Finding joy

Where is your joy today, dear ones? Does it feel far away, at the end of some long-line of shoulds, musts, and whens? Conditioned on some set of circumstances that may or may not be within your control? Or perhaps it feels just out of reach, one obstacle away; if only there was more time, more money, less stress, less responsibilities, less pain, more or less of … whatever it is that feels in the way today.

And, how long have you been waiting?

When the roses speak, I pay attention

“As long as we are able to
be extravagant we will be
hugely and damply
extravagant.  Then we will drop
foil by foil to the ground.  This
is our unalterable task,  and we do it                                                                            joyfully.”

And they went on, “Listen,
the heart-shackles are not as you think,
death, illness, pain,
unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
selfishness.”

Their fragrance all the while rising
from their blind bodies, making me
spin with joy.

~ Mary Oliver, from Thirst (2006)

I had been waiting a long, long time. Putting joy off for some other time, when the dishes are done, the bills are paid, the class is over, the job is secure, the people I care about are healthy, my body feels good, the emotional pain is gone, the lesson is learned, the world is at peace…

But lately, strangely, joy has been arising in the most unexpected places. Right here, actually. Right in the midst of the chaos. It comes in moments, in flashes of connection, when somehow the breaking of my heart breaks it simultaneously out of its shackles, and wonder, pain, joy, all come rushing in.

What if, as Mary Oliver says, the “heart-shackles” are not what we think: death, illness, pain, all of the internal and external “obstacles” we fight, resist, and long – in vain – to be rid of. What if the true shackles live within our fear and denial of those realities; in the ways we hold on to wishes for different lives and different selves; in our bitterness, our worry, our apathy, our endless striving for achievement and reliance on pride, our disconnection from the world around us.

Mary Oliver found a teacher in the speaking roses (and the larger natural world, in which she found endless sources of devotion, spirituality, and liberation). Perhaps we too can consider – who is speaking to us today? The trees, the sky, the little dog by your feet, the caring eyes of a loved one? What might they have to show us about joy, about love, about the simplicity and availability of that which we so desperately search, always looking out and away rather than close and within.

Where can we place our attention today, if even for the briefest of moments, to help us wake up; to see the opportunities for joy that may exist, right here, right where we stand, right as we are?

It’s an investigation, and one that may yield no concrete answers. Still, to me, the questions are worth asking. In fact, if it’s true that there are pains and losses in this life that are inevitable, then I can think of no more pressing question than how we might find sources of joy and connection and vitality that are not conditioned on living a pain-free life; that help us to live these brief, precious lives of ours as fully, and as heartfully, as possible.

The stillness

It’s the kind of morning when the shimmering water rests like glass between the staggered waves. The stillness of this powerful force stirs something familiar in me, calls me closer. I step my toes onto the sand, the coolness sending shivers up my legs. The stretching edge of the water reaches out to me, welcoming, beckoning from some place beyond my imagination.

What does it mean to be an ocean? Does it mean having waves, tides, a certain collection of inhabitants? Is it known by its grand size, its appearance, its salty constitution? As if in answer, one single wave rises out of the nothingness just a few yards out, lurching its body up and towards me with such ferocity that my stomach caves. My body trembles with memory, suddenly recalling the moment I watched death emerge out of emptiness before it carried the last breath out of my mother’s lungs. The wave descends forcefully on the ten little toes that are staring up at her in amazement, dissolving sand and salt and solidity in one swift blow before gently sweeping back into stillness. Traces of her might left now only in memory, the crystal shine of the water expands out calmly to meet, to mingle, to melt, with that early sterling sky.

I imagine gliding out there, feet barely hovering above the descending shore, my body slowly sheathed in shimmering silver. I feel the water wrapping around my feet, my calves, my thighs and hips; deliciously encircling my waist, my chest, the whole length of my arms, my neck; enveloping each tiny muscle of my jaw, my cheeks, my flickering eyelids; smoothing each strand of my windswept hair, before encompassing, finally, that last piece of exposed scalp. It is warm, nurturing; the sense of safety deep and primal as I lose track of where my body and the water begins and ends.

My breath naturally flows into the undulations of the waves, the rhythms of lungs and tides now inseparable. Inhaling, swelling; exhaling, surrendering; each cycle rhythmic, resonant, flowing seamlessly into that quiet, formless space between ebb and flow, and ebb again. Sea and skin dissolving into one another. Being, breathing; the sweet stillness calling us home.

How is it that these ever-dancing atoms, oriented so strongly towards life, towards movement, are capable of birthing such stillness? Just as quickly as the question arises, it disintegrates. Thoughts – like lives, like stories, like moments, like waves and seas and all living and natural things – falling away into nothingness, giving way to the space that holds them. And I know immediately, beyond thought or science or reason, from someplace both within and beyond me, that we – that these dancing and life-driven atoms – are not the birthers but the birthed.

In the distance, a figure appears; a head, emerging out of the silvery cocoon, draped in glitter. The head bobs for a bit, keeping time with the rhythms of the waves. The sun, rising pink and golden in the sky, sends rays out over the welcoming sea, bathing the figure in light. And then I see it: not one head but two, sparkling together in the stillness, somewhere between here and eternity; the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

 

“But…ew, what is ‘lovingkindness?'”

Love? Yes please. Kindness? Sure, ok. Lovingkindness? Uh…

Things start to sound a little off-putting when we put two sappy-sounding virtues together and call it a meditation – like a Hallmark card or, as Dan Harris puts it, “something we’d get lectured about in kindergarten.” As quoted from this week’s Mindful.org article, many of us respond to hearing about loving-kindness practice with something to the effect of: “but… ew, what is that?” Or, we simply tune out and move on to something more productive. But Dan Harris and Sharon Salzberg want us to know that loving-kindness is anything but – and yes, this is the technical term – “ooey gooey.”

India, through the senses

As soon as the feet step off the plane, India calls the senses to alert. Heat immediately wraps around exposed skin, seeping through day-old travel clothes. A warm, musky odor confirms that the sterile plane environment has been left behind, as a child returning home inhales deeply and sighs with content, “Ah, it smells like Mumbai.” To the unfamiliar nose, it’s a smell that can’t be placed, for which the brain has as of yet no mental map. It is deep and inescapable, somehow both sweet – as if fruit has been left in the sun too long – and sour; not in a crisp, tart way, but with an edgeless humidity, as if after strenuous physical activity when all olfaction is filtered through the smell of body heat.

Stepping outside of the airport, the ears are inundated with families and drivers shouting names of loved ones and travelers, each competing to see if his voice can rise above the dull roar. There is a small space between the the newcomer and the sea of people, creating a stage on which the deer-in-headlights act can be perfected.

Reflections from India: Empowerment through healthcare

I’ve been at the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) campus in Jamkhed, India for 6 days now, and my brain is bursting with new information. CRHP has been working with the rural poor since its inception in 1971, over 40 years ago. Its founders, Drs. Raj and Mabelle Arole, developed a model of community-based primary health care that is designed to improve health among the poorest of the poor by addressing the social and economic factors that limit access to health in impoverished and marginalized communities.

More than a broad model of healthcare, the Jamkhed Model is based on the specific voiced needs of the community, and is dependent upon the participation and engagement of the community members to bring health to their own village. Fundamentally, it is a grassroots model that empowers individuals to take health into their own hands, endowing them with the knowledge and training to be self-sustainable rather than relying on the government or well-meaning organizations for support.

An evening with Pema Chödrön and k.d. lang

On June 20, 2015, I had the good fortune of attending an event at UCLA’s Royce Hall with Pema Chödrön and k.d. lang. The event, a benefit for Tools for Peace and the Pema Chodron Foundation, was designed as a Q & A with Chödrön and lang on life’s “big questions,” followed by a musical performance by lang. The moderator was Tami Simon, the founder and publisher of Sounds True.

Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun and prolific author, is widely regarded for the down-to-earth manner in which she presents complex Buddhist teachings. While founded in her own monastic traditions, her teachings are uniquely accessible and wrestle with questions about how to live well as a human being in a complicated and often painful world – questions whose relevance extends beyond the boundaries of specific spiritual orientations. As a result, Chödrön’s work has reached a vast and varied audience, both within the Western Buddhist community and without. While I am still only scratching the surface in my understanding of these teachings, what has always stood out to me is the wise, clear, and convincing tone through which she conveys two radical messages: You already have everything you’re searching for; and, the more neurosis, the more wisdom. (To read more on these ideas, check out this wonderful Brain Pickings post.) Fundamentally, hers is a message of compassion: learning to befriend the parts of ourselves we find most challenging, thereby uncovering the material that enables us to open to others’ difficult experiences with love and kindness.

k.d. lang, a Grammy-award-winning singer, initially seemed a surprising partner for this event.

The Art of Being

This being a human is a messy business. We’re born into lives we didn’t choose, with bodies and brains programmed by thousands of years of evolution to act in ways we may never fully understand, into a world that is constantly in flux. This gorgeous mind of ours has the astounding capacity to time travel – a phenomenon that is both a blessing and a curse as it gives us a portal to visit our pasts and imagine our futures by the same means that it can cause us to get stuck there. The terrain of our inner experiences can be as frightening as it is enlivening, our emotions as immeasurably deep with joy as pain, while our outer experiences rarely provide any ground more stable.

And yet, amidst this uncertainty – amidst the awkward, clumsy, difficult task of navigating a world, brain, and body without a compass – we laugh. We share; we connect.