by Mark Coleman
The silent nature retreat was an ideal place to simply let the river of tears flow. The blessing of a silent retreat provides a space to breathe, to feel whatever your heart is feeling. It allowed Sarah to bring awareness to the natural disorientation and disbelief that comes with upheaval. However, Sarah, like many people dealing with loss, wasn’t really allowing the process to flow.
She was filled with self-judgments. She didn’t think she was doing enough as a caregiver, and she didn’t understand why she felt so confused and lost. She thought she should be over her grief by now and moving on with her life, or at least moving on from her pain, and she was frustrated to still be coping with residual denial, anger, and disbelief, which are common stages of the grief process. In addition, Sarah felt guilty for resenting her son’s risky skiing behavior, which led to his accident. It was a classic case of increasing the suffering of tremendous loss by engaging in self-criticism and blame.
Sarah’s reaction was not unique. Many times we increase the burden of an already painful situation because of our own assumptions or judgments about how the process should go or how we should be handling it. These views not only shut us down but further close our heart and interfere with the organic unfolding of the grief process. Such reactions are normal, yet they obstruct our ability to heal. Sarah’s judgments — especially that she should be over her grief and moving on with her life — were definitely hampering her ability to grieve. Only by allowing the tears to flow can we eventually surface from that well of sorrow and pick up the threads of our newly emerging life.
So how did attending a meditation retreat help Sarah in such a difficult situation? Mindfulness can help us develop the capacity to radically meet the conditions of our life with clarity, nonreactivity, and warmhearted presence. It does not take away the pain of loss, but it helps us hold our suffering and avoid making it worse through resistance, blame, or judgment.
During Sarah’s retreat, she learned to hold and surrender into her loss, grief, and disorientation with a kind presence. She gave herself the gift of not needing to figure anything out, and instead let the waves of pain wash over her. This allowed the suffering to shift into a natural tender sadness over time. From this softened and surrendered place, a caring responsiveness arose for the pain she and her son had been through and for the overwhelming hardship of the situation. She realized she couldn’t leapfrog to this place but instead had to walk through the tender path of grieving.
By leaning into and opening to loss, we allow those cold winds to blow through us. As hard as those storms may be, fighting them compounds the torment. Ironically, as we surrender to their flow, this can often, as the Sufi poet Rumi suggests, “clear us out for some new delight.” As we move through the waves of heartache and are softened by their blows, such melting can open up new horizons; influenced by loss, we discover new possibilities we had never thought possible. Conversely, if we don’t open, we may stay entombed in a suspended state, as if frozen in ice. The tears of kind presence allow this precious melting to happen and for new life to emerge.
Michelle, a longtime meditation student, shared with me this beautiful description of how this process unfolds:
When I was forty-one years old, my twenty-one-year-old son died in an accident while he was away at college. That was twenty-two years ago, and I cannot say or write those words without an enormous wave of grief and sadness. But I don’t drown. I can let that wave wash over me. I can live my life with interest and even joy along with the great sadness. I have learned to do that, I believe, largely with the help of my meditation practice, turning toward, not away from, the tenderness of grief.
Anticipation of potential loss is another facet of this terrain that we have to learn to work with. The dread of losing the people we love can cause unnecessary suffering and keep us frozen, so we don’t fully embrace the present moment. This happened with Maddie, a woman in her early forties from Oakland, California. Maddie had already known a fair amount of loss. She had lost a baby in childbirth, and when she was eight years old, she had lost her father in a car accident. However, she had a strong bond with her husband, whom she had married young and who was her rock through losing their son.
Maddie would often lie awake in the middle of the night in fear of what might become of her life partner. His family had a history of heart disease. She worried about all the stress he went through at his law firm. If he reported feeling pains in his chest, she would panic. Her worst nightmare was the thought of losing him. She decided to work with me to help relieve her anxiety and insomnia, and she expected me to help her be less attached, to let go. I instead shifted her in a different direction.
In a guided meditation, I asked Maddie to allow her anxiety and worry about her husband to surface, so she would feel the fullness of those emotions in her body. Mindfulness helps us acknowledge our experience and find a spacious capacity to hold even challenging emotions. This is the first step in working skillfully with anything, rather than avoiding it or being caught up in a stressful contention. Once she was able to find some steadiness simply being with those feelings, I then, to her surprise, directed her to feel the ocean of love that lay underneath the surface ripples of fear.
In meditation, Maddie found it easy to access the deep love she felt for her partner. The fear of losing that wealth of love was the cause of her duress. I invited her to really bathe in that love that flowed from her heart. As that quality pervaded her mind and body, she noticed her anxiety abating until she was able to rest in the sweetness of their connection and the power of her own kind heart. I then asked her to inquire about the source of that love. Certainly she received love from her partner, but the origin of her loving experience was coming from the depth of her own being.
Often the thought of losing someone we love feeds the fear that we will lose the essence of love itself. The more we realize that love is the nature of our own heart, the more we realize we cannot be separated from it. Such realization does not take away the sadness that comes when we lose loved ones, but we see that loss neither diminishes our capacity to love nor prevents access to that beautiful quality of openhearted connection.
As Maddie bathed in the depth of her love for her husband, she realized this was the doorway to diffusing her fear of losing him. The next, equally important step was turning that love toward herself, toward her own feelings of fear and panic. Once we access the kindness in our own hearts, we can focus that caring attention on the scared parts of ourselves. In Maddie’s case, the young child who lost a parent still lived within her, and that same anxiety was feeding her fears about losing her husband.
Maddie realized, as we all can, that healing comes when we tenderly embrace the scared, anxious parts that lie within us. Our nervous system settles, our breathing slows, our thoughts stop racing, and we find some ease in the present moment. It is a way we practice not abandoning ourselves. When we can hold ourselves with a loving mindful presence, we have the capacity to endure anything.
• PRACTICE •
Softening into Loss
Find a comfortable meditation posture and close your eyes. Settle your attention on your breath, breathing naturally and gently. Then shift your focus to feel or sense your heart area in the center of your chest. Feel the breath there. Then take some moments to reflect on someone or something you have lost. This could be a loved one or even a pet. It could be an experience, such as the loss of a good friendship. Take time to feel into both your love of that person or experience and the loss connected to that.
Finding peace in the midst of loss centers on whether we can hold ourselves with loving presence as we navigate the tender pain. As you feel the pangs of loss and grief, allow yourself to open to the rawness of that experience. Can you feel it in your heart or elsewhere in the body? Do thoughts, images, and memories arise with it? Without getting caught up in memories or carried away by thoughts, keep experiencing any waves of feeling that arise.
If possible, hold yourself with the kind att
ention you would offer a dear friend who is going through a difficult time. Particularly if the loss feels strong, try placing a hand over your heart as a gesture of self-love and soothing. Take some slower breaths and maintain a warm, friendly attitude toward yourself and your tender feelings. If you need to reduce the intensity of feeling, know that you can shift your attention away at any time, focusing on something more neutral like sounds or looking around the room you are in. You may also whisper to yourself that this too will pass. Remind yourself that the essence of your heart is love and that you always have the power to access this kindheartedness, as it is your nature.
At the end of this practice, shift your attention to something neutral in your experience, like the breath. Sense your connection to the earth through the contact of your body with the floor or the chair. Take a few minutes to allow your focus to shift until you feel ready to end the meditation. At the same time, know that feelings of tenderness or sadness may linger after the reflection is done. That is natural, so continue to hold whatever arises with tenderness and kindness.
• • •
Chapter 27
Living with a Steady Heart
When attachment does not occur when someone gives flowers, and no abhorrence occurs when someone throws stones, that is considered equanimity.
— DADA BHAGAWAN
When I first started to practice meditation, I brought along old misinterpretations of my early Catholic faith. I had learned from my churchgoing days the view of “‘being in the world but not of it.” That is a beautiful and elusive teaching. Hearing the Buddha’s teaching on renunciation sounded surprisingly familiar. I mistakenly took it as license to unconsciously reject things in myself I thought the church considered unholy. This led me to reject the wilder, passionate, unruly parts of my being. Unfortunately, that meant I also cut off the playful and creative parts of myself, which included abruptly ending my phase as a spirited punk rocker, someone who made his own gaudy clothes, dyed his mohawk white, wore crazy earrings, and squatted in empty houses. That vivacious, wild side got sadly buried.
I let go of a lot in order to become what I thought was a “good Buddhist,” which repeated my youthful attempts to win approval by being a “good Christian.” I shut down parts of myself to fulfill some false notion of being calm and collected, of what I imagined detachment and equanimity to be. But what I really engaged in was repression and what some call a “spiritual bypass.” This led to long years where my vitality went underground. It wasn’t until I went to Burning Man in the deserts of Nevada that I rediscovered that more creative, playful, and wild part of myself.
People often equate equanimity with being uncaring or coolness, as if it means becoming like a cold statue, like the ones we may see in temples and monasteries. Far from being aloof, equanimity refers to a connected presence that allows us to meet any experience with grounded balance. It’s the steadiness of heart that helps us not get lost in reactivity. Given the ceaseless demands and challenges of life, who wouldn’t want that quality?
Mindfulness meditation is like a training ground in which we get to practice how to meet an extensive range of experience in our body, heart, and mind. We sit still and bear witness to whatever happens, with the intention to be present with curiosity and openness. That is not as easy as it sounds, given the intensity of physical pain that can happen, or the waves of grief that flow, or the anxious, frenetic thoughts that can assault us.
Typically, when we don’t like what is happening in life, we try to avoid it, ignore it, or do something else, like switching TV channels. This habit can leave us with an impatient mind, unwilling to tolerate even the mildest unpleasantness. As my friend and colleague Howard Cohn amusingly asks students during his lectures: “What is it we practice in daily life? Follow every thought, chase every desire, get rid of everything you don’t like, avoid pain, and try to control experiences and people around you!” Not only is this exhausting, it is impossible. It fails to equip us to respond appropriately to life. It does not prepare us for things we have no control over, like our variable health, the rapidly changing economy, the instability of relationships, and the uncertainty of our work.
Mindfulness offers a different orientation, one that develops a steady heart to face life’s inevitable ups and downs. This balanced attention helps us respond to what are known as the “eight worldly winds.” These are the polarities of experience that are inherent in life: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, success and failure, and praise and blame. These storms are forever blowing and create uncertainty at every step. They make it hard to find stable ground, since they represent the unpredictable, changing fortunes of experience, and not a day goes by when we don’t experience one or more. In Zen, the perennial highs and lows of experience are called the “ten thousand joys and sorrows.” They remind me of a poem by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova:
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold.
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Then why do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
Cherries blow summer into town;
At night the deep transparent skies
Glitter with new galaxies.
Life is this fluctuating sea of change. It is rarely just one thing or the other. It is seldom just wretched or exquisite but often both and everything in between, even in the space of one day or a single moment.
We can see this polarity everywhere we look. There is beauty and horror in the lives of children, whether they come from the wealthiest families or the poorest. People can be magnificently kind and coldly cruel to one another. The economy surges and crashes on a dime. Love blooms only to be followed by betrayal. As one species is saved from extinction, another is lost. One minute we are praised for our accomplishments, and in the next we are torn down for our mistakes.
How do we manage this constant array of swings and roundabouts, of highs and lows? We can do so through equanimity, the principle of meeting all experience with balance. In mindfulness practice we learn to turn toward the truth of what is with clarity and acceptance, similar to the way rocks on the shoreline stand steady, unmoving, against the relentless onslaught of the waves. That quality of steadfastness is informed by the wisdom that knows that, however intense experience can be, it is transient and can change in any moment.
Research seems to support this notion. In one 2007 study, researchers found that people who had even minimal experience with mindfulness practice were more capable of dealing with pain than people with no training. The study suggested that mindfulness practitioners were more aware of pain’s fleeting nature and more able to release any distress that came with it.
Similarly, by embracing both joy and sorrow, we grow our capacity to be with either. Being able to enjoy pleasure knowing full well that it will fade is what also allows us to meet pain, for we know that it too will change, morph, and release. Equanimity does not mean we turn away, become numb, or are indifferent. It means we delight in the joys of spring daffodils and the first steps of our children, and we also have some capacity to embrace the pain of losing a loved one and the decline of our health as we age. Equanimity doesn’t necessarily make painful things easy, but it’s the understanding that to resist or contract around pain simply makes matters worse.
In the same way, this balanced presence holds lightly all the praise that comes our way, not letting it go to our head or inspire us to build a new identity around it. For we know too well that just as praise comes, critique or blame may be close on its heels. The more we build our pedestal on the shaky foundation of praise, the farther we will fall when it inevitably fades. Similarly, our pride can bloom with the fame that comes with success, only to have our name later smeared by some accusation.
Equanimity looks upon this whole show of life with the gaze of a grandmother watching her grandchildren play. She sees how they squeal with delight, fight with vengeance, and cry with loss all in the sp
ace of an hour, yet with the wisdom of age and perspective, she gazes upon them all fondly. She has strong feelings, and she takes appropriate action to help solve problems, correct mistakes, and discipline misbehavior. But under all of those feelings and responses, she sees the big picture: the nature of this world is unceasing change, ups and downs, and her grandchildren need love and guidance to help meet this reality.
This is equanimity, the balance that guides amidst the turbulence of life. What erodes our ability to abide in such a state? Most commonly, it is our resistance to or rejection of what is, when we are attached to a view that something is unfair or wrong or “should not” be happening. Or we are caught in blaming and judging someone or something for the problem. Many things in life can seem unfair or cruel, such as childhood cancer or a car accident killing a loved one. However, nature or the universe is neither fair nor just. It simply moves in accordance with natural laws. Sometimes the most innocent are harmed, the most generous lose everything, and the most loving lose the very people they cherish.
Equanimity asks us to meet such hardships with acceptance and discernment, since complaints and resistance can be counterproductive. This does not mean our response should be passive. Nor does it mean we tolerate anything that is harmful to self or others or the planet. Of course, the appropriate response to tragedy and intense pain includes helping and caring in all the ways we can — whether the misfortune is ours or someone else’s, and whether what happens is fair or not. Indeed, focusing on “unfairness” can lead to a sense of victimization or hopelessness, which can make us less able to respond.