In every breath we can experience the whole of life, and death. We breathe out, and reach a point where there’s no breath left, almost no oxygen. We must let go, shift focus, and breathe in so we can live. And when inhaling, we reach a point where we’re too full. We must stop and let go. Life depends on these two ways of letting go⎼ to let us open more to life, or to stop what causes hurt and delusion. A sort of yes, no. Living and dying together.
When we inhale, there’s a pause, or can be⎼ if we put our attention on it⎼ when everything naturally gets quiet. We might hold our breath to hold the silence, the peacefulness. When we exhale, there’s also a point where we easily pause. We can become very awake and focused on everything that’s right there with us. We breathe ourselves awake.
Zen teacher and author Susan Murphy talks about the deeply mortal fear sitting at the back of every breath, unless we take time to notice and examine it. The fear of death, of breathing out for the last time, or feeling we lack something we need or want. It sits there, unseen, in the breath, waiting⎼ a fear that we can’t face life moving on, that nothing is forever⎼ that we can’t face reality and must separate ourselves emotionally from “it.” Or we cling to the delusion that we will always be here, that we can step out of time.
But there are several practices that help me feel the strength to examine and even transform that fear. Here are five: creation, exertion, being in nature, compassion, and love.
It’s not just any sort of creative act that does this, but one we do with total honesty. When we get very quiet inside, and nothing is in mind but the moment of noticing, then insights emerge seemingly on their own. They speak, not me. Even a brief visit beforehand to this silence, to take a breath with full attention, to meditate opens a natural door to creating.
Walking in nature can do something similar. I’m walking in a forest, next to a stream; or I’m on the rural road near my home and hear water running. And I want to get lost in the beauty of the sound. I look at the gulley beside the road, to see where the sound originates, or to better hold onto it, but can’t. It disappears on me when I try to grasp it. Maybe trying to grasp or cling to anything does this. We can grasp a hammer, a shirt, maybe even a Presidency, for a while. But a musical note, a moment, love, peace, even life⎼ no.
We spend so much of our time now enraptured or entrapped by the ways corporate and social media distract and manipulate our attention, break everything into tiny bits of information or enticements. We focus so much on not missing out, on doing more and more, and the internal pace of our lives speeds up. We can habitually feel we’re falling behind. We feel what philosopher and Zen teacher David Loy calls a sense of lack, of inadequacy, in ourselves, in our lives. That if we don’t own the latest iPhone, hear the latest record, believe the latest theory, join a certain group there’s something wrong with us.
All this fragments our attention and speeds us to the edge of feeling threatened and anxious. But it might also open us to what was the central question in the life of Buddha, to maybe a central question of modern psychology and human society: what is, what causes, what ends what Buddha labeled Dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness, suffering⎼ or mislocating the sense of lack, suffering as being out there, separate from us, so we never get free of it.
I understand all this intellectually. But feel it? Feel it moment by moment? And the best way, maybe the only way to transform this, is to feel it, to return as soon as we’re aware of it, to moment by moment attention.
Every once and a when I take a walk in a natural setting, it’s not my thoughts, concerns, and pain that walks with me, but ravens, woodpeckers, purple finch, insects, trees, sun, and clouds. When I stop speaking inside my head, or when I free my mind from the usual entrapments, then the place that everything, including myself, occupies appears more clearly. I know better what needs to be done.
I remember many years ago I hitch-hiked to the Grand Canyon from San Francisco. It was my first visit. I arrived in the late afternoon, on a hot day, and had to walk with a backpack down a road and through a parking lot to get to the canyon rim. And when I got close, the whole sense of reality shifted. Suddenly, there in front of me, were almost bottomless depths. It was both scary and too beautiful, too immense. I felt I would fall in. A woman I didn’t know, from New York City, young, with two children and a husband, came from their car and stood next to me, like they knew me. And exclaimed, over and over, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” Some things yank us right out of any beliefs, and leave us, naked.
It’s not just any exercise that does this, not just any exertion. But only when we can get totally involved and disappear in it.
Compassion can also be an unanticipated wonder. When we’re with someone in pain, and we first feel so awful. But then we forget everything but this person before us. We pause to look inside ourselves to find some memory that can link us together, or some portion of them inside ourselves, to find the right thing to say or do. And the words we find or acts we do help them go from pain to maybe no longer being lost in suffering. And that little smile comes to them, that expression that says, “Ah, yes. That feels good. I can do that. Thank you.” And we share a sense of gratitude for whatever somehow occurred. That I like.
And then there are the moments when my wife and cats are sitting in bed with me. And I feel astonished. Overwhelmed. Simply present. These 3 beings want to be with me. Me. I feel wonderful and grateful. That we’re together. And I disappear in a silence that speaks the eloquence of the world.
All five of these types of practices and moments share something. And we might ask ourselves these two questions: What do our fears share? What do our joys share? For me, the fears all share the sense of lack, in ourselves and in reality itself. Share a powerlessness caused by the delusion of being separated, from the world we live in, the world we are, from the meaning of our own actions. The joys all share a letting go, a disappearance of a separated me into a silence that speaks the eloquence of the world.
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