The work of the dervish community was to open the heart, to explore the mystery of presence… and to celebrate the glory and difficulty of being in a human incarnation.
-Coleman Barks, speaking of Rumi’s community

When she was about eleven, my daughter said something to me that stayed with me for years:
“There are two kinds of pain,” she said, ” the pain of being frozen and stuck, and the pain that happens when we are open, feeling something deeply, when things are flowing and moving through us.” I felt the wisdom in that statement drop into me like a seed. That seed sprouted slowly into an ongoing sense of wonder about all the ways in which we try to protect ourselves. And why not? Human life is so incredibly uncertain, delicate, unpredictable. A woman spoke to me this morning about a huge challenge that came into her life: ” I never saw it coming… I think most of the time, that’s how it is. We don’t see things coming–they just appear.”

Anything can happen to us: things we would never ask for. Sometimes these events, these losses and defeats, take years for us to pass through. This is how it is for all of us– the kind of security we dream about, the kind of control we imagine, is not really possible. Since the stock market crashed, I’ve had people calling me and telling me about how long they have stayed at a job that meant nothing to them, in the hopes of building up some financial security. “I thought it was important, ” one man said to me, “and now I realize, there’s nowhere I can put what’s left of my money where it will be safe. What was I thinking? And what have I been doing all these years?”

Great question, a heartbreaking one. Sometimes those questions feel like sharp arrows that pierce us, and reach to our core. Like a splinter in the the foot that you can’t reach. I told this man that I think we can find out how to open to the “whole catastrophe” as Zorba the Greek called it, that it’s never too late for this. We cannot discover what it is to be fully human without being willing to experience loss, over and over again. If we are not willing, if we cling to one side of life, and reject the other, then grief and pain get frozen inside us. It’s so easy to lean into the glory, and refuse the difficulty.

I’ve listened to people speaking to me recently about how hard it is for them to be around their aging parents. They feel the rigidity, the brittleness that happens when we keep retreating, hiding, resisting the wild, chaotic flow of life. “I don’t want to end up like that,” one of them said. “I want to keep flowing, letting go, welcoming what life brings to me.” In the Radiant Mind work, we call this “broadening the river of life,” opening to more and more, protecting ourselves less and less, releasing our attachment to a solid, fixed identity. And sometimes it just feels like too much, and the mind wants to shut everything down. We can let ourselves experience that as well: what it feels like when we defend, protect, and try to hide from what seems to be threatening us.

Last night I went up to our hospital, where the daughter of a dear friend of mine was giving birth. I walked in the doors of that hospital and remembered dear ones who had died there, had miscarriages, gone through detox, struggled with cancer. I wandered around for a while, stunned by the depth and power of all that had happened in that small building.

I remembered sitting at the side of a dying friend last March. And Brooke sitting across from me– both of us watching, breathing, listening, as our friend slowly passed away. One night he said to me, “I don’t think we know what we are doing here. How can we know? All we have is our own ideas, the things that make us feel more comfortable. We don’t really know how to help her.” So we just sat together, in that unknowing. There was nothing else to do.

Malidoma Some, the African indigenous teacher and shaman, talks about life in his community: “We were a large village,” he says, ” but we all knew each other. Almost every week, someone would die, or give birth, or get married. Celebration and grieving were part of our everyday lives.” Sometimes, in our technological society,  it feels as if we have flattened everything out, in an effort to find some comfort, some ease. We flee from the intensity of the moment to the company of our machines– our cell phones, computers, ipods, cars, TV’s. Machines don’t feel anything. They offer us a refuge, or so it seems.

Malidoma tells a powerful story about how our western world relates to grief. He was invited a few years ago to a global cermony at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, a collective mourning for all the people lost in war. Teachers, artists, statesmen and leaders from all over the world came to bear witness to the kind of suffering that war brings to us all.

Malidoma described the long evening, and how he waited, as speeches were made, as candlelit processions passed by, and as songs were sung, for some genuine expression of grief. He assumed that it was all building up to that-that this outpouring of grief would be the climax of the whole ceremony. As the evening progressed, he realized it was ending, and he had only seen a few people weeping. “My God,” he thought, “these people really do not know how to sob their guts out.”
“No Malidoma, ” I thought when I read that, “we do not. We’ve been taught, mostly, how to keep it together, to be strong, not to let grief have it’s way with us.”

I understand, with all the chaos and destruction happening on our planet right now, that the idea of feeling our grief might be overwhelming. But the idea of it and the experience of it are so very different. If we honour the grief that we carry, simply because it is here, we can begin to relate to the experience of our sorrow directly, without concluding that something is wrong, just because there is suffering. So much of our pain comes from the belief that something should have been different, that something should or should not have happened.  If we allow ourselves to release these beliefs, just for a while, we can open to what we are feeling  without judgment or resistance.

Sometimes we are not ready to open to all of it, but when we allow ourselves to be fully present, something softens deep inside our heart.

We can simply sit down for ten minutes, and listen, without interfering, to the song that is being sung this moment, in the space of our own being. Perhaps it’s a song of sorrow, of aloneness, of being lost, confused and bewildered. This is not about moping around and indulging in all sorts of sad stories about how hard it is when we don’t get what we want. That’s not grief, that’s depression, bitterness. Depression leaves no room for the birth of compassion.

Grief is different. It’s not frozen– it’s fluid and alive. It starts, like a small stream, deep in our personal lives. If we open to it, it carries us into a huge river, where we all move together, through birth and death, loss and celebration, without much control over any of it.

The things you struggle with are part of my life too. I am not above or beyond or separate from anything that comes to challenge and shake you up. In this raw, vulnerable place, the last place we would ever choose to be, there is tremendous kindness and gentleness. From that place, we do not strike out, or punish or blame. We are able to simply be where we are, without struggling to change anything. In that place, which is open and without boundaries, it becomes clear that judgment, cruelty and violence are what happen when we just don’t know what to do with our own suffering.

love
Shayla