Notes on the Double Realm

Only twixt the twin realms
will our voice turn 
gentle and everlasting

– Rainer Maria Rilke

I learned a concept from the Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast. He said, "The poet Rilke used that and coined that term in German—the Double Realm, the doppelbereich." David goes on to explain that most of us think of time as the ribbon of Past, Present, and Future. And many of us think of "now" as a small section of that ribbon, but he explains that Now cannot be cut half, splitting Past and Future. He explains with two mental experiments:

“Cut that little stretch of Now in half. Half is not because it is no more and the other half is not because it is not yet. So, a very, very narrow little strip of time. Well, as long as it’s a strip of time—you can cut it in half. It shows you that Now is one way of approaching the fact that Now is not in time.”

“You can’t remember the past any other way than as Now. And when you imagine the future, you’re also imagining it as Now and you can’t imagine it as future. But instead, it’s the Now projected into the future. So, when the future comes, it also is Now. It’s not future. It’s Now.

Instead of a place on the ribbon of time, he explains that Now is a second realm, a twin realm, both in and outside of time. 

“From this point of view, you can see Now contains our time. When time is up, what remains for me is my Now. That isn’t even affected by dying. I live both in time and Now—or you can call it “eternity.” [I don’t] mean by eternity now “a long, long time,” but the very opposite of time—the Now.

So, when my time is up, everything that belongs to time and space is over. But, it is contained in—in the great Now. That Now is not affected by it.

So, what I’ve learned from that is what affects my daily practice is that I practice more and more to be in the Now. What is in the present moment—Now—T.S. Eliot called it “the moment in and out of time.” It’s a Double Realm. It’s in time and it’s out of time, being in this present moment. And then when my last moment will come, I will also be in this moment and everything that has to do with time is over. What remains is the Now.”

Brother Steindl-Rast goes on to teach that when we locate ourselves in Now, we also locate what John Lewis would call our “divine spark”:

“So, a way to get out of the ego is—again—moment by moment to live in the Now because in the Now we are also aware of being connected with all…Why these two are practically synonymous—being in the Now and being in the Self, the great Self the Buddhists call 'buddha nature' and Christians call 'the Christ self.' Christ lives in me." 

I'm not a religious person, but this idea went straight through my body and rung the bell of my heart.

One way of placing ourselves continually in Now is a simple practice Brother David has coined “Stop. Look. Go.”:

♾ One simply has to remember to stop (which is to pause, to find ourselves in the present, in the Now).

♾ Look for something to be grateful for (E.g. My eyes can see. My lungs are working. My house is warm.)

♾ And then simply take hold of that gratitude; go forward with it. 

Even if you can’t quite permit yourself to believe in the Double Realm, or “twin regions” or “twin realm” as it is sometimes translated, still, this simple practice of gratitude can do nothing but draw buoyancy into a life. 

If nothing else, here are some beautiful questions we may allow ourselves to ask:

What if “Now" is a place to have one foot in both worlds? 

What if “Now” is where I can easily find my most calm and wise self (even, the divine spark in me)?

What if “Now” is what the Celts would call a thin space?

What if “Now” is where I can be with the ones I have lost and loved, reunited easily, when I remember we can both be outside the ribbon of time in the spaciousness of Now?

What if "Now" is always a place I can go to reach the Beloved?

Birds, Meaning, Omens, Augueries

This past year, Maria Popova, whom I've been reading for nearly 20 years, started sharing about her connection with the Great Blue Heron. Over a few months, she shared social media posts about a blue heron she knows and then published a culmination of these thoughts in an article on her site themarginalian.org, where she held up Jarod K. Anderson's words as a mirror to her own. 

All of this, like a light shone and refracted on my heart, announced a truth I knew intimately but hadn't been able to name. My first chapbook was titled These Birds and drew me into a long relationship with receiving messages from birds. Below are Maria's words, which she articulated differently each time—each time, the phrases, the word choice arrested me like another facet on cut glass, a bright light suddenly focused on the wall of my heart. 

I've taken liberty to bold and italicize phrases:

The Great Blue Heron | Maria Popova

"...On a rainy dispirited day, it suddenly reappeared in my neighborhood after an absence so long I had taken it for permanent leave. I don’t believe in signs – I don’t believe that this immense impartial universe concerns itself with the fate of any one of us motes of stardust, that it is giving us personalized clues as to how to live our tiny transient lives. But I believe in omens. We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon the outliers of probability in this cathedral of chance we call life. And it is the making of meaning that makes us human. We render what and whom we love meaningful, and that may be the deepest meaning of love. 

Today, I take this omen gladly, grateful for the improbable encounter and grateful for consciousness – that crowning curio of the universe, capable of love and heartache and finding meaning in a bird."

-Maria Popova

“And what of the very notion of divination? 

I don’t believe in signs — I don’t believe that this immense impartial universe concerns itself with the fate of any one of us motes of stardust, that it is giving us personalized clues as to how to live our tiny transient lives. But I do believe in omens. Omens are the conversation between consciousness and reality, between the self and the unconscious. We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.”

-Maria Popova

Below are excerpts from Maria's article I mentioned above, which you can read in entirety here:

“Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive.

On signs, omens, and our search for meaning, lensed through a great blue heron...

...

One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowing uncertainty and longing for resolution, I have found in the long stillness of the hunting bird, waiting for the right moment to do the next right thing, a living divination — a great blue reminder that patience respects the possible.

It is naïve, of course, to believe that this immense and impartial universe is sending us, transient specks of stardust, personalized signs about how to live the cosmic accident of our lives. Still, it is as foolish to ask the meaning of a bird as it is to see it as a random assemblage of feather and bone. Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it. That is the difference between signs and omens. Signs disrespect the nature of reality, while omens betoken our search for meaning, reverent of the majesty and mystery of the universe — they are a conversation between consciousness and reality in the poetic language of belief.

A bird is never a sign, but it can become an omen if our attention and intention entwine about it in that golden thread of personal significance and purpose that gives life meaning."

Jarod K. Anderson looks to the heron, too. He writes:

“The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.

You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.

[…]

The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices. I sing my portion. The heron sings hers. The harmony is woven and meaning exists in the world. The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. ”

–Jarod K Anderson

Finally, I also discovered the Greco-Roman ancient practice of looking to birds for signs (augeries) and this poem by David Whyte.

Augeries

all wanting to make themselves familiar and understood

by DAVID WHYTE

A word I have always loved since I first stumbled across it at twelve years old; meaning ‘the interpretation of omens or signs’, a word that lives in parallel to another favorite of mine: ‘auspices’ meaning the ‘interpretations made from the flight of birds’. The way we are always, no matter our outer professions of logical thought, looking for intimate indications, for annunciations or for clues as to where we should go or how we should be. The sense, unearthed in this poem is that in the end we too, become auguries and auspices for others, and beneath even that, an understanding of the depth of that responsibility. 

AUGURIES

They have happened all your life,

the bird tapping at the dawn window

with that message from your mother,

telling you through a half sleep,

you were living in a strange

new parallel, both on your own,

and accompanied now, along ways

you could only begin to imagine.

They have happened by night

with or without your seeing or knowing,

all the stars turning above you round

the fixed true north where you slept,

and you at the center of every turning,

dying through all the layers of your dreaming,

to find yourself, each morning, through

all the creative undoing and drama,

nested at the heart of the pattern.

They have happened in every

first glimpse through a light-filled

afternoon window, needing only

the briefest look into the heavens,

grey or blue, to see clouds spilling

across an open sky, all come to find you,

all wanting to make themselves familiar

and understood, the race of constellating

shapes, clouds or passing crowds of faces

now beckoning, now warning you off,

now inviting you in again.

The intuition that every outer pattern,

dark or light can find its center in some

inner incomprehensible origin of being,

and the sense, living in this

meeting between inner and outer

of somehow always being implicated,

always being seen, always being invited,

and always in the end becoming in yourself

an omen and a sign and a revelation,

your own eyes lifted to the stars

following an invisible road and the merest

glimpse of your silhouette outlined

against the evening sky, perhaps

even now, beneath every confusion,

a beckoning life that others could follow.

In a crossthread, Maria writes of the relationship between science and poetry, at once explaining my magnetic draw to both of them, equal and entwined. This, too, is the harmony Jarod K. Anderson writes of, the two voices:

"Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it; a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder." 

-Maria Popova

It's hard to imagine more beautiful or apt language for two of my loves, science & poetry. Looking & deeper looking.

I thank Maria and Jarod and David, for managing to clarify something I've tried to reconcile myself for so long: that I don't believe that the universe is concerned with me, and yet, there are these birds (often tree swallows and magpies) who seem to be alerting me to all kinds of things. I know I'm stretching meaning—as we do in religion, in poetry, in art. Somehow, the birds marry my consciousness in "love and heartache and finding meaning in a bird" and locate me in the broader picture of a confounding universe. I sing. These birds sing.

Slowing Down to Let Your Goodness Catch Up

Jesuit priest, teacher, and founder of Homeboy Industries, Gregory Boyle talks about everyone’s “unshakable goodness” in his book The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. 

He writes:

“When we consult love instead of fear, our innocence and goodness catch up with us. 

…

They [peope in recovery at Homeboy Industries] locate their inner abundance. They move from the impasse of some previous scarcity to the doorway of "enough for everybody." The truly abundant person as the already whole one. Then they find themselves preferring playfulness over judgment.

…

It's always more illuminating to see what you have rather than lament your need. There is an abundance of goodness and innocence—focus on that. Something liberating happens when modifying our behavior ceases to be our first priority. Mystical love accepts with peace and isn't on the hunt for things to criticize…Since God persists in love, no matter how dark things get, God is not preoccupied nor enfeebled by our "sin." This is true because God doesn't see sin but wholeness. God sees right through it.”

Tara Brach, meditation teacher and psychologist, teaches about the story of The Golden Buddha in Thailand, a plaster buddha decorated with colored glass. A novice reportedly spotted some color in a crack, and it was discovered to be entirely gold underneath the plaster. 5.5 tons! It was covered over and remained that way for 200+ years to prevent it from being stolen. Buddhists use this story to help illustrate that the help we need is to uncover the plaster to get to the gold within ourselves. 

While I’ve been out of the faith I was born into for decades now, these teachings still feel revolutionary for a person who was raised to believe that a person is born deficient, doomed, in dire need of redemption, bent toward evil from the very beginning—amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. 

Now that I know Tenderness is the North Star, the real ground we’re all walking on, the first beat of the heart enclosed only by a membrane, now that I know that our goodness is already there—the gold already at the center—I am asking myself how to remember. 

What is the practice?

What if the practice is simply to slow down? To consult love and let our goodness catch up, like Gregory says. He compares it to indigenous peoples who stop along the journey to simply let their souls catch up with their bodies. 

What if I can trust that if I pause, my inner compass, that golden quiet knowing, can have the chance to lead? And what if trusting that goodness can lead to a knowing that will help me to loosen up, to play, to let the light in?

What would it be like to not hold so tightly because I know there’s so much abundance, so much so that I can let go, again and again, into that sea of goodness?

What if tenderness can once again be my default—like when I was very little, before the woundedness covered the heart?

What would it be like to—rather than chasing an ideal of betterment—trying to continually improve—wearing myself out on the hamster wheel of not-enoughness—what would it be like to turn my attention to returning to the goodness that’s already there?

A 180 degree change in direction from outward arms extended, muscles aching, striving, hustling, reaching — to slowing, stopping, returning, goodness, enoughness.

Pema Chödrön puts it like this. 

The Trouble with Happiness

People forget to tell us. Happiness is not a place we can arrive. It is not a destination. It is not the last box checked off. You can’t land and stay there.

Happiness is one color in the spectrum of colors. One color that is mixed with others. Some days, we see more of it. Some days, none at all. But to focus on the one color means we miss the whole palette available to us. 

What if we shift the entire goal? What if we do not aim to be happy? What if we simply aim to be awake?

Awake to all that is here before us. Maybe if we can look closely, be wide awake about what is it to be here as people walking on this earth, that is the whole thing. What if we stop resisting all the other colors? What if we make a practice of yielding to the reality, just as it is. Not to say we love it, but to say, “Yes, that’s what’s happening right now.” And then really being here, with all of it. 

If we have a practice of just wanting to be awake, we can’t miss the beauty and small delights that are scattered throughout our lives. It means you have to be open to the experience of sadness, or boredom, or fear, and it also means you have to be open to the nourishment that is there in a sunset, in a flower that insists on growing, in a person standing right in front of you talking to you, in a neighborhood cat that wants you to love it. 

How can we bear it? Being wide open to being here? What you find out is, none of it can shake the core of you, which is very good and wants to be here and wants to love. Whatever hurt or confusion or weariness comes up, there’s still this seamlessness in you, like John O’Donohue says, that is at the heart of everything about you. And you can return to that. That’s the real baseline—just being here and being good inside. 

There are things we can do to help us to wake up and stay awake—to weather the winds of whatever life is bringing us. Honest friends. Lovingkindness practice. Keeping a notebook. Therapy. Sleeping well. Eating well. Patting your heart in the shower. 

The trick is to remember that staying awake is the goal. And to remember that you have to practice staying awake, every day, every hour, every breath. You get to start over as many times as you need to. You’ll get better all the time if this is your goal. The other trick is to remember that it’s ok to have all the other emotions visit you. They really aren’t a problem. What I mean in, they only are if you don’t tend to them. Talk about them, take care of them, and know that the goal is not to hold on to one sunny feeling—the goal is to yield to the big, sweeping picture being painted before you with all the colors of your life. Trust that things will keep changing. Trust that joy will visit you. If you are awake, you’ll recognize it. It will sustain you. But we can’t live there. We aren’t meant to. 

Know, too, that you actually are made for this rocky, unexpected ride. We go together through the whole thing—that’s the loveliness. The being together.

Help for Seeing Clearly

Is the Harshest Lens the Clearest Lens?

What’s the lesson you keep learning? The lesson I keep learning is that to see clearly, there has to be tenderness. 

It’s counterintuitive to how I grew up—which lent itself to the harshest view being the most exact, the most cutting, the most ruthless, and, therefore, the most raw and true. A lot of the focus in the faith was this idea of burning and purity, like, Burn away all the impurities, Lord. I can take the heat. But then, the shame for not being able to stomach it. It seemed the purest way of living was to have a steeled temperament that can take the toughest feedback, but then somehow be malleable, too. Adaptability and steeliness don’t really mix, as far as I can tell. So, I was left with a heart that was sore, a mind that was flooded, and eyes that were always squinting. Bracing for impact, trying to be strong enough to bear the full force of whatever was true, then trying to stay on the road after the collision. 

Now, when I encounter some failure of mine, some blind spot, some mistake, or some unskillfulness—it’s a new skill to actually call the blunder “unskillfulness” or “unawareness,” rather than just label myself a fraud or a failure. Auto-pilot often commences a collapse into shame and self-loathing, and I can go into full-on retreat and withdrawal. Classic escape stuff. Or, I may “lawyer up” and create a fortress of arguments and words, my porcupine quills hurting me, too.  

I'm learning, but I'm not out of the woods. Brene Brown often talks about her leaning on the lines: 

“I’m here to get it right, not to be right.” 

Or, “I’m brave enough to listen.”

Now, both of these anchor me in wildly uncomfortable conversations so that I won't tap out. Or, if I have to tap out, I can now say, “I’m flooded and need a timeout, but I care about this and want to follow up after a break.” 

But what about after? 

After the conversation? After the misstep? When I’m so bruised and my mind is a muddy swirl of confusion. When I just can’t yet sort out the truth or know my part in the equation. When I can’t yet discern what the next adaptation needs to be.

What about this place, the thicket of my mind? The place where I can’t seem to parse anything out from anything else without more questions. This place is difficult for me. But this is the place I live. This is the place we live in the days after the talk or the mistake or the change. The days when it’s just you in there, in your mind, walking through the “bad neighborhood” as Anne Lamott would say. 

What then?

As far I can tell, two things save me:

The first is a friend holds up a mirror. Anne Lamott says of the bad neighborhood: 

"My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone."

Maria Popova beautifully tells it this way: 

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”

This holds me steady when I cannot see. 

The second thing is the practice of understanding that to see clearly means there has to be a measure of tenderness, gentleness, and compassion—and that when that nature is coupled with looking deeply with rigor, precision, and clarity, we then have the courage and capacity to see things anew. And when we see things anew, we can understand, and when we can understand, we gain insight, and when we gain insight, we can be different.

But without the gentleness, we just can’t really see. We’re not really awake. We’re not getting the full picture.

What a relief that is—to know tenderness is always the in-road. It’s difficult when you’ve been conditioned out of it—but to remember it again—the way a baby’s cry is stilled by being held, even if the source of the crying isn’t yet tended to—just to be held with tender presence—that makes it possible for things to be different. 

To be confused, to not be able to see clearly—that is a kind of suffering.

“The function of mindfulness is, first, to recognize the suffering and then to take care of the suffering. The work of mindfulness is first to recognize the suffering and second to embrace it. A mother taking care of a crying baby naturally will take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it, or ignoring the crying. Mindfulness is like that mother, recognizing and embracing suffering without judgment. 



So the practice is not to fight or suppress the feeling, but rather to cradle it with a lot of tenderness. When a mother embraces her child, that energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the child. Even if the mother doesn't understand at first why the child is suffering and she needs some time to find out what the difficulty is, just her act of taking the child into her arms with tenderness can already bring relief. If we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already.” 

― Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

So many teachers help us learn how to do this, to tend to our stirred-up, hurting minds. Here are three more teachers whose words have split my heart open with that deep recognition that can happen when we hear the truth:

Rigorous & Tender

"Koshin Paley Ellison: You know, recently I was just reading a memoir by a political person who I wouldn’t say I agree with at all. But I was very inspired by my friend Andy, who encourages me to read these kinds of things. To me, it’s like, how do you behold that face of the other in a way of respect and dignity? It doesn’t mean we have to agree with someone. We go through these cycles, where we’re very polarized to less polarized or more polarized, but to me, the medicine is always about how we behold the other and the face of one another. To me, that’s so important, particularly I call them giants, because I feel like they are. They just are. They’re huge, to reckon with what is huge and dominating has to be done. And all the great stories from world mythology had these giants, and they were these embodiments of these qualities that had to be reckoned with. Actually, I think that when they’re not reckoned with, we can’t really behold the other. We can’t really see. We can’t really feel. And to me, life is about love and tenderness and that capacity. And it’s so rare, because we get so caught up with our own bullshit. And we feel that in some ways, whether we consciously think of it or not, our bullshit gets in the way of actually beholding the other’s face.

James Shaheen: We recently had the Columbia philosophy professor Allison Aitken on the podcast, and she discussed how compassion as you’ve been describing can be a substitute attitude for anger. It seems like this practice is one way of examining our anger and cultivating this substitute attitude of compassion. I think that’s what you’ve been describing. Is that correct?

Koshin Paley Ellison: Yeah, there’s no substitute in a certain way. It’s about, Am I loving well? Am I actually allowing compassion to be what I reflect on and take a hard look at how we’re functioning and in particular, how we’re thinking? I find, actually, zazen and meditation is a total adventure of really the acuteness of attention to how I’m thinking. How do I really address it in a rigorous and tender way so that I can actually realize how challenging it constantly is? And when I’m able to do that and really take a look at how I keep separating myself from other people or having these like very quick thoughts of anger or delusion or greed or what I want. If I can really catch that, then I realize, wow, it’s so tricky. Everyone’s dealing with that. And so in some ways, to me, it’s like how can you not be compassionate? When you’re really working with your mind in a very diligent way, it makes the world pop in an incredible way. You realize, oh, my goodness, it’s amazing to me that we can get up in the morning. Most people are not tracking their mind like that or their thought waves. They’re just going around. 

And so even if you’re being very rigorous with it, it’s quite challenging. And so, to me, the experience in my own body and mind is to be more loving. I love the Western definition of compassion as to suffer with. It’s like, my goodness, like we’re really suffering together."

Read or listen to Kashin, here.

Precision & Gentleness

Pema Chodrön on Loving-Kindness 

“Curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open—actually being able to let go and open. Gentleness is a sense of goodheartedness toward ourselves. Precision is being able to see clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there. Openness is being able to let go and to open. When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling loving-kindness for others as well.”

“If we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness, and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we’re doing.”

“The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent, naïve misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.”

Chödrön explains in her book The Wisdom of No Escape that gentleness of presence, is at the heart of meditation. And teachings about meditation to me, are translatable to mindfulness, which is the practice of being awake in our everyday lives:

“Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.”

Clarity & Compassion

Tara Brach, from Chapter One of Radial Compassion: RAIN Creates a Clearing:

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life. ~ Martha Postlewaite

We all get lost in the dense forest of our lives, entangled in incessant worry and planning, in judgments of others, and in our busy striving to meet demands and solve problems. When we’re caught in that thicket, it’s easy to lose sight of what matters most. We forget how much we long to be kind and openhearted. We forget our ties to this sacred earth and to all living beings. And in a deep way, we forget who we are.

This forgetting is a part of being in trance—a partially unconscious state that, like a dream, is disconnected from the whole of reality. When we’re in trance, our minds are narrowed, fixated, and usually immersed in thought. Our hearts are often defended, anxious, or numb. Once you recognize the signs of trance, you will begin to see it everywhere, in yourself and others. You are in trance when you are living on autopilot, when you feel walled off and separate from those around you, when you are caught up in feeling fearful, angry, victimized, or deficient.

The good news is that we all have the capacity to free ourselves.

When we are lost in the forest, we can create a clearing simply by pausing and turning from our clamoring thoughts to become aware of our moment-to-moment experience. I call this wakeful and immediate awareness “presence.” It is also referred to as consciousness, spirit, Buddha nature, true nature, the awakened heartmind, and many other names. When we’ve reconnected fully to presence, we can open to what is going on inside us—the changing flow of sensations, feelings, and thoughts—without any resistance. This allows us to live our life moments with clarity and compassion. 

…Only by purposefully bringing attention to our inner experience can we move from trance toward healing. We need to become aware of the circling anxious thoughts, the habitual tightness in our shoulders, the pressure from being in a rush. Then we can begin to turn from our stories—about someone else’s wrongness, about our own deficiencies, about trouble around the corner—to directly feel our fears, hurts, and vulnerability, and ultimately the tender wakefulness of our heart.

Example of RAIN & a type of Compassionate Inquiry:

R.A.I.N.

R recognize what is going on within you

A allow the feeling to be there so you can listen to it

I investigate where the roots are

N nurture yourself with clear seeing and gentle precision so you can move forward differently. You are not your reactions. You can heal. Healing always happens in the present moment. What is it you need right now? 

After being triggered:

• What was the response (emotions) to whatever caused an outsized reaction? Eg. (angry and disappointed)

• What did you believe about the situation? (Eg. the person didn’t respect me and didn’t follow through)

• Can you think of a time you felt this way? How old were you? Is it possible your younger self felt this way as an automatic adaption to try and protect yourself?

• What’s another more generous reason this person might have acted this way? 

• If the trigger is always pointing to a wound that needs care, what care is being asked for now? 

More on RAIN, here.

Read a summary including Compassionate Inquiry by Gabor Mate, here.

Dropping Into Slow Time

In an interview between Krista Tippet and John O'Donohue:

Tippett: "You wrote about time...'In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration.' I wonder how you are able to have, I don’t know, I think a larger sense of time, because of — as an inheritor of the Celtic tradition.

O’Donohue: I think that’s a bit of it, that old Celtic thing, because I mean, there is, in Ireland, still, even though it’s getting consumerized so fast, there is still, in the west of Ireland where I live, a sense of time; that there’s time for things, and that when God made time, he made plenty of it, and all the rest of it. And, you see, I think that one of the huge difficulties in modern life is the way time has become the enemy.

Tippett: Time is a bully. We are captive to it.

O’Donohue: Totally, and I’d say seven out of every ten people who turn up in a doctor’s surgery are suffering from something stress-related. Now, there are big psychological tomes written on stress, but for me, philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time, so that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself, to relax in and to just be.

Meister Eckhart, whom I love, said, So many people come to me asking how I should pray, how I should think, what I should do; and the whole time, they neglect the most important question, which is, how should I be? And I think when you slow it down, then you find your rhythm. And when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time, because you know the way, in this country, there’s all the different zones? I think there are these zones within us, as well. There’s surface time, which is really rapid-fire, Ferrari time.

Tippett: And over-structured.

O’Donohue: Yeah, over-structured, like, and stolen from you, thieved all the time. And then if you slip down — like Dan Siegel, my friend, has this lovely meditation: you imagine the surface of the ocean is all restless, and then you slip down deep below the surface, where it’s still and where things move slower.

Tippett: So I’m assuming you would suggest that people need to create more space and stillness, but I think what you’re also saying is that simply by thinking differently about time, by approaching it differently, by putting on a new imagination, we can have a different sense of it. Is that right?

O’Donohue: That’s absolutely right, because I think that if you take time not as calendar product but as actually the parent or mother of presence, then you see that, in the world of spirit, time behaves differently, actually.

I mean, when I used to be a priest, it was an amazing thing — you’d see somebody who would be dying over a week, maybe, and had lived maybe a hard life where they were knuckled into themselves; where they were hard and tight and unyielding, and everything had to earn its way to their center. And suddenly, then, you’d see that within three or four days, you’d see them loosen. And you’d see a kind of buried beauty that they’d never allowed themselves to enjoy about themselves surface and bring a radiance to their face and spirit.

Tippett: And why did it surface then?

O’Donohue: Because suddenly, like, there was a recognition that the time was over and that their way of being could no longer help them with this, and that another way of being was being invited from them. And when they yielded to it, it would become transformative. And it just means that, actually, when you change time levels, that something can transform incredibly quickly.

I mean, I always think that that’s the secret of change: that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling."

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How can I better drop into slow time?

Could it be that slowing down is the key to all awakening? 

Am I wanting too much a swift reduction, the magic key of all insight? 

Or am I the most awake when I grasp this?

See, I am my most wise and most present when I am slow. 

I have the most insight, am the least reactive, and can taste life’s sweetness when I am slow. 

I am less afraid, less discouraged, and more kind when I am slow. 

When I am slow, I am myself. 

How can I better invite my true nature to come to the fore? 

How can I drop into slow time and live there? 

Mindfulness, certainly. Less discomfort with my own mind—

which can only come from compassion. 

So slowness and compassion for my “reluctance to be here” as David Whyte could call it, 

make it possible to breathe and be in my body. 

Be larger than my body. Be with your body in the same space. 

Feel small and large at once. 

Being slow is being here.

The present is the only place to heal, Gabor Maté would say. 

What a mercy. Maybe, the sweetest mercy. 

Find the Corner Pieces

My daughter comes into the bathroom while I'm in the shower and writes on the mirror with her finger: I need help with the puzzle. It's too complicated. 

I peek out and say, "Step one, find the corner pieces. 

Step two, connect the edge pieces. 

It’s kind of how you orient yourself to the big picture."

And I realize I've also given her life advice. When it's complicated, when you're charting your plan, first find the corner pieces.

These are your central values.

Then find the find perimeter. Know that everything should connect to the values. 

It's kind of how you orient yourself to the big picture. A border is also a boundary. 

A value is the starting place. 

Everything works out when you start there.  

So now I am asking myself, what are my corner pieces, and what connections I am making to ensure every part of my life, every hour, every venture, every piece, is hemmed in and secured by those corners? 

If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

Below are three variations of a sentiment frequently shared by Kurt Vonnegut in commencement speeches and life advice.

I've included all three because, together, they go deeper in the heart. For me, the neighbor playing the piano, especially.

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Kurt goes on to say: "So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'"

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“My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is?”

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And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

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In January, my new year's resolution was not so much a tangible goal as a wish to do this very thing Vonnegut implored us to do. And the New York Times best advice from reader's included this one: Stop and recognize happy moments when you’re in the middle of them. Literally stop and say out loud, “This is a happy time.” It’s a way to ground yourself in the joyful parts of your life. 

If I've learned anything, it's that life's sweetnesses are the fuel to get us through winter—and there is no oasis you can stay in forever. There is no perfect resting place. Well, maybe there is deep within us. I think there is, under all that conditioning and hurt and waywardness. 

But when so many outside conditions are not in our control and often difficult, we must learn to notice nectar when it's right in front of us. Noticing not only makes the moment sweeter when we are awake enough to really be there, it fortifies us so we can weather future storms—or better weather the storm we are now right in the middle of. 

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"So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. 

You don't have to run into the future in order to get more.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

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You don’t have to “run” any more for other conditions of happiness. So the Buddha advises to be mindful of what is going on, firstly, because, by doing so, you have a chance to realize that there are plenty of conditions for you to be happy right here, right now. And if you recognize these conditions, you can be happy—and you will stop “running.” To stop “running” is very important, because many of us are still “running.” We have “run” for our whole life, and we got the impression that we have not got what we want. 

And the practice of mindfulness helps us stop “running,” to realize that happiness is possible in the here and the now, 

so that you can nourish yourself and heal yourself.

― Thich Nhat Hanh

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I invite you to

 look carefully with me. 

Say aloud: 

If this isn't nice, what is?

This is a happy time. 

On Finding Clearances in States of Emergency

Dew evaporates

and all our world

is dew…so dear,

so refreshing, so fleeting. 

- Kobayashi Issa (Japanese haiku poet)

It may be that when you think of impermanence, you think of how fleeting and unjust it feels to be here in a world where everything is dew, here and then gone. Every moment coming and going without any of us able to hold on. 

But I have been learning to think of impermanence differently.

Lately, when I feel so afraid of the next emergency, the next telephone call that breaks me, which will undoubtedly come, I remind myself that very rarely is there a time that is a continuous state of emergency. In dark times, for brief moments, people still have to drink something. Sometimes, they look out windows. Something else happens for a minute. There are tiny refuges. 

Because of impermanence, everything is possible. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Issa wrote this poem after the death of his daughter.

Reading again:

Dew evaporates

and all our world

is dew…so dear,

so refreshing, so fleeting. 

In so few words, he captures such tenderness, such heartbreak, and also the somehow continually refreshing and temporary experience of being here.  It's what Jack Kornfield calls the “unbearable beauty of life—that it appears in forms and it disappears.”

Now when we think of our states of emergency—the times the grief is so acute, the anger so hot and blinding, the sadness so deep—may we be reminded that those times, too, are dew. And nothing can hold us forever. 

Yes, because of impermanence everything can feel so frail and impossibly transient; and it is because of impermanence that the intensity of your pain and the cold throb of your loneliness, your regret, your desperation, will give way to something else. 

We are saved moment by moment. 

A warm hand takes yours right there in the middle of an emergency. A dog is leaning its head out a car window.

Or it might feel like we're just going from one emergency to  the next. I feel that way. But a red light can stop us so we can allow ourselves to make a clearance in the pain, let go a little bit…

From an article in the Lion's Roar, an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh:

"Fourth Mindfulness Exercise: Releasing Tension

The next exercise is to release the tension in the body. When you are truly aware of your body, you notice there is some tension and pain in your body, some stress. The tension and pain have been accumulating for a long time and our body suffers, but our mind is not there to help release it. Therefore, it is very important to learn how to release the tension in the body.

In a sitting, lying, or standing position, it’s always possible to release the tension. You can practice total relaxation, deep relaxation, in a sitting or lying position. While you are driving your car, you might notice the tension in your body. You are eager to arrive and you don’t enjoy the time you spend driving. When you come to a red light, you are eager for the red light to become a green light so that you can continue. But the red light can be a signal. It can be a reminder that there is tension in you, the stress of wanting to arrive as quickly as possible. If you recognize that, you can make use of the red light. You can sit back and relax—take the ten seconds the light is red to practice mindful breathing and release the tension in the body.

So next time you’re stopped at a red light, you might like to sit back and practice the fourth exercise: “Breathing in, I’m aware of my body. Breathing out, I release the tension in my body.” Peace is possible at that moment, and it can be practiced many times a day—in the workplace, while you are driving, while you are cooking, while you are doing the dishes, while you are watering the vegetable garden. It is always possible to practice releasing the tension in yourself."

He teaches: "There is a river of feelings within us, and every drop of water in that river is a feeling. To observe our feelings, we sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it flows by. It may be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. One feeling lasts for a while, and then another comes. Meditation is to be aware of each feeling. Recognize it, smile to it, look deeply into it, and embrace it with all our heart. If we continue to look deeply, we discover the true nature of that feeling, and we are no longer afraid, even of a painful feeling. We know we are more than our feelings, and we are able to embrace each feeling and take good care of it."

Are you hurting now? 

Look, the clouds are blowing by. 

Yes, the dew will come and go. 

Yes, it hurts us to lose so much. 

And you can also know your pain will change.

Letting go, we allow confluence.

We can look for clearances in the emergency. 

There are so many places to rest. 

What Secret Work is Being Done in Me?

I am asking myself: What secret work is being done in me?

After John O’Donohue:  

"I always think that that’s the secret of change: that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling."

Katherine May writes in Wintering: 

“Even as the leaves are falling, the buds of next year’s crop are already in place, waiting to erupt again in spring. Most trees produce their buds in high summer, and the autumn leaf fall reveals them, neat and expectant, protected from the cold by thick scales. We rarely notice them because we think we’re seeing the skeleton of the tree, a dead thing until the sun returns. But look closely, and every single tree is in bud, from the sharp talons of the beech to the hooflike black buds of the ash…

The tree is waiting.  It has everything ready…

It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.”

And so, I wonder, are there spring-like conditions I can walk toward to invite the buds to open—open without any known effort of my own—that I may cross the threshold, suddenly be able to be different? 

It could be that I need only rest and allow the unseen, automatic, multitudinous orchestrations within me do their work. Trust the process. The beauty may be in how little of my help is needed—just my willingness.

Still, I wonder, as this secret work is done in me, is there a way for me to welcome it, too? 

Am I walking toward longer days?

I invite you to come along with me, to ask yourself, 

“What secret work is being done in me?” And “Am I tilting toward the light?”

There is No Triage for Heartbreak

"The worst loss is always your loss. People not in grief often want to compare losses. Comparing is of the mind. We don’t have a broken mind, we have a broken heart. For those in grief who feel the need to compare all their own losses, why do we need to choose? And if we compare to others and say ours is the worst, it often is a way of saying our grief has not been witnessed enough. All our tears count.” - David Kessler

I heard David say this in an interview. The worst loss is always your loss. And it helped me so much. I think it can easily be changed to also be “Your pain is always the worst pain,” because as Sharon Salzburg says, “Pain is pain.” There is no scale for how much compassion is deserved, how much gentleness, how much care. There is no finite amount to distribute. 

In the real triage world where we live, people do need to be graded and sorted so resources can be distributed equitably—but how quickly we forget that there is no triage for heartbreak. Pain is pain. 

It occurred to me that we need this reminder often and badly. Whole sectors do. So I want to remind you. 

There is no limit to the gentleness we can afford ourselves. There is no ration to distribute. 

All pain needs to be allowed to be real and witnessed. We all need to have someone take our hand. 

If you’re hurting a lot…struggling a lot…Pain is pain. 

You deserve grace. Because you are here, with a feeling, beating heart. 

Could you try not aiming so much?

Well, the trouble is, the trouble of my not posting anything for months, the larger trouble of troubles—is that I've been aiming too much. And also, the trouble is in the reasons I've been aiming too much. I was working on a larger write-up about the following not-so-small interconnected themes: parenting, fractals, global warming, and peace. So, a bit of a heavy lift, we'll call it. The first trouble is that I'm a small, partly-awakened, unwise person to be speaking on such topics. But I care about them very much, and I do feel compelled to speak on them, sometimes. All kinds of things. But I doubted. And the doubt spun a web that caught me.

The other larger trouble is that this site is a prayer for myself and for all of us. But part of the prayer was born in a crucible of unworthiness dating back to...well...way before me. It was passed down to me. So, all the hustling and injured hopefulness of my childhood, it's now in a new shape in my thirties. A fever pitch of self-healing books, podcasts, musings, and late-night bleary-eyed scrolling. My bookcase is growing with beautiful poetry, psychology, parenting, and Buddhist texts. In many ways, I am healing. I am. I am becoming more and more awake. But I am also hustling. I realized, somehow, that I have been trying to improve myself in the age-old hope of becoming—not just better, but more loveable. This is a larger hill I don't need to be on in the first place.

Then, last night, I remembered Seymour. A passage I have loved since 2003. The slash pockets. Twilight. The brother balancing on the curb. 

Seymour wasn't saying don't play marbles. He wasn't saying not to try to do well. He's asking me now, "Could you try not aiming so much?"

You'll still hear from me. I still think this is important. I am still playing marbles. This site is still a prayer. But I'm going to try not aiming so much. Let go of the desperation a bit. 

Let things grow and take their time. Trust that I'm alright, even when I'm not alright. You understand. 

Thank you, Seymour.

An Excerpt from Seymour — an Introduction

by J.D. Salinger

One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on — some on, some still off — I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to — his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's — and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended, and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness, and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me. It came as a pleasant shock that there was a third person in the universe, and to this feeling was added the justness of its being Seymour. I turned around, totally, and I suspect Ira must have, too. The bulby bright lights had just gone on under the canopy of our house. 

Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat. With the canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out. He was ten. From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from — well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. "Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it." He stepped down off the curb, his hands still in the slash pockets of his coat, and came over to us. But a thinking Seymour didn't cross a twilit street quickly, or surely didn't seem to. In that light he came toward us much like a sailboat. Pride, on the other hand, is one of the fastest-moving things in this world, and before he got within five feet of us, I said hurriedly to Ira, "It's getting dark anyway," effectively breaking up the game.

Ocean Vuong, poet, writer, teacher, on getting close to the terror, getting close to the human, in excerpts from this Tricycle Talks interview with James Shaheen and Sharon Salzberg:

Ocean Vuong: I often tell my students, “You should scare yourself, but you shouldn’t be scared of yourself.” Often people also ask me, “How can you be so vulnerable in your work? How do you do that? What does it take? And doesn’t it destroy you?” Sometimes I guiltily say, “Not at all,” because this is what I chose to do. And I think this is informed by Buddhism, which is that the world is dark, and it could very well get darker. If you’re going to be an artist, you have to look at it. It’s what we signed up for, to look long and hard at what is the most difficult part of samsara, of the human condition, and to make meaning out of it, to make something out of it, so that it could be shared and understood. There’s this idea of questing towards phenomena, which is so important to Buddhists. 

To me, this is right there with the task of the artist, and so I don’t see it as a burden or a difficulty. 

To me, to get close to the terror is to get close to the human, and that’s the job. That’s the job description.

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James Shaheen: You’ve talked about the “language lab” and the linguistic innovation that takes place in queer communities of color. I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about the role poetry plays in articulating different possible futures.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, it was always poetry’s role. I always felt that as long as there were soldiers, there were poets, and I think that’s always true, that the history of poetry is the history of displacement. It’s the history of war. It’s our species-wide condition. And that’s why I think it can never die, regardless of how we read it. There’s this conversation about the crisis of printing, but now there’s Twitter poetry, there’s Instagram poetry because it’s so portable. Anytime you have a marginalized community, you realize that innovation occurs at the most portable and malleable forms of art. This is true with hip-hop and how hip-hop blurs into poetry for communities of color in spoken-word traditions. You just need the self, the body, and it could happen anywhere. It has the power to interrupt. You don’t need a plot or context. There doesn’t need to be a setup. A poem can happen at any given moment. The power to interrupt and the power to be portable is why it can cross so many borders and so many communities and why it means so much to so many people because you can participate in it. I tell my students this. I tell them that to be a nurse or a doctor, you have to get a nursing degree, you have to go to medical school for eight years, maybe a decade. But if you want to be a poet, you could do it tonight. You could do it right now. And there’s an incredible exhilaration of power that the form really offers you.

Sharon Salzberg: Poetry itself I find intimidating, even though I love language and words and I write. There’s something about that particular kind of creation. Maybe I have to think of it more as just speaking a truth and not getting fancier than that because in my mind, it’s incredibly beyond me.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, poetry is up against so much, and often, particularly in the 20th century, it was kind of cajoled into institutions. The project of canonization, started by Matthew Arnold in the 19th century, was to prevent the working class and the peasantry from revolting. He saw that the Enlightenment created a lot of suspicion amongst Europe with the church, and so the church was losing its hold on its power over the populace. Matthew Arnold was asking how do we prevent what happened in France and America? How do we prevent revolutions? This was at the time of Marx, Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, and so he said, “What if we replace the church and Christianity with literature?” And that’s what began the English canon. The English canon was very middle class. The books and the poems that went in there were a way to kind of empathize with those who live under chandeliers so that we realize that the rich also suffer. It’s actually interesting because at the heart of that is Buddhist rhetoric, but for absolutely sinister means. It’s like, “We all suffer, so therefore, don’t overthrow us. We’re just like you. We suffer too.” And so right away, it’s now institutionalized, and there’s a sense that you have to decode it to know its secrets. That was the great flaw of the institutionalization of poetry in the 20th century. And it still sticks. 

People feel frustrated with poetry because they feel like it’s beyond them because we’re taught to plunder a text for a thesis. As soon as we’re in elementary school, it’s like, what’s the summary of this passage? Critical thinking and close reading tell us that we are outside of meaning, and reading will help us enter, and then we become hunters in the text. But that’s only one way of reading, and it’s a failure of our pedagogy because another way to read is to read a poem the way we experience weather. What is the meaning of rain? Rain doesn’t have a secret. It exists. It’s the same with music. You experience music. Why do we cry listening to Bach? There’s no meaning inherent in the notes. This is true with mantras. There’s no inherent meaning, but the intention creates a profound effect on the sonic wave and then the brain and then the emotions. And so part of my work as an educator is to undo a lot of these strict ways of reading that have been hammered into our students, and they get really excited but also really nervous, just like you described. They’re like, “Oh, my God, what do you mean, that could be anything?” And I say, “Yeah, just like weather and music, just experience it, and then you realize that there’s so much pleasure.” 

And I have to turn to the Eastern poets, who, by the way, were influenced by Buddhism, like Issa and Basho, the 18th- and 17th-century Japanese poets. One of my favorite Issa poems is the haiku, “Crickets on a log, floating downriver, still singing.” You don’t need to decode that. You can get a PhD on it if you like. Nobody will be upset. But you don’t need to. It’s there. To me, poetry is both rhetoric and the inaction of life as it is perceived. It’s a phenomenological approach, and there’s no right or wrong way to experience it.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s beautiful. Thank you for that. I want to go back for a moment to the influences you had as a child. You attended Baptist church services with friends, where you say you developed an infatuation with Noah’s ark and the idea of building a vessel for the future when the apocalypse comes. Can you speak a little bit more about Noah’s Ark and what it means to you? What would you put in your vessel for the future?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, I thought it was real. I was seven years old, going into a church. In the neighborhood I lived in Harford, it was mostly a Black and brown church. I experienced these myths, and to me, they made perfect sense with the myth of Leloii that my grandmother would tell me about, the king who defended the Chinese invasion in ancient Vietnam who went to the lake and summoned the turtle who leapt out of the lake and gave him the sword to defend the country. I thought that was real, and so when I heard Noah’s Ark, I was like, “Yeah, that sounds right,” this great flood coming and then this responsibility of discernment, which is so important for Christian thinking. And I think for me, it’s important for Buddhism too. Another way to translate mindfulness is discernment. What good things will you put into what you make, regardless of what you’re making? You can be a shoemaker or a poet like myself, but when you think about that, it becomes no longer a task or a job but a vocation that is invested in a spiritual intention. And that makes the work so much better. And it also makes you so much better because you’re now imbuing the object and the task with a personhood, a DNA of a selfhood. You can see it in someone who cooks a meal. They cook the same recipe, but the person who cooks it with intention and with love, that meal comes out a lot better. We’ve all seen that when we’ve cooked a meal when we’re stressed or we’re hurried or anxious, it comes out not a little sloppy, not the way we want it. So Noah’s Ark was so important to me, because I realized thinking back on it is that I always had the agency to decide what words. If the poem is the ark, then which words? And you have to interrogate yourself, why this word, as opposed to the others? It’s a profound, elongated practice of imbuing care into what you do.

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Sharon Salzberg: You’ve mentioned that you live across the street from a cemetery, and you’ve been practicing death meditation since the age of 15. I’m wondering if your relationship to this practice has changed over the years and how it might have influenced your writing.

Ocean Vuong: It influenced my writing, and it influenced my life. You do death meditation, and it’s hard to really be mad at anybody after because you get close to this condition that as mammals, we are so terrified of. I think that’s such a beautiful thing. You see an ant and you slap the table next to it, and it scurries in absolute frantic energy trying to preserve its life. I think that’s such a beautiful fact that we’re all in this to stay longer, and then the fact that we have to leave reminds us that there is that final door. When we think about passing through that final door, it’s hard to have these petty thoughts about who does the dishes or who takes out the garbage or something a colleague said in a committee meeting or what have you. It all fades away. And so it’s a really powerful tool to center ourselves back to what matters, back to that Noah’s Ark. To me, those two philosophies go hand in hand, those two meditations. The death meditation takes us back to the seat, the workshop of the Ark. It’s like now that the silly pettiness is out of me, for now, I can get to work and I can build something valuable and useful to myself and others. Ever since I was 15, that has been my North Star.

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Ocean Vuong: The poem is always an elegy and a love poem as well. And I think that’s also very close to my Buddhist practice, particularly with doing death meditation. For me, the poem is a profound death meditation. It’s a place where death doesn’t even have to be mentioned in order to be felt, which is something that I’m really interested in as an artist: how do I have a felt absence effect in the work? Sometimes you can feel that death and dying haunt the work without it having to be named.

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James Shaheen: You begin this latest collection, Time Is a Mother, with a line from the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who writes, “Forgive me, Lord: I’ve died so little.” Can you share a little bit about that epigraph and the relationship you see between poetry and death?

Ocean Vuong: I love Vallejo. To me, it has that quintessential plea to a higher being, which is poetry’s classical condition. Before Homer began the Iliad, he pleaded to the muses: “Help me do this. I can’t do it myself.” I love that. In Buddhism, I think that same plea occurs, but it’s more horizontal. It’s less vertical, and it’s more horizontal. It’s a plea to the world: “Help me do this, world.” The books, the people we know, our teachers, present and gone. That’s actually the spiritual crisis of the artist is to say that I’m not there. And I think what he means by that is I know so little. To die so little, to suffer so little is, to know so little, and that pain is also a vehicle of knowledge. It may very well be knowledge itself. And so I think that is actually the seat of a lot of my work, and I wrote that to remind myself that. We’re never there. If the destination is clear in sight, then there’s no point of going, no point of navigating the world. And so everything begins with this cry but also this admittance that we’re still so far from the knowledge that we need.

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Ocean Vuong: The common narrative around writing is that it should be cathartic. I don’t feel that way. I think it’s a conduit of energy, and the grief is also an energy. And so it’s never been cathartic for me, but there is a satisfaction in building something that could then be shared. I think for me, a book is like a town square. You fashion it the way you dreamed it, but the best part of it is that people get to inhabit it and engage with it and feel however they want to feel and bring their own griefs and joys to it. Ultimately, the poet is an architect. You build a space, a linguistic space, and whatever folks bring to it is valid. That’s really important to me. But I don’t think I’m any more free of the feelings through it. I know more. You might realize, “Ah, I can express this feeling this way,” so you feel perhaps more grounded. But you’re not washed of any of the grief or the feelings.

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Ocean Vuong: I think for me, as an artist, there has to be an allegiance to wonder and awe and mystery and a willingness to quest beyond facts and truth. I think that’s the artist’s role: to go to the cliff of knowledge and look over it and say, “It looks terrifying and there’s no light, but what can I see with my little flashlight, with my little lamp?” Sometimes you set your lamp down, and you just start digging. Sometimes there’s nothing there, and sometimes, all of a sudden, there’s a flash of bone, and you stumble on something. I think that is a very difficult endeavor for the soul. It’s very expensive on the soul to do that work because there’s very little support for it because it’s so ephemeral and malleable and abstract, whereas science and truth and the real and the literal is how adults traffic. It’s the currency of the real that we value in the West. Empirical knowledge is something that is a testament to make anything happen. And it’s hard. I think this is why a lot of artists get snuffed out throughout adulthood. They get snuffed out when they start to commercialize, when they start to talk to presses or galleries or museums, who can only see “the numbers,” which is such a sinister way of thinking about it, but that is the world that we live in. And so for me, it’s all about this balance. I put on a different hat when I go in to talk to the commercial side of things, and I understand and respect that that’s what we have to do because the material limitations that we currently live in dictate that I need the book to speak to people, just like I have a library, and behind every library is a marketing team and a publicity department. And so until I can beam my poems into others’ heads, and vice versa, this is what we have to work with. But a lot of creativity gets snuffed out along the way. I actually think that adulthood, or growing up, if we take it into our own hands, is actually the perfect medium to preserve this because we’re stronger, we have more experience, and we’re better at protecting our sense of wonder, whereas when we’re children, it gets knocked out so quickly. Sometimes it’s strong enough to last through childhood, but we don’t have the tools to defend it and to protect it and to preserve it, and so by the time we grow older, we get very cold and bitter. But I think on the other hand, if we make it our adulthood work to revitalize that fire of wonder, we realize we have a lot of skills as adults to really keep that: meditation skills, mindfulness, we can read more. We have so much more capacity to defend this. I don’t see it as innocence, but I see it as wonder. And it’s not about age. You can keep that wonder for as long as you live. It’s about the social pressure to snuff it out in order to be “productive.” We can easily undo that, and in fact, as adults, I think we’re better suited to undo that.

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You, The Catcher in the Rye | You, the Fire Escape

When we consider the tragedies and the violence in the world, we may feel swept away by the enormity and the complexity of the issues. What can we do?  Really?

After Uvalde, it can feel like there is no good answer to the pain and the horror that can manifest on any idle school day.

You may feel this way about any number of things. When you consider genocide. Or police brutality. Or Ukraine. 

Or when you learn about what’s happening in Detroit. Or still happening in Flint. 

Or even microplastics. You may feel this way when you find out what’s happened to the sea, or the trees. 

How much irreversible loss. So much damage in our societies, in our ecosystems. 

Any number of atrocities or slow-burn devastations can leave a person feeling numb, helpless, or afraid. 

Lately, reflecting on mass shootings and gun violence, it was helpful to look at it as a constellation of behaviors and factors. We can’t oversimplify the issues. There is no one answer. But there are many answers. And there are many of us.

What Precipitates Violence

Katelyn Jetelina, an Epidemiologist with a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, studies violence and the spread of violence (a behavioral branch of epidemiology). 

Jetelina explains, “Violence epidemiologists operate under the theory that violence is contagious. We’ve shown time and time again, that clusters of violence mirror clusters of infectious disease. This means that violence is not random, it’s predictable. And if it’s predictable, it’s preventable.” 

In the aftermath of Uvalde, she writes, “A research group studying mass shootings for decades (called The Violence Project) concluded that mass shootings are largely the results of a constellation of behaviors involving a buildup of childhood trauma, an identifiable crisis point (separate from psychosis), the need to blame someone, and the opportunity to conduct a mass shooting (i.e. access to firearms). Blaming mental illness entirely ‘conceals it more than it reveals it.’

"Among mass school shootings, in particular, the U.S. Secret Service found a similar theme. While they reported that most teen perpetrators had symptoms of mental illness, few had a psychotic illness and nearly all had histories of severe bullying, social isolation, school discipline, and adverse childhood events, like abuse, substance use in the home, parental incarceration, or parental mental health problems.” 

In other words, rather than asking “what’s wrong with these people?” our question would reach much further to ask “what happened to these people?”

“We need to have more difficult conversations about complex social problems that involve behavioral, cultural, legal, and political aspects as well as psychological factors. The life path of a mass shooter is peppered with points in which we, as a society, could have intervened and mitigated risk.” 

There are ways we can help specific to firearms. Some of the ways to help are a shared responsibility to change policies, change systems. This reflection you're reading now is about how we can help as individuals in day-to-day ways. This, too, is our shared responsibility. The points where we can intervene.

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A Catcher in the Rye

I keep thinking about what Holden said in Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger:

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”

I want to be a catcher in the rye, too. I don’t just mean for the children who may grow up to be violent teens. I also mean the ones who are wounded and will wound others if they aren’t seen, heard, and cared for. 

Who will catch them in that big field of rye? The ones who start going over to the wrong houses. The ones with secrets. The ones who take up drinking. The ones with bruises. The ones who feel they don’t belong. The ones who hurt themselves. 

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Fire Escapes 

Ocean Vuong is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New York University. He is a poet, writer, and was a MacArthur Fellow of 2019. In this beautiful, tender, heart-opening conversation, Ocean and Krista Tippett talk about language, survival, and our humanity:

Tippett: You wrote this beautiful essay in The Rumpus, in 2014, called “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation.” Part of the context of that piece was your uncle’s death by suicide. He was three years older than you, and you’d grown up together. And that wove into you reflecting, on these walks you do through New York City, on fire escapes. I’m going to read a little bit, and then I want you just to say more.

“All that richness and drama sealed away in a fortress whose walls echoed with communication of elemental and exquisite language” — you’re looking at all the buildings — “and yet only the fire escape, a clinging extremity, inanimate and often rusting, spoke — in its hardened, exiled silence with the most visible human honesty: We are capable of disaster. And we are scared.”

Vuong:

It was such a blow. Anyone who has lost anybody to suicide — I lost my uncle; I lost a few friends. The great mystery and the great violence of taking oneself out of the picture — I’ve been grappling with that for so long. And I think one of the things that lead us to that is that you start to feel that you are always out of the picture — this loneliness that language does not allow us to access. The way we say hello to each other — Hi, how are you? Oh, good, good, good, good, good. So the “how are you” is now defunct. It doesn’t access. It fills. It’s fluff.

And so what happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we’ve had, when it starts to fail at its function, and it starts to obscure, rather than open? And I think the crisis that my uncle went through, and a lot of my friends, was a crisis of communication — that they couldn’t say, “I’m hurt.”

And looking at — I remember when I heard of his suicide, I was a student at Brooklyn College in New York. I went for the longest walk. And I kept seeing these fire escapes. And I said, what happens if we had that? What is the linguistic existence of a fire escape, that we can give ourselves permission to say, Are you really OK? I know we’re talking, but you want to step out on the fire escape, and you can tell me the truth?

And I think we’ve built shame into vulnerability, and we’ve sealed it off in our culture — Not at the table, not at the dinner table, don’t say this here, don’t say that there, don’t talk about this, this is not cocktail conversation, what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet still not know who they are. Our “how are you” has failed us. And we have to find something else.

And I thought about that. What if literature, my participation in it — that’s my field, if you will — what if the poem, the story, the novel, at its best can serve as a fire escape? Because on the page, you don’t have the awkward reality of a body bumping into someone in the supermarket. You don’t have to say, How ‘bout them Patriots? You don’t have to talk about the weather. You can go right in, deep. And I really have been — it changed the way I thought about writing and literature, in that if we have the fire escape as a reality in our buildings, what does it look like in the reality of our communication, in our language? What does that look like?

And I’m still figuring that out. I’m still — every book, every poem, I think, is my attempt at articulating a fire escape. But I think it was a great reckoning for me, because here I am, supposedly a writer, and then my uncle dies, and I’ve lost so much. We talk all the time, we say all these things, and yet I never knew what was happening. And if that’s the case, language, this field that I chose, this thing that I feel so much hope for, failed me. And it was a reckoning, I think, existentially, with myself as an artist.

Tippett:

I wonder if, to close this incredible time together, if you would read a paragraph from the end of this essay from 2014, “The Weight of Our Living.”

Vuong:

“The poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to — because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions — and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”

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The Invitation

If you have read Catcher in the Rye, you know Holden, while wanting so much to be the Catcher in the Rye, was actually the grown-up child, in need of his own fire escape. In need of a catcher, too. Adults and children alike need rescue.

I lost my brother to the great mystery and the great violence of taking oneself out of the picture; he took his own life at age 35. Where might I have caught him in the field? How many times and how many places?

What fire escape might I have offered him?  And couldn’t I be a fire escape? Couldn’t I be the walking poem, the place where I can be as honest as I need to? A walking fire escape? 

Ocean, you say for me, everything:

"My brother is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living….I want to leave the party through the window and find my brother standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”

We can hold all our light and all our shadow, there on the fire escape, together.

At my brother’s funeral, I shared this quote by Fred Rogers: “Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

When we can do this for ourselves—

know that we as human beings can feel it all, 

hold all the light and shadow, talk about it all, 

show ourselves self-compassion, 

say we are hurt, get the help we need—

when we can teach our children— 

that we as human beings can feel it all, 

hold all the light and shadow, talk about it all, 

show ourselves self-compassion, 

say we are hurt, get the help we need—

we can save the world. 

Save both the ones at risk and 

the ones they will meet in the future. 

I believe deeply when we teach and model this, we prevent violence, we heal brokenness, we offer the medicine the world needs badly. 

Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.

If it’s predictable, it’s preventable. 

This is hope. This is togetherness. This is belonging. This is the rescue. 

I belive this, because I've been rescued.

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I invite you to join me as we ask ourselves:

What children might I catch in the field of rye before they run off the cliff? 

Who might I invite onto the fire escape? 

Whose wounds can I tend? 

How deep can I listen? 

Who can I stand with surrounded by the cold and starless night?

Who can I help save? 

Photo quote: Sylvia Boorstein

The Art of Befriending Anger

Do you feel sometimes that anger is full of darkness? Or dangerous? A byproduct of some undercurrent?

Most of us struggle with anger by blasting (we ignite it outwards in hot heat), bottling (we shove it down till it's pressurized and dangerous), or wrestling with it (we turn our inner world into a battleground of resistance and struggle). 

And every one of us has been hurt by mishandled anger in others. 

How can we reconcile ourselves to anger, and what can it tell us about ourselves? What is the utility of anger? How is it part of our wholeness?

The Spark, The Indicator Light

Anger is usually signaling that something is wrong. Like an indicator light, it can help us know when something feels unjust or out of balance or we feel hurt. The hot spark of anger can spur us into action to correct whatever wrong we’re being alerted to. 

But anger is not fuel for change. Or rather, if used as fuel, it is not a clean fuel, polluting its engine (you)—hurting others and the one in whom it’s lit. 

Love is the clean fuel. Love for what is needed. Love for what or whom needs protection, or advocacy, or care, or help. It may be you who needs those things. It may be others. It may be our planet.

Anger held in the kiln of the heart can transform into hate. Kurt Vonnegut famously warns us, “Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.”

Writer and activist Karen Walrond explains that anger is the spark, not the fuel. She says, “The fuel is the learning, the self-compassion, the staying in your values, the kindness, the measured-ness, the purposefulness.”

Sylvia Boosterin, Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist teaches on this, too:

"You need it (anger) just to alert you to what needs attention. But you don’t need to carry it along with you, to keep refueling you. And as a matter of fact, if you keep nurturing the flame of anger, it confuses the mind and maybe we don’t respond as wisely as we ought to.

But I need the anger, as if, I had a 104 fever, it would be a sign that I need to do something about it.

It’s a response, I think, to what I feel underneath it, which is a fear things really aren’t fair; this is not right, that this and this is happening in the world. And I think in response to that fear, which is basic, the human response is to lash out at it, when something frightens us.

…

So I think that the anger is on top of the fear, and to be able to say: I am frightened, because in the world these unjust things are happening. What can I do? And how can I have a mind that’s energized to do something about it, but not reacting in anger, but responding in firm kindness? But things need to be different. Things need to be different.”

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Blame, Lashing Out

When we don’t take time to lean in and listen to our anger carefully, we can snap to an easy go-to: blame. Brene Brown hilariously describes and an all-too-real scenario in this animated short where she spills coffee on her white pants and the floor in the morning and in two milliseconds her mind calculates that the butterfly effect was caused by her husband Steve arriving home later than promised from water polo practice the night before, which caused her to stay up too late, need a second a cup of coffee, and thus, the stained pants. Immediately after the spill, she mutters, “Damn you, Steve.” 

Brown explains blame is a discharge of pain, anger, and discomfort. And Brown explains how blame is corrosive in relationships. Blame has an inverse relationship with accountability for ourselves and others. 

We can easily catapult our hot potato of discomfort, irritation, pain, and fear right onto someone else, can’t we?   

But if we burn hot and bright and quick, we miss the invitation for real listening, real talk, and real change. 

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The Dance of Anger in Relationships | Anger as an Invitation for Change

If anger brings up painful memories from your childhood or your most important relationships, if it reminds you of the times you’ve been hurt, you’re not alone in that. It can feel like anger is an off-limits, dangerous emotion. So many of us walk these habitual loops of anger that seem to tie up our relationships. So many of us are wounded by anger.

In the Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner, she zooms in on how anger, when handled with care, can encourage changed patterns in our important relationships. Here are some key teachings/quotes:

⏦  "Anger is a signal and one worth listening to…"

⏦ "Anger is neither positive nor negative.  Anger simply is.  It’s an important emotion that deserves our attention and respect.  But most of us have little experience using our anger as a vehicle for positive change. Instead, we silence our anger, or vent it in a way that leaves us feeling helpless and powerless…"

⏦ "Anger is a tricky emotion.  It signals that something is wrong but it doesn’t tell us what is wrong or how to approach the problem in a growth-fostering way that leads to lasting change…"

⏦ "Our anger can be a vehicle for change.  It can help us to clarify the limits of how much we can give or do in a relationship, and the limits of our tolerance. It can inspire us to take a new position on our own behalf so that an old dance can’t continue in the same way…"

⏦ She explains how anger can be the cue to our “taking a firm and loving position on their own behalf."

⏦ “If you are feeling angry, think very carefully about what new position you want to take before doing anything. By its very nature anger propels us into quick action, so guard against this. We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern."

The Guardrails:

⏦ “Don’t use ‘below-the-belt’ tactics. These include blaming, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don’t put the other person down.” 

Ineffective Anger & Suffering:

⏦ …Feeling angry signals a problem, venting anger does not solve it. Venting anger may serve to maintain, and even rigidify, the old rules and patterns in a relationship, thus ensuring that change does not occur. When emotional intensity is high, many of us engage in nonproductive efforts to change the other person, and in so doing, fail to exercise our power to clarify and change our own selves. The old anger-in/anger-out theory, which states that ‘letting it all hang out’ offers protection from the psychological hazards of keeping it all pent up, is simply not true. 

⏦ Feelings of depression, low self-esteem, self-betrayal, and even self-hatred are inevitable when we fight but continue to submit to unfair circumstances, when we complain but live in a way that betrays our hopes, values and potentials, or when we find ourselves fulfilling society’s stereotype of the bitchy, nagging, bitter, or destructive woman (or men). Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.” 

Harriet outlines with real examples how a person can let their anger cool, spend time thinking about their need and then move forward with clear requests and newly realized choices that bring unrealized options into relationships that may be stuck in loops. The goal is not to change the other person, but to start moving forward with clear desires, wishes, and needs. To have the vulnerability to share our true concerns, fears, and hopes. To be curious with those we care about. To say what’s OK and what’s not OK. To take good care of whatever area is asking for our attention. 

We can slip back into passivity or back into hot, bright outbursts —but those don’t really move the needle. If we pay attention, practice curiosity, gain insight, and have the courage to behave differently, we find new routes forward we didn’t see before. 

It doesn’t mean we’re accepting total responsibility for the cause of the situation. It means we use our anger as an arrow that points back to ourselves. Own whatever our part is in it, own the power we do have, and ask, “What is my anger asking me to do? What’s my part? What choices do I have that I didn’t see before? What choices are here that need my courage?”

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Embracing Anger | Transforming Anger

Thich Nhat Hanh (lovingly referred to as "Thay," meaning "teacher") teaches that we must care for our anger the same way a mother cares for her crying child. Not to silence the child, but to meet the need.  

We can care for our anger tenderly. A baby may stop crying just by being held by the mother, but if they don’t, the mother continues to hold the baby mindfully, and she will find out what is wrong. Likewise, when we bring mindfulness to our anger, we cradle it. Just by recognizing it and embracing it, we may feel relief. And by giving our anger the care and concentration of mindfulness, we can find out what is wrong so we can transform our anger. 

"Hello, little anger, I am here for you. I will take care of you."

Thay teaches us, through mindfulness, we are transformed. Mindfulness carries us through this process:

1. we recognize

2. we embrace

3. we look deeply

4. we get insight

5. we transform, heal & and are free

He teaches that through mindfulness, we gain insight. “It is insight that transforms our afflictions.”

Do you want to learn how to do this well? This teaching is a so pure, so gentle, and so clear. 

Roots of Strong Emotions

While your anger may be a reaction to injustice, it may not be. You may find your anger is an old habit. Your anger may be an outsized flame-up that is not particularly helpful for a situation outside of you. You may find that your anger is actually irritation—it may be a tender, painful place. Sand in a wound. A place of fear, insecurity, loss of control. You may be like a wounded animal that is quick to bite—the pain driving the aggression. Or you may find that anger is an old habit energy—an impulse you’ve inherited, learned, followed. 

All of this is powerful to notice. When we can breathe and allow ourselves to be still, our stillness, our noticing, it opens up a space that has the power to completely shift how we show up in our lives.

Many people don’t know how to handle their strong emotions. Our wrong perceptions can make us angry or fill us with despair. To see clearly, we must calm down. When we’re overcome by strong emotions we’re like a tree in a storm, with its top branches and leaves swaying in the wind. But the trunk of the tree is solid, stable, and deeply rooted in the earth. When we’re caught in a storm of emotions, we can practice to be like the trunk of the tree. We don’t stay up in the high branches. We go down to the trunk and become still, not carried away by our thinking and emotions. We don’t say or do anything; we just focus all our attentions on the rise and fall of our abdomen, our trunk. This protects us from speaking in anger and say something we may regret. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh.

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There is a Space

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He said, 

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  

(Attribution of this quote is somewhat contested between Viktor Frankl, Stephen Covey, or Rollo May; most agree it was said by Viktor Frankl.)  

Importantly, this is not specific to anger. This space between stimulus and response and the freedom it offers us is there for every reaction we have—to everything outside of us and everything inside of us. 

Susan David PhD, author of Emotional Agility, unpacks this quote more in an interview with Brene Brown:

SD: You said to me, “What is rigidity and what is agility?” Rigidity is when there’s no space between stimulus and response. “I’m angry so I lash out.” “I’m frustrated so I leave the room.” “I feel undermined and so I either shut down or I speak up, but neither of which are actually serving the intention of who I want to be in the moment.” So, when there’s no space between stimulus and response, we are rigid. We get stuck on being right. We get so hooked on the idea of, “I’m right and they’re wrong, and I’m being undermined, and… 

"What we’re doing when we become curious with our difficult emotions, when we stop hustling with them and instead, we end the war with what we should feel by literally dropping the rope. When we open our hearts with willingness to the full range of our human experience and our beauty — even if those emotions are uncomfortable — that we stop hustling with whether we allow them or not, and then we step out of them. What you’re starting to do is you’re starting to… Between stimulus and response there is a space. How is the space created? The space is created by showing up to our difficult feeling, not blocking, not brooding, but rather creating space using these kinds of step-out strategies, labeling effectively…Again, our emotions are signposts. Our emotions are signposting our values."

David also explains that emotions are data, not directives—emotions are reports subject to our evaluation. This is where our mindfulness comes in. We call up our wisdom to gain insight and intuit what is needed. 

What would happen if the next time we felt anger, we considered it an important messenger? What if we assure it that we will listen and take care of it. Get the information we need. Open up that space. Stay there with mindfulness till we can move forward with care. With our awareness, we can rewrite old neural pathways by going another way. We can calm our anger with understanding before we react outwardly; we can be a source of peace to those around us. 

Do you have a habit energy of anger? And did you inherit it from your mother or father? Sometimes that is the need that is asking for your help. Sometimes the irritation, the anger, is simply letting us know that we need to be calmed. We need peace. We need to be transformed. 

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Am I Pleased? Or Am I Able to Care?

Sylvia Boorstein tells a story of a parent couple she witnessed caring for a distressed child on an airplane. They were very loving and patient and shared their calm with the child. She explains they were practicing wise effort. 

In terms of our reactions (this is the same space between stimulus and response that Frankl describes), Boorstein explains that there’s a big difference in any moment, between asking, 

"Am I pleased?'  or 

In this moment, am I able to care? For others and for myself, in a kindly way.'

This lens can crack and hold that space open between stimulus and response. Am I pleased? or...Am I able to care?

These beautiful questions help us quickly distill what our anger is asking of us, help us hold the little sister of our anger, help us move forward with wise effort. It doesn't mean we neutralize our anger so we're nicer and more likable—it means we move towards the need with precise, concentrated action. 

If we can learn to do this within ourselves and teach our children to do this, how much violence can we prevent?

How much suffering? How much hurt and separation? The work we do with our anger is not only for us:

Thich Nhat Hanh also teaches us: 

“There is a practice called the practice of taking refuge. You want to feel safe, to feel protected. We want to feel calm. And if you don't practice that you lose your peace, your feeling of safety, your calm. You will suffer and you will make other people suffer. 

So when a situation seems to be turbulent, overwhelming, full of suffering, we have to practice taking refuge in the Buddha, the Buddha in ourself. Because each of us has that seed of Buddhahood, that capacity of being calm, being understanding, being compassionate, and take refuge in that island of safety within us so we can maintain our humanness, our peace, our hope. And this practice is so important. 

Practicing like that, you become an island of peace, of compassion, and you may inspire other people to do the same. It's like a boat crossing over the ocean. If they encounter a storm and if everyone on the boat panics, then the boat will turn over. So if there is one person in the boat who can remain calm, then that person can inspire other people to be calm. And then there will be hope for the whole boatload. 

Who is that person who can stay calm in the situation of distress? In Mahayana Buddhism the answer is you. You have to be that person. You will be the savior of all of us. This is a very strong practice, the practice of bodhisattva, taking refuge. And in a situation of war, injustice, if you don't practice like that, you cannot survive. You will lose yourself very easily. And if you lose yourself, we have no hope. So we count on you." 

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A Blessing for Your Anger

May you learn the art of befriending your anger.

May you become skillful in self-compassion to learn what is needed.

May you discern what values your anger is pointing you toward.

May your anger help you find new ways to move forward with firm kindness.

May you communicate with clarity and understanding.

May your anger allow you to light the furnace of love inside you.

May you find easily the space to breathe, intuit, and choose your response.

May you recognize and release the habit energy of anger that has hurt you.

May you wash the sand from your wounds.

May you be a source of calm to others.

May you begin again.

How people heal relationally…

Part of how we heal is an inside job. We observe patterns in our behavior. We notice emotions and thoughts. We gain awareness.  

But relationship is also a prerequisite for healing. Thank God that old idiom isn’t true: You’ll never love well till you love yourself.

I would like to offer this amendment:

You’ll never love well until you begin to befriend yourself and open your heart to the healing of safe relationships.

I have such good news for you: You don’t have to perfectly champion yourself to love well. You don’t have to be all fixed up to be lovable.

But you can get on the path toward befriending yourself. You can say, “I’d like to start this practice of self-compassion and see what happens.” Then, you allow yourself to care for others and to be cared for and—coupled with your new awarenesses, your therapy, your writing, your talking, your art—tiny iterations between you and others can begin to heal the neural patterns that went sideways so long ago and hijacked your ability to lean in and love hard. Tiny iterations guide the rivers of your mind back to your naturally intended state—in community, in safety, in witnessing each others’ lives, in love. Your nervous system can relearn to be OK. 

Dr. Bruce Perry and Dr. Brene Brown explain:

“BB: A lot of neural pathways can be formed that are damaging and that hold us back when we’re young, but the brain also seems to be able to have a very powerful reparative function, that in connection and in relationship, we can repair and build new pathways that did not exist. True or not true?

BP: Absolutely true. And the key is, and this is again at the heart of your work, is that the contractor for that reconstruction process is the relationship. If you’re not in relationship, and you want to build a new pathway to health, you no longer use the old default that’s getting you in trouble and you need to build new stuff, you need relationships. And this is why when we do our work and anybody else who does work like this, as well, we find that the best predictor of your current functioning is your current connection, independent of how bad things were when you’re growing up. If you are in connection, you’re in an environment where you have many, many, many opportunities for healing, little iterative moments all through the day. But if you have the best therapist in the world and you see them once a week, and you have nobody else in your life the rest of the week, you’re never going to get better. You may have the architectural plans to build that highway, but you don’t have the contractor and you don’t have the supplies coming in, and you’re not going to make it. So it’s all about relationships. Relationships are the agent of change…

We’re neurobiologically and physiologically intended to be in relationship. And when you are in the presence of people who give you signals, both physical and emotional social signals, that you belong, your stress response systems are better regulated, your reward systems get stimulated, which decreases the probability that you’ll seek maladaptive ways to get reward through drugs or other things, …whatever your genetic strengths or weaknesses are, it pushes that towards health, and it prolongs your life. It means that whatever your risk is, it’s going to be diminished. It’s good for you.”

Brown goes on to bring up the problem so many of us know, “Sometimes out of the woundedness, we protect ourselves by being as unlikable as possible, so we beat people to the punch of hurting us. And then we ensure our demise, because the thing that we need to overcome our woundedness is relationship.”

Woundedness & The Brain's Framework

Does this kind of woundedness sound familiar? It starts in our earliest moments. 

The connections between neurons are called synapses. We have 86 billion neurons. Perry’s earlier work explains, “The development of synapses occurs at an astounding rate during children’s early years. By the age of 3, a baby’s brain has reached almost 90 percent of its adult size and their brains have approximately 1,000 trillion synapses…The experiences of the first few years form the foundation for children’s future functioning. While experiences may alter and change the functioning of an adult, experience literally provides the organizing framework for an infant and child.” (Perry, Pollard, Blakely, Baker & Vigilante, 1995). 

So the patterned, repetitive input we receive as children from primary caregivers shapes our brains. It matters how loving, reliable, consistent, and predictable the people who care for us are. If you cry and your parent reliably comes to comfort you, this organizes the brain in a healthy way. If this doesn’t happen consistently, the brain is poorly organized. If you are reliably fed when you are hungry, calmed when you’re scared, and generally responded to in an accepting way when you express a need—your brain makes well-organized connections and shapes normal structures from the brainstem, through the diencephalon, to the limbic brain, and finally to the cortex. 

Four Types of Attachments

Maybe you have heard of the four types of attachments that explain how our relationships with our first caregivers are our foundational relationships and shape future relationships. These primary relationships also literally form the organizing framework of infants and children’s brains.  

It isn’t difficult to imagine how inconsistent, cold, or aggressive caregivers can cause changes in the brain and subsequent coping/survival strategies in those babies/children. It isn’t difficult because we can probably recognize ourselves and the people we love (or struggle with) here:

⏦  secure attachment: this person has/had a caregiver who behaved in a reliable, consistent, and warm way. Positive, patterned, repetitive behaviors shaped the baby’s brain in an organized way. Adult relationships are more prone to be warm, connected, and respectful.

⏦ anxious-insecure attachment: this person has/had a caregiver who behaved in an unreliable and inconsistent way. The child coped by “level-ing up” their distress and needs forging a fierce, insecure attachment. Because of this woundedness, in adult relationships, this person may seem demanding and “clingy.” 

⏦  avoidant-insecure attachment: this person has/had a caregiver who may have behaved in an unavailable, dismissive, or “hands-off” way.  This child coped by bottling their feelings and becoming prematurely independent. Because of this woundedness, in adult relationships, this person may seem aloof and resistant to emotional intimacy, vulnerability, and commitment.

⏦  disorganized-insecure attachment: (less common) this person has/had a caregiver who behaved in a ridiculing, rejecting, and/or frightening way. This child coped by feeling signals of fear and anxiety instead of care and protection when near a parent. Because of this woundedness, in adult relationships, this person’s natural tendencies are confusing and unpredictable.

Healing Together

“To change any neural network in the brain, we need to provide patterned, repetitive input to reach poorly organized neural networks involved in the stress response. Any neural network that is activated in a repetitive way will change,” Perry explains. (More on just how wildly changeable the brain is, here.)

I'm not a therapist or psychologist, so understanding you and your loved ones' attachment types, any traumas suffered, and how to approach your situation would be best guided by a professional's help. If you feel self-conscious about getting that kind of help, I gently remind you, to love and be loved is why we are here. And we need help many times along the way to do it well because we have much learning and much healing to do. To struggle is to be human. I need reminders, so I have this taped in on a mirror: "You're imperfect, you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” - Brene Brown

I recently saw a quote on social media by Megan Shook: 

“When I say, ‘Have you considered seeing a therapist?’ I’m not saying, ‘You’re so messed up only a professional can help you.’ What I’m saying is: Have you considered that you're worthy of an unbiased, safe, and productive opportunity to process your experiences?"

I'm saying that, too. Once we have new awarenesses about our past and our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (often best discovered with the powerful and clarifying help of a therapist) we can enter relationships (or re-see current ones) differently. We have a whole new way of observing patterns, catching ourselves, and asking for help. 

We have to be patient with each other, don’t we? We have to be patient with ourselves. And we have to be more and more skillful.

Friendship: All the Light & Shadow of Being Here Together

"In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

-Excerpts of "Friendship" from CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. by David Whyte 

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There’s poetry in our ability to heal each other with “little iterative moments," isn’t there? Isn’t this how most beautiful things unfold, grow, change, and heal? Little iterations: cells split and double, sunshine sparks a chain reaction of photosynthesis, the water makes the rock smooth—slowly, consistently. This is how we build trust. This is how we love each other. This is how we heal. We listen longer. We pause more. We tell our truth. We look deeper. We understand more. We breathe. We start again. We walk together.

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Maybe you learn to befriend yourself more and more. 

May you have the help to see your woundedness. 

And may you see the woundedness in others. 

May you handle your heart with care. 

May you handle others’ hearts with care.

May you be patient with yourself as you rewrite pathways. 

May you be patient with others as they rewrite pathways. 

May you have the grace to apologize and the grit to start again.

May your pauses be long. 

May your thoughts be helpful.

May you unlock old wisdom.

May your kindnesses become skillful.

Maybe your actions be measured. 

May your hearts sing in new closeness and safety.

May the shelter of your love stretch to become your home.

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Highly Recommended Reading: What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.

Publisher's description:

Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and What Happened to You? provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns so many of us struggle to understand.

“Through this lens we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives.”—Oprah Winfrey

Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” “

A final and important note: If you worry you are in an abusive relationship, you do not need to learn how to heal it. You need to be safe. If you aren't sure, or if you feel stuck or scared, go here.

"Grainfields"  | Jacob van Ruisdael | Dutch 

Walking in the Wind

Living in a very windy place means sometimes there are wind advisories.

The wind can be dangerous. We need shelter for good reason.

And on windy days, I’m also reminded of how horses get stirred up in the wind, running. How on windy days, children get stirred up on the playground, running. Red-cheeked and hearts pounding, jackets thrown off. 

The Dutch word "uitwaaien" has no English equivalent, but means “to walk against the wind for pleasure or to clear one’s head.“ Literally translated, it means “outblowing” but the dictionary tries to capture its meaning: The Dutch practice of jogging or walking into the wind, especially in the winter, for the purpose of feeling invigorated while relieving stress and boosting one’s general health.

When it is windy, I wonder if we can learn from children and horses. Or, remember what we already know.

What can the wind remind us of? Besides our smallness, how pervious we are, how much we need shelter—

maybe we can also know what it means to have the wind blow around our shape, its feathers and force outlining our being here, right now, something standing up on the landscape—the wind knowing our every contour, breaking against it, hurrying along, a slower shadow of wind behind us where our being here has made a difference, just then. 

I wonder when we are in harsh blowing weather, if we can know our being here to face it is also somehow a miracle. Not to be glad for the suffering but to somehow keep our knowing, stay awake to the mystery of our being here, in this place for this time.

Next time you walk in the wind, may your being here announce itself against the weather in the quiet way a shape is known—in the secret ways only wind and only you can know. Force, strength, weakness, shadow, presence. And breathing. And cold cheeks. 

May the wind remind you of everything.

Working Together

by David Whyte

We shape our self

to fit this world

and by the world

are shaped again.

The visible

and the invisible

working together

in common cause,

to produce

the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way

the intangible air

traveled at speed

round a shaped wing

easily

holds our weight.

So may we, in this life

trust

to those elements

we have yet to see

or imagine,

and look for the true

shape of our own self,

by forming it well

to the great

intangibles about us.

Sizing up the Steep Hills

We already know friendships make our lives better in every way. Studies show this, too. Brain health, immune system function, and even our survival rates improve. And notably, in many studies, proximity and the amount of contact with a friend weren’t associated with survival. Just having friends was protective.

A small study by the University of Virginia has stayed with me for years:

Researchers took students to the base of a steep hill and fitted them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone.

The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.

When your backpack is heavy and you’re at the base of a big hill, be sure to link up with friends at the base. Tell them about the hill. Ask them to hike with you. We are not built to go it alone. It’s all more bearable together. 

Kate DiCamillo on the Sacred Task of Telling Stories

Below are excerpts from an interview with author Kate DiCamillo on the OnBeing podcast. 

Truth-telling | Making the Unbearable Bearable

She read aloud a letter she wrote in response to the question of how honest we should be in our truth-telling in stories for the young:

“Dear Matt,

You asked how honest we, as writers of books for children, should be with our readers, whether it is our job to tell them the truth or preserve their innocence.

Here’s a question for you: Have you ever asked an auditorium full of kids if they know and love Charlotte’s Web? In my experience, almost all of the hands go up. And if you ask them how many of them cried when they read it, most of those hands unabashedly stay aloft.

My childhood best friend read Charlotte’s Web over and over again as a kid. She would read the last page, turn the book over, and begin again. A few years ago, I asked her why.

‘What was it that made you read and reread that book?’ I asked her. “’Did you think that if you read it again, things would turn out differently, better? That Charlotte wouldn’t die?’

’No,’ she said. ’It wasn’t that. I kept reading it not because I wanted it to turn out differently or thought that it would turn out differently, but because I knew for a fact that it wasn’t going to turn out differently. I knew that a terrible thing was going to happen, and I also knew that it was going to be okay somehow. I thought that I couldn’t bear it, but then when I read it again, it was all so beautiful. And I found out that I could bear it. That was what the story told me. That was what I needed to hear. That I could bear it somehow.’

So that’s the question, I guess, for you and for me and for all of us trying to do this sacred task of telling stories for the young: How do we tell the truth and make that truth bearable?

When I talk to kids in schools, I tell them about how I became a writer. I talk about myself as a child and how my father left the family when I was very young. Four years ago … I was in South Dakota, in this massive auditorium, talking to 900 kids, and I did what I always do: I told them about being sick all the time as a kid and about my father leaving. And then I talked to them about wanting to write. I talked to them about persisting.

During the Q&A, a boy asked me if I thought I would have been a writer if I hadn’t been sick all the time as a kid and if my father hadn’t left. And I said something along the lines of ‘I think there is a very good chance that I wouldn’t be standing in front of you today if those things hadn’t happened to me.’ Later, a girl raised her hand and said, ‘It turns out that in the end you were stronger than you thought you were.’

When the kids left the auditorium, I stood at the door and talked with them as they walked past. One boy — skinny-legged and blond-haired — grabbed my hand and said, ‘I’m here in South Dakota and my dad is in California.’ He flung his free hand out in the direction of California. He said, ‘He’s there and I’m here with my mom. And I thought I might not be okay. But you said today that you’re okay. And so I think that I will be okay, too.’

What could I do?

I tried not to cry. I kept hold of his hand.

I looked him in the eye.

I said, ‘You will be okay. You are okay. It’s just like that other kid said: you’re stronger than you know.’

I felt so connected to that child.

I think we both felt seen.

My favorite lines of Charlotte’s Web, the lines that always make me cry, are toward the end of the book. They go like this: 

‘These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days …’

I have tried for a long time to figure out how E. B. White did what he did, how he told the truth and made it bearable.

And I think that you, with your beautiful book about love, won’t be surprised to learn that the only answer I could come up with was love. E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.

I think our job is to trust our readers.

I think our job is to see and to let ourselves be seen.

I think our job is to love the world.

Love,

Kate"

Kate on Chaos and Wonder, Comfort and Solace:

DiCamillo: Life is chaos, and art is pattern. So all of those wonderful things that I see, and all those terrifying things that I see — because — you have to see it all, right?

Tippett: If you’ve got your eyes really open.

DiCamillo: Yeah. And that’s the danger.

Tippett: And your heart open.

DiCamillo: Right — that’s the danger. And that’s also the great privilege of being here. And so for me, to synthesize the terror with the wonder and the joy, it grounds me and it comforts me. And then this miraculous thing happens where it can go out there and it can provide that for somebody else, too. And that’s — that just knocks me over, to think about that.

For some reason, this is what just popped into my head: so many stories from the old days of doing signings, and there was a kid who was leaning really hard against me as I was signing his book, and his mother said, 

“Don’t lean on her.” And this kid, who I’d never met, said, 

“It’s OK. She knows me.”

And it’s that great gift of connection, as I try to make sense out of the world through these stories, that it helps other people make sense out of the world, too, and provides comfort and solace.

Kate in a Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech:

"We have been given the sacred task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries … of ourselves and of each other.”

How to Help Those Hurting

Years ago, I listened to an interview with a woman who helped survivors of horrible traumatic experiences by teaching the women in African villages how to give manicures. Women who were suffering from severe PTSD began having their hands touched, touched others' hands, and slowly connection and talking happened—naturally. Many of the women were healed in ways they didn’t think were possible. And isn’t this what we know deep inside? To have quiet care given to us. To listen. To not force the wound to open. To hold hands.

This image of women caring for each other as they learned a skill full of care stayed with me. When people are hurting beyond what our words can define, there is something profoundly powerful about our gentle presence. Total acceptance of the pain.

Learning 

⏦  A 3-minute animated video featuring Brene Brown and animated by Katy Davis explains simply and beautifully the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy often includes ill-fitting attempts to change how the other person is feeling. It's distant. Empathy is being there with the person and going to a place inside you where you can relate to the feeling they are having. It’s close.

⏦  This animated video by Refuge in Grief talks about what actually helps those who are hurting and/or experiencing loss. It may seem so unforgivingly minimal, but offering acknowledgment without trying to shapeshift their pain is the best medicine. This isn't limited to death and loss.

⏦  If you’ve ever suffered a loss that blew you out of the water on some idle Tuesday, you know already that those who tried to “silver lining” your troubles away, though they were trying to help, actually hurt you more. This graphic by Refuge in Grief is a guide for what to say/do and what not to say/do. And this comic helps a friend know how to show up. This isn't limited to death and loss.

⏦  You may be hurting, too. Even if you aren’t affected directly by the person’s situation, because you care for them, you may have some anger or upset or suffering, too. Here is a beautiful illustration and article for how to manage your own pain and also care for the people at the center of the struggle: COMFORT IN; DUMP OUT.

I'm Right Here

If you can imagine the most loving voice—what you would most wish for someone to say to you when you are hurting the most, it probably isn’t a list of to-dos, comparisons, or library books. It’s probably something like, “I’m right here. I love you. I’m not going anywhere. I see what is happening. I’ll be here with you.” As Elizabeth Gilbert often says, Love never really gives her advice. It usually tells her to get a glass of water or to try and get some sleep. It usually says, “I’m right here. I love you. Always.”  

In Spanish, acompañar means “to go along with,” and that is what true companionship looks like. Researcher Brene Brown’s dissertation titled “Acompañar” was a study on helping professionals build and maintain connection with those they serve by not pushing from behind or leading from the front. To walk with. 

Can we show up like this for those we love in our lives when they are in pain? We may have to wrestle our inner advice monsters and resist the urge to paint the town in our help and goodness. Anne Lamott says, “Help is the sunny side of control.” I know this struggle. It doesn’t mean we never help. It means when we do, we give help thoughtfully, freely, and when their arms are out and asking. When moments arise to help, whether in what you say or do, tread gently. Don't be afraid to help, but don't try to control the outcome.

The Balance:

⏦  Let them have their grief, their disappointment, their sadness. Things take the time they take. They can cry as much as they need to. Clean as much as they want to. Leave photos untouched. Sleep. Not sleep. There is no correct way. 

⏦  And, if they are in danger of hurting themselves, killing themselves, or are unsafe/unwell, slipping into addiction, it's right to ask for help. Crisis lines are for those concerned as well as those in crisis. Call one if you're concerned and unsure. For medical and mental health concerns that aren't an emergency, ask your family doctor for guidance. We need each other when we can't see in the dark.

From our vantage point, we may have a much longer sightline. We may have more hope and more confidence in their whole storyline. Maybe we can see their healing arriving because we know what those deep valleys are like down there, and we’ve found footholds all the way up to new hilltops. But we can’t deny their "right now." It's not ours. And we can also let our long sightline carry their hope for them until they are able to. We hold hands. We talk a little. We are not in a hurry. We walk alongside.  

If you know the source for the interview about the woman who helped train survivors in the art of manicures, please write me via the Connect page as I could not find it again.

Grief & Joy | The Same Violin Strings

If death or loss or separation or unwanted change has come to your life—it can feel wholly wrong to experience a moment of joy. The contrast of joy with the reality you face can feel like a denial of your pain—a betrayal of your love, of your loss. 

It can feel like we can’t allow joy or love back in because we are so wounded in so much darkness–our allegiance to our loss is so fierce–that to allow a crack of light in can feel deeply wrong. I know what that is like. 

But I have learned and I am sharing with you now: The crack is already there. 

There is already an opening, and if you can let in the sweetness of joy—If you say yes to Joy, or even just softly acquiesce—the love that you feel will only be strengthened. The connection to life will be even more poignant. The loss and the joy are forever twinned—they will call back to each other again and again echoing across the contours of your heart:

Look, here I am. How much I feel. How much I long. How much I love. 

Dr. Steven Hayes, founder of ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) and clinical psychologist of University of Nevada says, "to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy." The joy ties you to the love and longing and the ache; and the love ties you to the joy and love and longing. Because whether we’ve already lost or have not yet lost, our love’s most clear moments are full of knowing just how short and precious our time is here together. The depth of our love is the depth of our loss. But we must love deeply. That is why we are here.

Thin spaces, divine sparks, and sweetnesses are our link to yearning; our tether to our beloved, to the unseen, to everything.

Researcher Matthew Kuantans Johnson studies joy and says, “while experiencing joy, we don’t lose ourselves, we become more truly ourselves.” When a moment of joy comes, it cannot cancel out or dilute the love and grief you feel for the one you long for. The joy plumbs into your heart in the very same places the grief lives, and it pulses in with each beat of your heart, “I know, I know, I know.” Yes, it can bring your loss into sharper focus. ⁣It can hurt. It hurts the way risking your heart and loving deeply does. With all the heat and nearness. They are the same violin strings deep inside you. It’s all there. The joy and the grief, which are both part of love.

As much as it hurts, grief is all about love. 

Whether you’ve been grieving for months or for years, 

most folks are made to feel like it’s wrong to be in pain -

 like if you were doing it “right,” you’d be all better now. 

But grief isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. 

Grief is a sign that love has been part of your life, 

and you want that love to continue, even now, even here. 

- Megan Devine | Refuge in Grief

Li-Young Lee writes in his poem “From Blossoms”:

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Susan Cain writes in her book Bittersweet,  page 93, on how we are to integrate the bitter and the sweetness of life to feel whole again. She has three answers. The first two are condensed here, but answer number three is what we need to know so badly now on grief:

1. Our losses shape our psyches and lay down patterns we have to discover and understand or we’ll repeat them again and again unknowingly.

2. Whatever healing or freedom or wholeness you grow into, you’ll still be called back by old habits, and you learn how to recognize them and course-correct.

3. “The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it’s also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”

Thich Nhat writes in How to Live When a Loved One Dies, 

“On a beautiful sunny day, you may look up into the sky and see a nice puffy cloud floating by. You admire its shape, the way the light falls upon its many folds and the shadow it casts on the green field. You fall in love with this cloud. You want it to stay with you and keep you happy. Then its shape and color start to change. The sky becomes dark, and it begins to rain. The cloud is no longer apparent to you. It has become rain. You begin to cry for the return of your beloved cloud.

But when the cloud transforms itself into rain, you can look deeply into the rain and see that your cloud is still there, laughing and smiling at you.”

The whole orchard, the blossom, the shade, the dust. The cloud and the rain. We hold within us.

Does this feel like flat language trying to assuage the pain of loss? I understand. Our losses reach back into our past, fill our present, and rewrite our future with absence.

And yet, somehow we also have the thin space within us, where the spirit and seen and unseen can touch, or get so close, we can almost hear their voices murmuring softly, just there, in the other room. You are in the house, too.

If you want joy to come or are not sure if you want joy to come or don’t know if joy will ever come, Anne Lamott, in response to our darkest trials in life, says to watch out for the return of joy. Joy is very sneaky, she says. I think it helps to go on walks, talk to people you love, and pet animals. Here are 10 gentle things you can do to tend to your grief. Your love and loss are "forever twinned," as Susan Cain writes; they are part of you. You will learn how to care for them. Have patience with your injured spirit, like a bird with a broken wing. 

And if joy wants to visit and you first feel that resistance, please know that the frame of your heart can hold at all. So much darkness, so many stars.  

Further Reading:

⏦  Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole | Susan Cain

⏦  How to Live When a Loved One Dies | Thich Nhat Hanh

In the fire pit, wildflowers. Fuel for winter.

Joy, the Most Vulnerable Emotion

Do you know the shudder that can come after a moment of pure joy? Or in the heartbeat just after an invitation to joy?

When you notice the light shining on a child’s hair,  their soft eyelashes fanned out, so delicate and beautiful it makes you ache? Do you feel it when you watch the one you love sleep serenely? On a walk holding hands, the sunset kissing the clouds, so infused with warmth, glowing so feverishly you feel small and grateful?

And then your brain starts "dress-rehearsing tragedy," as Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW describes. Do you start bracing for impact and think—"If I let the joy in, it will sear me with its potency. I'm flying too close to the sun, and I'll be a falling star before I know it"? 

I do that, too. 

This is why joy is the most vulnerable emotion. To feel joy is to feel the depth and breadth of our existence, right here in this sunkissed moment, to know “these are the days,” and they are not something we can cling to. That’s the ache of bittersweetness, and it’s the call our hearts to reach toward the sweetness. It takes courage to let ourselves feel that exposure to the sun; because we know whatever form love takes, all the joys that alight there—they are not ours to keep. Or, actually, we do keep them, but we can't stop time.

In Atlas of the Heart Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of the Human Experience, joy is characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Brown writes, “Based on our research, I define joy as an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.” It’s a thin space, isn’t it?

So to invite joy into our lives isn’t to ignore our struggles or paint a false silver lining around our lives. Instead, we broaden the circle of our arms, we open our heartdoors. We hold it all. We give ourselves license to notice and enjoy one moment. We lean into the connection we feel with life and with others. We accept for a moment that being human includes the whole spectrum of joy and struggle.

But Brown writes that it's when we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. She has researched what she calls “foreboding joy”—that shudder (mentioned above) so many of us feel immediately after that stab of joy, that aching warmth of sweetness. That fear we have that, if we lean into the experience, we’ll tempt fate and risk our hearts. We somehow tend to think that if we brace for impact now, we’ll somehow avoid the full measure of the heartrending consequence of loss—however it visits us—but we also know no amount of imagining tragedy can actually prepare us for it. 

Brown writes, “When we push away joy, we squander the goodness we need to build resilience, strength, and courage.”  

Writer Anne Lamott understands the dread of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Anne writes, “You grow up waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I think God only has one shoe. Love never fails; never not once, eventually.” 

Gratitude & Joy

Brown’s research of 11,000 coded pieces of data shows those with a deep capacity for joy are able to recognize the shudder we all feel after an invitation to joy as a signal to practice gratitude. It doesn’t mean they somehow found a way to “hack joy” and avoid the shudder of foreboding joy—they just actively choose not to play out the doomy fear film in their mind that arises and instead consciously practice gratitude. And perhaps unsurprisingly, her research confirmed that practicing gratitude invites more joy into our lives. It isn’t just that people experiencing joy can more easily feel grateful. 

Joy and gratitude create a beautiful feedback loop, an “upward spiral.”  She writes:

⏦  Trait (trait: a long-term characteristic of an individual) gratitude predicts great future experiences of in-the-moment joy.

⏦  Trait joy predicts greater future experiences of in-the-moment gratitude.

⏦  And dispositional or situational joy predicts greater future subjective well-being.

We can practice this over and over so our joy and gratitude become more and more embedded (“trait”) than temporary, (“state”). We sharpen our eyesight. We are awake to joy when it calls. We soften around our fear. Our gratitude is our prayer that helps us hold more and more.

Here we are. How precious this is.

Mary Oliver urged us:

Don’t Hesitate 

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that's often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

-Mary Oliver

Mindfulness

Do you want help? Mindfulness allows us to be awake to all the conditions for happiness all around us and within us.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes on inviting joy through mindfulness—which is paying attention. He says look deeply and you will find it. Notice your heart is beating for you and thank it for beating for you. Are your lungs working for you…do you feel each in-breath and out-breath. Can you enjoy your breathing for a moment? 

The beauty in nature is an invitation to joy. Thich Nhat Hanh writes in “You Are Here”: 

Joy and happiness are born of concentration…Getting in touch with the beauty of nature makes life much more beautiful, much more real, and the more mindful and more concentrated you are, the more deeply the sunset will reveal itself to you. Your happiness is multiplied by ten, by twenty. Look at a leaf or a flower with mindfulness, listen to the song of a bird, and you will get much more deeply in touch with them. After a minute of this practice, your joy will increase; your breathing will become deeper and more gentle; and this gentleness and depth will influence your body. Mindful breathing is a kind of bridge that brings the body and mind together. 

It’s a type of call and response, isn’t it? Something is here before me, and mindful breathing helps me see it and offer joy as my response. When was the last time you experienced joy and recognized it ringing that bell inside you? 

Fuel for Winter:  Joy, Amazement

Joy isn’t some light, extra experience we occasionally, if we’re lucky, indulge in. Joy is the fuel for our winters, the metabolic source for our everyday slog—like hummingbirds, the nectar we need for 1,260 heartbeats per minute. Joy has a sustaining quality, ferrying us along, day by day. 

It isn’t that we hope to always be happy or joyful. We can’t be joyful all the time, and we don’t try to be—to try would deny so much of our complexity, our compassion, our prayer, our sorrow, our anger, our contemplation. We want balance.

Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein teaches all this so clearly:

Since for myself, really, sometimes the pain of the world seems incomprehensible and unbearable to me, but I think if there’s anything that balances it, it’s the wonder at the world, the amazingness of people — how kind they are, how resilient they are, how people will take care of people that they don’t know.

If somebody falls, or someone’s in trouble in a public place, people take care of them. People take care of people that they don’t know — that human beings have that ability. I don’t think they have to learn it. They don’t have to have lessons. I think we’re a companionable species, for the most part. Every once in a while, we meet hermit-type people. But for the most part, we’re companionable and congenial, and we care about other people, and we take care of them. So to be able to look at human beings and say, Human beings are amazing. Life is amazing. The sun came up in the exact right place this morning. And celebrate seasons.

I think that’s a wonderful part of being part of a group of people who celebrate seasons and birthdays and holy days, so that here we are again, at another time, in another season. And there’s that great cosmos out there to look at, and imagine people going up into space and looking at the stars, and our ancestors looked at the same stars.

I think that there’s a way of, if I keep in myself a sense of amazement — I tell my grandchildren, Look at this moon. It’s a three-day moon. It’s the best moon. It’s better than a two-day moon. A two-day moon is kind of skimpy, you really can’t see it yet. And a four-day moon? Eh, it’s already on its way to a moon. But a three-day moon is just beautiful. It’s my favorite moon. And if I show that to them, then they begin to think, Oh, it’s my favorite moon, a three-day moon. [laughs] But that just happens to be me. I like moons. Everybody will do it in their own way.

But I think that always balances. When the Buddha taught about needing to see the suffering in the world so that we could respond with compassion, he also talked about the preciousness of life and the need to take care of it. And I think they’re both.

So we hold all our heartache and we are watchful for the invitation to amazement—all at the same time. Some of the deepest parts of our humanity are found in our ability to know we are in the crosscurrents of so much all the time. We know we are here for a moment, and we are also eternal.

We grow to learn that joy and suffering coexist. We handle the fragility of life only through love. We go forward carrying the embers of joy—pilot lights that never go out. 

Further Exploration:

⏦  Atlas of the Heart Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of the Human Experience | Brene Brown, PhD LMSW

⏦  What We Nurture, Sylvia Boorstein interview with Krista Tippett of OnBeing

Withstanding the Fragility & Uncertainty of Life 

From our very first cell-split, the moment we became, we entered a contract with life, which is also our contract with death. And it’s excruciating sometimes to know that. Bring children into the picture, and I’m apt to shut down. Then, I cannot even think about life’s impermanence. Sometimes I feel I can’t bear their fragile beauty—my whole world.

Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, Sylvia Boorstein, understands:

It’s the most amazing thing we can do…to create a new life that comes out with fingernails and eyelashes and all its fingers and toes. It’s an amazing thing. And it’s extremely awakening, in the sense of knowing how vulnerable we are.

But if I can acknowledge that every day on this spinning world brings peril, acknowledge the riskiness of being alive, the tenuousness of being made out of bones and muscles and an engine of cells we hope will keep machining forward, keep time with its miraculous electrical impulses—I can also know every one of us is afraid that something will sweep the ones we love away. 

If we can acknowledge all this, this bare fact that we are temporary,  it will only remind us—recognizing our impermanence is a gateway to presence. To right now. To our attention, our action, our biggest love. To gratitude. Can you feel it? It may be the scariest feeling we ever feel. That threshold; knowing all we have is now. It’s the thin space we create with our being awake to it. We touch the depths within us and our tenderness irradiates outward, upward. 

Mary Oliver’s urgency rings around my heart:

“I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.”

Memento mori, a reminder of death originating in ancient Rome, translates as “Remember that you must die.”  I like the shift in language: “Tomorrow is not promised.”

This snaps into clarity how precious each moment is, doesn’t it?

The aim is to shift the fear into action toward living and loving.

A Sweetness Appears

When I was young I thought maybe there was a plateau I could get to and rest on. Take my hands off the wheel a bit. Somewhere in the late 30s, maybe—I thought this might be when college is completed, or kids are school-age. Some time when stability markers like automatic payments and wedding rings were in place.

I’m in that place now—wedding rings and lost-tooth smiles—but I realize all the time that there is no plateau. Tragedy is interwoven into our lives. We can touch it anytime. Anytime we look around. Any morning we wake up. Any heart-stopping phone call in the late afternoon at the park. There is no haven from the fragility of life. 

Sometimes, depending on the doom in the headlines or the suffering coming close to my circles, I am tempted to think that maybe I can just put my head down…watch for the next mile marker. Muscle through to the next rest stop. But to do this means shutting down, tamping down, tensing up. Boorstein distills all this:

 Sylvia Boorstein says, 

“I tell people that I could have the most profound equanimity, and I am two words away from losing it completely.

And then they say, What are those two words? I say, Well, you have to understand that first, the phone has to ring. Ring, ring, and you pick up the phone, and a voice says, “Hello, Ma?” And it doesn’t sound right —  … because that’s a whole different story. 

But the truth is that we are connected with empathic bonds of tremendous energy. I wouldn’t want it otherwise. I don’t want to sail above my emotional life. I don’t want to complicate my emotions with worse complications, by struggling with what I can’t change or by reacting without thinking things through. In the beginning, I think I had a more lofty idea of what would happen if I practiced a lot. It’s become a lot more pedestrian. I’d like to live kindly, with a good heart, because I’ll be the happiest that way."

And also what I am learning deeply, now more than ever, are the truths Dan shared, ones he learned from Raymond Carver:

There isn’t enough of anything

as long as we live. But at intervals

a sweetness appears and, given a chance,

prevails.

The truth Dan learned about small sustaining sweetnesses: Northern lights, Monet, choirs, movies, poems. Now, I’m beginning to see. There is a way to survive the tragedy, the vulnerability, the intense lack of control, the deaths. We must be awake to the world. Like hummingbirds, hearts racing, we collect small sustaining sweetnesses from flower to flower. And we do that together.

But to be awake to sweetness, we cannot numb out the pain or close the shutters. Or muscle ahead to the rest stop without feeling. We have to be open-hearted in the moment, right now, so we can recognize the flower when it appears:

Look, your child is talking to the dog. Look, the sky is so blue. Look, a heron is skimming over the neighborhood. The wind is brushing your hair. Look, your hands are working beautifully while you wash the dishes. The water is warm. A favorite old song is on. The person you love is just over there. We’re still here. 

Or as someone once said, “The arts are not flowers on embroidery but fuel for winter.” If we can pay attention and fill our hearts when sweetness comes before us—whatever form it takes—we will have more shelter when the nights are so long and cold. 

We must be careful to remain awake. To remember our appointment with life is right now. To love with our whole selves. To remember that our humanness makes us weak and temporary, and also allows us to love fiercely. 

Perhaps the best way to withstand the fragility of life is not to withstand it at all, it is actually to wholeheartedly (as best we can) yield to it, yield to impermanence, the transience of each moment,  to remember tomorrow is not promised. Soften the fear with all the beauty happening right now. The preciousness in your hands, right now.

When we do, we are brought into the clearing of being here together. We are awakened into humility, a type of wonder, we pay attention. How short our time can be and how much difficulty—but woven into the pain, so much sweetness.

How do we hold the hot heat of all our love and all the fragility of life? I think only together. 

Like my teacher Dan Peters told me: "A quote by Thomas McGrath that we’ve had on our bulletin board since our first child was born. His son’s name is Tomasito:" 

“How wonderful, Tomasito! All of us here, together, a little while, on the road through.”

Unlocking Compassion for Others | Fuel for Activism

If you have been to the optometrist for a prescription, you know the doctor will flip the lenses for you and offer again and again “One…….or, two……” to learn which is best for your vision. Sometimes they are very hard to tell apart. Sometimes, in one lens, you can still make out the lines, but they are blurry.

I grew up with beliefs in evil and goodness. Evil was a powerful, mysterious force that we could try and tame with prayer, but of course, violence and terror and loss did (and do) happen despite the most fervent prayers. The concept of evil left me feeling helpless and afraid. Worse, I was taught that without redemption, evil was inside me—because I was human. Goodness was outside, in the divine. Something to chase.

When I learned there was a second lens to look through, it changed how I move through the world. I chose Lens 2: Suffering and the alleviation of suffering. 

“For forty-five years, the Buddha said, over and over again, 

‘I teach only suffering and the transformation of suffering.’” 

-Thich Nhat Hanh

If you look at the sweep of civilization, despite the universal existence of suffering, you see people helping babies to be born, people baking and buying bread, people sharing medicine. People form communities and rely on each other to survive—we’re social creatures, and our original impulses are to allay conflict and find union. These are very different from the ideas I was taught as a child.

How can we explain murder, war, dehumanization, abuse, and every other kind of pain? We do inflict these on each other. But with lens two, we see we were wounded into tragedy. Our bend is not toward harm. The ways we are neglected, hurt, misunderstood, shut out, harmed—those shape us. They leave a mark. This is suffering. 

By calling it suffering, we don’t look to minimize the magnitude of the outcomes of destructive violence and crushing power. Suffering hurts the one it is in and it also spreads like an illness—it is corrosive, abusive, destructive, full of pain, it shatters lives, often for generations.

Buddhists say the sources of our suffering are delusion, anger, fear, shame, loneliness....and unknowing can cause so much harm. Blind spots can wound so many. And the seeds of suffering are often much further up the river—in our ancestors, our parents, and society.  Now we can begin to see much more clearly. 

If we understand the birthplace of pain is not caused by a mysterious, unharnessed evil force, we can travel upstream, go up the river to see what caused people to fall in the first place. There's the adage: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.”  I say, we can do both.

Looking More Closely

Did your father hurt you? Someone else? Can you imagine them for a moment as a five-year-old child? Did they cry alone as a child with no comfort? What was not given because it was not there to give? What fear or stoniness grew in them? How far back are those beginnings?  

By imagining this, we know we can’t rewrite what happened. Sometimes, we can only go upstream in our minds. But now we have eyes to see how we, too, would suffer if we were them.  

And think now about the "near enemies," not those committing horrific acts, but those who you find unlikable. Those in your life who seem to bring up irritation and frustration. A family member. A coworker. How did their hearts become sore? What wisdom was never shared with them? What kindnesses were never given?

Going deeper, Thich Nhat Hanh writes of understanding the horrific acts of people against one another. How we cannot separate ourselves from the world around us, even those who do harm:

In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

Now the problem is not just a fixed label that locks us out of understanding or action. Now the problem is workable. Now we see the children in the bullies, the punishers, the fearmongers. We see the children in those who injure us in ignorance; those who act selfishly out of fear; those who are stony because they didn't feel loved.

All this isn't to say people should get a free pass because we are so generous in our understanding of the roots of the suffering. People should be held accountable. Kind, firm communication is a necessity. But now we have curiosity about the roots of their habits and perceptions and the conditions that brought this about. Now we have more clarity. 

We look at things in this way so we understand. The harm others cause is very real. It can’t always be fully explained. But unlike the idea of evil, when we apply curiosity and understanding to suffering, change is possible. Not to undo actions that broke us, but to heal the suffering within us that they gave to us. To have new insight so we can work to rescue others. 

Anger as Spark, as Fever | Love is Fuel

As writer and activist Karen Walrond explains, anger sparks the desire to wield our power—to move toward justice, toward transformation, toward preventing people from falling in the river. But anger is the spark, not the fuel.  She says, “The fuel is the learning, the self-compassion, the staying in your values, the kindness, the measured-ness, the purposefulness.”

Sylvia Boosterin, Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist teaches on this, too:

You need it just to alert you to what needs attention. But you don’t need to carry it along with you, to keep refueling you. And as a matter of fact, if you keep nurturing the flame of anger, it confuses the mind and maybe we don’t respond as wisely as we ought to.

But I need the anger, as if,  I had 104 fever, it would be a sign that I need to do something about it.

It’s a response, I think, to what I feel underneath it, which is a fear things really aren’t fair; this is not right, that this and this is happening in the world. And I think in response to that fear, which is basic, the human response is to lash out at it, when something frightens us.

…

So I think that the anger is on top of the fear, and to be able to say: I am frightened, because in the world these unjust things are happening. What can I do? And how can I have a mind that’s energized to do something about it, but not reacting in anger, but responding in firm kindness? But things need to be different. Things need to be different.

The right name for suffering and the right reading of our emotions can guide us. Where is your anger pointing you? What wrong should be made right? What wants your protection?  What help does your anger demand you give? 

How can we tap into love as a clean, long-game fuel? 

Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “True seeing always gives rise to true love.”

Looking deeply, we see lovelessness wants true love. We can remind each other: scared people are scary, injured people injure others, those who have had parts of them destroyed destroy others. The suffering that grows inside is inflicted on others, and it can grow exponentially. But what happens when we name it suffering, not evil. Lens two. What happens if we know they are prisoners of their own suffering sowing more seeds of suffering?

Can we travel up the river and look for the places our action is needed? How does our compassionate understanding change the way we react to the headlines that hit us in the gut?

And who can we prevent from falling into the river? Who in our lives can we protect by transforming our own suffering? 

“If we observe deeply, the mind of compassion will naturally be transformed into action.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

Can we go upstream with our own suffering? Look for the wounds that grew into walls and lonely places? What can I heal inside me? Go to my five-year-old child up the riverbank. I can start there. I invite you to join me.

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Further Reading & Guides: 

⏦   Thich Nhat Hanh quotes in this reflection can be found in Thich Nhat Hanh | Essential Writings Every page of this book is full of gentleness and wisdom.

⏦  What We Nurture, Sylvia Boorstein interview with Krista Tippett of OnBeing

⏦   For a neuroscience perspective, read on the shift from What's wrong with you? to What happened to you? (What happened to them? ) What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing | Bruce D. Perry, MD PhD & Oprah Winfrey

⏦  Guided loving-kindness meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh

⏦  Pema Chödrön | Tonglen Meditation