Stars, Snakes, & Vultures

My intention was to go coasting: head north along the coast. Attention, letting go, love, and beauty. I did that -- all of that. Drove the winding roads of Big Sur along cliff edges. Sat under the Milky Way. Meditated at a monastery, spending two weeks in silence before attending a grief workshop based on Francis Weller's work described in the book The Wild Edge of Sorrow. I rarely left the shore. Feet on the sand or in the water, or resting in a chair by a fire under the fog, other objectives emerged. I went with the flow and the synchronicities showed up. I was there to dive into my emptiness and see what it was about. I was there with my inner child, taking her on a trip that she would have loved when we were younger, and I was there to dive into my grief with others on the same path, brave enough to dive in with me, guided by two grief warriors and bodhisattvas, medicine women who contained us within their large wingspan of love and understanding. Things happened on their own. Rilke wrote, "Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows." Along the way, two symbols accompanied me: snakes and vultures. Doesn't sound good, does it? But it was. They were perfect sentinels for my journey.

Whispy clouds above a view of Big Sur and the green and blue water of the Pacific.

Vultures symbolize purification, a never-ending vigilance or attention, a guardian of mysteries, death and rebirth, a new vision. A being that devours what is dangerous to us, "Its feathers were used in rituals of grounding after shapeshifting ceremonies, facilitating a return to the self." Vultures are the ultimate symbol of coasting, because they tend to "soar for hours without flapping their wings, gliding on thermals and air currents; they do not need to expend much energy to oppose gravity." Everywhere I went, there were vultures. They were my favorite object to focus on during daytime meditation. I would observe them coasting, floating, soaring on those air currents, and I would feel that floaty feeling, like vertigo, just sailing through the air without effort, working with the natural order of things to maintain flight. Wu wei. Effortless action. The tips of their wings were like fingers, the feathers splayed in a great embrace of the air, they levitated rather than flew, representing a "denial of the material." Airy oneness.

Snakes symbolize "rebirth, resurrection, initiation, and wisdom." They are guardians of sacred places. I saw a real snake at the monastery, slithering a curving path through the stones. Snakes are the universal uroboros, the image of a snake eating its tail, representing the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, an alchemical symbol of transformation and, in Native American cultures, healing. Snake ceremonies are about "learning to transmute the poisons within the body after having been bitten a number of times... transmuting all poisons...developing an ability to kill or cure." The caduceus, the symbol of medicine, is two snakes entwined around a winged staff. The second group of snakes I saw were tattoos on a fellow grieving friend. She often sat on the floor to share. Grounding earth.

And the stars were visible the entire time. I can meditate on the starry sky for hours. Falling stars connected the sky with the earth and I made a lot of connections, too. Clarity, connection, protection -- pretty powerful companions for my vacation. Coasting through fire, water, air, and earth on a journey of purification and transformation, grief and healing.

Fire

My first day saw total fog. Couldn't even see the waves out my window when I woke up. As the day went on, it cleared a bit -- still gray, but brighter -- that diffused brightness when you know the sun is up and bouncing off the water droplets in the air. One lone surfer tried to catch mostly close out waves on a smooth sea. The brightness reflected off of the crisp, white feathers of an egret soaring through the fog. She alighted on the tips of the kelp forest offshore, so there was one lone spot of white standing out in sharp contrast to the gray. I didn't feel like moving that day, so I didn't. Sat by the fire and read, sat by the fire and thought, and then just sat by the fire. Staying in my bubble of warmth, watching the flames, and resting deeply. This view from my hotel room, straight out to the ocean south of Pico Creek in San Simeon, lulled me into a torpor. Mary Oliver was right -- for many hours, I could no longer remember what I was so worried about. It was the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, and I was rewarded the second night with a huge, fiery blast arcing across the whole sky.

The first task that emerged was diving into the emptiness that so worried me. That feeling of emptiness that prevented me from connecting to others, from feeling connected to others, was the source of my suffering, but also might be the source of rebirth. I read Mark Epstein's Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, which had a whole chapter devoted to emptiness. What a find along the way! He wrote, "What was the feeling, really, but the sense that I did not know who I was? Why should that be so objectionable? What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing....Winnicott taught that to go willingly into unknowing was the key to living a full life." According to Winnicott, a child develops the ability to be alone, "to go without fear into the unknown," surrounded by "good enough parenting" that allows a child to explore freely within safety. I didn't have that as a kid or now, so I dove into the unknown anyway; I was just accompanied by fear.

Getting through the fear was the first part of the journey. As I drove those winding cliff roads of Big Sur, I was terrified -- this is literally my worst physical fear: driving in the mountains. I remembered driving the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park in Montana when I was younger -- driving on cliff edges terrifies me, gives me vertigo. I was terrified. My inner child cried big, scared tears. And it was in that moment that a new voice emerged in my mind, strong and reassuring. As my body was panicking, my mind whispered kindness. "We can do this. Just go slow. No one is behind us; we have all the time in the world. We are next to the mountain, completely safe. Just keep your eyes on the yellow line." Such kindness. I stayed with BTG so long, because he was a kind, reassuring presence -- a substitute for the good enough parent that I missed. On this drive, I became my own good enough parent. Like Harry and Dumbledore going into the sea cave together, Dumbledore led the way in, but Harry helped him out -- there was a switch, an embodiment of leadership, stewardship, and growth into something more within that cave. I started the drive identified with my panic. I ended the drive completely calm, more in my current, adult self. Fire. Purification. Some fear burned away. I felt it fully and it burned away.

Water

It was so quiet. The roar of the waves was muted in every location where I stayed and there was very little noise from civilization. Mountains were always within view. Gulls and vultures, otters, elephant seals, and lizards were neighbors; pelicans trolled the shore. I was in a new landscape in every conceivable way. Epstein wrote, "We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown." I read another book, called Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, which was perfect for this journey. The author described the curving backroads of Maine in November, then wrote, "It might be fair to say that people who have lived there for years take this beauty internally; it enters them without their fully knowing it. But it is there; it is part of the landscape of their lives." I also read Kafka's Letter to the Father. Kafka wrote, "Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions...."

All of these books describe a loneliness and fear, an inability to connect with others, a default setting in existence of feeling alone -- of the rarity of genuine connection with others. Francis Weller wrote, “Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.” How important grief, exploring, and landscape can be to the wholeness we experience in being human. Getting through the fear allowed me to go deeper into this aloneness.

I wondered how much California has played a role in my healing and liberation? I am far away -- far beyond the regions my family inhabits or ever have inhabited, so I am free to wander in safety. I am literally pushed up against the edge of a continent -- beyond their regions of control, domination and abandonment -- and the quality of the landscape is becoming part of me. Ocean, mountains, roads along cliff edges, giant pine trees -- my favorite smell on earth, reminding me of the forests that surround the Great Lakes -- and eucalyptus, another enchanting aroma. I drove past miles and miles of vines -- I've never seen vineyards so huge! Vines like cornfields in the Midwest! A wide, flat valley between two mountain ranges, but not Midwest flat, California flat: gently curving up and down, east and west, the 101 snakes through the valley, green standing out by rivers amidst the brown fields of late summer. I have eaten this landscape - its walnuts and apples and garlic -- breathed it in, tasted its fruit, it's now a part of my cells. There is a quality of existence here that enlarges. I am not splashing in lakes, but surfing in the ocean. I am not driving through cornfields but over mountain passes. It is larger, grander, more obviously, spectacularly beautiful here, and I am larger and more spectacular too from surviving it and thriving in it. I am bigger now, I have room to explore and grow in the presence of people who show up, show up joyfully and consistently. I can be who I want to be here. I have been able to relax in this region of safety.

After the fear was spent, diving into the emptiness these first few days, I found loneliness. That vast, scary emptiness was simply loneliness. I imagine that I was a very lonely little kid. I read a lot on this journey, just like I did when I was little. Sitting in a big comfy chair with an ocean view and toasty fire, I loved curling up with a book -- great little mysteries as well as Buddhism and psychology books. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in my room reading, actually hiding in my closet, in my beanbag chair, visualizing the book in my lap. At some point, I wasn't quite reading the words, but a movie of those words started playing in my head. I now know that's a type of dissociation. I escaped into a book, into my imagination. I have been there ever since -- in my head, apart from my body. Emptiness is a lack of feeling and I think my body, the place of feeling, has been cut off for a long time. I wasn't able to feel the depth of my loneliness at that young age, so I cut off feeling altogether.

Epstein wrote about the context of freedom and safety the good enough parent provides with a "benign presence," but without it, the child cannot find themselves. He wrote, "With too much interference from the parents, or too much absence, a child is forced to spend her mental energy coping with her parents' intrusiveness or unavailability instead of exploring herself. This mental energy then takes over, leading to a situation in which the child's thinking mind becomes the locus of her existence and the child feels empty.... When the relationship with a parent is too fragile, a child naturally tries to compensate. This leads to the development of a precocious 'caretaker self' that is tinged with a feeling of falsity. Besides feeling empty, a person in this predicament also fears emptiness....[it] reminds us of how unsafe we once felt."

I have never felt so accurately reflected in my life. I now have a reason for the emptiness that feels really right, so wasn't really afraid of it anymore. I was able to look inside of it. I found loneliness. I was a very lonely child, felt unconnected and neglected. I don't believe that I was mirrored emotionally, so I have a really hard time identifying my emotions when I'm in them. Feeling itself is elusive. BTG taught me how to hang in with my emotions, so I can now tolerate that loneliness. So I spent a lot of time in this second phase of my trip just feeling lonely -- a feeling I had denied and dissociated from perhaps for my whole life. There were a number of places that I did not stop to see and I thought, "I would stop there if I had someone with me." I was glad to be honest with myself about this, finally admitting a desire to have someone else in my life. On this journey, I became my own benign presence, keeping myself safe in the unknown. So I became more real and honest with myself.

I really appreciated Epstein, Strout, Kafka, and Weller for making me feel less alone. In Tell Me Everything, one of the characters, Lucy, says, "I am so good at being lonely, though. I'm just so good at it." I am very good at being alone. It's been safer there. I'm not so good at being with people, because, as one of Epstein's patients said, "Engagement is frightening because I am always disappointed in the actuality of the experience." I remember thinking that the way between idealization (and thus disappointment) and isolation is to cease having expectations. Not knowing, again. This trip was without expectations, as much as I could. I was in the moment, experiencing everything as it was. It didn't need to be anything else, and I didn't need to be anything other than what I was in the moment. Tired? I took a nap. Hungry? I ate. Bored? I wandered and watched. Awe, nature, beauty never disappoints. No expectations, not knowing in advance and really seeing what's there, really works. I think part of the non-benign presence of my parents inculcated in me this need to fulfill their expectations -- so expectations, expecting, just became a mental habit. This trip did a lot to infuse a new habit within my mind: not expecting anything. Not knowing and thus able to discover what's real. To know the self is to forget the self.

Epstein wrote, "Focus on the emptiness, the dissatisfaction, and the feelings of imperfection and the character will get stronger. Learn how to tolerate nothing and your mind will be at rest.... Emptiness is vast and astonishing, the Buddhist approach insists; it does not have to be toxic. When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way." Epstein talks about going deeper into the "painful places" with acceptance and meditation. This phase of the journey was all about that. I stayed with what was real beyond the fear. Weller wrote, “We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. It is an act of soul activism.” Diving into the fire of my longing for connection, feeling it, and cleansing it with the soothing water of acceptance and acknowledgment, these authors helped me know that I was not alone in my emptiness, and that emptiness itself is the birthplace of discovery of what's real.

Air

At the monastery, it was completely dark at night. More stars that I've seen in a long time. I mostly stayed in my room during the day -- it was hot on the mountain. But I went out every night to watch the sunset and the Milky Way. The classic California sunset -- always the same colors -- took its time fading into black. A single bat would begin its quest for an evening meal, flapping with an awkward grace around me. Vultures dove into their nests. Spiders crawled around my feet. Crickets exhausted themselves chirping so loudly as darkness set in. Frogs croaked an occasional bass note. I could hear the sound of waves crashing far below me as Scorpio became visible to the southwest over the ocean. The Milky Way grew brighter as my eyes adjusted. Big and Little Dippers still there, north star appeared a bit behind my perch on a bench overlooking the ocean.

Emptiness. The night sky is a vast emptiness. As I meditated on the stars and the space between them, I felt a feeling of enormity -- like my inner emptiness, the vast void within me, met the vast void outside of me and there was a harmonization. Vertiginous void -- not falling but flying, soaring like the vultures. I felt like I wanted to hold it all, wrap my puny arms around it and hold it all. Or maybe that I already did hold it all? A magnetism with all there is and most of everything is nothing. There is a vastness in my chest that is pulled by the vastness of the ocean and the starry sky. It feels like when an orchestra is warming up at the beginning of a concert and all the instruments seem to come together out of the chaos to form one note, everything builds to that one note, and it is held for a long moment. That note -- the vibration, the settling into and holding of it, that's what I feel inside my chest. My individual body is strummed by nature and we play that one note together for as long as I can hold it. "The oceanic feeling" -- a vastness. A vibration. A longing. A joy. A satisfying, warm feeling of fullness and expanse -- spaciousness, indeed. The waves crashing far below seem to land on me, that sound soothing something deep within. This is the silence for me. This is what it holds.

So much empty space. What is the distance between the stars in the dipper? I drove through deserts on land where "nothing" lives but sand. Vast liquid deserts exist, too, where little can survive in the ocean -- only water, no life. Life here on earth is mostly emptiness. I am mostly emptiness. What is the distance between the electrons in the atoms that make up my cells? We all contain emptiness. I don't have to be afraid of it. Within that emptiness, there is a presence. Looking into the darkness, into the stars, I felt some of that same presence I felt in Sedona. Felt the presence during the night watching the stars and during the day soaring with the vultures. I focused my meditations on the stars at night, felt my self dissolve into the constellations, and the vultures during the day, soaring with them on the air currents below me and sometimes right next to me atop the mountain. The winds lift them up and they glide, slowly tilting right and left, heads turning to scan the ground for prey, yellow beaks pointing the way. Presence.

The emptiness is not empty. There is wind and waves. Stars and sunsets. Feathers and leaves and dust. A warm, floaty feeling that carries me, frees me, relaxes me. The time at the monastery was time to simply be. Silence and simplicity. Napping. Meditating. Wandering. Imagining. Listening to the night sounds, feeling the warmth of the sun. I was free. Safe and free. In the realm of silence, wrapped in my own benign presence, I could play and be free.

Epstein again, "We must learn how to be with our feelings of emptiness without rushing to change them. Only then can we have access to the still, silent center of our own awareness that has been hiding, unbeknownst to our caretaker selves, behind our own embarrassment and shame. When we tap into this secret storehouse, we begin to appreciate the two-faced nature of emptiness -- it fills us with dissatisfaction as it opens us to our own mystery....Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again." The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing wrote, "...you can more easily feel this nothing than see it. It can be experienced, not grasped." Epstein wrote in another book, Going on Being, "The known self is a false one... be suspicious of a self that was too knowable - the emptiness and unreality that can be seen is even more real than life itself." From an article in Tricycle, Christopher Rivas wrote, "I’ve come to understand that emptiness isn’t nothingness, it’s spaciousness. And spaciousness isn’t empty; it’s full of possibility." 

Change comes from accepting what is true about myself and working from there -- knowing about my blind spots, seeing them and working around them, not trying to eliminate them. I have been living in self-denial and worthlessness for too long. Emptiness held my longing and loneliness, things I have not wanted to feel, couldn't feel when I was younger, and I felt them in the silence. Moving through them revealed something else. A more fuller me. Epstein wrote, "“She made contact with her inherent sense of all-rightness, what Michael Eigen calls normality or aliveness and which Winnicott called going on being. Her exclusive identification with 'I am not' was challenged, and she could proceed.” An airy nothingness yielded a more grounded me.

Earth

The last phase of the journey was the grief workshop. I was there to honor my inner child, my younger self, and grieve her lost existence. I thought that if I could grieve that little girl, then I could free myself up to find who I am now. She needs to be honored; her struggle and sacrifice needed to be honored. If little Amy was brought up in a house that paid attention to her, she could have been so much more. Something has always been missing. And though I might never figure out what that was, I can honor that absence, that could have been, as a real death of possibility. Surrounded by rocks, earth, snakes, and, most importantly, strangers who expressed my grief more eloquently than I could, I honored her. And they did too by their presence and attention. Finally, I was held while I cried. Real people, real arms around me, held me while I cried. My deepest longing...fulfilled.

We were never meant to grieve alone. In his book In the Absence of the Ordinary, Weller writes, “What makes an experience traumatic, in addition to the pain of the encounter, is the absence of an adequate holding environment capable of supporting us in these times. Pain itself is not pathological. The pathology emerges from the isolation that all too often surrounds our experience. What we needed in these times were attuned and attentive individuals who could sense the distress we were experiencing and offer us assurance, soothing, and safe touch to help us re-modulate our inner states. A holding environment is a form of ritual ground, within which we can pour our grief, fear, and pain and trust that it will be held.” I poured out my pain and it was held so beautifully; it was incredibly healing. Weller again, "... a traumatized individual needs to feel the arms of the community holding them in their extreme condition. Through the eyes and hearts of the circle, the violated soul can begin to feel the resonance that is available to them inviting them home.” At the monastery, I felt the resonance of nature; at the grief workshop, I felt the resonance of human nature.

"You went to a grief workshop on your vacation?"

Yes.

To be fully able to grieve without worrying about anything else was a gift.

A long time ago, I saw a Christian speaker who spoke of "unsanctioned ascents." From Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces to many stories in the Bible, this speaker said that change only takes place after a long time slogging through the deep dark; there is no ascent without descent. Any ascent without descent will meet disappointment, it will not "take." If you look at Campbell's diagram of the path of the hero, it goes in a counter-clockwise direction and the first movement is down. We need to get down underground and dig through our shit before we can move on. Weller calls it The Long Dark, many others refer to The Dark Night of the Soul. Gotta go down before you can go up. Rock bottom is a beautiful place to find yourself.

People often want to change themselves and achieve greater success by some brute force effort to change their minds. They will use Buddhist ideas like gratitude or meditation as self-efficacy practices to work with thoughts alone, thinking their way to a better life. Thinking is air. This rarely works in a deep and abiding way on its own. We need earth too: dirt under our nails, leaves in our hair, face covered in mud with tears running rivulets through it over our cheeks. This is how I interpret a modern unsanctioned ascent: we want to fly higher by taking off from the ground, but thousands of years of myths have shown us that we need to spend time underground, in the mud and slop of our grief and despair, our ugly bits, our feelings, in order to really achieve any real transformation. Part of my emptiness was my body did not want to feel, but we cannot think our way there. BTG and Buddhism gave me the tools to feel; Weller gave me ritual, a process to go deeper. And my body made its needs known to me through that ritual. I was surprised.

The second gate of grief, according to Weller, is The Places That Have Not Known Love: "This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community. These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament—we chronically sense the presence of sorrow, but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.”

Weller urges us to develop an apprenticeship with sorrow. He writes, “It may be the grief we finally allow ourselves to feel for the life we did not choose. It may be our sorrow for losses that happened early in our life, losses that we were unprepared to grieve. It may be for relationships that fell apart, friendships that have vanished, times of violation and abandonment, or for the suffering we feel for our ravished earth.”

The final source of my emptiness, grief in the body, an inability to fully feel, didn't emerge until the grief workshop. I was surprised by what was drawn out by the rituals and writing activities. It's like my body spoke up and said: you cannot leave me behind; we still have stuff here. Weller says grief must be turned over to the adult within us -- and perhaps my past efforts at processing this body pain had been done as my inner child, so it was now being truly felt by the adult me. “One of the most essential skills we need to develop in our apprenticeship is our ability to stay present in our adult selves when grief arises. I have often witnessed, both in my private practice and in workshop settings, individuals regressing into a child-like state when feelings of grief emerge. They suddenly feel panicked, overwhelmed, hopeless, alone, and ashamed. They slide into another mode of being when sorrow comes near, one in which their perspectives, feelings, and behavior radically change. It is important to help them restore a connection with their adult selves or they risk slipping farther into their dissociated state and possibly getting lost there for a prolonged time.”

I have been lost there. The beautiful feeling of emptiness found in meditation won't take unless I get into my body. And so I did that in the context of this instantly loving community. Talk about synchronicity! Ten strangers in a living room in Carmel. I had more in common with this group than anything I've found with others my whole life. We held each other, witnessed each other, and soothed each other through all five of Weller's gates of grief. Attuning to each other's pain, and communally releasing it to Mother Ocean, was transformative. A purifying ritual.

Having been held and attuned to, this pain has eased. “For many of us, our experiences of loss were not adequately contained by those around us. We were not offered an adequate level of what trauma therapists call attunement to the emotional states that enveloped us. Attunement is a particular quality of attention, wedded with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable. We feel held and comforted, reassured and safe." The people at the grief workshop contained me and all I felt. I, and all I contained, was brought into the circle of worth. They expressed my grief with better words than I had. I felt acknowledged, affirmed, and again, so not alone. I was seen and loved. I have come home with a deep feeling of equanimity.

Weller writes, "I remember going to therapy with the expressed interest in having my therapist help me rid myself of these unwanted pieces. Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred. In order to loosen shame’s grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgment.” Therapy helped me with all of these, self-compassion workshop was a necessary soul-building tool, and the grief workshop really focused on the third. I shared my messy heart with a group of other people, not people who I paid to be there, and they accepted it with open arms.

“Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognize 'a still deeper grief . . . a sadness at the very heart of things' that binds us with the world." The whole world -- other humans and other-than-humans. Weller shares a quote from Paul Shepard, the biologist. Weller writes, "He was asked what role the others played in our development as a species. The others here referred to the animals, plants, rivers, trees; the entire surrounding field that was the ongoing reflection we encountered for hundreds of thousands of years. He said, 'The grief and sense of loss, that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.'"

A beautiful and strange otherness.

This whole journey was an encounter with that -- getting my known self out of the way, so I could encounter my unknown self as a beautiful and strange other, and encounter other beautiful and strange others. A deeper not knowing than I have achieved before. Nancy Mujo Baker in Opening to Oneness wrote, "But what does it mean to bear witness or to be in a state of not knowing? One way to understand this is in terms of being free of projection." Weller writes, “Nearly every day in my practice, I hear someone talk about feeling empty. But what if this emptiness is more akin to what Shepard is suggesting? What if what we are experiencing is a deep silence, a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red-tailed hawk, or the melancholy call of the loon? What if this emptiness is the great echo in our soul of what it is we expected and did not receive?” So much of my life has been serving others at the expense of my self. I might now begin to serve others as my self. A more authentic, whole, beautiful and strange self.

“We come into the wider and wilder reach of our souls as we feel our branches stretching toward the sun, our roots penetrating the dark and mysterious soil,” wrote Weller. The grounding practice at the workshop was to imagine our bodies in space. Visualize a swirling helix at our belly center. From that center, imagine one strand of the helix moving down through the earth, finding a rock or a root to circle around and secure to. I imagined myself on the mountain and the green strand of my helix diving deep below my favorite bench and around the root of a eucalyptus tree that sat nearby. Then, again from the center, imagine the other strand of the helix moving up toward the sky, reaching up to a cloud or the stars above. I imagined the blue strand of my helix weaving through the Milky Way and Scorpio from my perch at the monastery. I am connected now, to a deeper self, the stars and the ground. We're all welcome here.

Coming Home

In an article for Tricycle, Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote, "Admittedly, it’s true that the Buddha uses logic, inference, and analogy in presenting the dhamma to others, and he does advise his listeners to ponder the teaching until they agree that it makes enough sense for them to want to put it into practice. But those are just preliminary steps before actually getting on the path. You arrive at awakening only when you exert right effort based on what you’ve learned. In other words, awakening is based not on what you agree to as right but on what you do and what you experience as a result of what you do." This journey was about walking the path. Doing in an effort to change my quality of being, and see what happened.

He continues, "The Buddha often describes the first glimpse of awakening as seeing, in your immediate experience, that “This is suffering,” “This is the origination of suffering,” “This is the cessation of suffering,” and “This is the path to the cessation of suffering.” The way these statements are phrased, with the repeated emphasis on “this,” “this,” “this,” suggests that the Buddha is talking about a direct experience of these things. In other words, you’ve done some of the work. You’ve developed the path enough to have a glimpse of the cessation of suffering."

I have recognized my suffering and its origination. That's as far as I've gotten. I don't know if I recognized it in a different way than I've been recognizing it all along here these past two years, or if I experienced the end of the suffering or entirely know it ceases, but I do know a different voice emerged. It's better. During the panic attack I had when driving at Big Sur, that adult voice emerged that was kind and gentle. Encouraging. Absolutely confident. As I was driving in tears, the voice surrounded me and guided me, the green and blue strands of the helix comforting me. Perhaps, like Harry and Dumbledore trading places in the sea cave, I assumed a more adult version of myself on top of that mountain. I grieved from an adult place and saw my suffering with different, more compassionate eyes, and I now experience a greater equanimity in my daily life.

I also experienced emptiness. The vast space of despair and possibility and spaciousness. I got to simply sit and be and feel it. One other thing I did along this trip was visit Spirit Rock to see Norman Fischer speak. He said something interesting. When talking about impermanence, he said that, logically, when we think about it, there is no period of time in which any kind of permanence is established. If we think we are a permanent self for even a microsecond, we're wrong. Scientists and Buddhists alike are finding that things are in constant flux. Nothing is ever permanent. So if there is no permanence, there is therefore no impermanence. Nothing actually exists ever. So what is happening here?

Everything is empty. The self is elusive, empty. Epstein wrote of the "ever shifting fluid nature of the mind-body continuum" in Going on Being, "When [form, feelings, perceptions, ideas, and consciousness: the five skandas] come together, they create the conditions or the circumstances for the appearance of self, as a hologram is created out of light...." The self is constantly being created and recreated every moment. Winnicott, not a noted Buddhist as far as I know, wrote about psychological emptiness: "...a child who permits her ego to dissolve at the moment of good contact" feels the "dissolution of ego is satisfying and enriching," and this dissolution -- like a flow state -- "feeds a sense of continuity and trust implicit in what it takes to feel real." An empty self can achieve a flow state -- a boundaryless oneness with whatever is happening in the moment.

I think enlightenment is this flow state -- an unending flow state, intimate and interpenetrating with the beautiful and strange others around me, me with them and them with me, a swirling helix of us and not us. When I forget I have a body, completely lost in what I'm doing, one with the activity or object, neither bored or overwhelmed, perfectly challenged and intrigued, I'm empty. My self is lost in wonder and awe, but not entirely. I am still the one who is knowing, but losing my normal experience of self helps me find a truer version of my self in the moment in union with the other. To know the self is to forget the self. Flow.

Words begin to fail here. I defer to Mujo Baker: “Zen has several ways of talking about this. We could call it 'being in the now' or functioning in the 'nonconceptual' realm. What makes this—whether it is myself, an object, another person, a thought, even a precept—a nonconceptual experience is that it is not experienced as 'this, not that.' There is no comparing or contrasting here. As a result, it has no name or description and can’t be known as we ordinarily understand knowing something. Nonetheless, in a nondual kind of knowing, different from our usual ways, I do 'know' what it is. All one can say, however, were one aware of one’s experience at the time it is happening, is that it is just this. To have another sip of coffee in this state or in this kind of knowing, I reach for the mug and don’t try to take the sip from the pen or the book. In this nondual knowing—or prajna, as Zen calls it—I 'know' which is which, even though the describable, nameable whatness of the items in the room is gone. In addition, the knowing is not 'mine.' Both the object known in the ordinary sense and the subject that I ordinarily take myself to be are gone. We have become formless forms, no longer solid, separate, and permanent. I am experiencing here what Zen calls the 'suchness' of the mug and of myself as well—even if I am not aware of it. Suchness is not a thing or a quality of a thing but rather the way the nonconceptual presents itself to us, and it is often translated as 'as it is' or as 'just this.'”

Imagine living your whole life in a state of flow. Wow.

I experience this flow as all motion, that state of flux. All of reality is not fixed, it's in motion in these moments. As I sat on my surfboard with the dolphins at San O that day last summer, paddled out to avoid that huge wave, that's what I felt -- all motion. As I sat on that hillside in Sedona, that's what it felt like, a warmth coursing through my body as the wind swirled around and the rain and clouds swept by in the distance. All motion. I kind of leave my body for a while. At the monastery, it was completely dark. I could see all the stars. Scorpio appeared low in the southern sky just as the sun set. The Milky Way was above me soon after; its depth and density increasing as my eyes adjusted. The length of it started around the North Star and the other end touched Scorpio's tail low in the sky. I was rotating, the whole earth moving together making the stars appear to move. One single bat flew around for its dinner; its prey also moving. The leaves behind me crackled, heaving a sigh of relief now that they were out of the heat. As I stared at the sky in the pitch dark, it's like I was floating in it. Just me, above the ocean, floating in a sea of stars. All swooshy motion, soaring like the vultures on the warm thermals.

Heart full. Because after you empty yourself out, you get to choose how to fill it. Nothing is getting in the way. Dissolution. Intimacy. Emptiness. Flow.

Quite a journey. Let's see how long this beautiful equanimity lasts now that I'm home. So far, so good.

In Going on Being, Epstein wrote, “But we did not emerge from this with more fear, we came out of it with more confidence. It was not fragility that made such an impact, it was our ability to meet it. In the midst of the dissolution of things as we knew them, some sort of acceptance took hold, and it arose spontaneously. Our instinctive surrender permitted us to be totally present, come what may. There is a certain kind of confidence that precipitates out of these crises, the faith in our own capacity to face that which we most dread. I still do not know where such calm comes from, but I am more willing to believe that I have not seen the last of it.”