amputation

Susila was on the point of turning to catch the

expression of delight on Dugald's upturned face; then, checking herself,

she looked down at the ground. There was no Dugald any more; there was

only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the

imagination, haunting even the perceptions of those who have undergone an

amputation. "Amputation," she whispered to herself, "amputation ..."

 

Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off. Amputation was no excuse

for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as

ever and her children, all the other children-, had as much need to be loved

and helped and taught. 

 

If his absence was so constantly present, that was

to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take

thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own

eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before

the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.

~ aldous huxley

from Island

seawater stiffens cloth

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it's dried.

As pain after it's ended stays in the body:

A woman moves her hands oddly

because her grandfather passed through

a place he never spoke of.  Making

instead the old jokes with angled fingers.

Call one thing another's name long enough,

it will answer.  Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.

Call it a tree whose shape of branches happened.

Call what branching happened a man

whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.

Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,

to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.

Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

no superstition in the breath

Sometimes when I meditate

there is nothing left of me

but the breath

all the rest of me inseparable

from all the rest of you.

There is no superstition in the breath

only in the mind and body surrounding.

The mind and body are suspicious,

full of fables and myths;

but there is no superstition in the breath.

With each exhalation

wordless sensation migrates

from the nostrils to the belly and back again

brings water to the fields,

brings breath down the cord from mother to child,

brings blood to the sacrifice of love and war,

brings bright offerings to the temple;

sings into the dark,

assuring the aspirant bent in the shadow

the breath that never ends,

whether dropped to our knees below the cross,

or easy in the slippers of the Beloved,

and certainly behind the diamond brow,

sighs the sigh heard 'round the world.

That famous ten percent we are supposed 

to have use of our brain seems true

of the rest of the body and mind as well.

We occupy very little of ourselves

A few percent perhaps...

We barely inhabit the breath

living in the shallows of our life.

Our ordinary breath hollowed by fear and anger,

lost behind the nostrils somewhere near the heart,

lost somewhere between the back of the cave 

and to top of Jacob's ladder...our cells

are starving for breath.

The breath does not lie.

It has nothing to say

It simply is

overflowing with sensation

met crossing the bright field

inviting the body and the rest of the mind

to enter subtle as the breath

subtler levels of being...

The fable of each inhalation, like the first

firing of the imagination (full of the superstition of "I")

and animating the body; that first inhalation

still being drawn...

And last exhalation suspended in myth

begun to be expelled soon after birth.

Taking each breath as if it were the last,

before we enter the enormity at the center

of each breath.

Though superstition surrounds the first breath

and is rarely discarded even with the last,

these two breaths - separated by joyful swoons

and plaintive cries - come together in the great silence,

the bitter tears before and after

the great peace between breaths

when mind slows to wisdom and the body

knows itself, as T. S. Eliot nearly says,

for the very first time.

The wise man, the flying woman, dwells

in the space between breaths as faint echoes

drop over the edge and fade into

the vast chasm of silence.

Letting go at the end of each out-breath

stills the enormity.

Occasionally in the meditation hall my breath

nearly stopped.  I needed nothing more 

as thought stilled, and the wind-blown mind

settled.  As the drum stopped.

Breath and fear surrendered.

"If the breath never returns

the universe will breath for me."

Overcoming the distrust, not holding

to the last breath or grasping at the next.

Letting go completely of control of the breath.

Trusting a breath unshaped by pretense

or superstition, a breath that breaths itself

from the oceanic tides between planets ...

a breath like the one before

the one that created the universe,

that began thought, and forgot

its original face.

~Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

photo by Diane Varner

the etchings of trauma

~ Rupert Spira 

 

nothing

I have a feeling that my boat

has struck, down there in the depths,

against a great thing.

And nothing

happens! Nothing... Silence... Waves...

-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

translated by Robert Bly

Van Gogh reuses a canvas that he’d already painted 

some two and a half years earlier in Nuenen: x-ray photos

 reveal the head of a woman with a cap under Patch of grass.

trauma

More often than not, we feel so enmeshed in the life we have that the prospect of change appears remote or impossible.  Thus, we continue on the tracks that we have laid down for ourselves,  We are unable to think in new ways and we gradually teach ourselves to forget the other horizons.  We unlearn desire.  Quietly, over time, we succumb to the dependable script of the expected life and become masters of the middle way.  We avoid extremes and after a while we no longer even notice the pathways off to the side and no longer sense the danger and disturbance that could be experienced "out there."  We learn to fit our chosen world with alarming precision and regularity.  Often it takes a huge crisis or trauma to crack the dead shell that has grown ever more solid around us.  Painful as that can be, it does resurrect the longing of the neglected soul.  It makes a clearance.  Again we can see the horizons and feel their attraction.  Though we may wince with vulnerability as we taste the exhilaration of freedom, we feel alive!

John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace: Beauty

don't look at things through your concepts

If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. 

Every single thing is unique. 

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. 

It's a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, 

so that we can have a concept. 

It's a great help, from the point of view of communication, 

education, science. 

But it's also very misleading and a great hindrance

 to seeing this concrete individual. 

If all you experience is your concept,

 you're not experiencing reality,

 because reality is concrete. 

The concept is a help, 

to lead you to reality, 

but when you get there, 

you've got to intuit or experience it directly.

~ Anthony de Mello

problem?

There is a story of a man who came to see the Buddha because he had heard that the Buddha was a great teacher. He had some problems in his life, and he thought the Buddha might be able to help him straighten them out.

The Buddha listened patiently to the man as he laid out all his difficulties and worries, and then waited for the Buddha to say the words that would put everything right for him.

The Buddha said, "I can't help you."

"What do you mean?" said the man.

"Everybody's got problems," said the Buddha. "In fact, we've all got eighty-three problems, each one of us. Eighty-three problems, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you work really hard on one of them, maybe you can fix it - but if you do, another one will pop right into its place."

The man was furious. "I thought you were a great teacher! I thought you could help me!"

The Buddha said, "Well, maybe it will help you with the eighty-fourth problem."

"The eighty-fourth problem?" said the man. "What's the eighty-fourth problem?"

The Buddha said, "You want to not have any problems."

- Steve Hagen

from Buddhism Plain and Simple

art by Alex Arshansky

I'm working on the world

I’m working on the world,

revised, improved edition,

featuring fun for fools,

blues for brooders,

combs for bald pates,

tricks for old dogs.

Here’s one chapter: The Speech

of Animals and Plants.

Each species comes, of course,

with its own dictionary.

Even a simple “Hi there,”

when traded with a fish,

make both the fish and you

feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings

of rustlings, chirps, and growls!

Soliloquies of forests!

The epic hoot of owls!

Those crafty hedgehogs drafting

aphorisms after dark,

while we blindly believe

they are sleeping in the park!

Time retains

its sacred right to meddle

in each earthly affair.

Still, time’s unbounded power

that makes a mountain crumble,

moves seas, rotates a star,

won’t be enough to tear

lovers apart: they are

too naked, too embraced,

too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,

the price that felons pay,

so don’t whine that it’s steep:

you’ll stay young if you’re good.

Suffering doesn’t insult the body.

Death? It comes in your sleep,

exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming

that you don’t need to breathe;

that breathless silence is

the music of the dark

and it’s part of the rhythm

to vanish like a spark.

Only a death like that. A rose

could prick you harder, I suppose;

you’d feel more terror at the sound

of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die

just that much. And to live just so.

And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played

for the time being

on a saw.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,

I make something no nonbeing can hold.

– Wislawa Szymborska Polish Poet (Born July 1923)/Nobel Literature Prize 1996

Excerpt from her Nobel Lecture

December 1996

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” …

The Poet and the World by Wislawa Szymborska

©THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 1996

with thanks to https://mybanyantree.wordpress.com/

identify yourself with the consciousness and life

This is the essential experience of any mystical realization. 

You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. 

You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. 

You die to the vehicle and become identified…

with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. 

~ Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers

from The Power of Myth

bathe in its fiery waters

Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness.

You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.

You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for your intellect: do you not see that the very law of your own nature makes these a necessity for you?

–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

better

Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice

Better than knowledge is meditation

But better still is the surrender of attachment to results,

For there follows immediate peace. 

Bhagavad-gita

translated by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

living is relationship

Life is relationship, living is relationship, yet very little attention is given to the question.  What is your relationship with another? Have you any relationship at all; or is your relationship with the past?  The past with its images, experience, knowledge, brings about what you call relationship.  But knowledge in relationship causes disorder.  If you have hurt me, I remember that; you hurt me yesterday, or a week ago, that remains in my mind, that's the knowledge I have about you.  That knowledge prevents relationship; that knowledge in relationship breeds disorder.  So the question is:  When you hurt me, flatter me, when you scandalize me, can the mind wipe it away at the very moment without recording it?

So one asks:  Can you see that sunset, or the beautiful face, or your sexual experience, or whatever it be, see it and finish it, not carry it over  -  whether that thing was great beauty or great sorrow or great physical or psychological pain?  Can you see the beauty of it and be finished, completely finished, not take it over and store it up for the next day, next month, the future?  If you store it up, then thought plays with it.  Thought is the storing up of that incident of that pain or that suffering or that thing that gave delight.

I want to see the sunset, I want to look at the trees, full of the beauty of the earth. I don't want to reduce it, and thought will reduce it.  Is not the mind an instrument of comparison?  You say this is better than that; you compare yourself with somebody who is more beautiful, who is more clever.  There is comparison when you say, 'I remember that particular river that I saw a year ago, and it was still more beautiful'.  You compare yourself with somebody, with an example, with the ultimate ideal.  You see the sunset, and you immediately compare that sunset with the previous sunset.  You see a mountain and you see how beautiful it is.  Then you say, 'I saw a still more beautiful mountain two years ago'.  When you are comparing, you are really not looking at the sunset which is there, but you are looking at it in order to compare it with something else.  So comparison prevents you from looking fully.

What is actually taking place in our relationships?  Are not our relationships a self-isolation?  Is not every activity of the mind a process of safeguarding, of seeking security, isolation?  We have so many securities; we have built walls around ourselves with which we are satisfied, and occasionally there is a whisper beyond the wall;  occasionally there is an earthquake, a revolution, a disturbance which we soon smother.  So most of us really do not want to go beyond the self-enclosing process;  all we are seeking is a substitution, the same thing in a different form.  We are actually seeking, not to go beyond isolation, but to strengthen isolation so that it will be permanent and undisturbed.

Most of us are aware of this inner poverty, this inner insufficiency. You say it is empty, you give it a name, and you think you have understood it. Is not the very naming of the thing a hindrance to the understanding of it?   It is not an abortive reaction, it is a fact, and by calling it some name, we cannot dissolve it - it is there.  Do you know something by giving it a name?  Do you know me by calling me a name?  You can know me only when you observe me, when you have communion with me, but calling me by a name saying I am this or that, obviously puts an end to communion with me.     

It is only when the mind is quiet that it shall know love, and that state of quietness is not a thing to be cultivated.  Cultivation is still the action of the mind; discipline is still a product of the mind, and a mind that is disciplined, controlled, subjugated, a mind that is resisting, explaining, cannot know love. You may read, you may listen to what is being said about love, but that is not love.  Only when you put away the things of the mind, only when your heart is empty of the things of the mind, is there love.  Then you will know what it is to love without separation, without distance, without time, without fear - and that is not reserved to the few.





~ J. Krishnamurti
excerpts from a collection of talks
On Love and Loneliness

photo from streetcar named desire by Tennessee Williams

the stone of the fruit must break

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. 

And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, 

that its heart may stand in the sun, 

so must you know pain. 

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, 

your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; 

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 

even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. 

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. 

Much of your pain is self-chosen. 

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. 

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: 

For his hand, though heavy and hard,is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, 

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay 

which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

sitting with pain

.

In their MBSR Workbook, Bob Stahl and Elisha Golstein, present a very helpful how-to three step approach to working with chronic pain in meditation:

1) Investigate the pain and tension in the body:

A common knee-jerk reaction to pain is to clench and get tighter around it. Unfortunately, this can not only increase the physical pain, it may also begin a vicious cycle of reactions that lead to increased anger, fear, sadness, and confusion. Getting tight around pain further constricts the muscles and restricts blood flow, which may cause more spasms and pain, possibly even in other areas of the body. This cycle is difficult to stop, and in time you may discover that you're constricted not just around the painful area, but throughout the body.

The body scan provides an opportunity for you to reorient toward living and working with tension and pain. As you reeducate yourself about your pain by distinguishing physical sensations from mental and emotional feelings, you can learn to recognize strong sensations in the body as just physical sensations . . . 

Once you become aware of how you hold pain in the body, you can start figuring out how best to work with it . . . Mindful awareness will not only allow you to see where you're holding unnecessary tension, but will also help you soften and possibly release tension in these areas where there's no pain at all. Mindfulness also teaches you that if you can't release the tension, you can practice riding its waves, just observing them, letting them be, and allowing them to ripple wherever they need to go. 

2) Working with the emotions in physical pain:

Bringing mindful awareness to emotions allows you to begin to acknowledge them, no matter what they are, validating and acknowledging them without censorship and without resistance. As with physical pain, resistance to difficult emotions often causes more pain while learning to let be and go with them, rather than fighting them, can often diminish or change the suffering associated with them . . . 

As you gain more understanding of your physical pain, your emotional reactions to it, and the differences between them, you'll begin to see that there's a difference between physical pain and suffering. Even in times when you can't change the physical sensations of pain, you can change your emotional responses to them and thereby reduce your suffering. 

3) Living in the present moment:

When you identify with stress, tension, or chronic pain, you may think of it as a long-term problem or life sentence, and this attitude can take you out of the present moment and increase your suffering. Mindfulness teaches you to be here now. You don't know what the future may bring, and you really don't know if the stress and pain will last forever . . . 

Rather than being held hostage by your discomfort, you can cultivate the attitude that it's possible to learn from it. As you learn to let go of the past and not cling to a specific vision of the future, you'll be able to see things as they are in the moment, with a growing sense of freedom and the possibility of new options. This perspective transforms you, your pain, and your relationship to your pain.

Three proven steps that can change the way you live with your pain. Not easy, but well worth the effort. 

~ Marguerite Manteau-Rao