Suffering - Part One

Some days my heart breaks. It simply breaks for all the suffering that exists. Even when I was young and still very mired in a fire and brimstone concept of hell, there was always a part of me that thought -- "Can there really be a hell?" What could be worse than what we have done to each other as humans? We have waged unspeakable horrors against each other. It saddens and breaks me. But the brokenness is like being broken open.

These days the existential questions of suffering, hell, heaven, etc. enter differently still. Who is this “other” that we perpetrate our crimes against? It is not so much -- what could be worse than what we have done to each other as what could be worse than what we do to ourselves? Taking the question in rather than holding at arm’s length makes it so much more tender and raw. It is easier to think that it’s those people over there who commit the crimes or horrors and thus feel better about myself. But who are they? What if we truly lived no separation? That question would at once rend us permanently. It feels like it would cut one wide open. It would break us open. Upon hearing of some horror in the world, (and most nightly newscasts can fulfill this role), one of the first thoughts that enters many people's minds at some level is “how could they” or “that cannot be” Our conditioning immediately tries to push away what is real and painful. We get angry or try to find a way to shut it out and escape. But all of these are ways of clothing the naked and beautiful. Those methods put a layer over reality. Listen carefully and with your whole heart. Find out for yourelf. Frequently those questions begin an argument. At some level there is a movement of “this should not be” or "those people are different than these people or I am different from them". They are all ways of trying to control that which feels beyond us. They are escapes. What if we did not escape? Freedom lies in the ever increasing ability to simply sit with what is.

Stay with the news story that you just heard about a teenage African- American boy fatally shot or the soldier gunned down, or grandmother who has just been beaten up. What if you truly believed you were the one who harmed these people? What happens if you are the one who harmed the "other" person? Who are you? What are you? Do you find yourself moving to justify, blame, deny, distance, excuse? Are you set on proving what I am saying is wrong? Why do you think that is? What would happen if you didn’t? Do you find yourself doling out love and compassion to some parts of the story and some characters but not others; perhaps the boy or the elderly woman, or the situation but not “yourself”/the perpetrator who committed the crime? Do you find yourself a little saddened, angered, or numbed, grieved?

Regardless of whether or not you believe what I am saying is true, about you being the perpetrator is there an inclination to move away? The mind will argue that it's not true. That you did not commit that act. (And of course on a certain relative level that is absolutely true) But what is going on? What is going on when we encounter something and want to move away? Even if from the above example you do not believe it is you, can you can you hold that notion without judging it? When are we inclined to separate? Often we are inclined to separate when "too much" pain is encountered. We often move to create an “us” and “them” We start to blame. It is in part, a way of feeling better about ourselves. It is a way of salving our wounds. But what if we didn’t seek the band aid or traverse the blame path? What would we have to feel if we did not move towards resolving the enormity of that hurt? What if on a cellular and molecular level we understood that "they" are us.

I think we would feel immense heartbreak but it would be a pure and complete heartbreak undistorted by a need to protect. What would we be protecting against? Rather than being a life-sucking heartbreak born of the dream state and yeilding paralysis and depression it might be the kind of heartbreak that is life-affirming and action inspiring. Compassion always opens to alleviate suffering. Pure love, like water, always moves towards the rough spots, the unawakened, the opaque parts. And if action occurs its signature need not be grandiose. Our existence itself is action of a supreme kind and the more we are aware of that the more we realize that that which we bring to action is more important in many ways than the actual action. Ideologies, governments, religions, science, none of these will “save” the world. Indeed it is our obsession that the world needs saving which creates the “problem” in the first place.

It requires a hefty and unbridled arrogance to believe we must be savioiurs. Perhaps this is what is meant when in Christianity the fall of Lucifer is spoken about. In thistory, one of God’s angels, his “top” angel in fact, becomes so prideful that he is banished from heaven. Is that not us? Perhaps in a sense it is pride which keeps us in hell? Pride in a sense says "I am special" which implies that someone else is not and thus creates tension and separation amidst wholeness. It creates that which is special and that which is not. Yet it is a flimsy house of cards, for at any moment, who we think we are can crumble when someone else comes along who is more "special" We cast ourselves out of heaven when we lock into self that is built upon others behavior or even our own behaviour. We set ourselves up for the fall when our self worth is hitched to being more than someone or something else. To do that is to miss who they essentially are and who we essentially are. We do not need anything to be whole. What if the world were perfect in its imperfection as were you?

Does this then mean that we should not be proud of accomplishments or that we become inactive. Does it mean that we avoid the homeless man on the street ? Does it mean that we should not work on solutions to our environmental crisis? Does it mean that we should not give to charities? Does it mean that we stop voting? Does it mean that we do not volunteer at the animal shelter or participate in that walkathon? What do you think? What does your heart say? What is it that would try to avoid the grittiness of life?

It seems to me that only a delusion would try to avoid anything. Love/truth/reality does not need or want to avoid anything so why would it avoid helping people or even having pride.

Interestingly, are we even inclined to call it "pride" in the same way if the accomplishment belongs to all. Similarly is it really “helping” when the hand scratches the itch on the leg or the ears hear something beautiful? If we are truly “helping” ourselves is it really helping in the conventional sense of the word? Perhaps it is just something that happens in that moment. Perhaps that is what surrender looks like. Part of how love can be seen is as that which embraces all and avoids nothing. That is love. Egos and minds believe that somehow an absolutist position such as do not do this or do not do that can contain the possibility of resolution. At a certain level some kinds of dictums do help mitigate the most egregious behaviours temporarily and they may even have been necessary in our past but today it is increasingly possible to be directed by a moment to moment flow that is outside our traditional prescriptions of good/evil, warm/cold, polite/rude. happy /sad dualism. It is the way of the Tao. Lest you think it is simply an eastern philosophy it really has different names in different times and cultures and religions but essentially they all point to the same thing and that "thing" is more close to you than anything you could ever imagine. It is able to hold all the suffering and like a beautifully discordant chord from a Mahler symphony transform it into magical music. In some ways that is the potential transformational power in suffering.

(Sta tuned for more on Suffering)

What Have You Done with Your Whole Heart Today?

What have you done today with your whole heart?
Was there even a brief moment
when your entire existence rode on some action or state of being,
as if you would be blinked out of existence afterwards.
Not that it mattered whether you succeeded or not,
but just simply that all of you was at hand in every fiber.
A pen stroke like this vs the routine mechanical glide
Is the difference between heaven and hell.

Too often desire gets a bad rap.
Desiring is mistaken for “unspiritual”
A cancer on our souls.
So we seek to eradicate it like
caked mud on the boots of our sacred spiritual journey.
But desire is gorgeous, it is beautiful.
It is a smile so wide it swallows the universe.

Our trouble is we close compassion’s door on desire
to let it rot and fester outside supposedly.
We even think our satisfaction lies in obtaining our object of desire
And sometimes it does for a little while
But if we look closely enough the desire and desired aren’t separate.
Truly what we are looking for is what is looking.


Follow desire down the rabbit hole and see what it wants.
What if it simply seeks to be acknowledged to its depth
Perhap you are afraid you will never climb back up.
You do not see that desire has wings and you will soar when you befriend it.

Is it not exquisite to want something with the entirety of your being?
Why then would we get rid of this?
The aching sweetness of yearning, longing.
It does not matter at all whether you get your desire.

Fall deeply into it.
Trouble emerges not
because you yearn

But because you
fault yourself for wanting it

ALL.

Stop

Stop.
I ask you to stop,
please, I implore you, stop.
Do not lean forward into that next
moment which will never give more
than what you have in this very one.
What you most desire in your
depths is an unflinching, steadfast partner.
Be still and feel. She,life, is always dancing you.
What is it that scares you so much about being here, now
that you are willing to bleed her away
in exchange for a false promise to the kingdom's keys,
in which you already live.

Stop.
You run away from the very one that would fulfill you.
Instead, allow her to seep into your marrow,
every cell, every fiber.
Let her grab hold of your heart and dazzle you with her beauty
the crunch-crackle of the breakfast cereal;
the slippery aromatic wetness of lathered soap and water;
the cold breath puffing like a billowy cloud from pursed lips;
common, crystal clear and magical communication to colleauges across vast global distances;
A night sky so capacious its starry limits unimaginable;
a heart pounding; a yellow flower; a brown apple core; a siren;
the broken, smelly trash bag spilling its contents on the rain soaked ground;
heaping pyramids of tires, discarded, used up, black, springy, round;
the drone of cafeteria voices afar;
the sturdiness and earthy pine of a wooden seat underneath.
a sadness, an elation, a squeeze.
It is all embraced by love, by life.
her miracles are myriad,
infinite in fact.
Just stop and
open your senses.
What is here right now
is so much more than enough.
Just
stop
for a
moment
and
listen to
her radiant
song.

A Few Things For Which I am Grateful

My sister in law who makes tasty special vegetarian dishes just for me.
My own sister who I love with all my heart who lives so far away I often ache.
A world that is filled with staggering beauty.
Wonderful thanksgiving smells
A beautiful and smiling wife.
Night skys with stars so bountiful one is dizzied by space.
A Mom and Dad who love unabashedly
Leaping lizards - Geckos in this specific case.
Water, crystal clear pools, britta drinking, a canal with fish, hottubs
Beloved people who live in Seattle
A strong and vibrant father in law
Watching my son fish for the first time.
A friend in DC who I am hoping got a good meal and warm bed tonight.
The dearest college friends for whom I would do anything and who have seen my highs and lows
Misty dog, blackie dog, butchy dog, obi dog.
Aria, Coda, Tessie
A & T They are awesome.
Generosity itself and how it manifests in so many ways

Who Am I ?

Who am I ?
What a delicious question.
I could savor it for a lifetime.
When I truly bite into it there is a deep satisfaction.
I am sated through and through.
Oh it’s not because the fibers of eden’s apple cling to my belly.
On the contrary the question creates an immense
unfathomable and unknowable void
But where I used to Fill that Void with the many practices that
constitute a life, and call that happy, now, the void fills the practices that constitute a life, and contentment girds my actions.
Nor does the question grip me because I rejoice in celebration of
some laudably (and bemusedly) formed abstraction of having arrived somewhere.
That would be too convenient, and leave out the whimsy of a wild journey.
A journey that never was about getting anywhere but here anyway.
I could list a thousand conditions that claim to be me and in a way they are.
For they certainly aren’t separate.
It’s just that if I try to answer who am I from the depths of my being
the sweetness of a question mark is much more compelling than
A period.

The World In A Train

When the world is moving through this frame
I must heartily cry or laugh
It is the embrace of ten-thousand joys and sorrows;
the palpable exquisite beauty inherent in all
that animates these arms, legs, gut, mind.

In these moments I know so deeply who I am.
I want nothing, need nothing.
This is more than enough - a gift beyond measure.
I soulfully ache. I burst in an explosion of sound and color
my boundaries dissolve.

In these moments I know from my deepest heart
that there isn't anything I would not do for
anything or anyone.

I looked into the souls of fellow travelers on the metro today
a pregnant woman bringing new life into this world - feeling
a bit naseauted from the bumpy, jolting ride.
a wrinkled wise woman who in another era might have handed down jewels
of wisdom from bygone days but who today looked weary and burdened;
A gaggle of giggling teenagers
making enough noise with their uncontained joy
to disrupt the austere and saddled adults;
A blind man with his trusted companiion a loyal
and smiling yellow lab, slumbering at his feet.

Each is so dear to me.
Each working so hard for his and her happiness.
Each breathing, living, eating, loving.
I want to hold you so close I can hear your heart beat next to me
I want to cradle you in my arms
rocking back and forth on the floor and tell you I love you.

You are my sisters and brothers. Nothing that matters
separates this from that; you from me, the tear from
the water bottle rolling to ad fro on the floor.
All moved by silent forces.
All embraced.

When the world moves through this frame it is all present
and I explode with emotion.
We are all of us jammed together on this rattling cylinder
hurtling to our destiny. Here.

Spiritual Bypassing

I just finished a very challenging and insightful book. Spiritual Bypassing : When Spirituality Disconnects us from what Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters I had purchased the book after a retreat I attended with my sweetie. At one point in this retreat all the participants engaged in a very powerful exercise. For the exercise each person wrote down the facts of a situation in which they had had a strong emotional response. For example, someone shared that she had just had to tell her 20 year old son that she would not pay for his car loan. Next each person partnered with someone and told them the facts of the situation. The partner then responded by saying, “ I imagine you would feel . . . “ it was a powerful exercise because it unearthed feelings people didn’t even know they had, and because just the simple act of someone listening and trying to place themselves in the shoes of another changes both. We then exchanged partners and interactions several times.

The situations I chose were happy. I chose the fact that my sweetie and little one had treated me royally during my birthday week. I also shared with partners that I had gotten a wonderful card from my parents that had made me cry. After the group as a whole debriefed it was clear that very few people chose happy situations. I talked with my sweetie and told her what I chose, and how I found it difficult to come up with something that had evoked a strong emotional response that had been negative. Her insightful response was “ interesting – I am surprised you did not raise – and then she proceeded to name two things that evoke in me a low-grade but very deep disappointment and sadness. In fact I do not think that I am generally aware of the pain.

It was then that I knew that I had some interesting material to work with. Somehow I was failing to look at some important things in the interest of appearing “together” or “spiritual” or to simply avoid pain.
That’s when I began to revisit the idea of Spiritual Bypassing. According to Robert Augustus Masters

Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is much more common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go largely unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.
Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one's negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.

Essentially spiritual bypassing is a run around of life. Because pain is, well, painful, we seek to avoid it or numb it or falsely transcend it. This is not much different than how most people operate most of the time. From thrill seekers to drug addicts, to anorexics, to workaholics we know there are numerous ways to cover or get away from pain. In fact the Buddha identified similar challenges over 2,500 years ago when he pointed out grasping and aversion at the root of our problems. However with spiritual bypassing our false refuge is spirituality itself.
Interestingly, one of my sweetie’s biggest challenges around my burgeoning spirituality of the last several years was her perception of a certain flatness in me. She would frequently remark that where she might get too angry and loud – I was not angry enough or loud enough. When we would need to discipline our little one we often struggled because to her I seemed so incredibly non-reactive. From my perspective it was hard earned and cultivated non-reactivity.

What if she had been right though? What if there was truth in what she said? To what extent might I use my spirituality to avoid conflict? What if the flatness she experienced was really a false detachment – a way of stepping over my connection to a situation or issue or person rather than a way to go more deeply into the conflict and discover who I truly am and who others are. Goodness knows I had always avoided conflict during many other years. What if this had just given me another excuse but with a more acceptable mechanism?

I knew it was true at least to some degree. I had been invested in improving some me that had made gains and was now in a different place. I had so quietly created a new narrative for myself. Knowing that “I “ did not quite have it altogether was painful. I struggled. It was also however, incredibly instructive, since it allowed me to see a blindspot where my ego existed powerfully and strongly and before then, unnoticed. It showed me how incredibly subtle my ego could be. I had crafted a new “me,” a “more spiritual me”, even while touting notions of “no – self” Evidence that I had identified with this new me existed in the fact that when I realized that I used spiritual bypassing, I felt defensive, resistant, and like at some level I had failed. I even felt defensive of authors I loved who may or may not have bypassed spiritually. All that ,is the ego in operation. Does your true self care? Your true self is able to hold with compassion that which is driven to get it right while at the same time knowing in advance that it already is. What cared was this movement of mind that wanted a story that said” I used to act this way but now that I have found spirituality I am improved this way”. And it wanted that story because it believed it would help predict the future. It wanted that story because it wanted to prove to the world that is healthy, sane and safe. It wanted that story to cover the pain of not being enough.

One’s true self is not interested in the future. One’s true self is not invested in whether it gets anywhere else. One’s true self can look at the way spiritual bypassing happens and rather than feel let down because one has failed – feels compassion for that which needs to behave in these ways to seemingly protect itself. As I have said before, love claims all, our true self does not worry if “we got it right” and knows that only an ego worries about that. It then embraces that very ego in a blanket of compassion that recognizes the ego’s, (in this case gentle , but ultimately misguided) attempt to protect, defend, and safeguard. We put up our guards but does truth need to be defended? Does love need defenses?

At first when I realized that I had been spiritually bypassing I felt upset and paralyzed. I did not know what to do. But really the key to working with spiritual bypassing is similar to much of our other spiritual practice. Deepening our awareness is key. We are already more than halfway there if we can realize when it is happening. We might then ask ourselves why? – not in an accusatory way but gently, in a curious and attentive way. The answer need not be intellectual in fact perhaps it should not be. The question is to get you to inhabit the feeling of what it is that you are afraid of or in pain about. The question is to bring you closer to what is at the heart of that contraction or knot. What is it in me that could use some tenderness? What is it that feels like it needs to be protected? What does it need to be protected from? How did it come to those beliefs? The point is not to cast blame , or say so and so acted this way and now I need to act this way to be vindicated but to probe the origin of the conditioning that is generating the painful belief. The point isn’t even to get rid of the pain or problem (for that could be the very spiritual bypassing about which we are speaking ) but to understand how that pain or problem takes place within the much larger truth of who you are. Your pain is real but it is only a small part of you.

Spiritual Bypassing makes avoiding your pain a fixation and thus seem more solid and monolithic. By avoiding pain it is given more substance and weight than if the pain is acknowledged and explored and ultimately seen as happening within something infinitely more vast. Engaging in spiritual bypassing is like saying that your fingernail is you. Your fingernail is part of you but it’s not the whole thing.

Why then might we continue to do it even when we recognize that it may not be helpful? Because some part of us still holds out for a time or state that is pain free. We believe we might get “there” - some place without pain. But here is an interesting question to think about deeply for a moment - in truth would you really even want that? What of life would be missing if there were no pain? Why is pain synonymous with “bad. Isn’t pain a part of the unfathomable beauty of existence, at once personal and universal? This is not to embrace masochism but to point out the degree to which pain (whatever it is) is a part of life’s palette of colors with which we are painted. Furthermore that pain frequently is the catalyst for great compassion. When seen and acknowledged it can link us to the recognition that each of us experiences different flavors of a basic and primordial yearning for wholeness. Pain unifies us in the recognition that we will all face sickness, sorrow and death. That is not meant morbidly, it is meant to help us realize how incredibly precious we are and life is. Feeling pain is a deep sign of caring for this life.

I am working on moving towards my pain, knowing it embracing it, cradling it, letting it exist within compassionate space. I suspect by knowing my own pain I will be more open and loving to others who are in pain – which is just about all of us. The key however will be to know that pain AND to know the vastness within which that pain is taking place. That is essentially to walk on earth and be in the kingdom of heaven at the same time.

Even though I am not a psychologist, I suspect that there is an acute rawness underneath the hidden places where we spiritually bypass to survive. I wonder if we believe that we cannot tolerate the pain? Again, without being a psychotherapist, I believe we can. If those hurt places are approached gingerly and with love they can be healed and made whole. We are all in this together. Ultimately your pain is my pain and your freedom is my freedom.

Eventually you realize that even so called spirituality (whatever that is) is itself a means, a means toward an end which you already have within you.