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.

Wendy Wakes Up The Heart: learning to come to what's already there

For the past several months, six of us have met faithfully every Sunday morning at a private house for an early morning sit. We have grown to be great friends. When I first conceived of this blog, it was these Sangha Sisters who encouraged me and agreed to share their stories with me. This week I would like to introduce you to Wendy, who has this to say about our little group: "For me, the most important thing is that we energize each other, that we have real friends to practice that 24/7 awareness so it sinks into the heart bypassing the head, and we share the absolute joy of it all."

Wendy has been meditating formally ever since her parents gave her a course in Transcendental Meditation for her 18th birthday, over thirty years ago. She claims her spiritual awakening actually began when she was five years old.

"We had just moved to an old Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. My mother had a new baby. One morning, I let myself out of the house without supervision and walked down the block. There I saw, in the basement of an old tenement, men wrapped in their prayer shawls, gathered in a circle, rocking and chanting. I longed to join them, but I knew I wasn't allowed, because I was a little girl. So I stood at the top of the steps, watching. Their ecstasy, peace and fellowship, the sound of their prayers... watching them imprinted in my brain forever. My heart woke up."

Given that early experience, it is not surprising that Wendy loves to chant and sit in meditation. She has spent time in India, in the same ashram, Ganesheuri Siddhapeeth, as did Elizabeth Gilbert in "Eat, Pray, Love", and many a weekend in New York at her guru's New York State ashram, Muktananda Ashram in South Fallsberg. She moved to California in 1988. She is an active member of Long Beach Meditation, the driving force behind early morning Saturday sits on the beach, and much more besides.

On Wednesday evenings, several of us meet to sit and study Buddhist teachings. Earlier this year, our teacher, Victor Byrd, was on a two month retreat in Nepal, and we were reading his excellent online book, The Bare Bones of the Buddha, in his absence.

At one such meeting, Wendy shared an extraordinary experience. These are the notes I sent out the following day:

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

... We were talking about Chapter 4, the Third Noble Truth, and trying to wrap our heads around the idea that, as Victor says, "...this ego self, this palpable sense of "me" can literally die years before the body dies? I wonder how many of us even desire that kind of faith!" And we were wondering what that would look like, feel like, to be without a "me" - and then Wendy spoke up about an experience that had happened a year ago last November.

It seems the catalyst was a hurtful remark that wounded her literally to the core. It happened on a Sunday and she took herself to the sit and a voice in her head commanded her to stay: "You will not get up! You will see this through!" And so she forced herself to stay, sobbing the while. Her false beliefs in tatters: she neither defended herself, nor ran away, nor "built a better story". She described it eloquently as "sitting in a mudslide and seeing the house crash and not calling 911". She said she sat watching a self story "crumbling".

"Thoughts came up, exploded, and dissolved, as I continued to sob. I was looking at these self concepts I've clung to, and seeing the foolishness of it all."

She went home, listened to an Eckhardt Tolle tape entitled 'The sun will also die' (taped on the day of 9/11 and very powerful) and finally fell asleep, exhausted from her tears. And awoke the next morning without a sense of self. This state lasted six or seven hours and slowly dissolved back into the usual self-referencing we all do. That is all I am going to say about it, because it is Wendy's story and very difficult to put into words. The point is that someone we know - not some mystic in a cave somewhere - has actually touched this 'vast' space and was willing to share the experience. I gave you the detail on the "before" part because we all thought that that must have had something to do with it, the complete lowering of defenses.

And that is something the rest of us can do too, staying with the painful stuff, not distracting ourselves or escaping or, in Wendy's words, "building a better story" - and then I loved this bit, "not just building a better story (my usual self) but calling three or four girlfriends who will agree with my new story!"

Wendy says it has not come back, that feeling. She found it frightening at the time, but only because she had no idea what was happening or how long it would last. It seemed 'impersonal' but Sensei Ryoto told her it only seemed that way from her perspective. Victor assured her that all of us wake up every morning in that state - and then immediately put on our identities and the vastness of it all is telescoped small by identifying with our thinking mind. She also said there is no way to take any onwership of any kind, this experience was totally out of her control.

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

Wendy is married; her husband is currently having ongoing serious medical issues. She is a psychotherapist with a busy (read stressful) inner-city practice. She has twin boys, sixteen years old. To give you a flavor of what that's like, here's an excerpt from a recent email:

"So, another wild week here at our house, with one boy in emergency room, (face hit a pole), then run in with police, (riding his bike at night without a light on it), and social meltdown( my friends hate me), on top of the D in Spanish. One week with an adolescent!!!!"

When Wendy saw this retreat advertised at Spirit Rock at the end of May, she immediately signed up, long before her husband's medical problems presented themselves.

October 12-19 (Tuesday to Tuesday), Spirit Rock: Cultivating Clear Seeing, Opening the Heart (limited to about 20 persons), 7-day retreat, with yoga and chanting with Sean Feit. In this retreat we will emphasize the development of wisdom and compassion through practices that help us to quiet our minds, strengthen mindfulness and lead to insight, as well open our hearts and ground us in our bodies. There will be a special emphasis on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and the Divine Abodes--lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. There will be complete meditation instructions, sitting and walking meditation, evening talks and personal interviews, all in the context of a small, supportive practice community.

This past Sunday, Victor took a rare day off to recuperate from the Long Beach Meditation Benefit held the night before. Wendy led the afternoon sit and shared her experiences at Spirit Rock.

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Before I went on my seven day retreat to Spirit Rock, I was lucky enough to attend a three day retreat with Long Beach Meditation in Palos Verdes. [The same retreat I wrote about. In fact, Wendy and I were roommates.] It started with this group. It was a really moving experience. After that I took a plane and a bus and went up to Spirit Rock. Let me tell you, there is nothing they have in San Francisco that we don't have here. I found it's great to go away and it's great to practice right here. We have a wonderful Vipassana teacher in Victor. I have learned so much right here.

Mary and Joseph Retreat Center

I started the retreat not in a "retreat" frame of mind. I was frenzied, harried. I had had a very stressful week: a medical crisis in the family, job stress, it was a rough week. Difficult medical meetings and decisions had to be made. It's life. I get to the retreat late from work. I walk into the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center and think, "What if I fall apart? What if I have to sob? What if I'm a wreck?" The thought arose that there wouldn't be anyone in that retreat who would judge me, who wouldn't embrace me with total compassion, and that thought brought me right back to the meaning of sangha. Walking through those doors in that fragile state, with pain and suffering, would be met with total compassion by the group. The teachings of Buddhism tell us that suffering is everywhere, it's the human condition. We must turn towards our suffering, lean into it. Don't run - embrace it. Suffering can be a key, turning the lock of the door to something deeper.

At Spirit Rock, we sang a chant about it every morning - the Three Refuges. We can't cling to who we are or how we look. We can't even cling to our practice or our meditation state, whether restless or concentrated. Everything changes, like the weather. But we can take refuge, we can embrace it and find shelter.
We take refuge in the Buddha, which can mean the Buddha, or our teacher, or even the Buddha nature within.
We take refuge in the Dharma, or the teachings.
We take refuge in the Sangha, the community. The community has been so important to me, I have very wise friends here. My goodness! The wisdom in this group! In vulnerable times, it's great to have refuge. It strengthens how we serve in the world.

Yesterday Monica and Robin did a fabulous job organizing the Benefit. I bid on this photograph of the three lotus blossoms that Victor took when he was in Lumbini, Nepal. Monica mentioned she chose this photo. To me it represents the three jewels of the practice. I do say yes to spiritual materialism sometimes! I put it by my bed last night so I could see it when I woke up. I didn't have a talk prepared this morning, I've learned trying to "think" out a talk just makes me nervous. But as I stared at the photograph, a poem came to me

The Three Refuges by Victor Byrd, photographed in Lumbini, Nepal

Lean into Your Practice (The Three Refuges) 

Remember the joyful "hello"

As the Sangha greets you 

At the door when you arrive here.

After all, you deserve it.

You brought this weary body,

And dragged this restless mind

Screaming and kicking.

Even when your mind shouted, "later", "too busy", "too tired", "no."

Take in the kind appreciation offered here.

After all, how many miles have you walked

Alone on a cold winter day

To meet your heart.

Take off your coat,

Let the warmth 

Of the Sangha embrace you.

They hold the mirror of Self-love

Until you can hold it for yourself.

Make room for the Dharma.

Sweep out the dustbin of your past.

Brush off even the smallest speck of doubt

Hiding at the bottom of your shoe.

Make room for the Dharma.

Take down the trophies and clutter from your mantle.

Empty all objects,

Send them off to Goodwill.

If you can, sit like you are diving into deep water

On a hot summer day.

If you cannot, rest in appreciation anyway.

Your wave will come to meet you.

Carry the Dharma in your wallet, your handbag, your pocket.

Place it inside your instruction manual.

Let the Dharma guide you,

Although there is no destination,

The time spent lost will lessen.

Practice the teachings

Wise thought, wise speech, wise action will

Follow 

Like a faithful friend.

Let the teacher teach you.

Especially when you have had enough instruction for a lifetime.

Take the gift of your own Buddha nature.

Let it seep into your pores,

Synapses, cracks between your toes,

Until the wall surrounding your heart crumbles.

Hold this gift close.

Lean back into your practice.

Let it carry you.

Rest deeply into this place

And know

You are held by all beings and all things,

You hold all beings and all things

Holding and being held

Are one and the same.

Like a shiny penny with two sides,

Place it in your pocket

And know

This good fortune

Is yours.

The poem tells you a bit about this journey I get to take. Such good fortune.

On the three day retreat mostly what I learned about suffering is that it can lead to surrender, a deep letting go, to the practice: sitting, walking, sitting, walking, until you feel you're being held by everything and by nothing. We talk about "holding the crying baby", allowing all of it in. Something I felt was holding me and that allowed me in the meditation practice to go deeper. Let go some more. When the mind gets quiet, the heart really opens.

The path at Spirit Rock

At Spirit Rock by lunchtime on the fourth day, after a long morning of meditation, I was becoming agitated. I had made a vow - no matter what happens, just surrender to the practice. Follow the schedule, no matter what. At that point, I thought, "I'm done! I'm going to walk disconnected from my body. I need a break! I want a fast walk up in the hills, I want to forget being mindful." But the minute my foot hit the dirt, the thought came to me: "How many people have walked this path? Have sent metta to all beings? How many before, how many after... this whole ground is filled with metta. This loving kindness is holding you, every agitated cell in your body, holding it with love." By seeing everything as a gift, including the dirt path and the people who maintain the path and everyone who keeps the center going with their kindness and devotion, I could turn around and continue the practice.

You know how it is when we sit sometimes at the all day retreats. You want a quiet mind, but you get the Beatles' songs, Three Dog Night, the shopping list, something your mother-in-law said fifteen years ago running through the mind. But when we say "yes" to the practice of awareness, to observing this restless mind, no matter how painful, we are also saying "yes" to everyone in the room, to everyone who practices. We energize and support each other and that is why we have sangha.

Metta is about receiving too. Awareness can hold everything like a warm embrace. It can hold even the hardest thing and the most loving thing with kindness. When we see this clearly, the heart opens. Seeing how much we are given, of the good wishes of others, we can naturally give it back.

Divine Abidings - clear seeing Brahma Vijaras or "the eyes wide open" practice -
is the fourfold practice of lovingkindness - metta - cultivating the intention of benevolence as the orientation of the heart and mind;
compassion - karuna - the desire to remove harm and suffering;
joy - mudita - celebrating others' happiness
equanimity - upekkha - learning to accept praise and blame, success and failure

With equanimity practice and metta together, we don't distinguish between a best friend, an enemy or a stranger.
With social contact, the first thing that arises is a "me" in there who wants you to validate me, tell me, am I okay?
Using these divine abidings as a teaching is a way to be in the social world. Can I respond to the moment, leading with the heart? They tell us to cultivate this so it becomes the mind's constant dwelling place.

Donald Rothberg, our teacher on the retreat, advised us that metta needs a strong equanimity practice. We can give metta but sometimes we're attached to the outcome. Sometimes when we give metta to others, we want them to be better now, we want suffering to be relieved now - on our terms. We feel anxiety, nervousness, contraction when we cling to the idea of how it should be. Equanimity allows things to be as they are, allowing that there may be a reason for things to be just as they are.

So many days, honestly, I'd like things to be different from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I close my eyes at night! This mind can be filled with evaluating and judging.
I have shoulder pain. My physical therapist pointed out that I walk with my head jutting forward. I am lurching forward out of my body, energetically grasping at things, wanting, wanting, wanting. Wanting - that's the mind. We've forgotten to inhabit our body. Our mind is constantly lurching ahead of the body. So the practice for me is about coming back to the body, letting go of wanting, letting go of future, surrendering to this moment, now. I like the term "embodied presence."

At the end of the last sit of the afternoon, Wendy led us in exploring and meditating upon one of the following phrases:

Possible Phrases for Formal Equanimity Practice: 

You are the heir to (owner of) your karma. Your happiness and unhappiness depend on your actions, not so much on my wishes for you.

Whether I understand it or not, things are unfolding according to a lawful nature.

All beings meet their joys and sorrows according to a lawful nature.

Things are just as they are.

May I accept things just as they are.

May I be undisturbed by the comings and goings of events.

I will care for you but cannot keep you from suffering.

I wish you happiness but cannot make your choices for you.

No matter how I might wish things to be otherwise, things are as they are.

No matter what I wish for, things are as they are.

Self as I am, things as they are.

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I met with Wendy this week for a quick cup of tea at Bristol Farms. I wanted to quiz her on how she applies all she has learned to a life currently filled with challenges.

"What does your daily practice look like?"

Wendy: "I sit every morning, between six and eight a.m., for forty to fifty minutes every day. Some days, with more time, an hour. Then if I'm aware, I carry my Vipassana practice into the office.

I set an intention when I enter the building to be mindful. I don't always do it, sometimes I get lost in the content, but if I'm aware, I say, "Today I intend to practice mindfulness through walking, maintaining awareness of the breath and the energy in the body, observing likes and dislikes, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, grasping and clinging, Right Speech." I choose one or two to remain mindful. Part of the discipline as a therapist is to retain mindfulness during the clinical hours, so the majority of time, I'm able to do this in a therapy session. It's more difficult to grasp Right Speech when I engage staff or co-workers in between sessions. That's where I go very much unconscious, the "me" is looking for validation. That's where I struggle the most.

At home, I practice a lot of mindfulness in my dialogue with my family. I don't want to fall into my old beliefs and patterns. They have caused me pain in the past, and the pain has awakened me to dysfunctional patterns in my own self. I try to be very mindful of speech. Teenagers, though! My worry for them overshadows my mindfulness a lot of the time. And teenagers can press your buttons better than anybody. They're right up there with the tax collector, the dentist, root canal, your mother! That's why I find my sons are the best teachers anyone can have. They hold up a mirror every day."

"Now that you've been back a few weeks, is the memory of the retreats carrying over?"

Wendy: "It's definitely carrying over. I am very grateful to have gone through both retreats. It's one of the best things I've done lately. When I was on retreat, the environment was so uncluttered. There was so much quiet to practice and observe the thought process and not get caught in the story. To be able to observe the thought process as a thought process, and see it for what it is. It gave me space in my own mind that's still working. Every time I have the thought, say when I'm at work, "I'm too tired to see another patient" or, at home, "I'm too tired to listen to my son with his writing assignment", there's space around the thought.

I'd been thinking, "I'm exhausted and overwhelmed. I've had several intense days in a row." I was getting caught in that. The retreats gave me the ability to kind of step back, letting go of thought. There's a more expansive feeling in everyday life. The retreats gave me a gateway to see thought arising: the imagery and stories are sandcastles in the air, not quite real. I observe the stress in the body as a result of buying into these stories. I see how my neck contracts, my shoulder stiffens, my body contracts, all because I've bought some concoction of a belief.

The experience of being able to be away in absolute quiet without the stimulation of email, TV, ads. No to-do list. Just empty space. It's not a "doing", it's allowing the quiet which is already there. It is learning to come to what's already there. When I spoke on Sunday I was in two minds. On the one hand, I was happy and delighted to share the love of the experience. On the other hand, I felt some concern, some hesitation to concretize the experience. Part of me didn't want to do that. So I read my poem. I wanted to fill up the time so as not to have to identify something that doesn't have a "doing" or ownership to it. Trying to explain it almost seems absurd. It is more an undoing than a doing."

On that note, Wendy had to run. She left me with the sense that that devout little girl who once stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon the praying men, yearning to be a part of their world, has come into her own, however hard her current circumstances may be. Sure enough, just last night she emailed me:

"My lovely dog Bentley and I went for a walk this morning and this Jack Russell dog broke away from his owner and tried to attack Bentley. Anyway bad shoulder and me finally lifted Bently up after some struggle. Shoulder survived struggle, not bank account. Bentley has a sprained leg according to expensive vet, and is hobbling all over the house shaking, and my inner "Jewish mother" is worrying over this 8 lb dog.
I feel so sad for the little thing."

Her heart "woke up" when she was just five years old. It has done nothing but expand ever since. Of course there is room to fold in a little eight pound dog on top of everyone else in her life: Wendy has enough love to care for the whole world. And a practice that gives her the strength and awareness to do just that.

October 30, 2010 Day of the Dead: Buddhist Style led by Peggy Rowe Ward aka A Day of Mindfulness hosted by Organic Garden Sangha

 Dharmacharya Peggy Rowe received Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh in 2000, 

and has a Doctorate in Adult Education and a Master’s in Counseling Psychology.  

She has also studied and practiced with many wise Native American elders. 

The day begins in silence. We meet in a Quaker Meeting House and arrange ourselves on mats and cushions and chairs in a semi-circle facing an altar - a table covered with a colorful cloth - on which we are encouraged to place photographs of our beloved dead. Pictures of mothers, fathers, grandmothers and great grandmothers, and dogs join Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa and the Virgin Mary, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha and other spiritual heavyweights. I am early and choose my place at the front of the semicircle and close my eyes. When next I open them, there are about thirty people in the room, seated quietly, already meditating. So we continue like that for a while, until Peggy strikes a big bowl and says, "Be aware you are breathing in" and then a small bell, the sign to stretch our legs. We stand and introduce ourselves, saying our name and the ancestors we have brought with us today. Peggy urges us to name them: "they like to hear their names." There are many mothers and fathers, a great grandmother, a smattering of grandmothers. Many foreign names, Japanese, Turkish, German, Russian. A man says quietly of his parents, "I called them Momma and Poppy." The atmosphere gets heavier and heavier as we go around the room.

We sit down again and Peggy tells us not to get stuck in grief. "Let it flow through you, keep coming back to the breath. See if you can follow your breath all the way in, all the way out. Below the grief, you may find other remembrances - which is not the same as nostalgia. Remembering is felt in the body." She tells us, "Be alert to who appears today: it may not be who you think." 

A young girl standing near Peggy adds, "I think we have some tricksters here today!"

Both of these sits are effortless, physically. Nothing hurts, not my knees or back or any part of the body: how rare to note what isn't there, for a change! There are no clocks in this quiet room, and no watches that I can see, so I have no idea how long we sit. It is so peaceful. The two bells sound and we stand and put on our shoes. We are going to do a walking meditation to a little park down the road. First we sing a few songs, which everyone knows except me. Then Peggy instructs us to walk as if the ground were sealing wax, and our foot a seal. The object is to step as carefully as possible to make a clear imprint of our foot. She tells us we can hold hands if we want to. We don't have to, "but it's nice." And off we go, a slow silent caterpillar of humanity. The people in front of me are holding hands. I glance next to me and see a woman's hand hanging free, so I reach over and give it a squeeze. She immediately turns with a "Oh! Hello!" But I just smile down at the ground. I don't want to put on my social face, I just want to feel what it's like to hold hands with a stranger while walking to the park. I like it so much that when another person heaves into view on the other side of me, also unattached, I reach out and take her hand too. Now there is simply a sensation of warm hands and mindful feet and knowing breath. The woman on my right sighs deeply and her sigh travels through me somehow and I sigh too. We hold hands down two blocks, while waiting for two traffic lights and all the way into the park. The sounds of the city ebb and flow, cars mostly, mothers calling their children, a baby crying, a child laughing, someone playing drums. The sounds are just that: sound, as hypnotic as the ocean. 

When we reach the park, we string ourselves along a low wall or on the ground, close our eyes and meditate. Since introducing myself, and saying I brought my mother today, I haven't said a word. Now I feel the sun on my face, the stone wall cool from the earlier rain under my backside, the woman next to me unselfconsciously leaning her thigh against mine, as casually as a child. I smile: I feel like a child. Life is uncomplicated and safe and good. The tiny bell rings: time to stand. I experiment on the way back. I purposely don't take anybody's hand in order to compare. I feel ... singular. Much more aware of my separate 'self'. I miss the hand holding and the blurred boundaries. Now I know.

Back at the Quaker House, we hold hands in a circle in the driveway. Peggy instructs us in her father's prayer: "Squeeze and pass!" and the squeezed hands flash like lightning around the circle in both directions twice. Then we do her father's universal grace: "YUM!" (intoned like Ohm, but happily). We can't help but smile. We are instructed to eat slowly bearing in mind the five contemplations:

This food is the gift of the whole universe - the earth, the sky, and much hard work.

May we live in a way that makes us worthy to receive it.

May we transform our unskillful states of mind and learn to eat with moderation.

May we take only foods that nourish us and prevent illness.

We accept this food so that we may practice the path of understanding and love.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Peggy says if, in spite of our best efforts to slow down, we still 'woof' our food down, the next thing on the agenda is nap-time. This is my kind of retreat! Eating slowly and in silence, I end up playing with my food as I always do during the All Day silent retreats. I count my baby tomatoes; I count the seeds I can see in my bread; I break my banana into bits and sit them on the peel, little men on a raft. Their fuzzy insides look like shag carpeting. It occurs to me that children play with their food because they don't have a treasure house of thoughts or memories or facts to get lost in. So they have to improvise with what's at hand.

Into these musings a tiny feather, a baby bird feather, blows straight across the table and into my peanut butter sandwich. After my peacock experience on the retreat, I am alert to all things avian. I look around. I don't see a single other feather around. That this one came straight to me I take as a sign.  But of what? Or who? I remember my cousin Brigitte, who died of breast cancer maybe twenty years ago now. She hated birds - could it be her? As her name crosses my mind (and really, this happens so fast), I hear a voice clear as a bell in my head, "Eh oui! C'est moi!!" and it's not Brigitte after all, but her sister Francoise, who died just two years ago, after a long hard dance with cancer. I see her face, laughing, as clear as anything. And here I'd been thinking of my parents and my grandparents - but no, it's Francoise, my funny, fun-loving cousin. Tricksters are among us indeed.

My spirits soar. I put the tiny feather in my pocket and appreciate the day: the sky is deep blue, no clouds, a tiny smudge of moon like a white inkblot in the sky. Warm. Perfect. My thin peanut butter sandwich, eight cherry tomatoes and six pieces of banana take thirty minutes to chew. I have a mug of Yogi green tea with a message on the tea bag: "Speak the truth". That's what I'm trying to do this very minute! I contemplate eating the apple I have in my bag but - as I do on every retreat - I can't bear the thought of eating it mindfully: it will take half an hour all by itself. The apple stays in the bag, I eat a home-made brownie on the snack table in a quick and guilty two minutes, and return to the main room.

I am one of the first (!), so I get out my notebook and start writing what's happened so far. Slowly the others drift in and settle themselves flat on their backs with blankets and pillows. Peggy leads us in a guided meditation. She begins: "Get a sense of being on your island. Imagine you're on a big lily pad, the sun is out, there's a little breeze, dragonflies are in the air and you're safe there, just drifting a little bit. Imagine your fingers are just touching the water. We are doing such a great job of stopping together today. I'm very proud of us. It's not easy to stop. To slow down. But here we are."

This is where I set my notes aside and settle on my own lily pad. Peggy stops talking and starts to sing to us in a sweet, clear voice. Lullabies and chants.  A lot of the lyrics have to do with coming home, going home, being home. Home. Well, this is just bliss. After walking to the park hand-in-hand, my cheeky cousin appearing out of the blue, a brownie and now nap-time with lullabies? No wonder many of my fellows fall fast asleep on their islands. Snores began drifting up here and there, including someone quite near my head, quite loud. Peggy comments, "If you're not one of the snorers, perhaps you can just lie back and enjoy the magical zoo!" Muffled laughter snorts around the room. 

Again, no idea how long this lasts, but like all things, good and bad, it comes to an end. Gently, gently, we slowly get to our feet and began tapping the heart, our arms and legs, to get the blood flowing and wake up again. We twist from side to side, arms flopping against our kidneys: Peggy tells us she visited a village in China where the inhabitants are 120 years old and healthy and spry. She says their secret is that they do this movement for fifteen minutes every day. She says, "I do it for five. I'm in pretty good shape for an eighty-five year old, aren't I?!" 

Next she leads us in a delightful qigong sequence of highly symbolic moves. We begin by embracing the tiger of life, and throwing open the big wooden double doors to our life with both hands, saying 'Wah!" (Chinese for "Wow!" she tells us with a smile.) There are elements of fire and water and gold and wood. It is so beautiful, we do it twice.  When it is over, we walk around the room and gently bump into each other's shoulders, saying, "Thank you!" to each other. A clear illustration of the truth that every adverse situation you meet is here to teach you something. 

We have done sitting meditation, walking meditation, eating meditation and lying down meditation. Now we are at the heart of the day: the Touching the Earth ritual. It begins by standing tall and imagining our mothers standing behind us on one side, our fathers on the other, their hands resting on our shoulders. Behind them are their parents, and their parents' parents, back and back through generations, the idea being that we are not alone. Our ancestors are ready to support us, if only we would remember to call upon them for help. We get down on the floor and touch the earth while invoking them. We do this five times, summoning different teachers each time. It has a powerful feel.

When we are done, we sit once more on our cushions and Peggy invites us to the Sharing Circle. We can share anything at all: a song, a poem, an insight. We sit quietly for a while and then a small man to my right, gray-haired, stands up and says, "I would like to sing for you." His song is from the Broadway musical "All American"; he tells us that in the play, the actor sits on the edge of the stage and sings facing the audience. And with that he launches into "Once Upon a Time", such a romantic song he sings with such unabashed feeling, he has me in tears.

At the end, instead of clapping, everyone waves their hands in the air, the applause of the deaf. It retains the container of mindfulness that we have cultivated all day. 

There are stories of mothers and fathers and children, of hurts and wrongs revisited and steps taken towards acceptance. There are many more tears from us, the listeners. One that makes an impression on me comes from the woman seated behind me. She shares a beautiful story about how it wasn't until she joined a Vietnamese Buddhist Sangha that she understood what it means to love. She tells us how if it weren't for her practice, she would be in a mental asylum by now, for this year has been wave upon wave of disasters.

"Finally," she says, "I phoned my mentor, a Vietnamese nun and asked her what do I do? My husband is dying, and my daughter has a severe brain injury. She has sudden extreme rages and I am afraid she will not survive - what can I do?"

The gentle nun said, in her hesitant English, "Do you think you can see your daughter as she was when you saw her, two days old in the hospital, new, fresh, unspoiled? When all you felt for her was uncomplicated love?"

The woman continues, "I'm not taking credit for this, you understand. It's the practice. But I made that tiny change in the way I saw my daughter, and she responded with about a 90% change of her own. She's much calmer, she's started driving again, she's getting better. It's a miracle. And it's thanks to my mentor, who taught me how to love."

We nod, we bow our heads, we are moved. This is advice we can all use. To see the difficult people in your life as infants: how could you not love them?

More stories. Then the woman on my right says hesitantly, "I am Turkish, but I also speak French. I used to sing French songs and I would like to sing one for you now by ..."

Edith Piaf, I think.

"Edith Piaf." She pronounces it the French way - Ay-deet Piaf. She begins to sing "La Vie En Rose." Well, from the French side of my family, I know the songs of Ay-deet Piaf too and pretty soon I'm singing along quietly with her, watching her face.

 

Her eyes widen in the beginnings of panic, she's forgetting the lyrics and she's looking right at me, beseeching me with her eyes. So I sing a little louder, enough so she can catch the words, not wanting to muscle in on her song, but she smiles and relaxes and nods her head and is altogether encouraging, so I turn up the volume and so does she, and suddenly it's Life as a Musical, one of those rare and wonderful moments where people actually, spontaneously, burst into song in public. It's happened to me a handful of times in my life, all of them memorable. And here it's happening again, in a Quaker House at a Buddhist retreat honoring the Day of the Dead with a Turkish stranger singing in French with an Englishwoman - me! By the end, we are belting it out, and I can see those hands waving madly before we are even done singing.

We finish, grinning broadly at each other. Later, the woman will say, with tears in her eyes, "I'd forgotten how much fun it is to sing. I've been so busy saving the world, I forgot this thing I used to love. I'm going to sing more now."

For now though, there's a pause. Then I smile. "Of course you chose that song! The cousin I told you about. Francoise. With the feather... from lunch... in my pocket. She knew all of Edith Piaf's songs by heart too. I have sung it with her. It was one of our favorites." 

Now it's the end of the day. As a group, we sing one last song together, with such sweet and simple words: we are the sea, we are the stars in the sky and we are home.

And then the day is over. My park partner makes a point of thanking me for taking her hand. We busy ourselves putting away tables and tidying up. I am sorry to leave these kind people. Big hug to Peggy. I thank her for making me feel like a child again. "Oh!" she says, "You have no idea how I had to restrain myself when we got to the park! I had all these games in my head that we could play, but I thought no. But it was hard!" Never mind, I say, my little girl had a wonderful field trip. 

I think about my little girl, about Francoise, about Ay-deet Piaf. I realize that one of my greatest fears from the Three Day Retreat has been soothed. I had written, in a bit of a panic, "How can we ever communicate with each other? Our experiences are not - will never be - the same, and on top of it, they are changing inexorably every moment, as we are changing." Now I saw that while our shared experience held very different meanings for us both, that wasn't the important thing. That it happened at all is what matters.

Victor the next day quoted Bodhidharma:

"The wise one trusts to things and does not trust to self, and so he has neither grasping

nor rejecting, neither opposing nor agreeing.  The stupid one trust to self

and does not trust to things, and so he has grasping and rejecting, opposing 

and agreeing."

Trusting to things and not the self seems counter-intuitive, said Victor. But I think this little anecdote illustrates the concept quite well: the Turkish lady and I had very different stories in our heads about the meaning of our performance. Someone else could have joined in, coming from a third angle. They are all stories, the "dramas between the ears", as Victor calls them, and they can change at any moment, as we reflect, think, analyze and come up with other stories to layer on top of the event.

But the event itself? Ah! That's irrefutable! Thirty people were there to witness what happened: we sang from the heart and people smiled. That's all. And it's enough.

The next day, as I was driving, I had the strangest sensation. I felt hands on my shoulders: on my right was my mother, on my left was my dad. I felt like I was receiving a ghostly pat on the back. I felt protected and loved. My ancestors are with me. As yours are with you.