Lessons Drawn from Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving/ Field Day, Death

I have been working on a blog for weeks now about a wonderful psycho-spiritual workshop called A Path with Heart that I attended. But I didn't get the words down quick enough and the following week I went on an All Day Silent Meditation Retreat and I wanted to include that because the workshop and the retreat seemed to go together, but this meant rewriting the workshop bit otherwise it would be too long (as if my blogs aren't long enough). Then life itself stepped in and gave what teachers call the 'culminating activity' of both workshop and retreat, the one that shows whether or not the student has learned the lesson. At which point I had to throw out everything already written, but then it was the long weekend of Thanksgiving and that was all about being with family and eating too much. The week after Thanksgiving, and I really did intend to get to the blog, only first I had to come up with a word game for a Field Day in my writing class ...

... detour to my writing class. It began life in a senior center, and the seniors so loved the teacher, they refused to let her go after her allotted number of weeks. That was a few years ago. The class has remained loyal and grown so that we have had to move to a larger venue in a church hall. While our teacher is barely 40, the rest of us are in our 50's, 60's, 70's. We even have an 84 year old, a lively woman with more energy than me most days, who has a paying job ("I'm their token senior") and inspires me no end. Actually all the ladies inspire me no end...

... and then I was back to the blog, all these good things to write about, one after another: Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving and Field Day - and then I came home last week from the Field Day to a terrible message on the answering machine and a new and tragic 'culminating activity': my husband's 28-year-old nephew had died in the night. No-one knew what had happened only that he wouldn't wake up. This the son of my husband's younger brother, who died suddenly of a heart attack two years ago. Too much sorrow! For the family, especially for his mother, his sister. For his grandfather, my husband's Dad, and his aunt, my husband's sister, who looked upon this boy as the son she never had.

All this is happening in Pennsylvania, on the other side of the country, in the big house in Bucks County where John's parents lived with his younger siblings, when we were married in 1978. There were six children; John is the second oldest. John's mother was the heart of the family, kindness itself. We spent every Sunday there in those early years, before we moved to California. In winter we'd go ice skating on the creek, or play Monopoly for hours with the younger brothers, while Mr Dad shouted at the football games on TV. Mrs Mom would provide hot chocolate with marshmallows, and all sorts of fattening treats throughout the day, as well as a blow-out dinner and heaping bowls of ice cream later on. This was the big easy uncomplicated family I had yearned for growing up. People with roots, who stayed put, who had built a house on land owned by a great grandfather. They were like a family out of a really good children's book.

Now the house is falling into disrepair, and only one of John's sisters remains with Mr Dad whom we now call Pop. Mrs Mom is dead, as are shockingly the two younger brothers. The nephew lived with them, grandfather and aunt, in a happy arrangement, three generations together. Now the survivors are reeling. Talking to Pop: "When you're 92 you think you've seen it all. And then this..."

How to put the pieces together? Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving/Field Day, Death... I've been trying to let it be. Trusting that the lesson will rise up. But being impatient to a fault, secretly worrying over the pieces like a jigsaw made of sky: you KNOW there's a pattern, you just can't see it. And then I received this quote by Malcolm Muggeridge in an email: "Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message." I believe that ours is not a random universe and that everyone's particular life is his or her own teacher. But sometimes the lessons are universal. If I didn't think that, I'd be writing all this in a diary. So here goes.

When I was first writing about Sasha's workshop, I was focused on myself and what I got out of it. But now as I have to keep working to fold each new event into my non-random universe, it's as though the camera has zoomed back to show the bigger picture. The lesson of the workshop was not simply about my own "core wound" - but more importantly, that we all have a core wound. It was about looking around that room at those strong women, and knowing - because each one 'fessed up - that every one of them has some deep buried hurt. Briefly, with the short-lived clarity of death, I saw us as the small children we once were, hiding behind our grown-up faces, doing the best we can.

The lesson of the All Day retreat was to slow down and fight against the robotic programming, the instant reaction, the thing inside us that is so quick to say "oh yes! this reminds me of that, this is that, therefore this is what we do next." No! Every situation is unique, just as every person is unique, and is changing moment by moment. Our wanting things to be this way, once and for all, is our attempt to control things that seem to make no sense. A 28 year old boy dying in his sleep makes no sense. My husband says, "28 is when I met you. My life up to that point was a bit of a disaster. It all turned around after 28. It began then." So there is deep sorrow that this boy will not have that same chance to make who knows what of his life. But even that thought is programming, is our clever minds, comparing and analyzing. Who can say about a person's life and judge it in any way?

For me, the immediate lesson to be drawn from that death, from all death, was simply this: to treat everyone in my life as if I could lose them tomorrow. Because one day I will. Either I go or they go. So at all times, make sure I am current with my friends, no smoldering resentments, nothing left unsaid, especially not the words of thanks or appreciation or love. We are all in this together, whistling past the graveyard, doing the best we can. Sometimes it is an act of supreme courage just to get out of bed in the morning. We need to recognize that in each other and be kind to one another. It is the very least we can do. It is about relentlessly living in the present, not carrying on grudges from long ago, but reaching out in dialogue, searching for truth always tempered by kindness. This was so obvious that first day. Less obvious now, when the pain the family is experiencing is so deep, it's hard not to get lost in it.

Since I heard this news, I have had an overwhelming urge to bake. I am not much of a cook, nor yet a baker, but this urge feels so right. I imagine a long long line of women stretching back into the mists of time, who when they hear some terrible news reach for the flour, the butter, the eggs. The instinctive urge to take measured heaps of raw ingredients, and by combining them just so, to create something sweet and nourishing out of one big mess. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up at the larger picture, which makes no sense from our limited view, but here in the smaller one, the one bound by a hot stove and mixing bowls and wooden spoons and cookie sheets, a tiny bit of goodness at least can prevail.

I think of my daughter and her friend, staying up till 4:30 in the morning on the day before Thanksgiving, baking pies, preparing the stuffing, putting in a huge amount of effort on their one day off just so we four could eat like kings. They had never cooked the traditional Thanksgiving feast before, and they wanted to do it right. They did, and the effort showed, and the whole thing was deeply touching in the way that things are, whenever people expend a enormous amount of energy on something that will not last. Acting as if it matters. According to the poet Linda McCarriston, it does matter. In a poem entitled "Thanksgiving," about why we bother with all the work of this big feast, she writes:

"Any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,
with an intent to make order, matters."

There is something else of course. All this jumble of stuff happening, the good, the bad, the ugly, and me trying to capture it on paper and then having to rewrite it because more stuff happens and like a turn of the kaleidoscope, there's a whole new picture, and how to make sense of that? Then I realize this. That my attempt to write this experience is an attempt to nail Life itself down and squeeze it into a box. To proclaim "and then this happened" as if there were only one this. And by fixing it with words, hope that it would remain this forever more. Then I find myself getting all hot under the collar because stuff keeps happening. Life does not go on a coffee break while you jot down what's happened up to now. It barrels along, and just when you think you know the plot and how the story ends, it throws a curve ball. Besides the big events I mentioned, in the last month a cousin of mine died unexpectedly; a friend of a friend committed suicide; I baked three batches of oatmeal raisin cookies and gave most of them away but not before I gained five pounds; I wrote a rude parody of Jingle Bells that I thought was hilarious and nobody else did, and so on. What a funny collection of events! Where's the coherent plot? Life is change, and because we want things to stay put (but only the good things, thank you!), we suffer, just like the Buddha said.

This wanting it to make sense is once again the work of our clever minds, ceaselessly looking for patterns. It is what it does, after all. It is what it is programmed to do. Take a bunch of raw data, flip through the giant rolodex in our heads that contains all of our memories of books, plays, events, people, and so on, looking for matches and extrapolating from that situation to this. Good basic survival skills. But the moment I try to fix what has happened on paper and say it was like this, something happens to throw that earlier event into a different light. It wasn't that what I had written was no longer true, but it was no longer the whole truth. It was limited, like the five blind men describing the elephant according to what part of the elephant they happened to be touching. This is probably one big yawn to everyone out there, but for me, who has been such a believer in black and white thinking all my life, it is a revelation to see in my bones that there is no such thing. Truth is changing moment by moment. Our little selves, yearning for security, try to make it otherwise by creating elaborate stories and getting it down quick before we forget. But it's not that we forget - it's that things change and what was once true is no longer wholly true. Only we don't want to believe it because it makes life utterly precarious and begs the question, "Who are we?"

So what if it's much simpler than we think? What if this ceaseless change is simply the way life is, and our task is to learn to ride it like a surfer, without falling into the troughs and drowning? What if we are much simpler than we think? What if we are not our thoughts at all? Or as Krishnamurti would say, what if we are only thought? There's an unsettling thought.

And in that case, perhaps what matters is immersing ourselves in the little things, moment by moment, as if they matter - because after all, what else is there but this very moment? Can we hold a philosophy in our hands or touch an idea? Can we get our heads around The Meaning of Life and Death, in important capitals? Do we have any answers? Perhaps a more useful question is: Why do we need answers? Why isn't it enough to be alive? I keep coming back to the Field Day in my writing class. It involved word games which we, the students, invented, covering everything we had learned over the past several months. We worked hard at our games ("Define ephrastic poetry"), played them with gusto. We brought prizes and props and good things to eat. Like my girls staying up till 4:30 a.m. to cook us a Thanksgiving feast, it is important to pay attention to the effort that went into that Field Day, because the effort is all there is. Each of these women, carrying terrible stories of their own of heartbreak and loss, understand the importance of putting story aside, of showing up and making an effort. The moment I got home and heard the message about my nephew, I got it too, that what we had shared that morning was not just a fun time. It was the stuff of life.

Here's this about the Dalai Lama by Jeffrey Hopkins : "...when the Dalai Lama went to Europe for the first time, he would arrive in a city and announce, “Everyone wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.” That's it, isn't it? What we have in common, animals, plants, human beings - all living things. So simple. So hard to grasp. I think it is brave to reach out to others, brave to make an effort, brave to enter cheerfully into the spirit of things, in a world where change, if not outright tragedy, can and does strike when you least expect it. I wrote to the writing class almost as soon as I heard the awful news:

"I wish I could hold each of your faces and tell you how dear you are to me. How touched I am for the effort that everyone put in to our Field Day. Ribbons and prizes and special paper and forfeits and so many good things to eat. I'm only sorry it takes a shock like death to wake us up and appreciate every single moment we're alive."

Me telling my Helen how dear she is

Whoever you are, reading this, I wish I could hold each of your faces too and tell you how dear you are, just for being alive.

I wrote this shortly after my nephew's death and meant it with all my heart. But time has passed (not even ten days!) and I am no longer that open and vulnerable. Now I just wish I were that good. And wonder sadly what it all means. And know that in a week I will read this and wonder what I was trying to say and why don't I feel it any longer - proving my very point that everything changes and nothing remains the same. Including this person I think is me.

All Day Silent Meditation Retreat

 I have been to so many of Long Beach Meditation's silent retreats in the past two years, I forget how daunting it was in the beginning, to sit and walk and eat mindfully and in complete silence for hours on end. Now I welcome the silence. I am such a busybody normally, as if someone appointed me Official Helper and my role is to be ever vigilant, leaping to the rescue - never mind whether the person wants to be saved or not. As Victor wrote to me, "But when one jumps in to "save" someone, who are they really trying to save.  So many times, we just cannot stand the pain someone else's suffering causes us.  It is like the story of the butterfly emerging from it chrysalis - if you try to help it, you injure it permanently." I understood then that I am eternally trying to save my mother, who suffered more than anyone I knew, and since I failed to "save" her, I keep trying (unconsciously) with others, and of course that doesn't work so well either. What it does do is reinforce those feelings of 'not good enough.' The past once more reaching out a ghostly hand to stir the pot of the unthinking present.

Zeeba in a box

We did discuss this, HH, my therapist and teacher of a different ilk, and I, the day before the retreat. I told him all about Sasha's workshop and the uncovering of 'not good enough' and all its sad consequences. He gave me homework, something to consider over the next fortnight: "Do I matter if I am not being helpful or cheering people up, and if so, how?" Good question. How do any of us earn our place in the world - and why must it even be earned? It is something that so strikes me with animals: my cat who balances on my shoulder, leans down and gently closes my nostril with her paw to wake me up in the morning, makes her demands known as a matter of course, and trusts that the people in her universe will provide. Such huge trust our pets show us, that of course they have a right to jump all over things and act as if they own the place and we will look after them just because. How did we lose that same sense of belonging? I suppose because our universe, unlike our pets', is unstructured and unsafe - anything can happen at any time. Of course that is also true in our pets' world too - there are earthquakes and house fires and accidents that we can't prevent - but the illusion is that we can keep these creatures entrusted to us safe, and since they don't know any better, they play along so we can all feel safe, at least until it inevitably comes crashing down. We put our pets in a box of our own design, and take care of them perhaps as we secretly wish someone would take care of us.

So the first thing on Saturday at the retreat was to bring the focus out of the head, out of thinking mind and into the present. The effort involved makes it abundantly clear, at least to me, that control is an illusion. It is enormously difficult to keep the attention on what is happening moment by moment. Victor described our minds as computers, whose job it is to learn a procedure as quickly as possible so that it becomes automatic. Obviously a useful survival skill. But now, the effect of that hard-won automaticity is that we rarely look out at the world with new eyes; everything is filtered through the totality of our experiences to date: from the general - gender, nationality, religion - to the specific - our upbringing, childhood, schools attended - to the minutiae of any given moment - hunger, fatigue, even the bloody weather. An overcast day gives rise to a completely different state of mind than a bright sunny one.

So we slow everything down in a retreat in order to look closely at the robotic programming and break the pattern. This is especially apparent in walking meditation. Since it is so difficult to sustain concentration (and I'm talking the sort of concentration that causes you to break out in a sweat), Victor suggested trying to hold the attention for short intervals - maybe five minutes at most - and concentrating on walking, by slowly, slowly raising the foot, lifting it in the air, moving it forward, setting it down. He demonstrated what this looked like. His movements were incredibly slow, the minutest increments, aware every second what was happening in the body. Meditators in other traditions tend to laugh at Vipassana meditators for creeping about like robots, but in fact what is happening in the mind is anything but robotic. That's the whole point. To be aware of the tiniest sensation throughout the body, as it engages in something as ordinary as walking.

Walking meditation

In the second walking meditation (having already zipped far too quickly through the first, intent on the restroom and a cup of coffee, nothing mindful about any of that except to hurry up before the bell signaled time was up), with Victor's challenge fresh in mind, I happened to stand up on my zabuton, the larger cushion upon which my meditation cushion was perched, rather than the floor itself. Some of our zabutons are a heavy foam rectangle but this one was more like a pillow shaped like a square, stuffed with down. Because it is uneven, it proved to be extraordinarily difficult to stand and walk on mindfully. I tried closing my eyes and almost fell over. Lifting one foot in tiny increments was easy - any larger movement done as slowly and I would have toppled for sure.

I felt like a baby learning to walk, weight listing from side to side, trying to find a centered place of balance. That moment when the foot absolutely must leave the ground felt as perilous as jumping out of an airplane not knowing if your parachute will open. I had to fight the urge not to get down on hands and knees and scuttle to safety. So creeping in this manner off my zabuton and over to the door of the hall on two wobbly legs took an intense amount of time. I barely made it to the door when the bell rang and it was time to turn around and creep right back again. Seated once more on the cushion, it was interesting to transfer that same level of concentration to keeping the mind on the belly breathing. At one point I could feel myself flush with the heat of the effort and my scalp prickle with sweat. Of course the moment I was aware of it ("Oh look! I'm concentrating so hard I'm sweating!"), it stopped. And I was reminded of Victor's analogy of the mind when it stills being like a forest pool, and all the little critters feeling safe enough to come out and show their faces. Some of the critters are so skittish, they dive back into the undergrowth the second they have been noticed. Who knew sweat could be skittish.

The day continued to unfold in its untethered way. One of the best things about a retreat is the putting down of the paraphernalia of time. One person is the designated bell ringer and rings a small handbell to signal a return to our seats. For the rest of us, we are able to let go the whole concept. Like not speaking, not watching the clock is tremendously liberating. A whole day in which to do nothing but watch your mind and get to know it a little better. If last week's workshop was all about what Sasha termed the 'descending' (psychological) work, this silent meditation retreat was all about the 'ascending' (spiritual) work. I realized they are two halves of the same coin and must be done together. To do the psychological without being grounded in meditation and the body keeps the work too much in the head, at the level of thought; to do the spiritual work without the corresponding psychological work can become a New-Agey exercise in spiritual bypassing (meaning you sweep the messy emotions under the rug because all is now supposed to be sweetness and light). Pema Chodrun writes:

"... it is helpful to understand that meditation is not just about feeling good. To think this is why we meditate is to set ourselves up for failure. We'll assume we are doing it wrong almost every time we sit down: even the most settled meditator experiences psychological and physical pain. Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple direct relationship with the way we are."

This was the aim of both weekends, to begin to establish that "simple direct relationship with the way we are." Workshop and retreat demanded an honest exploration of self: the one through inquiry into body sensations uncovering deep emotions, the other through sensation in the body developing concentration and mindfulness. Neither had anything to do with thought.

                    ******************************************************

I wrote a poem after an All Day Retreat, in January 2010. I understand what I wrote a whole lot better now, and for sure it is much harder than I imagined then! But here it is - it does capture a little of the spirit of the thing.


Singular Heart  by Alison Cameron

The beautiful quote that inspired the poem:
“The wise enshrine the miraculous bones of the ancients within
themselves.”

We converge in the early morning,
singular minds and sturdy bodies
settling on our separate mats,
clutching our complicated stories,
social smiles pasted on wary faces.
We shield our battered hearts and
hide our collective eye.

As watery sun inches across pellucid sky
we sit and walk
and walk and sit
with measured step and even breath
training monkey mind.

Slowly, imperceptibly,
the marrow of our ancestors
infuses our bones as
we show our soft underbelly
stretched out like the dead.

Trust, says our Teacher,
Turn the Light within.

Sitting tall at close of day
the barking dog is still.
The sweet song
of a singular bird
calls out with her small clear voice.
As if in response,
our singular selves rise up and merge
to fill the room with one singular mind
thrumming like a tuning fork
to the communion of sorrow shared in our silent world.
Our light shines -
no, blinds -
through the cracks in our vulnerable hearts.

I am undone.

A Path with Heart: Sasha Papovich

Sasha Papovich

First came the workshop, entitled The Path With Heart, an inquiry into yoga and meditation and psycho-spiritual work as taught by Sasha Papovich, my beloved teacher who first introduced me to yoga, meditation and Buddhism.

One of the best things about leaving teaching four years ago meant that I could take Sasha's Tuesday and Thursday morning yoga classes. Sasha has an intellectual curiosity and a bright mind as befits the daughter of college professors. Once I interviewed her for a writing assignment, which unfortunately I never completed. But she shared some of her fascinating story: the way one thing led inexorably to the next, calamities becoming blessings, always nudging her towards a life as a teacher and seeker of truth. For instance, a house fire which destroyed everything she owned meant she was free to up stakes on the East Coast and move to California - where she took up yoga; a serious back injury put an end to a very active, strength based yoga practice, leading her to meditation and restorative yin yoga.

Pigeon Pose

By the time I caught up with Sasha on those two weekday mornings, her main focus was yin yoga. Yin yoga means you hold a pose anywhere from three to five minutes in a specific sequence designed to open the meridians, the lines of chi, energy, running through the body, stimulating the deep connective tissue. In the beginning, a hip opener like Pigeon, held for five minutes, filled me with angry tears, not of pain, but of frustration. When we learned that emotion is held in the hips, and at that point I had so much that was blocked, the discomfort became something to grit your teeth through, turned tolerable and eventually disappeared. Sasha would talk us through the long poses: she would read us poems or excerpts from whatever book she was studying, or she would simply talk about how the practice was affecting her own life. Since she is a brilliant off the cuff speaker, her voice alone could hold you to the mat.

But something else she often repeated in those early days resonated with me. Occasionally a beginner would wander into Sasha's class, not knowing about having to hold the poses. Inevitably, they would wriggle and groan and sometimes even leave the room to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, but really to escape. Whenever that happened, Sasha would point out the parallels between the difficult yoga pose and life itself. She would ask us, "What do you do when life gets hard? Do you get yourself something to eat? Go watch a movie? Or ... can you stay with it?"

How do you distract yourself?

Staying with it. These are the words, the key instruction that is so hard to follow but is so vital. It has become an imperative in my life. We must stay present to our life, whatever it is throwing at us, if we are not to sleepwalk through it, doing the usual thing we do, have done for years,  to distract ourselves from paying any attention whatsoever to what is really happening. Pema Chodrun says, "The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?" (from The Pocket Pema Chodrun) Yoga practice turns out to be an excellent training ground for staying with it in the bigger picture.

Sasha's life turned another corner when she decided to pursue graduate studies in Integral Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. In the three months before she moved north, her Tuesday and Thursday morning classes became intense workshops in which she tried to pass on to us, her loyal students, everything she had learned so far, about yin, about Buddhism, about meditation. She urged us to find a place to meditate on a regular basis, that it was too hard to do alone, at least in the beginning. Which is how I found Long Beach Meditation and a very different sort of teacher in Victor Byrd.

It has now been a year and a half since Sasha moved to the Bay Area. Periodically she returns to Long Beach to gather her former students together and teach us whatever she is currently learning. Her passion is still there, stronger than ever, deepened now by her own experiences as a student. She lives and breathes this work and it shows.

And that is how we came to be together once again, on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon at the beginning of November, with Sasha guiding us as competently as ever. The workshop contained only a little yoga, just enough to stretch and open the channels between belly and heart and throat and head. Mostly we sat in guided meditation or worked individually or in pairs, looking deeply within.

To begin this work, Sasha had us think back to a recent time when we were upset. Not an 8 to 10 upset, because then we might get lost in the content and become upset all over again; but something around a 4 to a 6. When we had the upset in mind, the next step was to consider what was the underlying feeling that was so upsetting, and finally, what did we do to avoid feeling that underlying feeling. All this was done silently in our own heads, but then we went around the room and people shared the two feelings: the initial hurt, anger, fear, whatever, which they then covered up by distancing themselves, getting busy, being perfect or super happy, and so on. By the time it got to me, most everything had been said, so I grinned and said airily, "All of the above!" and everyone laughed and Sasha moved on. We had run out of time, another class was waiting to come in, and there was a flurry of activity getting out the door. On my way home, I started to laugh. I realized that what I had done was itself a perfect illustration of what I do when I am on the spot. I was feeling anxious, not having anything clever to add to the discussion, so I came up with a comment to make people laugh - and get me off the hook.

Sunday afternoon, we reconvened and we began where we had left off. I raised my hand and shared my revelation that I had used my coping strategy in the doing of the exercise itself. Sasha said, "Great! Now let's narrow it down. Let's get one word to describe what it was you wanted to avoid." I could feel my face start to crumple, and I raised my arms in a cross, as if warding off an inquisition. "Yes, we do have to go there," she said gently. And to the others, she said, "Can you see how Alison would not want to go there? She has spent a lifetime building up a defense precisely so she does not have to visit this core wound, this vulnerable place. But we must name it in order to move beyond it."

Rumpelstiltskin

Parenthetically, it has dawned on me that this is the meaning of the dreadful fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin. I have never understood it until now. The little man who so frightens the young miller's daughter turned Queen, demanding her new baby as payment for having helped her spin straw into gold, can only be vanquished when he is named. The naming causes him to lose all his power. Similarly, we can only be set free of our deepest fears when we have the courage to face them head on and name them. Exposed to the light of day and staying with the knowledge, means that every time it rears its head, we can (hopefully) recognize it as 'that thing we do.' We're not trying to get rid of it, we're not ashamed of it, we're just - staying with it. And in the staying with it, it loses a little more of its hold over us.
(For a funny illustration of this very serious point, check out the YouTube video, Mr. Ramesh).

So there I am, tearful, and getting quite lost in that small vulnerable self who can barely whisper the shameful feeling that lies at bottom of it all.
"Is it a deficiency or an insufficiency?" prompts Sasha. "Deficiency, meaning you don't have it at all, or insufficiency, meaning you don't have enough?"
"Insufficiency," I mumble. "Not good enough." And there you have it. Another piece of it, at any rate. (I do wonder how many pieces there are!) Three little words that contain a wealth of buried hurt.

There are several points Sasha stressed here. That this is not about blame. This is not pointing a finger at parents, especially mothers (poor mothers!), and accusing them of bad parenting. They did the best they could, being wounded themselves. We're all wounded! The point is, a human baby requires so much love, so much constant attention. Its needs are enormous, they cannot possibly be met and therefore no-one escapes this core wounding: it is the tragedy of the human condition. We are born into this human life beautiful and whole and complete in ourselves.  Only, as babies, we lack the self-knowledge to recognize who or what we are. Instead we take our cues from those around us. They hold up a distorted mirror in which we dimly see the way life is and who we are. We grow armor around those places where we are vulnerable. We have to! If we did not, we would die. A human baby needs to be loved above all.

Compelling research on this very topic has been carried out by British psychologists into children hospitalized for long periods during the Second World War. The prevailing wisdom of the time decreed that parents should drop their sick children off at the hospital entrance and not come visit, sometimes not for months on end, until the child was 'cured.' Too often the child would not get well, would die, supposedly of pneumonia or some such, but the doctors on duty knew better. They believed the child died of a broken heart.

The Hospital for Sick Children 1940

The problem is that the necessary armor we develop around the site of our hurt eventually imprisons us. We continue to hide behind it for the rest of our lives, believing this is who we are. We act and react in life on automatic pilot, based on those earliest impressions that once served us, but ultimately are flawed. What does a child understand of the world? Only that she must remain part of the tribe in order to survive. If I carry my own feeling of "not good enough" to its conclusion, this is how it plays out: if I feel I am not good enough, I will not be loved. If I am not loved, I will be cast out. If I am cast out, I will die. In the case of the small child, the fear is of literal death, I believe (think of those hospitalized children). Later on, the ego hijacks the child, and the death it fears is the death of self. Who am I without my burning coals? Even though they burn me, they are mine, they make me real. In fact, they do the opposite. They bolster an illusory self and make her seem three dimensional when in fact she is as real as a child's imaginary playmate. (This was the wonder and the relief of the Voice Dialogue work, experiencing for myself that the vulnerable selves and the primary selves are ultimately insubstantial; that there is a place of central awareness that is none of the above, that transcends all the various selves.)

The rest of the afternoon was spent in partner work, further exploring our core wounds and how they have affected our lives. For me, a glib "It feels uncomfortable" in the beginning turned to wracking sobs the more I opened to the sensations in the body: the anxiety in the pit of the stomach, the tight throat, so tight it was hard to speak, and the pained heart. I felt quite shattered to realize that in order to avoid feeling 'not good enough,' I have constructed elaborate defenses throughout my life. I have done things I didn't want to do, and not dared do things I did want to do, so much so that who I am and what I want has been so deeply buried I can't guess at the answers. 'Not good enough' translated too often into 'don't deserve better.' Of course! If I am not good enough, what can I expect? Not much. I cringe to remember a pompous so-called boyfriend telling me matter-of-factly in his upper crust English accent, "You do understand that we're not the same class? There can't be any real future for us?" - and me, smiling at him as if it was perfectly normal for someone to tell you you can never measure up, reassuring him brightly, "Of course!"  Ugh. No wonder I cried when my dear Australian cousin told me mildly to "Do what you want to do." What does that even look like, I wonder?

When we regrouped and talked about what it was like to do these exercises, I said how awful it was to realize how long I have believed this basic lie, that I am not good enough, and how shocking to note the significant impact it has had on my life. Something I took on board as a baby!!

Sasha nodded and looked sad. "I wish it could be otherwise," she said. "I wish I could turn the clock back for all of us. But this is the way it is. It seems to me we have only two choices in life. We can either do the work and try to wake up - or not. And knowing what you know, how can you not go on? What else can we do but go on?"

1 year old "Not good enough? " Alison

(Writing this weeks later, I realize it is not even that I have avoided the feeling - worse, it is that I was not remotely aware of it, yet it has run my life.)

Further exercises involved inquiring into what it might be like to accept this part of ourselves we have shunned for so long. Predictably, we moved through fear, distaste, disgust and tears, towards acceptance, spaciousness and calm. I say "towards" - I had only the briefest glimmer of what it might be like to enfold "not good enough" into myself. My partner, although she was not supposed to speak, whispered to me fiercely, "It is a part of you! It is what makes you lovely." And Sasha said later, "Listen to her. She tells the truth.

Yet again, the limitations of working a life within a narrow band of childish feeling are made clear. A child perceives in black and white - at least this child did! Things were either wholly good or wholly bad, no gray areas for me! But this is not only unrealistic with regards to other people, it is also dangerous. Who can live up to those impossible standards, including me? I would so love to see myself as wholly good and life as wholly good and other people as wholly good. The hardest thing for me is to stay with what is actually happening in the moment, especially if it is sad or painful. (Although for whom is this easy?)

So I will try to fold in this feeling of 'not good enough', because there is also this which is true: when we returned to the circle, I shared that for me the flip side of my earlier comment about feeling sad for all the lost time was the realization that I am no longer that small vulnerable child. I am 57 years old! I am old enough, strong enough, to bear what the child could not bear. Sasha added too that I am no longer alone, dealing with a critical mother. Instead I have tremendous support in my own beautiful, fantastic, amazing daughter; my strong, centered husband and so many good people, teachers all, who are also on a similar journey and who offer encouragement and love. Why do I - why do any of us - need to protect ourselves any longer? What was vulnerable in the child is no longer so in the adult - or at least not if the adult brings attention to it, as well as a whole lot of compassion to the child who once needed to erect this defense.

We finished the day with a metta (Pema's maitri) meditation, sending lovingkindness to ourselves and to the world. Sasha gave us a choice of phrases for us to repeat in our heads:
May I be peaceful. May all beings be peaceful.
May I be free from suffering. May all beings be free from suffering.
May I be healthy in body, mind and heart. May all beings be healthy in body, mind and heart.
May I be happy. May all beings be happy.

My favorite?

May I be loved, just as I am. May all beings be loved, just as they are.

We sat quietly in the gathering dusk, repeating our little prayer silently, sending metta first to our own little selves, then to everyone in the room, and beyond, to everyone in the world. Thank you for reading all the way to here. May you be loved, just as you are.

Circle of Women

Dad's Final Days

Alan Elgar, 1922-2005

Alan Elgar, my Dad, was born on October 3rd, 1922 and died on October 14th, 2005, of pancreatic cancer. Every year, the days between those two dates are filled with memories of him. So here it is October again, and he is very much on my mind, especially since this year, like the year he died, October 14th falls on a Friday.  By this date six years ago, my sister Claudia, our Uncle Dick and I had gathered to keep watch over him: Claude from Turkey, Dick from Australia and me from California. Dick, retired surgeon, an Englishman like Dad, married to my mother's youngest sister Dedee, considered Dad his brother. All of us stayed in Dad's flat in Camberley, thankful he was able to stay home to the end.

In his memory, I would like to share with you the pages I wrote for family and friends immediately after his death, detailing the last week of his life and his extraordinary final hours.

                                                         ********************
Well. Here it is, Dad's Final Hours, which actually expands to Dad's final days, because he thought his final hour had come much earlier in the week...

Where to begin?? With Gaby [my mother's sister] who came over on the Eurostar, straight from Paris to Dad's bedside...

Gaby had actually arrived from Paris on the Thursday, the week before Dad died. How elegant she looked, in a magnificent camel coat and very cool new shoes! Dad too had made a huge effort on her behalf, putting trousers on, debating with Dick which shirt to wear, allowing Dick to shave him... It was very touching to see the two of them together, their 60 plus years of shared history culminating in these last few days. At first, when Gaby saw Dad, she told us confidentially that he could go on for weeks like this - he was up, drinking soup, even a little sherry, being a part of the conversation. Gaby returned again on Saturday, Claude's birthday, to spend the afternoon with Dad while I took Claude out shopping for her birthday. We - Dick, Gaby, Claude and I - enjoyed a delicious Indian meal (from the take-out place at the end of Hawley Road) in the kitchen, once Dad was in bed. However, when Gaby came back again on Sunday, Dad was feeling the efforts of the past few days and stayed in bed. Gaby asked for a chair so she could sit next to him, and she was wonderful, subduing her vast energy so that she could sit quietly next to him for 45 minutes, doing nothing but holding his hand gently.

Sunday night, we  were all gathered about his bed, Claude, Dick and I. Dad cocked us a glance and said, "I know what you're all thinking - you think I'm going to pop off tonight."
We murmured in agreement, um yes, this wasn't totally off the wall.
"Well, I'm not, so go away."
I persisted, "But how do you know?"
 He sounded irritable and said, "Because I have some addresses to give you."
I asked, "Are you sure you don't want to give us the addresses tonight?"
"No. Plenty of time for that tomorrow. Now go to bed."
For the first time since our arrival, Claude and I stayed at Hawley Lodge, instead of going off to a friend's house, half an hour away, to sleep. We pulled out two camp beds and set them up in the living-room so we could hear Dad in the night. Dick was ensconced in the guest room and had been there before we arrived so we left him settled where he was.

Monday, and we did the last of the paperwork, Dad and I - the addresses he had to give me were his three pension plans, which I thought was very interesting. After all, I'd been helping him get his papers in order since May - but this, this was 'the money' without which he could not live. It was his last bit of control, and giving it up was the first real sign on his part that the end would be soon. In fact, we all - Dad included - thought the end would be that Monday night. After all, the paperwork was done, his mind was at rest, and even more telling - he cautioned us to call his sister, Audrey, who had hired a car and driver to come visit him the next day. He said, "You'd better tell Audrey to phone before she leaves tomorrow."
"Oh. Why, Dad?" says me, all innocence, curious as to what he would say.
"Because I might be gone."
Of course I called Audrey that night to alert her - she said immediately, "He has a 'feeling'" and decided not to come at all, since anything could happen on the four hour drive.

We said goodbye to Dad that night as if we would never see him again - funnily enough, it wasn't sad or anything, at least not terribly, as you might imagine it would be. It seemed 'right and fitting' as they used to say in church. We sat on either side of him and told him how much we loved him, and what a great father he had been, and he said quite chattily, holding our hands, "Yes, we have always loved each other, haven't we? I've never understood these families who never got on. We always did, didn't we?" Gaby had shown me how to moisten a cotton ball and wet his lips, since drinking was a strain - as I was carefully doing this, on the Monday, trying not to squeeze too much water out, not to make him choke, concentrating like mad, under Claude's nervous gaze,  Dad looked me in the eye and said "I always knew I should never have got you that nurse's outfit!" At which, we all collapsed laughing, Dad so pleased to have made us laugh! We kissed him good night, and he waved his fingers, one at a time, in that way he had, and said "Gooly, gooly" which is horrible Anglo-Turkish for 'gule, gule', or 'bye-bye'. And we laughed and said "Alasmaladik (spelling?), you old Turk!" which is what you reply to 'gule gule' and we left the room, leaving the door a little ajar. He also said, meaningfully, we thought, "If I'm sleeping tomorrow, don't wake me up." And we were all smiling, albeit a bit apprehensive. Would he really be dead when we woke up the next day?

Well, no. And his face when he realized he was still here - oh, the disappointment. He had been so certain, and so had we... Tuesday was a funny day, Dad almost at a loose end. Instead of lying down on his bed after lunch, as he had been doing, he sat in the living-room where we were all reading quietly, and I thought to play his various CDs on 'The Classic Experience'. I sat beside him on the sofa,and got him a hot-water bottle for his back, and also massaged it, while we zipped through several CDs. Luckily I had the remote and could skip or increase the volume, as he wished. He didn't want to hear Carmina Burana, he wanted Claude and I to sing our 'duet' to 'Belle Nuit' which we had learned as children back in Haiti, and he wanted the volume turned up loud for the Slaves Chorus from Nabucco, and Figaro. I thought idly what a weird afternoon, music to die by. It was a strange and rather magical experience. When the music was all over, and Claude and Dick were in the kitchen preparing dinner, Dad awkwardly put his arms around me and I would swear that a tear slid down his nose and fell on my head. The one and only time.

That night, Dad's dear friend Pat had arranged to come over to tell us all about her weekend at her daughter's wedding. Pat had been by the previous week to tell us what she was going to wear etc. so we were eager to hear how it had turned out. Dad went back to his bed just before Pat's arrival, and when we heard her at the door, he said, "Quick, Ali, my teeth!" and I raced to fetch them, motioning Claude to delay Pat in the hall - of course we couldn't get the bloody things to fit, so Dad gave it up in disgust. I put some lip stuff on his lips so they would be 'kissable'  - he grinned - and Pat went in. She closed the door and came out a while later, looking rather shaken, but said they'd had a good talk and were able to say how much they had meant to each other. We invited her to stay for supper. Dad called Claude in and said, "I hear you've invited Pat to supper. That's jolly kind of you." And then, "What are you having?!" He got up and joined us, even had a tiny glass of wine, and a tiny dish of stewed apple and cream - which he couldn't keep down, and which turned out to be the last bit of solid food he attempted to eat. But we had a lovely evening, chatting about the wedding and this and that, as if nothing were wrong. Death seemed very far away that night, and sure enough, Wednesday morning, Dad was still there.

When the District Nurse Sandra came by that morning, she and Dick conferred on a likely timeline. They agreed that in 24 hours 'things would likely be very different' and 48 hours, 'for sure'. They discussed pain medication, and the fact that Dad had had that back-ache yesterday, but hadn't wanted to take his morphine, afraid that it would cloud his mind for his visit with Pat (so we think, anyway - he never actually said this). Sandra suggested something called a morphine 'driver' which would administer the morphine on a continuous basis, nothing more than he was already receiving, but on a small but steady supply, rather than in a little shot glass which was how he was getting it, all at once, just before going to sleep at night. She said it would do a better job of managing his pain in this way. We didn't think he'd agree to have this done - he'd always been leery of the morphine, making semi-jokes about becoming an addict - but Sandra went in and asked him and came out again in minutes saying, "He's agreed." We took that to be another sign that he had truly had enough and if the morphine would hurry it up, then good.

From this point on, Dad did not get out of bed again, did not eat or drink and barely spoke. We took it in turns to sit with him in the chair beside his bed - we even rigged up a lamp so we could read there once it got dark. His breathing was an event - sometimes it would stop completely, and then, after an age, it would start up again. It did make it hard to do much else besides just watch him breathe. His eyes were always half open, but unfocused, and you yearned to tell him, 'go on, close your eyes, it's ok, go to sleep!' - how he fought it!! Wednesday night, I moved my little camp bed into Dad's room and slept by his side - an uneventful night.

Thursday, I went to the little church down the road - there was no-one there but an elderly couple, obviously keeping an eye on things. When I appeared and lit my candle and knelt quietly, the chap gave me a heartfelt concert on the organ, running through a whole repertoire of hymns. I thanked him when I (and he) were done and he said modestly that he always likes to give people a 'bit of music to pray to' when they come in like I did. Made me smile!

I got home just before noon, and Claude said I was just in time, Dad wanted his feet massaged. Either Dick or I did this job - I was happy to do it, putting cream on those feet, thinking of all the miles, all the places where they had walked in his lifetime. The worst thing about being a caregiver to someone who is dying is knowing that there is nothing you can do to really help. So any little thing - like listening to the music, like giving a massage - is great because for a moment you feel useful, as though you are sharing the load. Dick's daily job was to wet a washcloth with warm water and wipe Dad's face with it. I knew just how much pleasure he got out of doing that little thing. Claude's special task was the smooth running of the house - all the behind the scenes stuff, like laundry and cooking. She told me she didn't actually enjoy doing that stuff, but it had to be done, and I thanked God for my older sister, who is so responsible and take-chargeish and organized, just as a first-born should be. (I have no hidden talents in this direction, but Dick proved to be a terrific ironer.)

Sandra came to check up on Dad, and after conferring with us, went in to tell him what a privilege it was for her to know him and to help him. She held his hand and asked him to squeeze it if he understood. Claude, Dick and I listened, unashamedly crying because her words came straight from the heart. She told us later that he had understood, he squeezed her hand at every important point she made, so she was satisfied he had heard her. Michele [Gaby's daughter], Gaby and Pierre came by that afternoon, and we all took it in turns to sit with Dad, and the Leveques got a chance to say goodbye too.

How did we know Thursday night was truly it? Was it because by now Dad had extended his timeline by several hours and we felt he surely couldn't last much longer? Was it because the District Nurses had come in earlier that afternoon and hooked him up to a catheter, which seemed very serious and final? ("You will never go to the loo again...")

In the evening, Dad grew agitated and seemed to want to get up. This was unnerving - Dick said he couldn't possibly go anywhere, he was too weak to walk any distance. Claude said, "I know where you want to go, you want to go to the living-room and sit in your spot next to the telephone, don't you?" Dad nodded weakly. We suggested that since that was just too far, that he sit in the little chair beside the bed and we would pretend it was the living-room... It was an excruciating effort to move him from bed to chair - it took the three of us about 15 minutes, it seemed, because we had to get him up, then get his feet turned the right way, then get his knees to bend - we were all sweating when it was done. We weren't quite sure what we were supposed to do next, or what Dad wanted, so we started reminiscing about holidays long gone, until finally Dad made a motion with his hand and said softly, "Enough." We took advantage of his being out of bed to change the sheets, Claude and I, and put new pillowcases on - remember, he hadn't been out of bed for two days straight. Then we bundled him back in, another exhausting effort, said our goodnights and went back out to the living-room. Claude said to me, "You aren't going to sleep in his room next to him, are you?" and there, we knew then that this was it, and I said a dubious 'no' because I wasn't sure if I wanted to wake up next to a dead body, even if it was my Dad's...

As it turned out, I couldn't stand it. I was on the sofa in the living-room (we left my campbed where it was in his bedroom, just in case), and I kept hearing all these loud noises - oh, how to describe them in words?? They sounded as if he were saying 'O' - the short 'O' sound, as in 'fox' - but loud, LOUD, and a whole burst of them, all on the out-breath. Then there would be silence, and then they would start up again. I couldn't stand it, just listening to this, not knowing what was happening, so I went in and at first lay on his bed beside him, careful about the catheter - he seemed so agitated, and his arms would flail about on these 'o' sounds - it was rather alarming. I decided there wasn't enough room on the bed for the two of us, so returned to my campbed. From there, whenever he started with the 'o's and his arms would swing up, I'd grab an arm and stroke it and try to calm him ' there, there, Dad, it's ok' etc.  Finally, though, it dawned on me what this reminded me of. It sounded like a woman panting, breathing hard, in labor. It occurred to me that it must be every bit as difficult for the spirit to leave the body as difficult as it is for a baby to leave the body... The next time Dad went through this rigmarole, instead of soothing him, I encouraged him "Go on, Dad! Go! Go!" and when it was over and his breathing was normal again, he whispered, "I know". Meaning, I know I need to go but it's not so easy...? That's what it seemed to me. Anyway, after I had sorted out what this was all about in my head, the sounds didn't bother me. In fact, it seems to me they stopped then or shortly after.

However, the next thing that happened had me wide awake. All of a sudden, Dad says, clear as a bell, slowly, deliberately, "What... the... heck?" in a completely puzzled tone of voice. There's a pause, as though someone is answering him, and then he says, "Oh! So that's what that's for!" Remember that he had not really spoken in two days, and certainly not clearly like this. I shot out of bed and went to get Claude - "Claude! Claude! Dad's talking to I don't know who and it's really interesting! Come quick!" Dick was right there pacing the corridor, so he came too and we all sat and watched and waited, Claude and Dick on one side of the bed, on the stool and the chair, me on the other on my little campbed.

At one point I sat up and said to Claude in a puzzled voice, "Did you just whisper something in French?"
Claude said, "No. Nobody's said anything."
I said, "Well, that's really odd, because I just heard someone whisper in my ear, 'Il partira toute de suite.'"
We all said hm! and then thought no more about it, because at this point Dad's breathing suddenly changed into this awful rattly, gurgly thing. This was just stomach-twisting to listen to, definitely the worst thing that had happened so far, terribly distressing. Thank God for Dick, who assured us that this breathing, though noisy and horrible to listen to, was not in fact causing him any pain. He said it might alarm him if he could hear himself, but it didn't seem to be doing so, so we would just watch and wait... We sat about and watched and listened and had a terrible shock when we realized that he was choking on this liquid and about to throw up!  We raced about looking for something to be sick in - Claude remembered brilliantly where a little bucket was kept - but in fact it was a false alarm, and he wasn't actually sick. Still, it shook us out of our spectator pose, the more so when Dad started on with this "Pull me up!" Of course we thought he wanted to sit up, so he wouldn't choke any more on that ghastly liquid in his lungs, and this is where I climbed into the bed behind him so he could lean against me and be supported. (Again, the wonderful feeling of being able to actually DO something, as opposed to watching in anguish...)

Even sitting up, his breathing continued to rattle and so Claude has the great idea to telephone Sue the Vicar - she said, "I think Dad needs help, what do you think?" and we all agreed that this was a fine idea. By now it's around 8 in the morning. By virtue of an amazing series of coincidences, Claude had, right by the telephone, the phone number of the only people we knew who were likely to have Sue's home phone number : she called them, they had it and within minutes, Sue was on her way. Meanwhile, dear old Betty telephoned at 8:45 a.m., as she'd arranged the night before when we thought it wasn't looking good - Claude said, "If you want to see Dad, you'd better get over here fast" and she did, doing the walk that normally took her half an hour in just twenty minutes. She said she had never walked so fast in her life, and here she is 79 years old.

So now the tableau is set. I am sitting behind Dad, cradling him in my arms and my legs ('like a Pieta,' said Claude - I don't know about that, but I do find it interesting that I could sit like that without moving for almost three hours), one hand on the top of his head, because I had read somewhere that babies like to feel pressure on the tops of their heads, it reminds them of the womb, and I thought it might be comforting at the end of life too; Claude is sitting on the bed holding Dad's left hand; Dick is at the foot of the bed, massaging his legs and feet; Betty is sitting next to me holding his right hand. Sue is sitting on a stool between Claude and I. The first thing she did when she arrived was to anoint him with oil - not apparently an Anglican thing, they don't have the sacrament of Extreme Unction, but I can't tell you how comforting it was to see her do this and intone these solemn End-Of-Life words. I felt he was in the hands of an expert now and the whole thing was out of our hands...

After the anointing, Sue read quietly passages from her Bible, The Lord is my Shepherd, among other things. (Towards the end, Sue kept saying quietly, over and over again, "Jesus, take him, Jesus, take him...")  And this is where Dad, quietly talking to himself, difficult to understand because he is still gurgling, says, so we all hear, "Hello, it's Alan" as if he were introducing himself, and then "Pat" and "Arthur" and "There's my sister!" We imagine the Pat he was referring to was his Auntie Pat - we had been looking at photos of her as a young woman that his sister's family had sent to him, back in May. Claude and I knew Auntie Pat as a very old (she lived to be 105!!) and completely deaf old lady but Dad protested and said ,"No, no, we all loved Auntie Pat, she was our favourite aunt!" Arthur was his uncle... And Kath, his sister - his eldest sister, whom he adored, and who had just died in January... It made sense that these people from his earliest childhood, trusted and well-loved family, would be there.  As Betty said, "He's being met." I asked Claude to show me on her face what Dad's face was like, since I was sitting behind him and couldn't see - she said, "He has an expression of complete wonder, looking, looking, just amazed."  We were also sitting there looking pretty amazed. When Dad started up again with his "Pull me up," it was Claude who realized what he meant and said, "Aren't we clots! He's not talking to us, he's talking to them, the people on the ceiling!"

And so, gradually Dad's breathing grew quieter - Stephanie, the 25 year old District Nurse, for whom Dad was her first death all on her own, conferred with Dick and gave him something to help with the breathing, but Dick said later that his breath was getting shallower and shallower and he just wasn't breathing deeply enough to stir up all that awful liquid. We all sat quietly, listening as he quietened down... Suddenly Claude, who was watching his eyes carefully, her face just crumpled, like a little girl's, and she said, "Oh! Good-bye, Dad!" and she said later she could almost see his spirit leave his body. We continued to sit in our positions a few moments longer, while little Steph made sure that he was truly dead, and then I extricated myself from behind him, and we arranged him gently flat on the bed. Quietly we withdrew, all a bit in shock, and did as all good English do, had a cup of tea.

Steph and Sue the Vicar left fairly soon, Betty went in to Dad to say her last good byes, and the Original Three started notifying people. Pretty soon, the phone was ringing off the hook. Periodically we would go in separately and look at Dad - he looked as he had done those past few days, so it was hard to comprehend that he was really gone. We would touch his chest under the covers - his skin was still warm, the illusion could continue... The undertakers called to see if we wanted them to come right away or wait until the doctor came to us to sign the cause of death certificate. We said we'd wait for the doctor to come - it seemed too soon, after all these months, weeks, days of waiting, to ship Dad out the minute it was all over. Of course the doctor was horribly late (in fact he never did come, the idiot - but that's another story) and the only time I personally broke down was when I went in to check on Dad in the early afternoon and his flesh, even under the covers, was like ice. I just howled to poor old Dick, "He's so cold! So cold!" And Dick was very comforting, hugging me like I was a little kid, murmuring, "I was afraid this would happen if he stayed here too long..." Shortly after that, the undertakers came and very respectfully carried Dad downstairs on a stretcher covered with a cloth. They even straightened the bedclothes a bit. We all spent time in that room once it was empty, staring at the bed, scene of such emotion, such passion, now so still.

Our day passed with a visit to Easthampstead Park Convention Center, the place where we had the reception - it seemed such an odd thing to be doing the afternoon that our Dad had died. I suppose anything we did would have seemed odd. I remember stiff drinks once home again - I guess there was dinner, but I don't remember it. Next thing I do remember was Claude and I lying on our little beds (we moved mine back out to the living-room), going through the whole sequence of events. Claude said, "One thing I don't understand is, where was Mum in those people on the ceiling? Why didn't he say 'Maryse!'"
I said, "Well, he said an awful lot that we just couldn't understand ..." and then I remembered the whisper in French. "Hey! Claude! I did tell you about that voice whispering in French, didn't I?" "Yes!"
"Well then, who else could it be but Mum??"
And thinking about it since, I've thought, yes, a whisper because it disguises the voice - if I had actually heard Mum's voice loud and clear, I think I would have freaked out; but then the words are in French to make it clear that this is not me - I certainly wasn't up to thinking in French at that moment - it was around 5 a.m. - and besides, if it was me talking to myself, I would have said 'Il va partir' not 'il partira' which is much harder for a foreigner to say. I checked later with Gaby and Michele, and they both agreed that 'il partira' is very correct French, such as Mum for sure would use. I am so glad I said something to Claude about it at the time, proof I wasn't making it up or dreaming.

We all slept like logs that night! Next day, we had been invited to Michele's for lunch. En route in the car, I dared ask Dick what he thought of the whole experience. I was so afraid he was going to say it was a morphine hallucination or something... To our JOY, Dick absolutely pooh-poohed the morphine idea, said Dad hadn't been on any more morphine then than he had taken at other times, and he hadn't hallucinated before so why would he start then? He also suggested that the morphine driver was not necessarily a good method of disseminating the drug, since Dad had so little subcutaneous fat left - he thought that if one were to cut into him after death, one would find a little pool of morphine just sitting there... Plus, he said, "Don't forget when you are telling this story about 'Pull me up!', that Alan had both arms raised in the air - this at a time when he had very little muscle control left - he shouldn't have been able to maintain that position for any length of time, if at all." The upshot? Dick believes that 'something spiritual' was happening, and that is surely enough.

Perhaps this whole experience is something that must happen to you before it becomes believable. Certainly I had read about this sort of thing and was open to the experience, and I would have said I believed, but it would have been more of a hope... Being there, however, removed any shred of doubt - not least because this was happening to Dad, of all people, who had not read of any of this, and didn't want to talk about it, and claimed it would be the 'last adventure' and he'd find out what it was all about when he got there. I think it interesting that in spite of all my reading, it was Claude who broke the code, who understood the meaning of 'Pull me up!'

On reflection, I really love my labor analogy - interesting that in the joy of having a baby at the end, women tend to forget just how painful labor is - painful and bloody and messy and endless, sometimes. And how some people have no trouble, and others have lots. And perhaps because we are conditioned to seeing death as a negative experience, we don't understand that it is simply a passage, and somewhere that newly freed soul is being greeted with as much joy and love as we greet a new baby here on earth. Frances (Dick's daughter) kept saying through Dedee (Dick's wife), who passed it on to Dick, who told us, "Wait until it is all over before you say what sort of death it was - you need to see the whole picture." It is true that, up to the very last bit, Claude and I were just in anguish, I said clearly to Claude, "This makes you believe in euthanasia," because Dad seemed so distressed, his breathing, his agitation... It was so hard to watch. But imagine if he had been in a hospital, or even a hospice - Dick says he would have been given mega-doses of morphine, would have fallen into a coma, would have died - and we would have declared it a horrible death. Thank God for Dick!!! He refused to increase the morphine, saying he wasn't actually in pain. And so Dad was able to go clear-eyed - when we say he was looking at the ceiling, he really was looking, not with misty, out-of-focus druggy eyes, but clear eyes, focused eyes, alert eyes - and gave us the gift of those extraordinary last words.

It is interesting, the people who hear this story. They either dismiss it as the shutting down of the brain, some last image thrown up by a dying mind (to which I say, what about my French whisper? I was neither on morphine nor dying, so what was that then?); OR they accept it utterly, with great enthusiasm and joy. My old headmistress from Farnborough, Mother Alexander, now living in Ireland, with whom I had a long conversation the night of the funeral, is in the joyful camp : she said "Marvelous! This is what is meant by 'the communion of saints'! How lucky you were to witness that!" And I don't understand why anyone would NOT want to believe this. My own John doesn't and it's quite a sore point. He believes it happened as I said, he just doesn't believe my interpretation. He asked me "What does it mean to you?" I thought it so obvious, I couldn't believe he had to ask. But if I have to spell it out, to me, it shows me that there is something more after death, that we do not die (because where did those dead people on the ceiling come from?), that death is neither frightening nor lonely nor the end of things - at the very least, it shows me that we don't have the answers and Shakespeare had it right when he said "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy,"  and why not lean towards an optimistic view???

Perhaps the most telling thing is the difference between Dad's death and Mum's. Certainly Mum was younger and it was sudden and a great shock, and there was nothing remotely comforting about any of it. I grieved for Mum for years, and can still put myself back in that terrible place when I first heard that she was dead. With Dad, I feel completely different. I examine myself, wonder if perhaps I am in denial and everything will catch up with me at some later date. But no, I just cannot feel sad. Yes, of course I miss Dad, but the Dad I miss is a Dad who hasn't been around for some time now. Before the cancer, there was his hip, which meant he had to give up his beloved walking; and then there was diabetes, which meant no more sticky toffee puddings, which were harder to give up than smoking, he said. If Dad could have been restored to a younger, healthier self, well then, that would be one thing - as he was, it was not a life, nothing one would want to see prolonged. I believe now that Dad has been restored to that younger, healthier self, I believe he is reunited with Mum and his family and friends who have gone before, I don't for a minute think that he is dead and gone, never to be seen again. I think he is lucky to be out of this world and all its troubles. But the memory of him, how he looked on life and how he handled himself in all situations has given, not just me, but all who knew him, a road map for how to behave. His dying revelations were simply more of the same - a road map for what lies ahead, and I for one and extremely grateful that I got to be there, and witness it, from the incredibly privileged position of holding him in my arms.

Three Days on Retreat at Yokoji Zen Center

The Path - actually the road to the retreat center.

Well, a few more little detours on the path to digging into the early years. I guess I'm not looking forward to going there. Although I don't think the detours are detours at all. They are the Path itself. Of course, your life is your path. Meaning, as my extraordinary niece learned after spending ten days in the Amazon on retreat with a shaman (now there's a story!), that your specific life is your path: everything that happens to you, every person you meet, has something to teach you. That's an exciting thought, isn't it?  So it's important to look at the so-called interruptions and see how they figure in the scheme of things. I had three big ones in the past couple of weeks. My daughter flew down from Berkeley to spend her birthday week with us; my cousin from Australia unexpectedly arrived for three days on Friday; I drove Helen back up to Berkeley the following Tuesday, and came back to Long Beach the next day (long drive!); and Thursday was the beginning of our three day silent meditation retreat at a remote Zen center a fair drive away from home.

Helen as tiny snow angel

Any time I spend with my daughter is a happy time. She turned 22, and chose to come home to spend her first birthday with us in four years (since college). She strengthens me, gives me courage in myself, simply by her presence. That she wants to spend time with me makes me think perhaps I haven't been too shabby a mother. This is not a question that secretly begs reassurance: I believe your mother essentially stops being your mother at whatever age you are when you leave home. I had my mother until I was eleven; after that, I feel I brought myself up, muddling through with the help of my peers at boarding school. My mother was simply not there. So once Helen passed eleven, I was flying blind. Add to that strange American rituals like sleep-overs, proms, high-school electives, driver's ed, parent-teacher conferences, FAFSA, dating - all of which I had either managed on my own or never experienced. I was at a loss as to how to shepherd my daughter through many of these alien rites of passage. That she managed, we managed, is more testament to her than me, with a huge nod of thanks to her Dad, my husband, who is American and grew up in a large family with the kind of Mom I would love to have had. So all this to explain that whenever Helen rolls back into our lives, she brings a jolt of joy.

But something else. She also puts me back in the role of Mom. Remember Martha-Lou, the Voice Dialogue lady, advising me to find time every day to let myself cry? This is hard to do when you are being Mom. I don't care how old or mature your child is, it is surely disturbing to hear your mother say, "Excuse me, dear, I have to go cry now." So, I didn't.

Michele, my Australian cousin

Helen's arrival closely followed by my cousin's was surely no accident. This cousin is a middle child in a family of eight. Her father is my mother's brother, who was as terrifying to his children growing up as my mother was to my sister and me. My cousin took a different tack. Instead of becoming a people pleaser and an all round good girl, she rebelled. At 17, she decided she had had enough of being quiet and shy and set out to change herself. A little younger than I, she has become quite fearless, traveling the world by herself, independent and comfortable in her own skin. She is blunt and direct, fiercely proud of her wrinkles ("I earned every one of them and I don't want anyone telling me I look younger than my age. I am proud of my age and how far I've come!"), a sort of warrior woman, and just who I needed to come visit at a time when I'm feeling a little precarious. Her blood is in me, after all. But here's what she taught me. Sunday morning and I was torn between conflicting duties: my regular Sunday at Long Beach Meditation, checking in the beginners for the new series of meditation classes; and my cousin on a once in a lifetime trip to America; and Helen 's visit. I was agonizing over this until Michele said mildly, "Why not do what you want to do." Her words stopped me short. I have a choice? I can do what I want? An idea so rare it brought tears to my eyes. In the end, I checked in the beginners but chose not to stay, Helen went for a bike ride with her Dad, and Michele and I went whale watching, spending a splendid afternoon sighting hundreds of dolphins and many blue whales.

Yokoji, the Zen monastery that was our retreat center

By the time the retreat came around, I had been busy doing, driving, planning and coping for days. I was more than ready to set it all down and be quiet. I envisaged a peaceful time in this rustic setting: we were staying in a real Zen monastery, in the mountains below Idyllwild, about three hours away from Long Beach. The monastery, called Yokoji, was off the grid: electricity came from solar power and a small generator. No cell phone reception, no paved roads, shared accommodations and loos, a communal bathhouse, vegetarian fare and no dessert apart from fruit. Two resident golden labradors and one visiting very friendly pitbull. Bring your own sleeping bag and pillow and bath towel. I envisaged a rough, semi-camping experience, and was pleasantly surprised to find it far nicer than I'd anticipated. We spent so little time in our rooms that the bare bones of the sleeping arrangements was not a problem. And enough loos were dotted about the place that that wasn't a problem either. We spent our days either inside the zendo (the meditation hall), or walking outside, 30 or 45 minute sits alternating with 30 or 45 minute walking meditations. We had an hour's rest after lunch, an hour of yoga in the afternoon and in the evening, an hour's dharma talk given by Victor. The day began supposedly at 6 a.m., but I was usually awake earlier than that and in the hall by 5 or 5:30. The last sit was over at 10 p.m..

Victor walking down from his cabin, being greeted by one of the resident dogs.

Friday, after the first walking meditation, Victor challenged us to break our patterns. We sit like statues, he said, hardly daring to move, trying so hard to be "good little meditators". And then we go outside and pet the dogs, stare at the mountains, walk at our usual brisk clip. So the question is, can we take our meditation off the cushion? Can we break our patterns, so ingrained, so persistent? Victor suggested the only way he knew how to do it was to slow everything way down, walking especially.

The beautiful butterfly wing

So at the next walking meditation, I walked back and forth over the wooden bridge. Two boards' width was exactly one foot length. Ten precise steps with each foot covered the bridge. Back and forth I trod, carefully, mindfully, placing each foot within the planks of wood, not lifting the one foot until the other was stable, synchronizing breathing and walking. After plodding back and forth many times, I noticed something sticking up between the boards: half of a butterfly wing, a beautiful wing, unusual, multi-colored, pink and blue and black. It was perfect. And I would never have noticed it if I hadn't deliberately been walking so very slowly! Happily, I picked it up, examined it and wondered what to do with it. I carried it back to our zendo in cupped hands. We had an altar upon which people were encouraged to place treasures. I hadn't brought a treasure, but now I had one. Later when we were sitting, I had to smile. Picking up the butterfly wing and putting it on the altar was such typical Ali behavior. "Look what I found!!" Even without words, sitting in silence,  it is possible to shout that message. So much for breaking patterns. The atypical thing would have been to have left the wing alone for someone else to notice in wonder, when they were walking slowly and mindfully across the bridge. I considered taking the wing and stuffing it back where I had found it, but thought that would be silly. Still, the whole incident underscored how being aware of patterns - let alone breaking them - is a moment by moment affair.

A second, related theme of the weekend was, do we take refuge in awareness or in the personality? The whole thrust of our being is to take refuge in the personality, in the self. We say, "That's just the way I am. That's me!" Yet the self is impermanent, thoughts are fleeting, emotions too. Ajahn Sumedho, the wonderful American Buddhist monk whom we are studying on Wednesday nights says,
"The mood comes and goes. It changes, revolves; it's happy, sad, elated, depressed, inspired, bored, loving, hateful, and on and on like this. According to the conditions that come together at this point, then the mood is this way. It's so easy to say, "Oh, I'm in a bad mood" or "I'm in a good mood." Our language is like that, so we become the mood. "I feel happy today, everything's fine" or "Today is one of my bad days." That's why I encourage this investigation of thought, so that you're not creating yourself, endlessly reinforcing the sense of a self through your proliferating thoughts."
p. 230, The Sound of Silence 

Picnic tables on the right

I sat writing about this at a picnic table after lunch that first day, intoxicated by the scent of the pine trees all around, the sun warm on my back, the breeze gentle. It was perfect. Then I thought, imagine if it were cold, rainy, muddy... The monk who gave us our orientation talk told us that just the day before our arrival there had been a hail storm such as he had never seen in seven years of living on the mountain. Hail stones as big as golf balls. So imagine if it was like that. Would I be feeling so mellow? No. Taking refuge in the personality with its "proliferating thoughts" then is dangerous, just like Ajahn Sunedho said - we are "sensitive," dependent on too many factors, any one of which can change at any moment: weather, temperature, bodily aches and pains... (Ah, but when everything is good! Then "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world"... and it's almost impossible to summon up energy to inquire within).

Victor sitting in front of the altars, big and little

Friday night's dharma talk was for me one of those electrifying talks that Victor conjures up at least once on retreat. Here is the quote around which he built his talk:

"The empty mind cannot be purchased at the altar of demand; it comes into being when thought is aware of its own activities - not the thinker being aware of his thought."
J. Krishnamurti, 
Only Revolution California Part 3

"When thought is aware of its own activities..." that would be us! WE are thought, the thinker IS thought. Not simply being aware of our thoughts, "Oh, that's just a thought!" But that which is thinking, "Oh, that's just a thought!" is itself a thought! The empty mind is the mind that realizes this. Hard to do, you're - er - thinking. Well, yes. From the standpoint of the ego, impossible. Because the ego is the part that thinks. Awareness - that which we truly are - does not think. It reflects. It mirrors back what is. But we have allowed the thinking mind to take over to such an extent, our sliver of pure awareness is almost lost. And this is why we must work so hard at something that is probably quite simple: being quiet and still in the mind. Being with what is, moment to moment, without reference to thought, to memories past, or expectations for the future. When you sit for any amount of time and try to stay in the present moment, you immediately see how difficult this is. As Victor has noted, the mind has a tremendous resistance to staying in the present. It has nothing to do. And if it has nothing to do, it catches a whiff of its own mortality and it panics. Who am I, without thought? Incessant thought, that critical voice in the head that endlessly comments and judges and compares and analyzes. Whatever else it is, it feed us the illusion that we are not alone. Stephen King, master of horror, said, "Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

The thinking mind is robotic, mechanical. You can argue that it's not, but the proof for me was when I was doing The Artist's Way, writing three pages every morning without fail for twelve weeks straight. In the ninth week we were instructed to go back and reread what we had written. And what a shocker to find that certain thoughts played out compulsively over and over again, each time written as if I'd never had that thought before. In fact I would have sworn it was brand new. Yet here was the proof. Pages and pages of repeats. The Voice Dialogue work shed a little light on that: maybe the thought seemed new because each time a new persona was thinking it, and since they have no interest in speaking to each other, don't want to know each other's thoughts, then perhaps for that one it is in fact a new thought. (I don't know if this is true. It's just a thought!)

So for me the galvanizing thing Friday night was when Victor told us this: "Imagine that you have just been given a spiritual book. One that you have searched for, longed to read for years, and at last, in this very beautiful library, the book is placed in your hands." He continued, "Wouldn't you read every word, every page, of that book with interest and curiosity? Now..." (drumroll) "...imagine that you are that rare book. You must learn to read yourself, your thoughts, your mind, with equal interest and curiosity."

"Know thyself"

After this dharma talk, I was wide awake, mind racing. If we hadn't been in Noble Silence, I would have been up all night discussing this. Isn't it funny how an idea can spark something? I felt like a keen college student, exposed for the first time to Big Ideas. I loved being that book in the library. Because it seemed to bring together all the strands we have been reading and talking about lately. And for me it also seemed to marry the psychological work to the spiritual, which is usually quite a conundrum: How to bolster the self on the one hand only to knock it down with the other?

So I was thinking, if awareness is a mirror, it is reflected through the self. Each of us has our own unique self through which to reflect back out into the world this awareness, which in fact we share with every living thing. Call it energy, if you like. You can have bright energy, high energy, low energy. Your job then is to polish your mirror, your self, so that what you reflect back into the world is bright and clear-seeing. So yes to therapy, to self-examination. Chogyam Trungpa spoke of spiritual bypassing - how much easier it would be, to just hurtle over the murky bits of the self and get straight to the calm sitting. But it doesn't work like that. The things you do not face simply go underground; they do not disappear. Maybe you will be able to tiptoe through life avoiding the thing that will trigger you - but since you are likely unaware there even is a trigger, how do you know what to avoid? Until the unfortunate day when that buried aspect of yourself comes roaring out, to everyone's surprise, but mostly your own.

All my life I have leaped over the sad bits of my life, like a super-hero leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, eager to get on with it, with life, with its seemingly continuous forward motion. I bought my family's unspoken motto, "Never look back, never go back." Now I am finding out that I must go back and revisit every dreary floor - I like the image of trudging up and down each skyscraper, in and out of all its rooms, down the corridors, the elevator shafts.

The funny thing is, after we have done the work, spent the effort reading every line of our one book, it seems we will find that the book wasn't the thing at all. After all, it is one book among billions, a single volume in that library containing a copy of every book ever written. So what? Is it the library, is that it? The container of all those individual stories? As the ocean is to the little wavelets on its surface, each wave unique yet part of the whole? So what's the point of reading our own story so carefully? Is it to discover the commonality of our stories? If I plumb my own depths, will it increase my compassion for others? There are only so many plots after all...

Talk about "proliferating thoughts."

I had an interview with Victor the following morning, still brimming with excitement over these ideas. We sat outside at a picnic table. I told him how much I loved the idea of reading the book in the library. Mildly, he pointed out the fatal flaw - "WHO is reading the book?" Aaaargh. He added, "Why does there have to be anyone reading the book? It is being read." So imagine that. There is nothing to do, nothing to be. It just is. Hard to fathom this! I love words, I love analyzing and yes, thinking. And analyzing and thinking provide a good cover for not doing the actual work. HH tells me the same thing. So often I will plunge into an intellectual discussion, while he keeps trying to bring me back to feeling, as in, "What are you feeling right now?" Most of the time, I haven't a clue or don't want to know. Who wants to be sad? I'd rather live in my head.

So here I am on retreat, thought firing on all cylinders, and Victor is warning me that the mind is very clever, it can find connections between anything. My clever mind is busy doing just that. I can spin a good story about investigating elevator shafts, but in fact I am back to my old trick of leaping over the tall buildings, aka messy emotions, flying high on pure thought.

Meanwhile, something else is going on. I noticed during the first full day, Friday, whenever I was feeling particularly upbeat and happy, for instance during the little story of the butterfly wing, there would follow a tearful interlude. Nothing dramatic, just a little drip of cold tears. They weren't even accompanied by great physical sensations, no tightening in the throat or heaviness in the chest, just a steady drip of tears. In the restroom below the zendo was a little card tacked to the wall - "In case of cold weather, please don't turn the tap off completely." I knew enough about cold climates to know the dangers of pipes bursting from frozen water expanding. I thought the stream of my cold tears was analogous to relieving pressure in the pipes. I thought to myself that this was the little girl from Voice Dialogue, the one who holds the sorrow, feeling safe enough to show her face and gently weep. It was all very calm and measured and actually rather pleasant.

Somehow I lost control. I wish I could tell you how it happened. And why. It would be nice to be so aware I could pinpoint the exact thought that set me off. But truth is, I can't say for certain what happened. By Saturday afternoon, the sorrow was growing, the tears less polite, the sensations in the body becoming unbearable, until I knew that sooner or later I was going to break down. I thought yoga wold help - it usually does - but when I found tears sliding into my ears while lying in savasana, I knew meltdown was impossible to avoid. The very next sit, the one right after yoga which is usually the best one as far as I'm concerned, the pipes burst. Luckily I remembered that at Goenka they would escort you outside not just for laughter (as I knew firsthand), but also for sobbing. In both cases, the sounds and emotions can infect others. So when I felt an unstoppable "ugly cry" arising, I got up from my seat and with a panicked glance at Victor and a vague wave at my face, fled the zendo.

My room, there's my bed right by the door.

I charged down the hill and into the room I shared with Wendy. I threw myself on my bed and sobbed as if my heart would break. The same thing had happened at last year's retreat, but in the morning. And it didn't last as long, nor was it as severe. And I managed to chatter to myself, before, during and after, about what was happening and what it might mean. This time around, there were no words or thoughts in my head. Just sobs, just like during the Voice Dialogue session. It helped a lot having that behind me. I wasn't panicked about a need to attach the tears to a particular story.  Goenka again said something useful about our stories - that the story is only necessary to lead us back to the emotion. Once you feel the emotion, you can let go of the story and simply stay in the body. So the thing here was to cry it out. I felt like a child who is overtired and cries for no reason - but still needs to cry. I did go on and on with the crying, and felt a little frightened. I wondered if I'd ever being able to stop. Then Wendy came to the room after the sit and in silence stood next to me, in silence rubbed my back like the good mother she is. After a long while I was able to whisper, "I'm ok." Thank God Wendy had been part of the Voice Dialogue workshop and had seen that sobbing child before. Plus she's a therapist and one of my strong supports. I frightened myself, but I didn't frighten her. It was a huge help. Eventually she left for supper and later I found out she asked the Yokoji people to put a plate of food aside for me. She whispered to me it was "up the stairs in the kitchen" but I didn't know where the kitchen was, and since I wasn't hungry, I didn't hunt for it. But I appreciated her kindness.

My favorite Buddha

After Wendy left and while the others were eating supper, I washed my face and escaped from the room. I took my notebook and pen and held them tightly, words ever my lifeline, although I didn't write. And I walked all over the property. There are Buddhas scattered about the place, stone ones with big ears, wooden ones, carved ones, big ones, even a funny little one wearing real clothes, an orange bathcap and robe. I found my favorite, a tall androgynous Buddha with fresh purple flowers around his/her head and a small child looking up beseechingly.

Big yellow comforting dog

I sat next to it and for the first time noticed a tall wooden pole next to me. It had five sides, each side with words painted upon it. The side facing me read, "Buddha Spirituality. Experience No Separation." Which so fit with what I had thought all those hours ago in the morning, about why we must study our own little books in order to better understand one another, that I copied it into my notebook. Then I felt self-conscious to be caught mooning about on a rock next to the Buddha, face all puffy with tears, so I walked about some more. The dining hall was empty by now so I made myself a cup of tea and took it out to the picnic table where one of the big dogs was stretched out.  I put my head down on her yellow fur and cried. I think many people have done this very thing because she knew just what to do. She turned her head and licked my face, lay back down and let me cry on her some more. When I was quiet, she got up and moved to the end of the table and I made my way back to the zendo.

Tran hugging me in the silence

Tran and some of the others were outside, looking up at the setting sun reflected on the mountain. Tran is my beautiful young friend who always makes me laugh. She hugged me with such strong arms I could carry on with the evening's program. (In an aside, Tran played a large part in last year's retreat. This year, when we were allowed to speak, I told her, "I think we've grown up a bit since last year." At least we weren't wildly inappropriate and there's a switch).

When I finally did get to bed, I could hardly sleep and next morning I was up and dressed in the dark and in the zendo by 5. Someone was doing yoga stretches at one end of the room and I wrote in my notebook at the other. I wrote about the night before, all those tears, that there was no reason. And that it's all thought, isn't it? Anything I write is a thought. A thought put into words. If it can be put into words, it's a creation. Was it that idea - that we are thoughts - that on some level is so bleak? But that thought is itself a thought. How the mind can occupy itself, going round and round in thought.

We are not vegetables if we don't think. I think that is the fear. (My fear. One of them.) There is much beyond thought, beyond the descriptive power of words.

 For instance, the words to the left, by Brian Andreas, read:
"I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand and  the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep and there are no words for that."

"There are no words for that." Yet we "know" just what he means. When I speak of the comfort in Wendy's hand rubbing my back, or Tran's strong embrace, you can imagine how it felt. Words are the signpost to something beyond thought. But we've invested thought with such importance that now we must go through contortions to turn ourselves off. I do realize the hand, the embrace, the sense of touch, are still creations, still "things" arising from the senses, from this conditioned realm. But we start where we are, and here is where I am. I imagine pure awareness is that empty stage and all the little selves quiet. Nobody wanting anything from anyone. And there. Silence. Of course in the imagining, I conjure up another creation...

Life is not linear after all, but a spiral. These reflections are not very different from last year's retreat reflections. Then I wrote after that crying jag:
"My little girl, felt in the tight heart of the night before, was the one who was shattered. After spending an entire, excruciating year clawing her way into the light, now she is dismissed, and told she is "only a thought?" Oh no! This was a plunge back into darkest pit."

Ajahn Sumedho again, "When the self starts to break up, some people find that it becomes very frightening, because everything you have regarded as solid and real starts falling apart." What's different is that each go round, it seems what I thought I understood, I only understood intellectually. It has to be experienced in the body. As Victor wrote a year ago, "There is no path that skirts your crying, Alison." I didn't understand that then. Perhaps I couldn't. Not sure I fully understand it now, it runs counter to years and years of programming and change is not easy. And now I have come full circle: this is where I began, trying to break the old patterns. The retreat showed just what a monumental task that is.

When we were no longer in Noble Silence on Sunday, I told Wendy I think we live our lives from the tip of the iceberg. And we haven't a clue what's going on below. Hardly an original thought but I understood it in my bones. Also that I felt as if I never needed to overeat again. That lasted until the next meal, but at the time it felt like I no longer needed a padding of fat to cushion life's edges. I did feel lighter, as if all those tears had shucked off a great swathe of old sorrow. How, why, to what purpose or for how long, who knows. My aunt, my mother's sister, says I am reclaiming my childhood, my self. We will see where it goes. If I say I have a destination, I am looking for a certain outcome, I am setting up expectations and am no longer open to what is. So we shall have to see.

And probably at our next retreat, I will spiral around once more to these same reflections and I will cry and be shocked and write about them as if they were brand new.  But hopefully I'll expose a little more of the iceberg. (What did I just say about setting expectations?!)

Victor read us more from Krishnamurti on Saturday night:
"The sky is very blue, the blue that comes after the rain, and these rains have come after many months of drought.  After the rain the skies are washed clean and the hills are rejoicing, and the earth is still.  And every leaf has the light of the sun on it, and the feeling of the earth is very close to you.  So meditate in the very secret recesses of your heart and mind, where you have never been before."

In my next blog, I will explore that sad little girl who lives in "the very secret recesses" of heart and mind and see what she has to say.