Tiny Toads

I have been giving a lot of thought to meditation, and this week I had a wonderful meditative experience with some tiny toads while I was out for a walk. The tiny toads were about the size of my finger nail on my pinkie. A dozen or more of them were spaced along a stretch of the road; each tiny toad was trying (unsuccessfully) to climb the curb. They did not seem yet to be able to hop high enough to make it up, and  as soon as they would get partway up, down they would slide. I have always loved toads and frogs. I took time to help each one up and onto the soil, feeling very connected to the web of life.

Two years ago researchers at Justus Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany and Harvard Medical School integrated decades of existing research into a comprehensive conjectural report, which explains the various neurological and conceptual processes through which mindfulness mediation works (and which recent studies have continued to affirm.)

The report suggests that mindfulness meditation operates through a combination of several distinct mechanisms: attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and a change in perspective on the self. Each component is believed to assist us in various aspects of our lives, and when functioning together, the cumulative process claims to lend an enhanced capacity for "self-regulation" — the ability to control our own "thought, affect, behavior, or attention" (The loss of which has been cited as the cause of much psychological distress and suffering).

In other words, the researchers suggest that the practice allows us to develop a stronger command over the machinery of the mind, a dexterity which, according to a study released this week, stays with you long after you finish meditating. 

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/how-meditation-works/277275/

    Long after the experience, the lesson seems to stay with me. The best ones do that...

Intention or In Tension

It is amazing how obvious something is as you are able to be more present. Saturday morning when I stopped to pick up my friend Claudia to drive to a three-day silent meditation retreat, I made one last potty stop, using her husband's bathroom. We got into the car, settled in, and  as I backed out of the driveway, I teased her that I like his bathroom other than the fact that his toilet paper rolls the wrong way. I did not yet realize that the message of the retreat was already being revealed to me....

The teachers of the retreat help students work with the practice of Vipassana (mindfulness or insight) meditation. As a prolific writer, it is a miracle that I can limit myself to just a few sentences on the tiny pages in a 3 inch by 4 inch notebook. On Sunday afternoon, I made the first note in my retreat journal: "If I were not judging right now, what might I be experiencing?"   

    

The toilet paper roll came to mind—along with a flood of pain and the thought that what I might be experiencing if I was not judging, was my desire to be "right." Even toilet paper direction had a right and wrong connotation in my mind. It was as though every act held life or death implications.

Right and wrong are not like perfect pitch, they are like relative pitch. Close enough is good enough. It is important you are moving in the direction of... Be sure to set your intention. Correct and incorrect belongs to the mundane. Words tumbled onto the page as relief flowed in along with the welcomed pure awareness. I could see the past simply as what I was to experience.

Another note in my retreat journal: "If we have a preference, that can be a place of stuckness." 

The bathroom adjacent to the meditation hall had a twin toilet paper holder. I reversed one so it went under while the other went over. I experimented with noticing my preferences and soon began to feel a palpable ease in accessing tissue from down under!

 

I began to notice how deeply connected that old fear of doing something wrong had been connected to the tension in my shoulders and the tightness in my abdomen. As I saw the old conditioning for what it was, I began to set my intention to not be in tension, choosing instead to experience ease in my body, mind, and spirit, by letting grace flow in. My shoulders relaxed and my belly softened. What an amazing relief....

We were instructed to notice how much even our sensations of pleasant and unpleasant are influenced by our perceptions which have been conditioned. Barbara said if you feel something on your skin and you see that it is a fly, the sensation is likely to be considered unpleasant. However, if you see that what is walking on you is a butterfly, you are much more likely to consider delight in the tickling of that touch. As is often the case, you have the opportunity to practice experiencing the truth you are integrating...

This morning, as I was immersed in the tasks around catching up, I began to feel that old pattern of stress in my shoulders and tightness in my belly starting to reassert itself. I remembered hearing a teaching about the one who is aware of tension is not tense. I set that intention to see that bigger picture, and I began to ponder that idea of right and wrong applying only to the mundane world. When I am putting a phone number in the customer profile, if I put in a 7 where there should have been an 8, I have put in a WRONG number. If I decide to buy this car over another make and model, is one choice right and another wrong? Perhaps if I am buying a Corvette and I can only pay for a Ford Focus, that may not the best choice, but notice how clearly you are able to see that idea of relative pitch.

Barbara shared about having gone into a local soda shop with a friend of color. This was about 50 years ago, in the old world of hatred and biggotry we lived in back then. Barbara and her friend sat down at the counter and Barbara said, "We would each like a coke." She thought things were going well as she watched the soda jerk turn and draw two glasses of cola, but when he came back over to the counter where the two young girls were sitting, rather than set the glasses on the counter for them, he poured the ice cold contents over each girls' head! A riot broke out and Barbara was arrested. With her in the cell was an elderly black woman (elderly to Barbara's then twenty-something, but probably no more than fifty). The woman  commented to Barbara about how angry she was.

"Yes, I am angry. You should be angry, too. Aren't you angry?" Barbara snapped.

"Of course, I am feeling angry, but I am also feeling love. They are so afraid..." came the woman's life-changing reply. 

As Mother Teresa said, "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." 

I don't know if you will agree or disagree with all of this, but one more note of truth in my journal worth remembering: "Nothing is ever finished."

The Lovers

A few days ago I received a message from Betty Lue Lieber, co-founder of the interfaith program I am ordained in. She was reporting that there are now 42 ordained Ministers of Reunion, and she provided us the invitation to "check in" if we would like to do that.

Immediately, I thought "4 plus 2 = 6."

The Lovers!

This has been an amazing week for me. On Monday, my husband's (John’s) business (Johnny on the Spot Window Cleaning Service) was officially sold to a young man who had been his employee for years about a decade ago—before falling in love and getting married to a woman who lived in another state. We have been close, and I performed their wedding!

Like with most changes we want (I am thinking of couples with children who want to divorce and then find they need to cooperate more fully in the new relationship than the previous one, or a person with a painful joint who undergoes surgery), I am finding this next phase of freedom—training and assisting the new owner and the new administrative assistant— is far more challenging than I imagined.

That takes me to this week’s major awareness as I worked with a client who had a total knee replacement. As I watched her dance in the debilitating daze of the anesthetic and narcotics, I was reliving my own postsurgical experience from last November. I had such compassion for both of us, and I knew there was only ONE of us and I was actually reliving my experience. That happens to me more and more now....

Most days I bring pleasure and well-being to my busyness by riding my bike to the credit union to make the deposit, or finding a point of connection more clear than windows while scheduling a job. Even so, more often than I would like, I find my body in stress as though I am in rush with life or death. This strikes me as very odd for someone who sees death as the doorway to life eternal.

When I catch myself armed against the very peace I say I seek, I remember Betty Lue’s saying, “Awareness without judgment is healing.” I bring my shoulders down, soften my abdomen, take a breath, and sometimes even express my gratitude for life right out loud.

Yesterday when I got back from my weekly trip to Kalamazoo (in addition to having an office here in Saint Joseph, I am still working part time at Borgess Integrative Medicine at the Health and Fitness Center in Kalamazoo), the new admin was leaning back in my office chair looking out my window into the amazing bird sanctuary that is home to ducks, orioles, jays, cardinals, rose-breasted grossbeak, finches, robins, doves, and a host of other winged ones. I felt my body cringe...

When he left, assorted papers were strewn across the surface of MY desk and on MY floor. The outer chaos churned against my own inner questions about what life will be like without this distraction which brought the illusion of security into our lives. I thought immediately about how children often will play the game of, “He/she is on my side of the _____.” You can fill in the blank... and get the idea.

Every day I remember that this moment is opportunity for spiritual practice. The best way to express what I believe about all that now is to share this familiar writing from 1st Corinthians. I am using a contemporary version called The Message.

1 Corinthians 13 (The Message)

The Way of Love

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all God’s mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

   Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
   Love doesn't strut,
   Doesn't have a swelled head,
   Doesn't force itself on others,
   Isn't always "me first,"
   Doesn't fly off the handle,
   Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn't revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies.

Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing God directly just as God knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

Ah, yes. The best of the three is love. And there is great love for each of you!