Another Invitation to Love

Grief as I felt it this afternoon was of the more subtle kind. Nobody had died. Instead, I had been reminded of a painful bond, a loss not clearly visible to the outside world, but very real nevertheless. Heart aching still, I got to see up close again, the suffering that comes when love gets thrown back onto itself, with no one to respond at the other end. This is where mindfulness practice is put to the test. Mindfulness helps one to not wallow in self-pity and despair. Instead, one can investigate the full impact of hanging on to the idea of love on one's own terms. One can feel the physical pain from grasping, and make the connection with ancient wisdom. 

Every time I fall into that place, I feel compelled to revisit Ayya Khema's Metta talk. And each time, I come up with another treasure. 

There are six billion of us, so why diminish ourselves to one, two, or three? And not only that, the whole problem lies in the fact that because it is attachment, we've got to *keep* those one, two, or three in order to experience any kind of love. We are afraid to lose them: to lose them through death, through change of mind, to leaving home, to whatever change happens. And that fear discolors our love to the point where it can no longer be pure, because it is hanging on.

Grief begs us to listen to the suffering within, and to slowly let go of the cause. Life is too short to waste one more moment in self-inflicted misery. True love is limitless and independent of external conditions.

Loving Kindness and Compassion

Loving kindness and compassion both originate in the heart. Both evoke a warm, fuzzy feeling. And each tends to be confused for the other, and vice versa. 

Loving kindness, or metta, or unconditional love is the practice of generating love in one's heart towards all people, regardless of how lovable they are.

Far enemy: hate

Near enemy: attachment

Compassion, or karuna, arises when we feel sorry with someone. We feel their suffering. It starts with feeling compassion for our own suffering, the unsatisfactoriness of one's own life. 

Far enemy: cruelty

Near enemy: pity (feeling sorry for the other person)

While different, I find those two inclinations of the heart to be intimately related. Loving kindness practice naturally leads towards feeling compassion, and compassion for self and others facilitates the openness of the heart needed to feel loving kindness.  

Grieve, And Don't Grieve

The mindfulness-based injunction to not grieve can be misunderstood. As I am waddling through my own grief, it is becoming more clear that one is not to indulge in the proliferation of grief related thoughts. AND, at the same time, one is not to ignore the waves of grief-related emotions that keep on surging from the heart.

'Do not grieve' is an impossible goal for the ordinary humans that we are. Hindrances in the unenlightened or partially enlightened mind make it such that clinging is present still, which leads us to experience great suffering when our love one leaves us permanently. This non negotiable goodbye brings our grasping tendencies to the forefront of our consciousness, and we get to feel the painful consequence from our binding and impure love.

If we try to hasten the 'not grieving' process, we run the risk of repressing the grief. Not a good thing, as I learned many years ago when I could not face up to the reality of my emotions when my father died. The dis-owned grief came back to crush me a year later, in the form of a disabling breakdown. We are to recognize the emotions that rise up, all of them, without judgment. We feel them, we give them space to be, and we move on with the next moment.

Conversely, we do not want to overindulge grieving thoughts. Such over thinking is only an expression of the mind-created self running wild. It is easy letting the mind create stories about the dead person, and ourselves in relation to the person. Wishful stories, guilt ridden thoughts, embellished tales . . . are all fabrications that keep us stuck in the suffering from unnecessary clinging. To let go of the urge to think such thoughts, I have found it helpful to contemplate Ayya Khema's talk on Metta, especially this:

The near enemy of love is attachment. [...] The whole problem lies in the fact that because it is attachment, we've got to *keep* those one, two, or three in order to experience any kind of love. We are afraid to lose them: to lose them through death, through change of mind, to leaving home, to whatever change happens. And that fear discolors our love to the point where it can no longer be pure, because it is hanging on. Now fear is always connected to hate. It doesn't mean that we hate those people, those one, two, or three, or four, or five, or how many there happen to be in the house, it means that we hate the idea that we could be losing them. So there's never that kind of open-hearted giving, without any demand behind it that a certain person is also there to receive it. Therefore it's always dependent, and as long as we are dependent, we're not free. This kind of love is doomed from the beginning and we all know that. We can change that kind of attachment to something else, but most people do not have that ability. Some people do, they manage; but it's a rare case. 

The Man At the Grocery Store

During Ayya Khema's Flower Garden metta meditation, his face came up. An almost stranger. A clerk at the neighborhood grocery store. The nun asked that I pick up a beautiful bouquet of flowers from the garden in my heart, and that I hand it to the man. 

I felt the hesitation, the mind's reluctance, the heart closing its gate. The mind, my mind said, this man, you barely know him. He does not fit the criteria for so much love. A smile, a kind word, that you can give, just as you do whenever he rings you up and the two of you do some small talk. But boundless love, as much as you would give to your daughter, my mind had a problem with that. 

The mind's got ideas about what's needed to be worthy of my love. Never mind that we are the first one to suffer. Why not open the gates? Let it flow . . . 

Earlier today, I was listening to a talk from Ayya Khema, and she talked about how pretty much all of us are not capable of unconditional love. We've got limits, and the trick is in recognizing when we don't love, because then, we can change and correct our stinginess. We are in trouble if we delude ourselves into thinking that we love everybody. 

The man at the grocery store showed me the work I have to do still in the area of love. 

The 5 Benefits of Loving Kindness

Ever since I came back from the retreat, I have continued to open the many gifts from sustained metta practice. Walking in the world with one's heart open is a wonderful thing. Here is a list of the benefits from loving kindness practice, according to the Mettanisamsa Sutta:

Metta is good for sleep

Metta makes one likable

Metta is good for one's health

Metta is good for concentration

Metta is good for insight

How come it can take years for the mind to surrender to the heart? 

The Garden in My Heart

Reminding me of Ayya Khema's 'A Garden in Your Heart' meditation, Monet's painting of a poppy field:

Almost like the one I 'see',  every time I look inside my heart. Except 'mine is more golden yellow, and filled with not just poppies, but also bluets, and daisies . . . Flowers from my childhood. 

What does your inner garden look like? 

Opening the Heart Door

Following up on yesterday's post, is a practice I developed during the retreat. I call it 'Opening the Heart Door' practice. It is not easy, but well worth the effort. It goes like this:

Whenever meeting of thinking of someone,
get in touch with your heart place
and visualize the door of your heart.
Is the door open, or closed?
How much love does it let out, or in?
If open, notice the sweetness of a fully open heart,
and rejoice.
If closed, even if just a little, notice the pain attached.
How does it manifest in the body?
What are some contributing thoughts?
Angry, blaming, wishful, hateful,
name them all, one by one.
Thoughts about you, thoughts about the other person,
thoughts about the situation.
And then, comes the hard part . . .
Getting in touch with all the love in your heart,
practice releasing those thoughts,
and visualize opening the door.
See what happens, without judgment.
If necessary, contemplate new thoughts,
wise thoughts to replace the old ones.
And remember, it is up to you
to open the door of your heart.

This practice is particularly useful when dealing with difficult people. We can look at them as our most formidable love teachers. If we can open the door of our heart to them, we've got it made, as far as love is concerned . . . 

The Necessity of Gladness

I went into the retreat wanting to learn the first levels of concentration practice, the jhanas as taught by Leigh, and Ayya Khema before him. At some point, it became clear that to persevere in that exploration would not be beneficial. I learned the hard way that the release of piti energy without enough pleasantness attached, simply does not work. Three sleepless nights, and a state of being on 24/7 demanded that all means be taken to return to my normal self. I walked, and I spent time in nature. I took long warm showers. I refrained from sitting too long and from counting my breath. I shifted away from pure meditation, and contemplated instead. It took me five days before I was able to feel like myself again. This is why jhana initiation should only be undertaken within the container of a long retreat and under the guidance of a teacher.

I followed Leigh's advice to cultivate joy, a missing ingredient in my overly busy life. Specifically, I was to do some metta (loving kindness) practice. The heart needed to be ready first before the mind could proceed any further. Besides practicing formal metta meditation, I needed to spend time contemplating the nature of heart. For that, I turned to Ayya Khema's illuminating talk on 'Metta'. Here are the salient points from Ayya Khema's talk:

1. See the difficult people as opportunity to practice unconditional love
2. Realize the faults we see in others are also our own
3. Love without expectations of anything back
4. Practice mindfulness
5. Don't blame the trigger
6. Let go of views and opinions about other people
7. Just love, don't discriminate and know the difference between the two
8. Practice self-compassion

The seventh point blew my mind:

Now we deliberately start every lovingkindness meditation with ourselves. Many people find it difficult to love themselves -- sometimes because they know themselves too well. [laughter] Which means that they're judging. We don't have to judge ourselves, we can just love ourselves. Judging ourselves and loving ourselves do not have to be in the same breath. We can first love this manifestation of universal existence which we call "Me." And then, if we really want to make some changes, we can find out what needs to be changed, but we don't have to mix up those two, we don't have to mix up our bad qualities with our love for ourselves. They don't have anything to do with each other. But because we do mix those two things together in ourselves, we do that with everybody else, too. They're quite nice, but... they've got all these other qualities which aren't that nice. Or we can see that they're ok, but only if they are just doing something that we're also doing, going along with our ideas. This is totally unnecessary. This is a totally different track -- the mind's track, that's where the mind comes into its own. That's when we are discriminating between that which we find useful and helpful, and that which we don't. But the heart has nothing to do with that. The heart just has to love; it doesn't have to discriminate. And when we can see the difference between the usual judgments and just loving -- not discriminating -- we have taken a very important step.

Being in a retreat environment, I had plenty of opportunities to figure this out. 

It did not take long for the mind to start developing ideas about other folks in the retreat, deciding which one 'I' liked, which ones 'I' didn't like, all without any word exchanged. Indications of partially closed heart, that let only as much love as allowed by long held limiting habits from the mind. Of course, the hope lied in the difference made by the mindful experiencing of the pain of a closed heart. During the retreat, I had the time, and presence of mind to really 'see' the heart up close. On the second before last day of the retreat, an insight arose that filled me with great joy, and that I sealed with those words:

'It is the mind that closes the heart. The love, all of it is in the heart, all along. It is up to me to notice whenever the mind starts closing the door of the heart. The same mind that closed the door can also open it. It is up to me to intervene and keep the door open, giving myself the sweetness of fully open heart. '

A radical shift had taken place, from believing that boundless love was out of reach, to feeling it right there in the heart, always accessible.