"Mindfulness and Meditation allow us to open our hearts, relax our bodies, and clear our minds enough to experience the vast, mysterious, sacred reality of life directly. With Practice we come to know for ourselves that eternity is available in each moment.

Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call:
Musings on Life and Practice
by a Longtime Student of Meditation

Friday, April 18, 2014

The Genuine Heart of Sadness

This world- absolutely pure
As is. Behind the fear,
Vulnerability. Behind that,
Sadness, then compassion
And behind that the vast sky.
--Rick Fields

Sometimes, insight and healing emerge slowly during the course of Practice.   Like spring unfolding across the palette of April and May, our world slowly greens and blooms.  What was dark, harsh and frigid, slowly brightens, softens and warms.  At a point we notice:  It's different now than before.

At other times, insight and healing emerge like a bolt of lightning!

 Zap! 

Sometimes coming with a torrential downpour of tears, sometimes not, a Grand Gestalt comes together in a heartbeat. In a flash, in an instant,  we really Get It! (Or perhaps, more accurately-- It Gets Us.)  We can't help noticing.  It's different now than before.

I was at Himalayan Views, a nearby spiritual gift shop/bookstore a few years back, when I was fortunate enough to hear about a woman's experience of one of those moments. Suffering from what was diagnosed as "clinical depression" since adolescence, she had come across one of Pema Chodron's teachings on the genuine heart of sadness.  As she told it, an awakening had come in a flash.  In an instant she knew.  At that instant she discovered a whole new way to hold her experience.  

Zap!

In a burst of tears -- and then with rainbows glistening through her tears -- the whole world had shifted.  She clearly saw that her deep sadness about the human condition wasn't a sickness, it was an essential Connection to Bodhichitta, the soft and tender core of our Spiritual Heart.  She had felt that as a child, but nobody in her life knew what it was.  She now understood that sadness wasn't a personal flaw, an illness,   She now knew that in her heart of hearts that she had touched what the Buddha had touched.  Now, she just needed to learn how to work with it.  

With the assistance of a supportive counselor and a regular meditation practice, she successfully decreased and then discontinued her use of antidepressant medications -- and at the point she was sharing her story, had been successfully, sometimes quite joyfully, navigating her life for a couple of years, drug free.

Please understand: My point here is not that medications are always the wrong approach.  (As a child of the sixties, how could I ever claim that drugs are always a bad thing?  Stephan Gaskin and Ram Dass weren't the only ones who learned a few things under the influence.)  Drugs simply are what they are.  Over the years, I have had dear friends whose quality of life has been dramatically improved through the use of prescription drugs to address their psychological and physical health. 

Instead, what I am pointing to here, is that there is a great value in exploring what our society
(READ MORE)
conditions us to avoid, the so-called "negative" emotions.   Oftentimes, "Don't be sad" can actually be a horrible message.  In fact in the world today, we are in desperate need of teachings that enable us to approach sadness and grief with understanding and skill. *   For, as many have seen through the ages, deep within our own personal sadness is a shared existential sadness that connects us to one another and to the One Love that we are immersed in.  Once touched and understood, the Genuine Heart of Sadness is also the pathway to fundamental fearlessness, boundless compassion,  --and deep joy.


As the Practice develops we see that in coming to intimately know the entire menagerie of our emotional boogiemen, a wider gaze and deeper freedom emerge.  On the meditation cushion --and in our lives -- we find that the entire range of our human feelings (fear, sadness, anger, confusion, shame, to name a few) can be patiently embraced, gently explored and understood -- and ultimately transformed. Rather than stagger along with our minds clouded by our conditioning, over time we sometimes find ourselves dancing freely within the infinite expanse of a clear blue sky.

It just takes Practice.

* The Lojong Trainings of Tibetan Buddhism are one system of such teachings.  Through the cultivation of mindfulness and awareness practice, tonglen meditation, and using a list of slogans,  practitioners learn to cultivate kindness, clarity and compassion.  For more, including an emerging bibliography on these teachings, see  A Layman Looks at Lojong

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I resonated with what you said about society telling us "don't be sad" (or afraid, or nervous, or angry, or anything "negative"). In my recent thoughts about death as simply something that IS, I've started to realize how conditioned I am to avoid even the thought of death. In a totally curious and exploratory way, I've started occasionally looking at the people around me and realizing that each of them will die, as a way to help me realize that someday I, too, will die.

I'm amazed that avoidance of death has taken such a strong hold in wealthy American culture, the same culture that tells us to "live life to the fullest." We can really only live life "fully" through a willingness to look at everything. We can't expect to avoid anything "bad" and also experience everything "good" to its full extent.

Lance Smith said...

"We can really only live life "fully" through a willingness to look at everything. We can't expect to avoid anything "bad" and also experience everything "good" to its full extent."

Well said, Friend.

I think this the Heart of the Matter. Our willingness to embrace fully the Reality of Life/Death, with the entire range of feelings and thoughts is the Key to True Compassion and the Gateway to the One Love we all share.

(I'd like to share your post and my response on A Layman Looks at Lojong as well.)
One Love,
Lance