A Good Cry

“Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer.  Crying includes all the principles of Yoga.”

― Swami Kripalvanandji

“In the Lakota/Sioux tradition, a person who is grieving is considered 

most Wakan, most holy."

― Tara Brach

"Blessed be those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

-- Yogi Jesus of Nazareth

Emmett Kelly 1898 - 1979

 

Some time ago, I came across the quote by Swami Kripalvanandji cited above.   I immediately emailed it to a dear friend who was having a rough time.

She called me later to tell me it helped -- a lot.  After reading it, she immediately headed out to her garden to have a good cry.  She said it was exactly what she needed. 

Big Boys (Girls) Don't Cry

 

Growing up in contemporary society, most of us have learned to avoid crying like the plague.  Widely seen as a sign of unacceptable weakness and frailty, we are conditioned to keep a stiff upper lip, to steel ourselves against this natural expression of heartfelt feeling.  Although this conditioning is considered to be a "male," thing, most of the women I know often fight back their tears as well. 

 

(Strain's of the Four Seasons singing "Big Girls Don't Cry-yay-yay"just ran through my inner iPod)

Hmmmm.  Maybe I shouldn't plunge ahead here.  Although I'm an amateur and would never charge for sitting still with folks and comparing notes on our experiences with Mindfulness Practice, I might get sued by the Commercial Mindfulness Cartel.  Although the pro's may give a nod to Buddha's first noble truth, the suffering baked into the human condition, they tend to skip right ahead to Buddha's Third Noble Truth: the Cessation of Suffering.  You don't see any glitzy promotional commercials proclaiming -- Mindfulness Practice: Guaranteed to Make You Cry!  It might be bad for business.

And yet...

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ARGH!!!

“We can suppress anger and aggression or act it out, 

either way making things worse for ourselves and others.

Or we can practice patience: wait,

experience the anger and investigate its nature. ”
---Pema Chodron

“Just because anger or hate is present does not
mean that the capacity to love and accept
is not there; love is always with you.”

---Thich Nhat Hanh

The Universe is exquisite.  

Once you hitch your wagon to Practice and roll out, you are going to get the lessons along the way that are needed to take you deeper --whether you like it or not!  

 

This might be especially true if you have the unbridled chutzpah to publicly ramble on about your experiences. 

More than once here in this blog, I've spent time presenting the notion that simply "cutting loose of the story line," is an immediate fix to disturbing emotions.  I've found that when I have the presence of mind to expand the sphere of my attention from the realm of discursive thought to include what is going on in my breath, body, and heart, sometimes hell dissolves and heaven is revealed in the blink of an eye.  (See Your Courtesy Wake Up Call: Once Upon a Time...)   

The operative word here is -- sometimes.

As the years roll by and the Practice deepens, I have experienced such an instantaneous transformation quite often.  Yet, it seems a bit of Karmic Comeuppance was necessary.  A few weeks ago, I found myself swirled up in an angry outburst for the first time in a couple of years.  It's certainly been enough to remind me that it can take a lot of work and a whole lot longer than a "blink of an eye" to learn something from a situation -- and regain a sense of wonder about it all.  

The lesson?  
 

For some of us, being a calm and kind, clear and compassionate, human being is NOT that easy.  It is a daunting discipline.  It takes commitment, courage, patience, skill, time, and effort.  It takes Practice.

Then and Now

As a child and a young man I had what folks might call an extremely bad temper.  Having grown up in the midst of a lot of anger and physical violence, I would react to things in my world with bursts of violent emotions -- and even violent behavior.  Throughout childhood, I could fly into a rage and smash things and strike out with the worst of them.  My kid brother and I fought like cats and dogs.  Our last furniture breaking brawl took place when I was in college.  

It would take years to quell those patterns.

Perhaps, the deepest gratitude that I have to the Practice is that I am no longer likely to get extremely angry.  Annoyance and irritation usually is about as bad as it gets.  I'm grateful that it usually doesn't spill out of my mouth.  Even then, there is usually an immediate recognition, and I'm able to come into the moment with a deeper sense of openness and relaxation.

Yet, life being life, usually doesn't mean never.  A few weeks ago, I dove into a deep pool of anger for the first time in quite awhile.  I was angry.  Really angry.  I could feel it in the muscles of my jaw, in my torso over the course of a minute or so.  Then, as I launched an explosive "F*# @  Y#@! You're driving me crazy!!!' the look on my beloved Migdalia's face was enough to wake me up.  I knew that she wasn't "driving me crazy."  I was.  My own deep conditioning had spun me out.  I had gotten deeply attached to my own point of view.  It was time to pause, withdraw, and re-calibrate.  (Thankfully, Migdalia helped that process by refusing to engage in even my toned-down defense of my self-centered position.  It wasn't just my own effort that helped save the day.)

 
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Love. Love. Love

"The moment we give rise to the desire for all beings to be happy and at peace, the energy of love arises in our minds, and all our feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness is permeated by love: in fact, they become love."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love

"All you need is love."

-- The Beatles

We have it on good authority. 

Buddha and Jesus, as well as many other sages and saints throughout the ages, seem to agree with the Hippies -- and the Beatles.  In the final analysis: All you need is Love.  

That seems simple enough.

So, what's the problem? Why are so many folks suffering and why does the world appear to be going to hell in the proverbial hand basket? 

First of all, what many folks have learned to believe is love, the terrain of much music and Hollywood Movies -- isn't love.  What is presented as love is a very human blend of desire, biological attraction, and attachment.  It's pretty clear that "I love you so much that I'll kill anyone who looks at you, then you, then myself." is not exactly what JC, Buddha and others had in mind, right?

The form of "love" that our culture promotes has a lot more to do with fulfilling one's own individual ego needs for sex, security, status, and self-esteem than the quality of consciousness that emerges from what American Buddhist Teacher Pema Chodron calls an Awakened Heart.  True Love is not the profound passionate grasping of deep attachment. True Love calls for surrendering the deep fixation on "I, me, mine" that is the source of human suffering.

True Love emerges, and is essentially inseparable from, Pure Being.  It is identical to the One Love that exists beyond the illusion of disconnection that characterizes the realm of relative reality.  Flowing from and returning to our Essential Oneness, True Love emerges as the compassion, kindness, joy, ease, and clarity that exists in our heart of hearts. 

Unlike the common contemporary understanding that views love as something we just fall into (and, so often, fall out of),  in the Buddhist tradition, love is seen as the naturally emerging qualities of an awakened consciousness.  Existing within and beyond our human conditioning, a connection to that love can be intentionally cultivated.  Although we may stumble into glimpses of Oneness through an intimate connection to "the other" in a romantic relationship -- especially in its initial honeymoon phase -- ultimately, True Love emerges from a fundamental choice to embrace Life itself, to let go of who we think we are and open our hearts and minds to the actual experience of the present moment.  

Although this can happen with the very next breath, the process of actually becoming a loving person generally doesn't just happen.  It is a Practice.  Erich Fromm characterized it as an art in his classic work, The Art of Loving.  Like any discipline, True Love takes commitment, a set of skills, effort, persistence -- and patience.  It takes Practice.
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Judgement Day -- Not!

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“We sow the seeds of our future hells or happiness by the way
 we open or close our minds right now.”

 ― Pema Chodron

I don't think there is any greater freedom than being Present -- engaging life as it is -- without the distortion caused by Judgment Mind.  

Growing up immersed in a society that is highly judgmental, most of us have been deeply conditioned to experience our lives in terms of good/bad, right/wrong, should be/shouldn't be.  In fact, our ego sense, with its perceived separation and isolation from "the other" is maintained by the thoughts, opinions, and various mind states that emerge from this conditioning.  Even in its mild form of liking/disliking, Judgment Mind can generate thoughts and feelings that serve to separate us from the peaceful, calm, and caring Presence we have access to in every moment.  

 

If we are overly self-absorbed, distracted, stressed, moving too fast, it's easy to get lost in our conditioned reactions to Life.  Adrift in Judgment Mind, we loose Presence.  We get lost in the alternative reality we have created -- and forget that the world is really not as it appears to us at that moment.  This deeply ingrained process of evaluating what we experience as bad, wrong, condemnable, is part of our social conditioning.  It appears as discontent, diatribe, enmity, blame, and self-blame.  If we aren't paying attention, it can and will dominate our lives, moment to moment.

 

Seeing For Yourself

 

One of the fruits of meditation is that we can see how that process works directly.  We can see for ourselves that Judgment Mind isn't only the thoughts going through our heads at the moment.  It's deeper than that.  It is embedded in the emotions we are experiencing.  It's embodied in the tightnesses and discomforts of our body.  It directly effects the quality of our consciousness, our state of mind.  

 

It is actually quite fun to see for yourself how that plays out on the meditation cushion.  

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