Tag Archives: Loss

Everything is coming or going

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At any given moment, one part of our life is already gone and the other part of it has not yet happened. In fact, a great deal of our life is gone for good — everything up to this very point in time. If you are thirty, for example, that means that your first twenty-nine years are dead and gone already. They will not be any more or less dead and gone in the future, at the time of your physical death, than they are already. As to the rest of our life, it has not yet happened, and it may or may not ever happen. The boundaries of our life are not so clear cut. We do not actually live in either the past or the future, but in that undefined territory where past and future meet, on the boundary of what is gone and what is to come.  The past is at our back, just an instant behind us, nipping at our heels; and the future is totally questionable.  We are caught between those two throughout our life, from our first breath to our last. It is as if we were riding the crest of a wave in the middle of a vast ocean. What is immediately behind us is constantly disappearing as we ride the edge of the wave; and as we are propelled forward, we can neither turn back nor slow that wave’s powerful momentum.

The practice of mindfulness is a way to become more familiar with that undefined territory where past and future touch. Through meditation practice, gently, step by step, we learn to make friends with death as it arises in our immediate experience. We begin to reconnect with the immediacy of life and death here and now. Mindfulness practice starts very simply, with what is most close at hand, the breath. What is our experience of each breath, as if comes and goes? The breath is our most simple, and perhaps most profound, connection with life and death….. As a byproduct of the cultivation of mindfulness, we begin to notice similar boundaries and meeting points throughout our experience. We begin to take note of our thinking, for instance, as a process rather than just a collection of thoughts. Thoughts seem to arise out of nowhere: by the time we notice them, they are already there — we don’t know how they got there, they are just there blithering away. But as we settle down and look further, we begin to see that they come and go too, just like the breath.

In subtle and in more obvious ways, the experience of birth and death is continuous. All that we experience arises fresh, appears for a time, and then dissolves. What we are experiencing can be as subtle as the breath or the thinking process, or as dramatic as losing a job, getting a divorce, or losing our life. That arising and falling of experience is our life; it is what we have to work with.

Judy Lief, Riding the Crest of the Wave

When things don’t work out

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Sooner or later, everyone will face not getting what they want. How we respond to this unavoidable moment determines how much peace or agitation we will have in our life. In truth, this is the moment that opens all others. For it is our acceptance of things as they are and not as we would have them that allows us to find our place in the stream of life. Free of our entitlements, we can discover that we are small fish in the stream and go about our business of finding the current.

This deeper chance to shed our willfulness doesn’t preclude our sadness and disappointment that things aren’t going the way we had imagined. But when we stay angry and resentful at how life unfolds beyond our will, we refuse the gifts of being a humble part in the inscrutable whole. When we stay angry and resentful that —and you can fill in the blank— the stock market didn’t reward our conscientious investing or the hurricane destroyed the truck we were going to inherit or the promotion we earned was given to someone else or the person we love so deeply doesn’t care in the same way, we risk getting stuck.

Eventually, we are asked to undo the story we’ve been told about life — or the story we have told ourselves — so we might drop freshly into life. For under all our attempts to script our lives, life itself cannot be scripted. It’s like trying to net the sea. Life will only use our nets up: tangle them, sink them, unravel them, wear them down, embed them in its bottom. Like the sea, the only way to know life is to enter it. How then do we listen below our willfulness?

Mark Nepo,  Not Getting what We Want

Facing our pain

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Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.

Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart

How to deal with the losses in our lives

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In the Easter Story there are universal themes, such as the place of  forgiveness in our lives, the role of  hope when go through some things we cannot understand, the fight against abandonment and isolation, and how to work with a humanity that is weak and sometimes fails us. The heart of the story on this Friday afternoon concerns death and burial in a tomb. It leads me to reflect on how we deal with the sadness that comes from the losses in our lives, how we cope when someone or something goes away and we are left to stand and deal with an absence.  What can we do when we feel that there is a heavy stone  blocking our life or when we find ourselves in some  lost place?

Sometimes, whether by circumstances or by the result of  actions we have chosen, we are faced with a degree of change which seems  to stretch us beyond our capacity to deal with it. We can feel like the women in the gospel story who stand beside the tomb, confronted with loss and pain.  As there was in them, there can be a longing in us, and frequently a lot of  unresolved questions. Sometimes we feel this longing as an emptiness.  We can feel helpless at times like this, and passive, in the sense of having to deal with something which is not of our choosing.

However, we can get strength from reflecting on the meaning which others have drawn from these archetypal stories over thousands of years. And one of messages of these three days is that the experience of the tomb is not the end of the story. Often  things dying in our lives are simply creating space for something else to be born. Any time we have an experience which bring us into  contact with  something greater than the then limited capacity of our ego is always a wounding experience, but can lead to growth.  However, it takes time for us to see that.  All we can do is allow  the passing days take us, gradually,  deeper into our heart.  Just because some experiences leave us feeling helpless does not mean that we are a failure. We have within us capacities which can only emerge in moments of difficulty. Everyday,  since we were little , we have had to deal with losses, big and small. Thus, even though we do not like it,  loss in our life is not totally unknown. It may feel terrifying for a while but we have walked some of this way already with our lesser losses. Thus we can try to continue to trust, despite not understanding what is going on, and in this way we will emerge changed, but alive, on the other side.

We can also get strength in a personal way from the simple practice  that we do each day. We try to stay at the tomb of our losses and sadness and resist the understandable instinct to run away. We practice this in our sitting and in our everyday frustrations and in this way we find in ourselves the strength to stay when something bigger happens.

When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation for our life. And we keep waking up as the natural dukkha [suffering] touches us. This means that we sharpen our attention to catch our instinctive reactions of blaming ourselves, blaming our parents, or blaming society; we meditate and access our suffering at its root; and consequently we learn to open and be still in our heart. And even on a small scale in daily life situations, such as when we feel bored or ill at ease, instead of trying to avoid these feelings by staying busy or buying another fancy gadget, we learn to look more clearly at our impulses, attitudes, and defenses. In this way dukkha guides and deepens our motivation to the point where we’ll say, “Enough running, enough walls, I’ll grow through handling my blocks and lost places.”

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

When we get hurt and damaged

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Another post on working with the past. Typically, after tidying the garden over the weekend,  the wind rose last night and scattered bins, leaves, twigs and nests, reminding us – and the birds – that it is not quite Summer, despite the warm temperatures. And coincidentally, the reading for today in Mark Nepo’s lovely book The Book of Awakening is about damage and hurt in our lives, so I thought I would share it here. Dealing with the past sometimes means moving on and letting go and at other times means healing what has been wounded or repairing what has been broken:

Stones loosened by storms cover paths, and uprooted trees break newly formed nests, and crisis after crisis throws us into each other. It is inevitable. Stay alive and you will be hurt, and you will also hurt others. Unintended hurt is as common as branches snapped in wind. But it is the unacknowledged hurt that becomes a wound.

Being human, we are subject to many ancient and powerful opposites found in life. Among those that impact us constantly are light and dark, yes and no, and especially fear and peace. For it is out of fear that we feel the need to isolate ourselves or to control others, and it is often in the act of elevating ourselves that we hurt one another, not to mention ourselves.

Still, as no one in daily life is exempt from both sleeping and waking, no one can escape feeling both fear and peace, and so, no one can escape being both hurtful and loving. But the world is kept whole by those who can overcome their fear, however briefly. The blood of life itself is kept vital by those who can simply and bravely repair their separations, time and time again.

Spring cleaning, uprooting, not looking back, new growth….

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Some thoughts, prompted by having to queue to get into the déchetterie – the recycling depot  – this morning, which are in the same vein as some of the quotes over the past few days. The good weather motivates people to tidy up their houses and garages after the enforced restricted time that is winter. I was working in the garden yesterday, digging up the plants that did not survive the winter and cutting back those which will now grow more strongly in the Summer. Getting rid of the old and letting the new grow stronger or in different directions. And all around Nature is budding now, revealing what has been going on unseen and underground for months. In our own life path it is the same. We  get rid of elements that no longer accord with who we are now, or let go of that which we can no longer hold onto. While waiting in the queue I listened to “Don’t Look Back” by Van Morrison which prompted these thoughts. Maybe the words will speak to someone this evening. If not, any excuse to play early Van the Man is good….