Meeting Our Edge and Softening
 |
| Photo Credit: Sergio Tudela |
But what about just being able to wander the hills
and woods around our home? What about walking along the river? So much has been
taken away, and I’m losing strength on all fronts, because most ways of
strengthening the muscles injure my joints.
Getting sick, getting closer to death, can unravel
our identity as a good, worthy, dignified, or spiritual person. It puts us
face-to-face with the core identity of what I call “the controller”—the ego’s
executive director, the self we believe
is responsible for making decisions and directing the course of our lives. The controller obsessively plans and
worries, trying to make things safe and okay, and it can give us at least a
temporary sense of self-efficacy and self-trust.
Yet, great loss can unseat the controller, which
we often scramble to resurrect by getting busy, blaming others, blaming
ourselves, or trying to fix things. Even so, if we are willing to let there be
a gap, if we can live in presence without controlling, healing becomes
possible.
My controller can hold loss at bay for months at a
time. If I can keep doing things—teaching, serving our community, counseling
others—the ground stays firm under my feet. But some years ago, right before
our winter meditation retreat, my body crashed. I landed in the hospital,
unable to teach, or for that matter to read, walk around, or go to the bathroom
without trailing an IV.
I remember lying on the hospital bed that first
night, unable to sleep. At around 3 a.m.,
an elderly nurse came in to take my vitals and look at my chart. Seeing me
watching her, she leaned over and patted me gently on the shoulder. “Oh dear,”
she whispered kindly, “you’re feeling poorly, aren’t you?”
As she walked out tears started streaming down my
face. Kindness had opened the door to how vulnerable I felt. How much worse
would it get? What if I wasn’t well enough to teach? Should I get off our
meditation community’s board? Would I even be able to sit in front of a
computer to write? There was nothing about the future I could count on.
Then a verse from Rumi came to mind: Forget the future … I’d worship someone
who could do that … If you can say “There’s nothing ahead,” there will be
nothing there. The cure for the pain is in the pain.
I began to reflect on this, repeating, There’s nothing ahead, there’s nothing ahead.
All my ideas about the future receded. In their place was the squeeze of raw
fear, the clutching in my heart I had been running from. As I allowed the
fear—attended to it, breathed with it—I could feel a deep, cutting grief. “Just
be here,” I told myself. “Open to this.”
The pain was tugging, tearing at my heart. I
sobbed silently (not wanting to disturb my roommate), wracked by surge after
surge of grief. This human self was face to face with its fragility,
temporariness, and inevitability of loss.
Yet as my crying subsided, a sense of relief set
in. It wasn’t quite peace—I was still afraid of being sick and sidelined from
life—but the burden of being the
controller, of thinking I could manage the future or fight against loss, was
gone for the moment. It was clear that my life was out of my hands.
On the third day I was walking around the
perimeter of the cardiac unit, jarred by how weak I felt, how uncertain about
my future. Then, for the ten-thousandth time, my mind lurched forward,
anticipating how I might reconfigure my life, what I’d have to cancel, how I
could manage this deteriorating body. When I saw that the controller was back
in action, I returned to my room and wearily collapsed on the raised hospital
bed. As I lay there, the circling thoughts collapsed too, and I sank below the
surface, into pain.
I was immersed in the very thing I had been
running from. Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa taught that the essence of a
liberating spiritual practice is to “meet our edge and soften.” My edge was
right here, in the acute loneliness, despair about the future, and grip of
fear. I knew I needed to soften and open. I tried to keep my attention on where
the pain was most acute, but the controller was still there, holding back. It
was as if I’d fall into a black hole of grief and die.
Then, gently, tentatively, I started encouraging
myself to feel what was there and soften. The more painful the edge of grief
was, the more tender my inner voice became. At some point I placed my hand on
my heart and said, “Sweetheart, just soften … let go, it’s okay.” As
I dropped into that aching hole of grief, I entered a space filled with the
tenderness of pure love. It surrounded me, held me, suffused my being. Meeting
my edge and softening was a dying into timeless loving presence.
In the remaining days, whenever I recognized that I’d
tightened into anxious planning and worry, I noted it as “my edge.” Then I repeated
to myself: “Sweetheart, just soften.” I
found that kindness made all the difference. When I returned home, the stories
and fears about the future were still there. The controller would come and go. But
I had a deeper trust that I could meet my life with an open and present heart.
Consciously grieving loss is at the very center of
the spiritual path. In small and great ways, each of our losses links us to
what we love. It’s natural that the controller arises: We will seek to manage
the pain of separation in whatever way we can. Yet, as we awaken, we can allow
our sorrow to remain faithful to itself. We can willingly surrender into the
grieving. I’ve found that by honoring the pain for what has passed away, we are
free to love the life that is here.
Adapted from True Refuge (Jan. 2013)
Enjoy this talk on No Mud, No Lotus
For more information visit: www.tarabrach.com
