Resilience, Connection, Courage.
Cultivating a steady mind, compassionate heart and faithful spirit in tumultuous times.
While this poem is dated as it is a reflection from way back in April about COVID from our Youth Poet Laureate, it still speaks to me quite profoundly and so I’d like to share it with you as a preface to this months (overdue) newsletter.
I thought I’d awaken to a world in mourning.
Heavy clouds crowding, a society storming.
But there’s something different on this golden morning.
Something magical in the sunlight, wide and warming.
I see a dad with a stroller taking a jog.
Across the street, a bright-eyed girl chases her dog.
A grandma on a porch fingers her rosaries.
She grins as her young neighbor brings her groceries.
While we might feel small, separate, and all alone,
Our people have never been more closely tethered.
The question isn’t if we will weather this unknown,
But how we will weather this unknown together.
So on this meaningful morn, we mourn and we mend.
Like light, we can’t be broken, even when we bend.
As one, we will defeat both despair and disease.
We stand with healthcare heroes and all employees;
With families, libraries, schools, waiters, artists;
Businesses, restaurants, and hospitals hit hardest.
We ignite not in the light, but in lack thereof,
For it is in loss that we truly learn to love.
In this chaos, we will discover clarity.
In suffering, we must find solidarity.
For it’s our grief that gives us our gratitude,
Shows us how to find hope, if we ever lose it.
So ensure that this ache wasn’t endured in vain:
Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.
Read children’s books, dance alone to DJ music.
Know that this distance will make our hearts grow fonder.
From a wave of woes our world will emerge stronger.
We’ll observe how the burdens braved by humankind
Are also the moments that make us humans kind;
Let every dawn find us courageous, brought closer;
Heeding the light before the fight is over.
When this ends, we’ll smile sweetly, finally seeing
In testing times, we became the best of beings.
Youth poet laureate, Amanda Gorman.
September Newsletter Share
(read the full newsletter offerings HERE)
As I sit down to write this newsletter, I’m truly not even sure where to begin. I suppose I should begin with a Hello. So, Hello my friends. It’s been sometime since I’ve reached out to touch base with you here and while I know everyone’s lives are full and you likely were not waiting with bated breath to hear from me, please know that I’ve been thinking about you. Connection is an essential need (of all humans) and a priority to cultivate in my own life, personal and professional. However, the connection I’ve found needed the most attention in the past couple of months has been my own connection to Self which is what I have been tending to while absent from this space.
There is so much I want to speak to, so much happening in the world, individual and collective. There is simply not enough time to touch on it all. While many if not all of us are navigating on some level fear, doubt, loss, grief, overwhelm and much more from the ongoing pandemic and the uprising of racial awakening in our hearts and streets, I chose the poem above specifically because it speaks to Hope. Because it speaks to something it seems many of us have forgotten, but which is at the root of humanity, Hope and Resilience. What’s been at the forefront of my own experience is what I can speak to most authentically and that has been feeling my own pain deeply and allowing it to build resilience, stimulate growth and nurture my own awakening to the sliver of hope that is always there even in the darkest hours. Interestingly, after retreating from much communication these past months I find my expressive skills a little rusty but here is my attempt to share anyhow.
Our world is wild, tumultuous and incredibly uncertain right now. COVID, racial awakening and the social justice movement, the inferno that is the West Coast and the ominous and paramount upcoming election are enough for any one person to try and find stable ground within and make meaning of. In addition to the state of our collective world, I’ve been moving through several major life changes in my own world, including the dissolving of a 10-year relationship with my partner, the acquisition of the home we fostered together, and the uncertain re-visioning of my business and career as well as familial health issues and upheavals including a beautiful, young niece fighting and often times seeming to succumb to the perils of leukemia. It’s alot. I know many of you, some of whom I’ve had the privilege and opportunity to speak with and some I have not, are navigating your own major challenges in your lives as well. My heart is with you.
In many eastern wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, it is considered lucky to have many difficulties in one’s life. Actually, it is directly prayed for. “May I be granted difficulty so that it might serve my awakening”. This might sound crazy at first and counter-intuitive to living the “eternally happy life” our culture has conditioned us to believe we want, however if you think about your own experience, I think you’ll find it makes perfect sense. I invite you to take a moment and close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and let yourself settle. Now, reflect on one or two of your own memorably difficult times in life that you have made it through. Perhaps the death of a loved one, loss of a relationship/job/home, the shattering of a long-held belief, or a significant injury or illness. Now consider, having come through the other side of it, through the resistance, denial, pain, tears, heartache, grief, have you ever NOT grown stronger or learned something valuable? Have you ever NOT evolved in some way, mind, spirit, heart? Has it ever NOT held some gem of a lesson that has pointed you toward living a more alive and awakened life? If you were paying any attention at all with some level of consciousness, I will bet that you HAVE gained something significantly positive or insightful from each of these experiences. Even if it’s “just” (and I say that with air quotes because it is deeply relevant and not to be taken lightly) to realize your own resilience having gone through something that challenged your very being, and survived.
Now, in the throes of our most difficult moments it can be incredibly hard to see anything about our circumstance as beneficial. Understandably. I’m not suggesting we sugar-coat or overlay some “positive thinking” over the reality of our suffering. That would simply be spiritual bypassing and a disservice to ourselves and the experience. Sometimes, we need to be with the suffering and acknowledge that things suck. That this hurts. That it feels unfair. That life is a bitch and then you die, right? I have spent many nights (and will likely spend many more) racked by uncontrollable sobbing, anguish, and physical pain in my heart, in the wake of grief from the end of a 10-year relationship, even in knowing it was the right decision. I will likely still have the mental temper tantrums over what feels like 10 years of regression in the forward momentum of my career as result of this pandemic. I will be saddened to tears every time I drive by our busy outdoor dining stages, not in disregard to their thriving currently, but because of the simple fact of why they exist. Life sucks sometimes. Or in the teaching of the Buddha, the nature of life is to experience dukkha, so aptly named and which means “suffering/sorrow”. It is one of the 3 defining marks of existence as a human. We cannot escape it. Our trillion-dollar capitalist, consumer-based industry would have us believe otherwise, that if we just have enough money we can buy endless happiness or at least numb ourselves to the pain with alcohol, food, a new car, a bigger, better vacation. But the reality is what it is. Life is beautiful AND tragic. Our real suffering lies in the resistance and denial. There is no real escaping. The question is, can we find the beauty in the tragedy?
This teaching has been one Ive struggled with most, one that brings up the “F you, Buddha” reaction in me at times;-) But as Ive leaned into it over the years, Im realizing it’s fruits. It takes courage. It takes resilience. And it takes trust. It takes all of these to lean into suffering and pain, rather than always trying to get away. All things that we can cultivate in our lives through practice, reflection, and remembrance. Aside from formal meditation practice, we can also remember that for centuries our ancestors have endured the most atrocious difficulties and have survived and evolved. Resilience is in our blood and bone. We can reflect on our own difficult times and how we’ve persevered and come through. We can recall the fundamental teaching and experience of dukkha, that life has suffering, and we can trust that what is happening to us isn’t our fault, or a mistake, or some random experience. It is simply the nature of being alive. God (insert word that works for you) didn’t get it wrong. And we can recollect another important teaching of the Buddha, that everything in life is impermanent. NOTHING stays forever. No relationship, job, feeling, thought, experience. Everything changes eventually. There is a lawfulness to this that we can trust so that when we are deep in the throes of suffering and think “will it always be like this”?, we can remind ourselves that no, it will not always be like this. It may seem that way at times. When our hearts are breaking, when our bodies are bloodied, when our minds are exhausted, but it isn’t truth.
Things will always change, we can count on that. There will always be difficult times in our lives, we can count on that. And in every experience, we have the opportunity to mine the gem and let our suffering tease out something deeper in us, awaken us to something fresh, alive, and vital. In the words of one powerful yogini Seane Corn, “Let your pain be your purpose”. Or the words that have held me sobbing through with grief on many nights, by the great Sufi poet Kabir; “Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deeply. Let it season you as few human or divine ingredients can.” And as our poet laureate said so beautifully in her poem above, “So ensure that this ache wasn’t endured in vain. Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.”
We, individually and collectively, are in a great and deep time of suffering, of dukkha. We have been riding the waves of tolerance and overwhelm, sometimes gracefully, sometimes like an injured and drunken dancer with two left feet. Our resilience has been challenged (which by definition builds more resilience). What I have gratefully seen in my clients, students, friends and family and have experienced in myself, is a deepening inquiry. An inquiry whose underlying drive seems to be to make meaning of it all. An inquiry into what truly matters in life. Into how we want to be living. Into what has NOT been working all along in our lives and the world. An inquiry into what might work better for our lives and the world moving forward. An inquiry into what is to be learned through all of this. And inquiry into how we can show up in Life and in Love. And that ancient inquiry from so many wisdom traditions, “How can this suffering serve our Awakening?”
I invite you to sit with these inquiries. I invite you to remember nothing is permanent, pleasant or unpleasant. I invite you to trust your own resilience and let the resilience of your ancestors and our Great Mother Earth, carry you when it feels too much. I invite you to have the courageous heart to be fully in the world, beauty and tragedy, and trust as our Youth Poet Laureate states, “through testing times, we can become the best of beings”.
I love each of you and am here to support you in whatever way I can including an upcoming daylong meditation retreat.
May you, I, and all beings everywhere, human and non-human, be Safe. May we be Healed. May we be truly Happy. And may we be at Peace, within ourselves and the world around us.
In Deep Gratitude,
Lauri