"Life is like stepping into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink."
--Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Pema Chodron unearthed this Suzuki Roshi gem in her book Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change.
As we watch life after precious life being cut down on the news, everyone is feeling raw. We may go from a sense of vulnerability to anger or from a sense of loss to grief. Emotions this powerful are also complex. When I first saw the Suzuki quote above, in an excerpt of Pema's book at the Daily Om, I had a laugh/cry moment. In an instant, funny and ironic slammed into sad but true. This is the complexity of raw.
A friend of mine, generally a positive guy, often refers to our nation as "the great experiment." After a news week full of shootings, he came out with, "I'm feeling pretty hopeless about the great experiment." It seems no one is untouched by the news.
For me last week was a particularly raw week because sandwiched between the sharp sadness that came with each report of families left to grieve horrific shooting deaths, my dog-friend of 14 years passed away.
In the rawness of so much grief, I turned to the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron and her mentor, Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa because I knew they would lead me back to meditation practice. They also led me to more takeaways that I will share in this series.
#1 Raw is Good
Both Pema Chodron and Chogyam Trungpa tell us that rawness gives us an important opportunity. It gives us an emotional texture we can "sit with." Typically this means to let our raw emotion be the focus of a meditative practice.
For example:
- Follow the mood where it takes you, bringing your curiosity along.
- Examine the emotions with as much honesty as you can muster.
- Stay with uncomfortable feelings rather than running from them.
As Chogyam Trungpa put it in Smile at Fear, "Relate with whatever arises with a sense of sadness and tenderness."
I have found that it is hard, amid grief, to sit with the emotions. Sometimes they fall out and you just let them, watching.
Other times, you can't even feel them; or they manifest as random nervous energy, or they seem displaced, as if they are on the other side of the room.
In my experience, sitting with a tough emotion does not follow a linear path, as in, first you sit, then you get a revelation, then you rise, renewed. For me, it was sit, feel miserable, watch myself feeling miserable. Often after a bit of sitting the mood passes - for the moment. No conclusion. But I also believe that benefits do kick in over time. What kicks in is mostly unpredictable and different for everybody. For me, I acquired the need to write.
Diving into meditation with Pema Chodron and Chogyam Trungpa, I learned things that might as likely carry me through a horrific news climate as through personal tragedy. So I thought the observations deserved a breakout into successive posts. Up next: The urge to fortify.