment and allow myself to rest there, even though it might not be entirely comfortable to do so, what with aches and fever and what have you! But I have found that adding anything to the physical discomfort of illness just makes me feel so much worse, and also makes me very cranky with my children and partner. Illness slows us down, so we can relax into that and not fight it. When illness makes us itchy to be outside of the house, or tackle a project that has been planned, we can notice that itch of wanting things to be different, notice the tightness it creates in us, and just breathe. We can send breath to where the tightness lives and practice releasing it physically. We can give ourselves a glass of orange juice or a nice bowl of warm soup, watch a movie on the couch snuggled with our children, take them all into bed with us for a communal nap. Sometimes just breathing is enough. We so rarely give ourselves the space to do that in our busy days.

When feeling really awful, I also try to practice tonglen. By breathing out healing for myself and all beings who are suffering from illness, I am able to unwind my tendency to make it all about me and how miserable I am. This invariably leads to me feeling less miserable. I start by connecting to my basic goodness, that sense of complete spaciousness and freedom, then start slowly breathing in my suffering and discomfort and breathing out healing. Then I extend to other beings - I breathe in their suffering and discomfort with the flu, and breathe out healing to them. This can be very brief, just a touching in really.

So we are practicing just breathing here while the chaos around us builds up. My babes continue to teach me generosity, as even in my illness I have to extend out and care for them, and care for them with tenderness and patience as they are also sick. I continue to practice turning my heart and mind outward towards others, rather than inwards towards just myself. Sometimes I do this willingly, and sometimes not so much. But this is the heart of our practice, and illness gives us an amazing opportunity to deepen it.