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Acceptance of life as it manifests, in all its forms, is a basic tenet of the Buddha’s teaching. However, the word ‘acceptance’ is often misunderstood. In this two part blog, Anna Aysea explores acceptance as an awakening to a more insightful understanding of reality.

The radio show I was listening to recently had a guest on who spoke about her experience of a panic attack during a hike, alone in the mountains, while descending a particularly challenging and steep section. As she heard the sound of dislodged small rocks rapidly falling into the precipice next to the narrow path, she froze and started to experience racing thoughts: “Oh this is bad.. I don’t want this.. I am going to fall, I am going to die in a minute… no.. no.. no.. oh I want to get out of here…get me out of here..”. At some point she recognized her thinking was not very helpful and she intuitively started to talk to herself out loud as if speaking to a toddler, saying: “Its Okay Jane, just breath now and see if you can feel your feet, are they both on the ground? Yes they are, good, excellent! Now, put your left hand on the rock beside you, yes very good! Okay, see if you now can move your right foot two inches to the left, yes, excellent!”. This way she was able to get herself out of the panic state and safely make the difficult descent. She said that speaking to yourself as if talking to a child helps you to get a grip on fear because it is a form of positive thinking and positive motivation.

The path from resistance to acceptance
Focusing on the positive can of course be good in dealing with challenging situations, I feel however that what truly worked here was the simple fact that this hiker was able to stop resisting. What she describes is the transition from: “No.. no.. no..I don’t want this, get me out of here!” to “Okay, lets look at this situation right here, right now, and see; what do I need to do?” The first position is fear, despair, resistance, rejection, the second position is open acceptance, trust, not-knowing.

Notice that it is not about acceptance of “I am going to die” – that thought is a mind projection into the future – rather it is the acceptance of reality in the now – standing with both feet on the ground in this case – and just leaving the projection for what it is for a moment. Notice also that trust is a state of open willingness, not ” trust in Something”. The state of open acceptance comes about by recognizing thoughts / mind activity for what it is, ceasing resistance, and simply being fully present in the now: “What is good to do now? What is the next step?”. The path from resistance to acceptance is the way to discern right action.

The News
We are facing bleak times which may even get bleaker. Listening to the news seems to hold the same challenges as standing on the edge of a precipice. News about wars that are ongoing or that have recently erupted, more escalations on the horizon for the very near future, with political leaders fueling divisiveness. Even the possibility of a World War 3 is now being mentioned . All this easily triggers fear driven projections, which are further multiplied by a media that has an incentive to exactly do that, as fear commands attention and increases news consumption, which in turn serves the underlying revenue model.

So what do you do when you find yourself in the grip of fear for the state of the world, for the possibility of World War 3? What do you do when your thought process echos: “Oh this is bad.. no.. no.. no.. I don’t want this.. get me /us out of here!”? How do you transition from resistance and rejection to open acceptance in the face of war, in the face of atrocities?

To investigate these questions, it is helpful to have a brief look at the three main aspects that are involved: acceptance, imagination and fear.

Acceptance | What it is not
Acceptance may be one of the most misunderstood terms in the Buddhist teaching. Most of us may have tried to practice acceptance in one or more of the following ways only to realize that it doesn’t quite work that way.

First of all, acceptance is not the same as passivity;  If I am able to act and change a situation for the better but I remain passive, that doesn’t sit right. Acceptance is not subservience either; Accepting everything my guru, my master or my tradition tells me without questioning, without investigating is not acceptance, it is dependency. Subservience combined with inadequacy is often mistaken for acceptance but is far from it; To think: “I am going to die, I don’t want that, but Buddhist teaching / my master says I must accept, so I must somehow learn to accept death.” is not acceptance, it is delusion. When I fail to accept death – and I will because accepting a mind projection as reality cannot be done – I feel inadequate because I erroneously think: it is just me who is failing, everyone else seems to be perfectly able to do it. Now I have completely lost my way in trying to follow Buddhist teaching.

Acceptance
Ultimately, acceptance is about reality. The thought “I am going to die” is not reality in the now – I am not dead or I would not be heaving a thought – it is a mind projection into the future and needs to be recognized as such. Trying to accept a mind projection as reality is a fools errand.

An arising thought – be that a projection or otherwise – can and should of course always be acknowledged and accepted as an activity of the mind. The problem arises when we mistake a thought for reality and then convince ourselves that we can accept that so called “reality”. That is not accepting reality, we are simply being tricked by the creative power of our own mind, tricked by the power of imagination.

Part two will continue the investigation on how to transition from resistance to acceptance in the face of the state of the world, and the role imagination and fear play in the arising of resistance.

It has been six months since we last posted on Dew on the Grass. Life has been busy for all of us, in different ways. The summer seems to be a time for outdoors and family and then there are the general ups and downs of the everyday that draw on everyone’s energy. Still, as autumn begins to wrap us up in her “mists and mellow fruitfulness”, I have a sense of returning home, here to our little blog, and to the words that are waiting patiently to be written.

It has been a revelation to me, in recent years, to realise that the creative parts of our nature are expressions of our spiritual journey. That may surprise the reader who has always known this, or in fact, does not yet know it. I have had an impetus to write since I could first hold a pen and join words together into sentences. In infant school, I was encouraged by my teacher when I wrote short stories and I often got to perform them in front of the class. I attempted to write a novel, when I was nine, sent articles to magazines, which were rejected,  and in my early teens, wrote poems that I showed to no one for fear of judgment.

Like many people, especially women, perhaps, as I emerged from the creative freedom of childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood, crushing self-doubt stoked the belief that writing was a waste of time when I could be doing something more productive and this halted the creative flow, tied me in knots and generally crushed the intuitive knowledge within me that writing my thoughts down on the page was a means of spiritual self-discovery. Furthermore, it took many years to understand that revisiting those words, moulding them like wet clay, and presenting them to a wider audience was not necessarily a pretentious act but one of trust in a process of growth that goes deeper than the words, themselves.

Of course, life is busy and always will be, there are many pulls on our time, but neglecting the creative life within us, whether that be writing, drawing, sculpting, or other form of creativity such as sewing or knitting, if that is our means of expression,  is like shutting off our air.

Artists who write about writing not as a commercial enterprise but as a way of delving deeper into the human heart and consciousness, such as Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, have long advocated for spending time each day simply spilling out onto the page without premeditation of what gets written. The key to this method is to allow the words to arrive on the page, without letting our inner judge impede them. We sit, without expectation, in a space that is simultaneously empty and ripe with the potential for insight. It is a revelation to bring this type of trust to our relationship with creativity, whether it is writing or any other form of art. It lays us bare, all quest for accomplishment is necessarily dropped and we release that which needs to be seen.

This is akin to sitting on our meditation cushion, facing the wall. We have no warning of what thoughts or emotions will arise.  We can do this anywhere and at any time, of course, but, as with any practice, creating an environment that is conducive to the process is helpful. Sometimes, what comes is a need to change something in our lives. Even if the change is small, it can be profound. It is the space that speaks and connects us to our true nature.

One afternoon, quite recently, after carving some time into my day for reflection and writing,  I knew that I had to do something quite specific to support myself emotionally and spiritually. Previous visitors to this blog, and to entries that I have posted, may have picked up on the fact that my husband is chronically ill, and requiring a lot of care. He lives and sleeps on the ground floor of the house, whilst I slept upstairs in an enormous double bed, a relic of a former time in our marriage. The bed filled the room. I struggled to find a bit of wall space to place my meditation bench. The room was cramped and I felt cramped, along with it. It seemed to represent my feelings of being squashed: of being held hostage in a situation that I felt I could not escape from. Of course, being in these ‘no escape’ situations can, of themselves, be a catalyst for spiritual awakening and I did not want to turn away from any part of my situation. At the same time, I felt I needed the air to move and to unblock some energy. I needed to create space in the physical environment to breathe my way back to a regular writing practice.

So, with help, I moved the enormous bed into a spare bedroom and replaced it with a far less grand single bed, which I placed against a wall, found a lovely desk on an online auction site, which now sits, catching the morning sunlight, in the bay window, and, importantly, there is also wall space for my meditation bench. The centre of the room is empty. I may dance in it if the mood takes me!

The late Thích Nhất Hạnh once said that we have a right to meditate. I think we have a right to write, too. Or, sculpt, sew paint or practice whatever connects us to our inner life and spiritual home. To do this makes us richer, more integrated human beings – we just have to show up and let go.

References:

To Autumn by John Keates

Writing Down the Bones  – Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg – Shambala Press

The Artist’s Way – A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self by Julia Cameron – Macmillan Press

Continuing our theme of “In the Shadows”, Anna Ayse describes how her childhood experience of pain caused a disconnect between body and mind, as a method of survival, and how Buddhist practice, over time, was  the catalyst for a deeper understanding of ‘reality’, bringing greater harmony and a sense of wholeness into her life.

As a fifteen year-old teenager I wrote in a dairy entry that my greatest wish in life was to become as transparent as fine cloth.

That wish was born out of the experience of the body* as dense, dark, heavy, claustrophobic. It was born out of the experience of being trapped in this limited form that was being judged, mistreated, medically probed, jabbed, grabbed, pushed and pulled; that was being restrained by plaster casts, by cold hard gripping metal drilled into it; that was being subjected, many times over, to the deep slicing of the surgical blade, slicing-drawing broad, indelible lines of considerable yardage, creating intricate cord like scars, with a halo of crude stitch marks, as scattered grains of rice. I would often dissociate and retreat from the body so as not to feel the pain that was being inflicted on it. To this day, it does not come naturally to say “my body”, although perhaps it is partly for different reasons now than it was in the past. This type of detachment from the body is a mode of survival, induced when the current experience is felt to be too overwhelming, when the current experience is existential terror.

A few years after writing down my greatest wish in life and as a slightly older teenager, I traveled to a Buddhist monastery to learn to meditate, led by a deep intuition that the key for realizing my life’s wish and overcoming the shadow world of the body, may lie there. It was surprising to learn that Buddhists deem a state of detachment as something desirable, something to aspire to. It would long remain a mystery as to why.

Localization in the body

The experience of being localized in the body is a difficult conundrum to crack. Our senses seemed to reinforce that “I” is localized “here” behind the eyes and the world is localized “over there” outside “I”, creating the dichotomy of self and other, the duality of subject and object. Ideas like “a healthy mind in a healthy body” reinforce the belief that we are localized in the body. This mainstream belief is challenged when suffering becomes so excessive that it forces a disconnect. Existential terror induced at an early age is one of the causes for such a disconnect. It results in a debilitating state of affairs. Nowadays, terms are used like childhood trauma and PTSS. Information and research in that area can very much help understand and deal with the impact of certain experiences on the body-mind, even though solving the root cause falls in the spiritual domain.

The Immovable One

Becoming established in the unmoving, unflinching presence of Zazen meditation – vividly personified by Achalanātha, The Immovable One – makes it possible to face debilitating states.

It took more than 35 years of remaining present in the experience of being trapped in this body, being in chronic pain and in existential terror, to realize the simple, glaring truth: the body is within “I”, not the other way round. The erroneous belief that the self is trapped in the body, and shares the limitations of the body is a contraction and that contraction is at the root of suffering.

The unbound state

The body being within “I” is glaring because it is our direct experience all along. All that we know of the body is bodily sensations, that is, how the body feels on the inside and sense perceptions of how it appears on the outside. Both sensations and sense perceptions arise within the space of awareness, the space of stillness. This collection of bodily sensations and sense perceptions we call “my body” is an activity within the space of stillness, which is the true “I”. The activity of bodily sensations and sense perceptions is ‘the contained’, not ‘that which contains’. Ignorance, that is the ignoring of this reality, is the root cause of suffering. Ignorance obscures the true “I” but it can never obscure it completely. Even in the midst of deep suffering, the truth remains as the deep wish in the heart to be free of the contraction, to be free of the belief of being a limited entity. The deep wish in the heart to dissolve the contraction is like a beacon directing ships at night, it guides us through suffering to return to our true home, the unbound state, which was never lost to begin with.

Effortless detachment

Coming back to detachment, the disconnect caused by suffering shatters the belief of being localized in this body but it does not eliminate that belief altogether. Even without trauma, the idea that the body is an obstacle; the experience of being a limited entity and the wish to overcome that limitation, are all forms of disconnected detachment, are forms of suffering. The detachment the Buddhist teaching speaks of is not a disconnection, rather it is the natural outcome of seeing the truth of the matter, which is: the true self does not share the limitations of the body. The body is not an entity in its own right; the body-mind is the activity of the true self. Seeing it for the activity it is, seeing that the body cannot impact the self, puts the body in its rightful place in the wider perspective. This natural detachment is effortless and intimate.

Buddha recognizes Buddha

The realization that the body-mind does not contain but is the contained, that it is within the space of awareness, the true self, is a major shift that has far reaching implications. It is not just this body-mind that is the activity of the true self; the whole universe is contained as activity of the true self, therefore the universe is our true body. The expression: “Buddha recognizes Buddha” does not mean: “I as Buddha recognize you as another Buddha”. This had been the underlying assumption. The teaching does not say: all beings are Buddha’s. The believe that there are multiple Buddha’s is duality, is still the believe of being a separate finite entity. All body-minds, all beings, the whole universe, is the activity of a single, universal True Self. The teaching says: All beings are Buddha. There only ever is one indivisible Buddha. Buddha recognizes Buddha is the true self recognizing no other than itself. To reconcile this reality with the sensory experience of a world “out there” is the work at hand

Old habits

The ingrained thinking, sensing, feeling based on the belief of being localized in this body-mind, of being a limited object in time and space, are conditionings that have deep roots. These patterns have been reinforced over a lifetime, are still reinforced in the world. The work of re-examining these ingrained habits whenever they arise, aligning them with the truth and allowing them to dissolve is a long process. Some conditionings laid very early on at the time of infancy may never dissolve completely as the imprint is too deep. That is okay. It does not obscure the inherent transparency of the fine cloth.

This article is a brief write-up about an ongoing, non-linear process, I hope it may be of benefit to others.

* Wind from the Sea by Andrew Wyeth: The curtain in the painting represents the “fine cloth” in the article. The transparency and the gentle flowing in the breeze of the illuminated curtain evokes a sense of spaciousness and freedom that is not inhibited by the dark frame. This represents the wish to be free of the contraction that shines brightly as the truth which cannot be obscured within the experience of the body as dark and heavy, within suffering.

We begin our series ‘In the Shadows’ with a reflective piece, by Mo Henderson, which describes how  fear  can distort reality, and how the practice of meditation brings clarity.

There is a story of someone who walks along a path at night, they see a poisonous snake on the path and, feeling fearful, they turn and run away in the opposite direction. They return along the same path the next morning and find a coiled rope on the ground. In the darkness it was difficult to see reality, but in the light it became clear, it was a rope and not a snake.

For me, this story illustrates how the feeling of fear can manifest when reality is not clear, when it appeared to be a snake in the shadows of night the response was based on the emotion of fear. In a sense this is understandable, waiting around to find the truth may have been dangerous in the dark, if it was indeed a snake!

Perceptions of reality can be distorted by thoughts of pending danger at any time, even when we are not in a life threatening situation. When feeling in danger, the bodies natural stress reaction ‘fight or flight’ can kick in to help protect us, by boosting our strength in order to fight or run away.

Dwelling on things that may not be true and the resulting fear, worry and need to ‘escape’ from a situation can manifest in many ways, including, avoidance of certain people or situations, distractions such as addictions and preoccupation with ruminating thoughts. These things can help us function, however only serve to push unresolved issues further into the hidden depths of mind, rendering us ignorant to what truly needs to be done. When living in our own self created shadow like this, it can be difficult to be aware of our own personal needs and to distinguish them from the needs of others. The energy depleted by this ‘bottled up’ containment of powerful emotions can be exhausting and cause a person to project onto others what is within themselves. For example, blame, gossip, rejection, over exaggerating to appear ‘better’ than we judge ourselves to be and trying to please others to prove our worthiness. Life can then become governed by conditioned habit energy which can divide us from reality.

I believe no one is perfect in being able to always see reality for what it is in every moment of the day. For me, it takes a certain amount of stillness in daily life to do what’s best to do based on reality. Thoughts are good in terms of planning my day, however, if I find myself caught up in over thinking things, I need to question what I’m doing and why? Sometimes I feel ‘stuck’ and it’s usually because I’m too concerned about the thoughts of what has happened or will happen and all the while I can miss what is actually happening in reality. The stillness can bring back some relative harmony, then I can listen and observe how to be with my life and the lives of those around me.

Returning to avoidance and distraction, my particular tendency in the early days of learning to be still in sitting meditation was ‘ workaholism’. I was deeply grateful to learn this, as I was ignorant to this fact before the practice. I began to notice each time a discomforting thought arose, I would feel the need to get off my cushion and start working on something. Now I’m willing to be with uncomfortable thoughts and not feel the need to ‘run’. That’s not to say I feel great about it.

Being with discomfort and suffering in this way has allowed me to accept my own suffering, the mistakes I have made in the past, and to forgive any hurts experienced. I believe this acceptance is a form of love and that going on with learning to be still with one’s own suffering, manifests in being able to be with the suffering of others.

I have noticed accepting the pains of life in a deeper way can also bring space to see the natural joys of life. It feels as though there is still much to be known and to delve deeper into. I wish to keep trying to live in the world doing the best I can and trust this means being aware of the reality of each moment, responding to what comes with the best intentions and being vigilant enough to notice when any habit energy is taking me off course. I guess signs of my own shadows in terms of past loss, sadness, hurts and mistakes may crop up at any time and it’s how I accept and live with everything that truly matters.

I read somewhere these habit energies are like shadows, like thieves entering an empty house, eventually the shadows can’t cause trouble.

Mo Henderson

 

This week we begin a new series . We are inviting submissions of art, photography, poetry, and other writing on the theme of “In the Shadows”. Images should be sent in jpeg format and writing as a Word.doc. We can also work with Pages, if you are a Mac user. Please send your offerings to us by using the contact form, on the website.

By way of inspiration, here is a poem, by Mary Oliver, which is pertinent to the time in which we live and, as always with Oliver’s writing, ends with hope and wisdom.

 Shadows

by Mary Oliver

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
senseless acts has its thread looping
back through the world and into a human heart.
And meanwhile
the gold-trimmed thunder
wanders the sky; the river
may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.
Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins
bring us to grief—but these are the hours
with the old wooden-god faces;
we lift them to our shoulders like so many
black coffins, we continue walking
into the future. I don’t mean
there are no bodies in the river,
or bones broken by the wind. I mean
everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar
of the tornado swears there was no mention ever
of any person, or reason—I mean
the waters rise without any plot upon
history, or even geography. Whatever
power of the earth rampages, we turn to it
dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
the opposite of love.

In the last of our posts on the theme of Lost and Losing, Anna Aysea describes her experience of training with pain. This post, which is a little longer than our usual, recommended word count, first appeared on the blog Jade Mountains and has recently been republished in the Portland Buddhist Priory Newsletter.

Due to orthopaedic surgeries and treatments, I have been dealing with long periods of excessive physical pain. Because of my body’s condition, being without pain is a rare thing in general. So training with pain is a necessity. The following is an excerpt of sorts, some bits and pieces on my personal dealings with pain. I guess what I am learning, in the process is, in essence, applicable to any form of difficulty or adversary we may encounter in daily life.

Unbearable?

When in hospital, several times a day, you are asked to assess your pain level by giving it a rating between 0 and 10, zero being no pain, ten being unbearable pain. This made me reflect on the meaning of unbearable. There have been times when  the agony I was in completely filled the whole of consciousness, excluding all else, and I felt it was utterly unbearable. But having reached unbearable nothing much happens really, you do not drop dead, you do not explode in pieces, you do not vanish out of existence. Having reached unbearable you just continue to live, your heart simply continuing to beat. The truth is, despite the agony being unbearable, you continue to bear it, anyway. So, however excessive, I thought it would be contrary to the truth to rate my pain a level 10, since if it was truly unbearable I reckon I would have dropped dead. I think this is an important distinction to be aware of when dealing with all kinds of stuff: to see clearly how something feels, how your experience of it is and then how that relates to the truth of how things really are, the bigger reality.

Room for complaint

There is a difference between mild to reasonably severe pain and truly excessive pain in the way that  it affects the mind. With excessive pain there is no escape. It nails your consciousness immovably to a single point, the now, The Reality Of Pain, that reality excludes all else. One has no option but to face it without flinching and to endure it, whether you think you are capable of it or not. With milder forms of pain, there is more room for distraction, room for escape in familiar forms like being grumpy, feeling sorry for oneself, complaining. When I catch myself complaining, sometimes, I smile and think “Actually, if I have room for complaint, I am doing not too bad!”

I should say that the above way of differentiating is for internal use only. I don’t think you can reverse it to make inferences about someone else’s pain based on their “complaint level.” That would be trying to step into another’s shoes, which — apart from being impossible — does not really help and can lead to a judgmental attitude, which is bound to heavily tax whatever is going on.

Preserving resilience

There is nothing that drains your energy more than chronic pain that lasts and lasts without giving you a break. This can be quite exhausting and depressing. What helps me to get through bleak times is to find helpful distractions that lift the mood, like watching movies and television or chatting to friends and ways of relaxing the body as much as possible to minimize the accumulation of tension and stress. But by far the main thing that preserves your resilience in a situation of ceaseless pain is to not give in to gloomy thoughts, to stay focused and to keep looking at the distinction between the feelings, the experience of the now and the truth, the bigger reality of how things really are. Not losing sight of the bigger reality prevents the mind from getting into isolation where you feel all alone in your agony. I guess that loneliness is the most unbearable of all and can make you apathetic or spiral you down into the pits of depression and despair.

Endless night

When dealing with pain, the night-time forms the biggest challenge, since for some reason, everything is multiplied: the pain, the isolation, the loneliness, the arising fears. The nights in the first week after a major surgery, for instance, seem to last eternally.

I remember one such night about two years ago after a particularly extensive operation that took 8 hours. I think it was the third night after the operation. By then, the pain is not only from operation wounds and fractures, but every bone, joint, muscle and tissue hurts after lying in the same posture for days on end, because you cannot move and bedsores start to kick in. Any sense of time completely lost in the mist of the morphine haze from the two morphine drips, I spend the time subsequently by dozing off a little and then looking at the clock on the bedside table, hoping maybe it has advanced at least half an hour, but always to find that it is only a few minutes later than the previous time I checked. Time has become like a rubber band, every minute stretches and stretches and stretches, to infinity, making the dark night last forever. A little after 1:00 am, when the pressure on my spine from lying on my back for days has become terrible, I tried to shift, turn a little to one side, but impossible, I cannot move. I decide to call for the night nurse and see if I can perhaps manage with some help.

This human being

It takes a while before the nurse answers. Must be a busy night. When she finally comes, she enters the room only halfway, staying at a distance from the bed. Not a good sign. It’s dark in the room. Out of the corner of my eye I can only see her silhouette against the light from the open door. I sense agitation emanating from her. Something is not right at all. Throat bone dry and sore from the respiration tube, my voice is a hoarse whisper. Trying to over bridge the distance, I ask if she can help me shift a little to one side. She snaps: “You are not allowed to turn!” This is not true. She knows it and I know it. She is flatly refusing to do something. I’ve been on this ward frequently due to the unending schedule of operations. Notwithstanding the understaffed situation that seems to be common for most health-care institutions, usually the staff here is friendly and helpful, including this nurse, but she has the tendency to become snappy when she is stressed. It is a big ward and there is only one nurse during the night, and a lot of patients recently operated on at the moment, so gathering from her reaction, things must be rather tough tonight. But right now this nurse is the only human being in the whole universe that I’ve got to be there for me in some small way in this dark night, and yet she is not able to. She is very stressed and annoyed; her agitation fills the single-bed hospital room like a dark cloud, intensifying the shadows. I remain silent; I know I am in no position to argue the situation. She hesitates, not quite sure how to read my silence. She then turns abruptly and leaves the room.

Expanding awareness

I am alone in a hospital room 900 kilometres from home in a foreign country. Everything and everyone familiar is far away. It is just over 1.30 am, the worst part of the endless night still to come. A feeling of utter loneliness and abandonment engulfs me like a huge wave. My mind is trapped like a caged bird in this terrible now without escape. I focus to prevent it from being hurled into dark pits of desperation and existential fear opening up all around. The flat rejection of the nurse when I am most vulnerable and helpless is spiralling my mind into withdrawal, into isolation from sheer panic. I somehow need to find my way back. To reverse the withdrawal, I use all the willpower I can summon to focus and to expand my awareness. First to the hospital bed: I feel its size, its robustness, how it supports my aching body together with all the many tubes coming in and out of it; I then expand to feel the space of the room — it is pleasant and spacious; expand to its walls and beyond, to the ward, the fellow patients — lots of them, no doubt in pain and without sleep like me; to the whole hospital, the city, to my friends far away. When my awareness expands to include it all, I become suddenly aware of this stream of love and care coming towards me from all those thinking of me, wishing me well. They may be far away and at sleep now and yet this stream is still pouring forth from them like a river of light. The stream simply leaves no room for feelings of entrapment, despair, loneliness, abandonment, such powerful emotions a moment ago, and yet where did they go? They have simply evaporated in the light of the stream when I was able to reverse the isolation and reconnect. The darkness that fills the room. Where does it go when you turn on the light switch? Like darkness, these feelings, despite their all powerful and overwhelming appearance, don’t seem to have a real substance in the end.

Nothing has changed: the lonely hospital room, the excruciating pain, the endless night ahead, the terrible weariness and exhaustion, all still there. And yet my experience of it now is very different. There is a sense of being carried, being embraced, me and everything I am going through. It is all right to just be and endure without flinching or needing to escape.

In this week’s post, Mo Henderson explores a state of feeling lost and confused about the state of the world and how the practice of meditation, and being willing to face life as it is, has helped her to both understand and be ready for change when it comes.

People living today may think there never has been such a chaotic mess, such a threatening environment, and with many assumptions/predictions of doom and gloom. The world is a complex place and probably, in a relative sense, always has been. I admit to sometimes feeling lost about the best and least harmful way to live. The discomfort of not serving the world in big and meaningful ways can be overwhelming. Sadness at seeing other human beings struggling for survival in situations of war and poverty can lead to despair and hopelessness and it is easy to get caught up in confusion and indecision when trying to work out how to help.

No one knows what will happen in the future, even what will happen in the next moment! With my logical mind, I can try to discern what is good to do, given all the information, experience, and study available to me. However, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to practice Zen meditation, just to sit still without trying to think, or not to think, has opened up a sense of being without needing to be over-concerned with deliberation about purpose and goals, particularly about things over which I have no control. Through sitting meditation I am learning to accept ‘not knowing’ with a minimum of assumptions and to see and experience what I may have otherwise missed.

In hindsight, there is sadness about this, especially when I recall past mistakes which I believe were governed by my narrow thoughts and predictions. What is important to me now is to simply ‘show up’ each day with an open mind, without any illusive purpose. This kind of ‘paying attention’ to what exists in life has helped me to hold what I think lightly and to be ready for it to be different.

In Buddhism, this is called ‘beginner’s mind’ to meet life as it is.

‘In beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,
but in the expert’s mind there are few’.

Shunryū Suzuki

 

This week, Karen Richards writes about her Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in the second in the series Losing and Lost.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the feeling of apprehension that one is either not in the know about or missing out on information, events, experiences, or life decisions that could make one’s life better. It was, according to Wikipedia, first identified by a marketing strategist, called Dan Herman, in 1996 and has since been exacerbated by the use of social media. But, the fear of missing or losing out is not a modern phenomenon, though it may have an acronym, now.

I have suffered from a fear of missing out since I was in my early teens. I remember being in awe of the different roads that it was possible to take in life and wanted to take them all!  There were so many subjects that one could study, craft skills that could be acquired, books to be read, and careers that could be had. It caused a sort of existential anxiety that I may die not having experienced all that could be experienced: that I may inadvertently take the wrong path and end up in a dead end, from which I could not escape. I was, passionate and enthusiastic, inquisitive about many things, had a capacity for hard work, and loved to be around interesting people but alongside this passionate enthusiasm was a deep sense of dissatisfaction and an underlying fear that by doing one thing, I was losing out on another.

This often led to me taking jobs that ultimately did not satisfy me and starting projects that I would later abandon, not through boredom but because of a nagging feeling that this was not ‘it’. I remember, at the age of nineteen, when I decided to leave nursing, before completing my training, the Head of the School of Nursing told me, “Nurse, you have the capability, just not the ‘stickability’. How right she was. Ironically, her words ‘stuck’ with me. They helped me to begin questioning why I was not satisfied. So, when I first encountered Buddhism, in my mid-twenties, I was ‘ripe’ to begin discovering, for myself, the root cause of my dissatisfaction, why suffering exists, and how to be still in the midst of it. It takes a lifetime to answer these questions but being willing to meet the fear, head-on is the beginning of understanding.

Like most of us, I have had many challenges in my life, not least of which has been the restrictions that come from being a carer for my invalid husband. As his illness and disability have progressed, both his world and mine have reduced, in the physical sense, to the extent that he is all but housebound and within the house, his world has been reduced to the few meters of space between his bed, the bathroom, and his chair, in the living room. As his carer, this has reduced my world, too. There have been times when that early existential fear of losing out on life has risen within me. The dreams and ambitions of my youth, are still there, in some measure or other. At times, I have been gripped by the claustrophobia of not being able to leave my house and simply walk as long as I wish to, jump on a train, or take a holiday. But this is a distorted view of reality.

Whilst any of these activities can be vehicles for training, they are in no way the goal. They are not the ultimate experience and cannot of themselves bring true satisfaction. The practice of meditation and Buddhist training provides the remedy for existential panic. The medicine for dissatisfaction is to meet life right where it is.

As the late Thich Nhat Hanh has said, ‘The way out is in’.  The reality of this is that no career, hobby, or visit to far-flung countries is as satisfying as the adventure experienced on the journey to meet the True self. The more I get to know myself, the wish to escape lessens and the present moment opens up and offers the True jewel.

This week, we begin a series of posts on the theme of Losing and Lost. Our first contributor is Chris Yeomans who writes about her lived experience of the slow loss that occurs when a partner has Alzheimer’s. It is both moving and relevant.

Alzheimer’s seems to me to be predominantly about loss. And so, to a lesser extent, is old age. I look at myself. I am not that young woman who lived a life decades ago, not the child that young woman once was. And yet of course there is a continuous thread in my brain, and in the brains of those who know me, which are the memories of some of those times. Selective of course. Defective certainly. But there is a certain consistency and some agreement with friends and family that they broadly represent a shared reality.

Dementia disrupts that thread. Memories are simply lost, never to be recovered. And with those memories also some recognition of patterns of behaviour. I behave in the way that I do because I have a memory of how I have behaved in similar situations, that behaviour born of genetics, circumstances, and conditioning. I can modify it to a very small extent, but I am unlikely to be able to change it completely.

The challenge of relating to someone with dementia is that those patterns no longer exist. The brain changes mean that the very person changes and seems no longer to be who they once were. That is loss of course. The loss of a person. Except that it is difficult to accept the grief of the loss because that person is still here. That body/mind continues to live a life, but the brain, which controls all things, has changed. The loved physical manifestation of that person does not now represent quite what it did. And that is a hard thing to get your head around.

I have changed too. I am not that young woman from way back. My body doesn’t do anything like the things it used to do. I am slow. I am stiff. I have lost youth and flexibility. My husband now looks like an old man in ways that he didn’t ten years ago. Change. Loss. The basics of human life.

Change is hard. I find myself caring for someone who is no longer the person that he used to be. That person has changed into someone that I wouldn’t, sometimes, necessarily, find it easy to be with or relate to. And so I have to deal all the time with the question of acceptance. And that too is quite tricky. In relationships, there are lines to be drawn. There are things we can accept and things that we challenge. But in a relationship with someone with an impaired brain, there is no point in trying to challenge, as there can be no learning or changing without memory. The person I live with has changed but is not yet a complete stranger. And even with increased mental impairment, that body will continue to remind me of the person who once engaged with me. It will be hard, I’m sure.

This week, we continue our series on Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers with a very informative and enlightening piece by Mo Henderson, in which she outlines the work of Doctors Without Borders and how we, too, can live without borders.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) which translates to Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971 in Paris by a group of journalists and doctors. Today, it has grown into a worldwide movement of nearly 68,000 people. They provide medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare and are bound together by a charter guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence, and neutrality. They are a non-profit, self-governed, member-based organisation and members agree to honour their charter principles, these include:

1  Providing assistance to populations in distress.

2 Helping victims of natural or man-made disasters and victims of armed conflict, irrespective of race, religion, creed or political convictions.

3 Having neutrality and impartiality in the name of universal medical ethics and the right to humanitarian assistance and claims to full and unhindered freedom in the exercise of its functions, while respecting their professional code of ethics and maintaining complete independence from all political, economic or religious powers.

4 Finally, as volunteers, members understand the risks and dangers of the missions they carry out and make no claim for themselves or their assigns for any form of compensation other than that which the association might be able to afford them.

I am deeply impressed by people who selflessly offer their service for others in this way, how do they move towards suffering, not knowing what to expect? Individually, they may have all kinds of reasons, but without their help, many would not survive.

Volunteering to go and help others you don’t know must be a particular kind of calling, and not everyone would deliberately seek such work. Those who choose to engage in humanitarian work in difficult conditions, such as war, famine, or natural catastrophe, and who consistently return to those conditions must be blessed by having cultivated specific virtues. For example, courage to take risks,  patience to be with difficult circumstances and the diligence to wholeheartedly be with the process, applying effort and hard work to protect the team and everyone in many different ways, while at the same time not abandoning the humanitarian principles illustrated in their charter.

The faith to do such work without knowing the outcome is essential to carrying on. Having the courage to continue this work is often supported by the reciprocal relationship, which survivors reflect through having their faith in humanity encouraged by experiencing the existence of human kindness, which seeks the good in people and being accepted despite their identity as allies, opponents, race, gender, religion or political convictions.

I never cease to be amazed when I see, on TV, acts of kindness within the most extreme struggles of war. People focusing wholeheartedly on rescue work, holding and hugging those who have lost loved ones and struggling to do the best they can for their families and friends, while all the time surrounded by the horrors of war.

In a sense this humanitarian example is comparable with what the Buddha taught, that suffering exists and there is a way of responding to it with practice in our daily life, the virtues described are not too far removed from the practice we as a community do our best to cultivate. We may not be called to travel to other countries and our daily life may not be so extreme, although relatively speaking we can experience wars of a different kind, where suffering can be created. With practice, our work could be viewed as becoming border less in a way that frees us to take risks, lessens the hold on grasping at identity and helps us to let go of the uncertainties of life. Having faith in the work that comes to us and making decisions to act, or not, needs courage and focus in order to do our best for all, not forgetting ourselves in this process. I don’t doubt the humanitarian work described is well supported by their organisation, educational training, and working teams. Similarly, the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are, in our order, an essential foundation in the cultivation of enlightened training.

Thank you to all the helpers, whether it is consciously known or not.
With Bows