Permission to Die

Story from Ajahn Brahm:

A fellow monk had been sick with an unknown illness for many years. He would spend day after day, week after week, in bed all day, too weak even to walk beyond his room. The monastery spared no expense or effort arranging every kind of medical therapy, orthodox and alternative, in an attempt to help him, but nothing seemed to work. He would think he was feeling better, stagger outside for a little walk, and then relapse for weeks. Many times they thought he would die.

One day, the wise abbot of the monastery had an insight into the problem. So he went to the sick monk’s room.

The bedridden monk stared up at the abbot with utter hopelessness.

“I’ve come here,” said the abbot, “on behalf of all the monks and nuns of this monastery, and also for all the laypeople who support us. On behalf of all those people who love and care for you, I have come to give you permission to die. You don’t have to get better.”

At those words, the sick monk wept. He’d been trying so hard to get better. His friends had gone to so much trouble trying to help heal his sick body that he couldn’t bear to disappoint them. He felt such a failure, so guilty, for not getting better. On hearing the abbot’s words, he now felt free to be sick, even to die. He didn’t need to struggle so hard to please his friends anymore. The release he felt caused him to cry.

What do you think happened next? Well, of course, from that day on he began to recover.

Perhaps we collectively need permission to die, as a human species. Perhaps whatever attempts to “save the world” need permission to fail. Who says this life experiment called humanity must survive?

Many will recoil at the very question — especially those struggling so hard to ensure the survival of  our species, and countless others (not the planet, though — Earth will most likely outlast us regardless).

For me, this is not a grim thought. It’s a practice in acceptance.

Reflections from a 5 Day Walk

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Am I young enough to believe in revolution
Am I strong enough to get on my knees and pray
Am I high enough on the chain of evolution
To respect myself and my brothers and my sisters
And perfect myself in my own peculiar way.
~Kris Kristoferson, from Pilgrim’s Progress

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I recently walked about 60 miles over 5 days, from Oakland to Santa Clara.

This certainly isn’t anything unique. In a way, I was immitating many inspirations that came before, and probably many iterations will come after. Still, “we love to make music of this puzzle” of our artful work of lives. :)

For me, the walk was many things. It was an expression of wandering. It was a pilgrimage from one sacred circle to another. It was a birthday gift to myself and a gratitude gift to everything around me. It was a change of pace, a physical challenge and a mental exercise. And most of all it was simply — a walk.

There was no explicit goal other than to put one foot in front of another, and I held a simple, fundamental intention to  s  l  o  w     d  o  w  n.  And once I slowed down, then to listen. And if I listened well enough, then perhaps I could discern how to serve. Here’s what I learned from those intentions:

Soul Stories Recap

July came and went and so did the Soul Stories project. It seems much of what happened occurred on an intangible level, but I’ll try to highlight some of the more apparent aspects here.

There were two parts to the project — one personal and individual, and one archetypal and collective. I learned that planning for the individual stories pretty much stopped being effective at the level of intention. Meaning, setting the intention to hold space for individual stories was effective, but beyond that — when and where and how it would happen — seemed mostly out of my control. I would more often than not being sitting solitary in the park, reading a book or something, but then walking down the street, a totally random person would engage, I would listen, and the story would flow. Like this story. A Joe Campbell quote comes to mind: “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

On the other hand, the collective part drew lots of folks, and here careful planning (to an extent :)) did come in handy. One Saturday evening about a dozen of us gathered to share the “language of the soul” — poems, songs, and myths/stories. Everyone was asked to bring at least one piece to share, one of their own or someone else’s. There were personal poems shared, archetypal songs, mythical stories, moving stories, silly stories, and a bunch in between. Lots of energy around this. Who doesn’t love a good story?

Many beautiful moments bubbled up that night, and maybe some seeds planted. Rishi captured some of those moments in his first ever video experiment:

 

 

All this got me thinking about what John O’Donahue said about “indirect pedagogy” — that to approach a deep issue too directly sometimes doesn’t work as well as a more subtle approach. That seemed to be the case with music and story night. We love a good story, especially a mytho-poetic story because it evokes our imagination and facilitates what Michael Meade calls mythical acupuncture, piercing everyone differently depending on their individual experience and longing. But are we ready to speak our own mytho-poetic stories? To what extent can we be aware of them as they unfold and we embrace them, or not?

As usual, exploring one answer leads to more questions to be lived. :)

The Map Is Not The Territory

“The map is not the territory.” This simple and profound statement, taught to me by an early mentor, has cleared up so much confusion over the years. It says in succinct terms that models and theories will always be approximations for one’s own experience of life, and that the two should not be conflated. On a deeper lever it says: trust your own experience.

The Most Beautiful Interview I’ve Ever Heard

Have you ever heard words that act like a key, unlocking a covered place within you?  Where the message, the cadence, and all the experience behind the words land in such a way that tears of deep understanding can’t help but form? This interview with the late Irish mystic and lover-of-life, John O’Donahue, contains those words.

For a wanderer, “living the questions” can become a cerebral process. But Rilke also advises his young poet friend to “love the questions.”  To me, that’s venturing into the realm of beauty. The interview with John O’Donahue is aptly titled “The Inner Landscape of Beauty.”

Download and listen to the interview  (great for  a long walk :))

I’d love to do a more thorough parsing of all the gems in there at some point. For now,

Welcome to Soul Stories

Welcome to Soul Stories!

If our lives are played out in a series of ever-deepening stories, and soul is the place from which we (ideally) act out those stories, then Soul Stories is about touching the essence of the deepest, juiciest story of which we can be(come) aware.

We hear this word in many contexts, don’t we — “soul.” What, specifically, does it refer to?

Peruse a book like Handbook for the Soul and you might notice (or at least I did) a theme emerging around this term, “soul.” Jacob Needleman talks of a “sacred impulse”, referring to the soul as “an embryo in us that needs to be nurtured and nourished.” Phil Cousineau shares, “It seems to me soul is still our touchstone word for what’s authentic and vital. So if someone says, ‘I’ve lost my soul,’ what I hear is, ‘I’ve lost my authenticity. I’ve lost my spark. I’ve lost my connection to the sacred.’”

It’s true, even everyday vernacular about living or performing “soulfully” hints at a specific meaning to the term. Singer John Legend describes this well in a 2009 commencement speech, noting, “Soul is about authenticity.”

I love Michael Meade’s wax-lyrical on soul in Fate and Destiny:

The Importance of Solitude

“But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” –Rilke

Solitude is an obvious facet of a wandering journey. But it might not always take the form we typically expect.

The below commencement address by former Yale professor William Deresiewicz shares some valuable insights on the importance of solitude — for anyone, and specifically for those who would be leaders (the address was delivered at West Point).

I gleaned four main takeways for a wanderer, along with relevant excerpts:

1. Independent Thought: Key to leadership — of oneself as well as others

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

2. Concentration: Attention is the fundamental literacy

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty [or purpose], honor [or truth], and country [or cosmos]—really mean? Am I happy?

3. It’s the Questions! – and living them out through authentic work

So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.

But let me be clear that solitude doesn’t always have to mean introspection. […]

Now that phrase, “finding yourself,” has acquired a bad reputation. It suggests an aimless liberal-arts college graduate—an English major, no doubt, someone who went to a place like Amherst or Pomona—who’s too spoiled to get a job and spends his time staring off into space. But [the author of Heart of Darkness] believes in the need to find yourself just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.

4. Good solitude inclues good friends

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.

What Does It Mean to Truly Serve with ‘No Strings Attached’?

This is a story about how we choose to identify and when, for me, that turns into “institutional narcissism.” For a while I was proud of working with organizations that strive to “change the world!” Not that I’m ashamed after this, :) but the following series of events dramatically changed my perspective….

The mid-day sun was shining and I was feeling good. After dropping my sister off at the train station, I decided to stop at the bank to take out cash. On the street ahead of me I saw a middle-aged man selling an independent newspaper. Many people were passing him by without even acknowledgment. Now, I’ve purchased this paper before, read it through, and that was enough for me. Since then I have not felt compelled to buy another paper, though I do acknowledge the value of offering an independently-produced paper in return for a donation, as opposed to pan-handling, and I want to acknowledge the existence of other beings, regardless. So I said hello as I walked by.

“Hi, would you like to buy a paper.”  ”No, thank you.” A look of bitterness and disappointment. “But I’m coming back this way and I’ll stop and chat!”  ”Oh, ok.”

How can I serve this person?

ACT ONE.  I decided to try an experiment. I withdrew some small bills from the bank. On my way back I stopped and chatted a bit, then I made the proposal. I was to give him five dollars, for five papers, and together we would offer them freely to people, instead of trying to sell it to them. “Ok, let’s do it.”