Cuppa Green Tea

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“Making a cup of green tea, I stopped the war.” ~ Paul Reps

I’ve loved this quote for decades and like all Zen koans, it ages well. How I’d say it now is: when I give full awareness to what is happening in this moment, I stop the war and my mind & body are nowhere else, there’s no conflict.

An American student of mine shared her dilemma: her partner is Chinese and he has a daughter. However, there’s great pressure for my student to bring her partner a son. She lives in China with him and is subject to the cultural norms.

Her partner and his mother are pushing her to go through repeated courses of In Vitro Fertilization. Her body is screaming to stop–her Chinese family pushes her to do more. She had the insight in our session to ask if this was normal? Of course it’s not normal, at least not by her own standards and her own standards matter; she’s slowly reclaiming that truth.

She admitted that for most of her life she has defined herself as the one who fills the void in other peoples’ lives so she can feel loved. However she navigates going forward, she now has the awareness of the unconscious beliefs causing her so much suffering. There’s a self violation that occurs in order to survive a complex situation. Most of us, if we’re honest have done this as well.

There’s no shame in our survival strategies. What’s important is that we learn how to come to the moment when we too could make a cup of green tea & stop the internal war.

Avoidance is Not Peace

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I grew up in a household with plenty of conflict, most of which was never worked through. Each of us was wounded and exiled in our own way.

Some people are “conflict averse” and with good reason: people get hurt. What I’ve discovered is what can cause more harm is to avoid conflict. If the **only thing** I know how to do is avoid conflict, I am not creating peace I am perpetuating disconnection from my own vitality and from others.

Workability and Repair

“Workable” means that it’s not necessarily easy but there’s a willingness to stay with the process of repair. “Repair” invites us into the territory of forgiveness. I’m not convinced anymore that forgiveness is possible in every situation; ultimately yes but in the day to day, I am not so sure. Recognizing our limitations is an act of self respect and healing in itself. To remain open to the possibility of repair while not forcing it, can be enough.

I’d read a story of a holocaust survivor who admitted that she could never forgive her perpetrators but she knew she could teach her children and grandchildren about kindness. She knew her limits but those limitations did not prevent her from doing the good she could do.

The repair process can take moments, decades or even beyond this life. We have the choice of tilling the hard and soft places within our own hearts long after those who have harmed us or whom we have harmed, are no longer here. Our inner work never ends. That idea can be daunting if we believe that inner work is only important in a crisis. Consistent emotional hygiene is required to discover the courage needed for real peace: in ourselves and in our communities.

Inner work and outer work are inseparable. “Workability” and “Repair” offer alternatives to the ambivalence most of us carry about conflict.

We stay safe

Repair, workability and forgiveness are not code for putting ourselves in harm’s way based on fantasies of heroics. We must have the humility to tell ourselves and others the truth about our limits.

Self knowledge and self awareness are key to working with the truth of conflict. A safe holding space for the hard conversations is essential. Our safety is non negotiable. Our vitality ought not be negotiable either and it’s deadening when we allow our life force to be siphoned off by living a life of avoidance that we mistake for “peace”.

Wabi Sabi Perfection in the Imperfection

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Often when we are called to do our inner work, there’s a subtle but stubborn belief that we are “improving ourselves”: that we’re going to get rid of that old, tired, dingy self and come out with a brand new version. In fact a popular phrase is: “becoming the best version of oneself.” Honestly? I have no idea what that phrase actually means but it evokes exhaustion in me whenever I hear it.

Many of us have tried various self improvement techniques and continue to suffer because the starting assumption is not correct: if I’m unhappy, uncomfortable, dismayed, freaked out or despairing, there must be something wrong with me! The definition of a “normal” life is so narrow that anything on either side of that tightrope is terrifying. We’ve somehow gotten far away from accepting that these various states are part of being human.

To open toward our humanity rather than push away what we think are flaws, is gently learning to embrace what ails us and to discover that what ails us is the gateway to restoring our sanity. This is the practice of wabi sabi–seeing the perfection in the imperfection. We’re not seeking the “best version of ourselves”–we are opening to the possibility that the best version of ourselves is already here.

Faith & Disorientation

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“Faith is a small movement, slow but steady & sure, holding all our experience in a clear circle of compassionate light.” ~K. Patel

It’s fair to say that most of our lives have been upended by the past 2 years of living with a pandemic. And that’s only what’s gone on collectively. There’s the personal challenges that have happened for each of us as well.

We’ve all been impacted and yet we don’t all have a context. What we are going through is known in the transitions process as “Disorientation”. Here’s what William Bridges, author of the book “Transitions” has to say about disorientation:

“Traditional people in passage did not enjoy or embrace the experience of disorientation. They suffered through it because that was the way, which is to say they had faith in the death and rebirth process. Having that faith they did not need to try to make distress comfortable. However, many modern people lacking that faith are caught between positive thinking and despair, keeping themselves going by lighting matches and whistling in the dark.”

Disorientation is only one part of a transition process. What’s essential to know is that life moves in a circle, not a straight line. In our embrace of linear thinking exclusively, we lose track of the life/death/rebirth reality of life. Under conditions like the relentlessness of these times, linear thinking is a quick path to despair as we toggle between hope and fear.

Everything in this life has a beginning and an end and every ending offers the promise of a new beginning: in between those two places is disorientation.

Accepting that all things come to an end requires faith in the circular nature of life and in our capacity to familiarize ourselves and trust in the natural phases of all change.

(“Transitions:Making Sense of Life’s Changes” William Bridges, PhD/Addison-Weslely Publishing, 1980)

Self Compassion

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Why Self Compassion?

There’s confusion about the need for self compassion. It seems it’s the place we go to as a last resort–after we’ve exhausted ourselves trying to figure out why we feel the way we do. In our habits of over analyzing everything we only deepen our confusion. It’s important to have compassion for that part of ourselves that keeps us in our heads! Self compassion is an expression of the heart and our heart is the seat of wisdom.

Return to Our True Nature

The north star that guides my work is that each of us at our core is whole, wise, compassionate, and clear. That includes even the most deluded person. These qualities are ever present and can be covered over by the wear and tear of this life, in short, we forget who we are, we forget our true nature. There is no one way to back to our hearts but the movement toward “returning to our true nature” rather than a “self improvement project” is an act of compassion in itself. In the self forgetting we develop strategies for getting through life and with time, these same strategies can become barriers to the contentment we seek.

This practice is a way of tending those barriers

What is it to tend to our inner critic, or an angry part of ourselves, or our disappointments while holding to what is whole and true and undamaged?

To “live close to the way we are made” as poet David Whyte puts it, requires knowing ourselves. It requires not putting ourselves out of our own hearts. When we make room for who we are we make room for others. If you’d like guided support here’s an audio (10 minutes 37 seconds).

Where do you take refuge?

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That question was put to me by my spiritual director a few months back and I’ll ask you now: Where do you take refuge? It’s easy to feel we have no respite from the upheaval all around us. And it’s easy to feel our emotional life runs amok. Yet our embodied emotional life is meant as a resource for growing our wisdom.

Most of us have not been educated to see our emotions or our body as sources of wisdom. And it is a matter of education.

Here’s an example: I worked with a client who was angry and at first, she wasn’t even able to name that she was angry: because well, anger gets a bad rap. It’s a powerful emotion and left untended can cause great harm. In her mind, the choices were to stuff the anger or blow out at people around her. I offered her a third option: be with the anger, tend it, locate where it lives in her and be with it. As she was slowly able to do be with the anger–give it room, she became quiet, present with an awareness of her whole body. She had a direct experience of her body as a safe holding place for the anger.

The outer circumstances had not changed yet she was able to be with herself and she could touch the hurt beneath the anger. Her heart was no longer contracted around her inner conflict about anger. It gave her a way of being with herself that was compassionate and responsive to the circumstances with clarity. Anger’s gift is clarity. It’s an example of the alchemy that reveals what’s present as the the gift–the wisdom we need to move with life.

This is a practice that builds our emotional repertoire and a practice our worlds needs right now: transforming our emotions into wisdom.

Point being, practices that support our inner life cultivate a refuge we can rely upon day in and day out. Without consistent training in what feeds our inner life we have nothing to rely on especially in crisis. The Greek poet Archilochos said “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”.

Recently I’ve been listening to talks by Lama Rod Owens. You can read more about him here at www.lamarod.com. I deeply value him as an activist, a black, queer, Buddhist teacher who challenges the status quo, but always comes back to the intersection of his social activism and a well honed inner life. As he so beautifully puts it, each time one of us wakes up, we bring light to the world. I cannot think of a better reason for being true to the cultivation of refuge.

Tending the Vital Heart

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In the Sufi tradition, there are many layers to the human heart, the innermost being the holiest of places where our true nature dwells, untouched by the troubles of this life. In the subtle body teachings of Tibetan Medicine, sperm meets egg at the heart chakra and new life unfolds from there. The heart is considered the seat of consciousness. We can think of the Sacred Heart in the Christian mystical tradition as well.

However we approach it “tending the vital heart” is essential work.

To tend the vital heart is to do our inner work. That means befriending what gets in the way of remembering this jewel that dwells at the center of ourselves.

It can be covered over, forgotten, even denied, but our true nature never changes. For our essence to be seen and reflected back to us is an extraordinary experience. It’s what we hunger for and it’s the work of a life time.

Usually we come to our inner work due to a crisis in our lives but over time, we come to realize that we deserve more than just enough to keep us on the sunny side of not feeling bad.

Life is so much more than needing to justify our inner work. To find meaning in life is to recognize that tending the vital heart is the most important work we’ll ever do. It’s from that place of a well tended heart that we are of the greatest service to others.

Touching with Love

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“To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.”
~Stephen Levine

So much of my work comes down to that: Touching with love, with care, with respect, that which we have previously touched with fear. Approaching our difficulties in this way allows us to take a deep breath and relax, to appreciate our humanity. We all have barriers, challenges both in mind and body and it’s how we meet those barriers that determines our well being. It’s not so much the content of what’s happened to us but how we carry the history, how we tell the story, and what happens when we discover to our relief and delight, that we can make new choices.

This is the core practice of self compassion. Knowing how to be with ourselves, learning how to be with our difficulties and noticing what we learn about ourselves in the process is at the heart of all sincere healing journeys.

That discovery process is what offers our lives meaning.

“Open yourself to discomfort. Meet it with mercy, not fear. Recognize that when our pain calls most for our embrace, we are often least present. Soften, enter, and explore and continue softening to make room for your life.” ~Stephen Levine

Our Beloved Inner Community

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“The clarity we need to meet the world as it is, arises out of self compassion: here is the intersection of inner and outer work.”

From the point of view of depth psychology and the wisdom traditions, we each have a center point, the ground of being that is untouched, unfazed, unharmed by anything. Different traditions call it different things: the Self with a capital “S”, Awakened Heart, Atman. I refer to it sometimes as our “bright and shiny being”. It has no one name but it belongs to all of us and is not corruptible. We can become quite confused and lose track of it but it doesn’t mean it has ever lost track of us.

From the point of view of our incorruptible-ness, we are offered a different relationship to ourselves and the option to move from an inner world that includes all of who we are.

To embrace all parts of ourselves is key to our inner work; it is the work of cultivating self compassion. Self compassion is essential in order to offer compassion to those who’ve been marginalized in our outer world.

By “compassion” I don’t mean the watered down version of what that word has come to mean. By compassion, I mean we recognize the suffering of ourselves and other beings and we are not complicit in perpetuating harm to ourselves or others.

The impact of our service to the world is equal to the compassion for ourselves.

In this time of deep social, economic, and political change, to engage from a place of self compassion prevents burn out.

The clarity we need to meet the world as it is, arises out of self compassion: here is the intersection of inner and outer work.

To embrace our humanity is to embrace all beings. To live and move from the place of deep interconnectedness acknowledges that what each of us does, matters. Each time one of us awakens, heals, and embraces our marginalized parts, the world is healed.

Offering healing to the world is not often the initial reason most of us seek support during hard passages in our lives but we may have the insight that embracing our beloved inner community uplifts all beings.

This is the reason I get out of bed in the morning.

An Antidote to Loneliness/January Retreat

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When I first entered the small 10′ x 10′ cabin (that’s 9.29 square meters) and began to settle in with my clothing, food, etc. panic shot through me: I’d made a mistake. I’d just spent 10 months in limited social contact and now I was entering into complete isolation?

What was I thinking?! I remembered that I could leave at anytime. I had nothing to prove, this wasn’t an endurance contest, there were no retreat police holding me there. Yet I also relished the challenge of 21 days in solitude. I needed the alchemy it would provide.

Intimacy

As each icy cold night yielded to lengthening January days and I pumped water from the well, continuously fed the small wood burning stove and cooked canned soup on a tiny camp stove, I realized I was never lonely, I never felt isolated.

I had been slowed down enough to allow the world to meet me: birds, wind, prayer flags flapping tirelessly, snow and ice crunching beneath my feet and the slant of sunlight were my companions.

That subtle sense of grasping at experiences in which many of us are well trained, stopped. I could allow myself to receive the vitality of life always pulsing, nudging, meeting me.

What I experience as “loneliness” is a lack of intimacy with myself and the world. I feel impoverished and unworthy of my own good companionship. We are pack animals and we do need connection with others.

Yet, loneliness can be an alchemical invitation to go deeper into our experience. Intimacy with ourselves is an antidote to loneliness. If we allow it, loneliness is an invitation to life lived more genuinely and generously.

Each time you receive your breath, your movement, birdsong or even difficult moments, that pulse of life is right there to meet you: it’s that close in, no cold winter cabin required.