Healing Gifts

Today, for the second time, I listened to a guided healing meditation by Jack Kornfield, whom I had the great good luck of sitting with just once at Spirit Rock. It was more satisfactory for me this time, though my back still hurts - there's only so much you can do about getting old.  I thought I'd share it here, though I always feel somewhat shy about sharing spiritual experience.  I don't know whether visualization can work for everyone, but it's worth a try, and Kornfield leads it well, makes it easy.

This time my mind went back to a place that felt like a healing temple to me.  This was a small art gallery we visited during a vacation in Toronto Montreal that was simple, clean, and silent.  I rested on a bench there, not examining any particular painting, just enjoying the peace of the place.

The healing presence who came to me looked quite a bit like Andrew Weil, a healer of the body and the whole self....

And also like Bernie Glassman Roshi, whose specialty is the mind, or consciousness, and ethics. 















And when I thought about it they both reminded me of someone generous I loved in childhood.........

So there you are.

You do various things during this meditation, and at two points the healing presence gives you something.  The first time I got a small jewelry box that contained a clear glass heart pendant.  I liked that.  I do a lot of heart-cat meditation with Tashi; she prefers being held against my heart to sitting on my lap.

The second gift was even better - a small white book, the cover handmade paper.  I smiled, because I knew instantly that the book was blank, and when I opened it, it was.  So, I thought, every day is a blank page.  Anything can be written on it.

And I thought I'd pass that on.

Thus

[image: Jack Kornfield]
Some days it is impossible to feel inspired or light-hearted. That’s what this week has been like. Lots of extra work getting ready for Tom’s big birthday party coming up, so I didn't have time to write. An MRI on my obdurately painful ankle Tuesday. Blood pressure has dropped very low, no explanation. Results of major blood draw Thursday show my kidneys have not recoveredand my anemia is not responding to Procrit shots.
Have developed night sweats, waking up drenched - why?

Now it’s Friday, and I just had PT again for the least of my worries, the muscle spasm in my back that won’t give up. (We noted the good news, though - I can put on a tee-shirt without pain.) The sports doc wants to see me Monday to explain the results of the MRI thoroughly. Uh-oh.

I am actually not so worried about the ankle and what is causing this pain, something that did not show up on an X-ray. I am much more worried about how my kidney functions dropped to 11%, and how this seems to be my new plateau, at best. I really hoped to stay sort of well.

While Chad did physical therapy magic on my back, I told him I know the spasm might be affected by anxiety about having to go on dialysis again. He is a very level, factual guy. He listened to the short form of my story, in which dialysis two years ago turned out worse than I could have dreamed. He told me anybody would naturally feel anxious. Bless him. I wondered if he was religious.

So it was with this that I sat down in a chair to do the final part of the therapy, the moist heat. I love this. I looked through a Real Simple magazine, with special interest in the story about 42 ways to find joy. It turned out to be 42 items you could buy. Like a knit sleeve for your takeout coffee, instead of that old cardboard sleeve. I had a pretty hard time equating this sort of tiny, passing pleasure with joy, and put the magazine aside. I thought, Some people don't get it about the economy and consuming things.

Into this voice, the thought popped out that I really believe I can't fight the massive karma of low-functioning kidneys, which overwork and tend to burn themselves out. Either they will get worse and worse and kill you, or something else will. And I thought how hard I resist that knowledge. Like, "I know I'm going to lose, but dammit, I won't admit it. I'm fighting." What kind of sense does that make?

As I sat there enjoying the heat on my back, I remembered something from a tape of a talk by the Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield. He told about going into the hospital room of a man he knew who was dying. They looked at each other, and he said to the man, "Thus."

It was an audiotape, but I could imagine the gesture that went with that. I think he said the man smiled, and said, "Thus" back. When I heard this many years ago I didn't quite understand it; so it stuck in my mind.

Thus or Just this, things Buddhists say, meaning, this is reality now. Here it is.

Sitting in my chair I imagined Jack walking over to me and saying, "Thus." This kidney thing is your reality. I was taken by a warm feeling. At first it wanted to spring out in tears - I cry easily - and then it just expanded in my chest. Thus. I saw the reality. There was nothing there to fight - you just cope, no big deal. It had the fresh green feeling this day has, on which spring has finally come, with day after day of sunshine promised, so that here in Ohio we can pretend we live in California and life is easy, the way the folks out there do.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love

Now that I am feeling a little better, I have enough detachment to begin talking about the fourth line of The Five Remembrances. (The complete text is at the bottom of this page.)

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

In a talk, Jack Kornfield tells of two friends who run into each other at a funeral home, where they are paying respects to a wealthy man.

One asks, “What did he leave behind?”

The other says, “Why, everything.”

Yes, that's what we leave behind.

Last night network news ran a story about people “losing their homes.” No, wait! I said. You’re talking about losing a house. It’s a pile of sticks and concrete and rebars. If we think it’s our one safe place, that our shelter is somehow us, we grasp it with everything we’ve got.

This does not just apply to younger people in foreclosure. Many of my friends have been worried by elderly parents whose mantra is, “I want to stay in my home. I love my house.” Sometimes everyone else can see that, on a realistic level, the house is not very lovable. It has gone from being a good shelter for an active young family to being a burden for people too infirm to maintain it. Reason tells us they are in constant danger using stairs, they don’t eat well. It would make sense to move somewhere suitable to their actual present life, somewhere where they could get a hot meal once a day, and have the security of a bellpull by the bed and in the bathroom. This is actually what we mean by "living in the moment" - being in touch with reality, without the filters of attachment and illusion.

Believe me, I have felt the intensity of an elder’s passion to “stay in my home,” and learned that sometimes you can't fight it. It has to end with a catastrophic health event that might have been avoided by more realistic choices.

The intensity of an emotion does not make it a good guideline for action, more so when the emotion is about maintaining an illusion. In fact, acting on impulse and passion is a good way to ruin your life, and take others down with you. One of the effects of meditation practice is to show us time after time that if we just sit still and allow emotions to come and go, that's what they do. Yes, they're my emotions, and I might have to dance with them; but I don't have to marry them.

There is an old song that straightforwardly compares a house to our own self, our own body. It was one of the first songs I ever learned; I have a feeling it was printed on the back of a Kellogg’s cornflakes box. I still like the song as an example of accepting change and death with good humor. The chorus is -

Ain't a-gonna need this house no longer
Ain't a-gonna need this house no more
Ain't got time to fix the shingles
Ain't got time to fix the floor
Ain't got time to oil the hinges
Nor to mend the windowpane
Ain't a-gonna need this house no longer
I’m a-gettin' ready to meet the saints.

(Not that I personally am ready, you know.)

What passes for the new

I like to have poetry in my head. Recently I am working on memorizing the end of Dr. William Carlos Williams' long poem, Asphodel. I don't know how to get it to format it here the way he did, but you can find the whole thing on poets.org.

Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

You can't open a paper today without realizing that it is September 11. In the NY Times, one stately, blank ad after another pays homage to the day we could have learned something.

We could have learned---did know for at least a few minutes that morning---how very fragile our lives are, how open to interruption, and how vulnerable civilization itself is to men who feed that wolf of hatred inside themselves. We could have learned that American arrogance is an affront to desperate, hungry people.

As a nation, we refused to learn that, but responded with a crazy attempt to put up some huge memorial that could only invite more hatred. With a "war on terror," always with a war.

Buddhists talk about the trio of behaviors that get us in trouble: greed, hatred, and ignorance. They are really almost never three separate things. I know my friends understand how much war is connected with the greed of the wealthy patrons of the greedy politician, how racial hatred rests on ignorance of our true similarity and connectedness as organic life on this planet.

Compared to the devastation wrought by simple-minded boys getting the fun idea of running a passenger jet into the twin towers, you would suppose a $925 Blahnik shoe, shown here, is well, just fun. Bergdorf Goodman has had over 100 requests for this shoe since Carrie Bradshaw wore it in "Sex and the City." Mr. Blahnik may feel he has absolved himself of the responsibility for for creating and selling a product like this by commenting "That's quite obscene."

I suppose that spending so much money on a shoe falls roughly under the canopy of "ignorance," or delusion. Women who do that mistakenly believe it will make them more desirable, and that will make them happy. They believe their bodies are impervious to the strain and misalignment of such a high heel, the shock through the spine with every step. Maybe they believe that money spent through a credit card isn't really money, that you don't have to earn money. I suspect some of those consumers believe that somehow, someday they will be able to pay off their credit cards. That the bill won't come due. We believe we can get away with things, somehow.

But, as Jack Kornfield reported in one talk, a student explained karma like this: "You don't get away with nothing."

What passes for the new is same old. Same old delusion, same old aggression, same old silly concentration on things, same old us vs. them nationalism. You can read about these follies in any scripture, or just read the actual news. It is out there in reality, and in poems.