We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. It’s the birthplace of the renewable energy sources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.

Despite all that’s wrong in the world, at times I surrender and trust that I can be of some benefit by staying awake for it all, but non entangled, yet connected by a caring heart.

The line from a poem by Neruda comes to mind:

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance

You can’t keep spring from coming

Neruda was probably addressing the humanitarian and political crisis of his native Chile when he wrote that line, reminding us that at times of oppression, dehumanization cannot last.

But I think that line also describes the fruit of our mindfulness practice. With a calm mind, we live in a bigger, fresher space that accommodates everything with ease. As Jack Kornfield reminds us:

What would it feel like to love the whole kit and caboodle—to make our love bigger than our sorrows?

When I read the Japanese poet Issa’s haiku below, I see cherry blossoms blooming in the dead of winter (despite it’s unlikeliness), and I feel the acute poignancy of life, with all its joys and sorrows:

What a strange thing!
To be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.

the power of non-contention

Mindfulness softens the contracted heart many of us experience these days, and hastens the coming of the Spring Neruda mentions.

Diana Winston calls this special power of our mindfulness practice non-contention.  “You release the need to struggle and oppose the present moment,” she explains.

Diana elaborates:

If I don’t practice non-contention, I suffer, fret, struggle, complain, and basically ruin my day. If I do do it, I grieve briefly but my mind is at peace. I let go of what are merely ideas about the way things should be and open to the truth of things as they are.

But let’s not miss one key point. This non-contention Diana talks about is not giving in to oppressive conditions nor to escaping them in distraction.

ending the war in our heads

This inner work is suble and layered. First we end the war we carry on in ours minds as we constantly react to this and that, e.g., the news.

But then there is the work of healing, integration and nurting our communuties. Let’s let Cesar Chavez describe this part of our path:

Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak. It is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.

In fact, opposition to injustice will be much more effective by the training in non-violence baked into our basic mindfulness practice.  

whatever blocks your heart is unreal

Jack Kornfield observes that whatever blocks your love is, in the end, unreal. The twelfth-century Sufi philosopher El-Ghazali observed:

If you can lose it in a shipwreck, it isn’t yours.

I don’t think we can easily lose this love in a shipwreck.

We just rest for a moment, being purely and simply present, awake and aware, with no agenda at all, we radically step out of our habitual comfort zones of control, manipulation, and could have-would have-should have.

this takes courage

Living with mindfulness and meeting each moment as it is takes practice, and a kind of courage. I’ve been told this courage is depicted symbolically as those fierce figures in Vajrayana Buddhist iconography.

In times of stress and uncertainty, we may cling to a protected place. This is a small space, where we aren’t fully ourselves, and want to control life. We like to think in this space that we aren’t vulnerable, but that’s not so.

Mindfulness mirrors our humanity. It’s just plain vulnerable to be human, to be in a body, and be intimate with others in this way.

tenderness

To meet that vulnerability fully, not half-assed, that’s tenderness. We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. It’s the birthplace of the renewable energy sources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.

And the good news is that they are already here for us, at the center of our being, just waiting for us to put down our burdens.

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