Shakin' Out The Nonsense

Ten years ago, my husband suffered a colossal heart attack. As  he drifted further and further away from me during the 40 minutes it took the EMTs to arrive at our home, I had no idea a gift was being offered.

While the particulars vary, most of us experience moments when everything crumbles. Marriages end, jobs are lost, houses burn, people die. Our lives suddenly seem unrecognizable. The outer structure has shattered and our identities hang in tatters.

           

Thankfully, change is usually more gradual. However, sometimes it is a tsunami that washes us clean of all we thought we were. Destruction is as much a part of life as creation. We may prefer light over darkness and birth over death, but that’s rather irrelevant. Destruction happens. As Paul Simon sang it, “Everything put together sooner or later falls apart.” Everything.

           

Of course, we are not powerless in that process. Our response is ours, and it can make all the difference. Rather than acting the passive victim, we can seek the gift within the loss. Instead of being broken, we can allow ourselves to be broken open.           

           

The intense physical pain brought my husband into the moment like nothing else could. And watching him navigate his way along the threshold of death was, for me, a meditation like no other.

This heightened awareness continued through the ICU and the Cath Lab, during that first tentative walk around the block, over the months when the risk of sudden death remained high. Each moment and every breath was precious. And with my husband’s regained vitality, the tutorial continues. This heart attack has become our forever teacher.

           

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron writes “…the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

           

My husband and I have more room for all these things now. We live more deeply, think more kindly, feel gratitude and joy more fully.

           

Humans often need a nudge, and life obliges. As the mystic Rumi put it, “Many demolitions are actually renovations.” At least, if we’re smart. In Tired of Speaking Sweetly, 14th century poet Hafiz put it this way, “The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.”

           

Believe me, there’s no shortage of nonsense remaining. We have, though, let some of it go. And our life is all the richer because of it.

           

Happy re-birth day, my sweet man. And for the rest of us...let's not wait for a near~death experience to shake ourselves free of a little nonsense. 

Loanne Marie

Here's a link to Hafiz's poem Tired of Speaking Sweetly. I highly recommend it~~so much so that I decided to put it right here!

TIRED OF SPEAKING SWEETLY

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

~ Hafiz ~

(The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

Sit. Stay. Heal.

You’re having lunch with a few acquaintances and the conversation is humming along nicely. Suddenly, someone makes a comment that seems harsh, perhaps personal. You tense up, close down emotionally.

Depending on your wiring, you might withdraw, slip into battle mode, or feel yourself drifting dangerously near a vortex of unworthiness. Whichever way you go, there’s a tendency to unconsciously weave a story line, one that may exist mostly within your own psyche. Or perhaps you simply repress your reaction all together.

In her book, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears*, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron shares the Tibetan word for this phenomenon~~shenpa, which is commonly translated as “attachment”.

Chodron, however, finds this term too abstract and instead prefers the word “hooked”. Shenpa is about the ways we get hooked, caught up in a series of reactions that can lead us far into the brambles, removing us from a true experience of the moment and complicating our interactions with others.

Expressions of shenpa are as varied as we are. “This is very personal,” Chodron writes. “What was said…triggers you. It might not bother someone else at all, but we’re talking about what touches your sore place.”

Most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re hooked until we’re well into acting out our reactions in some way. But working with shenpa offers another option. If we can catch our initial response before our unconscious reactions have gathered steam, we have, in Chodron’s words, “the possibility of becoming curious about this urge to do the habitual thing, this urge to strengthen a repetitive pattern.”

We can, instead, simply notice our reaction. Feel it physically. Experience its all too familiar emotional and mental qualities. By not acting and, instead, fully experiencing our responses simply as they are, we allow space for something special to occur.

“Our natural intelligence begins to guide us,” Chodron writes. “We begin to foresee the whole chain reaction and where it will lead. There’s some wisdom that becomes accessible to us.” This wisdom, Chodron continues, is “based on compassion for oneself and others that has nothing to do with ego’s fears. It’s the part of us that knows we can connect and live from our basic goodness, our basic intelligence, openness and warmth.”

Refraining from acting out our shenpa does not mean, however, that we refrain from acting. By slowing down and quieting ourselves, we are able to tap into our inner knowing, that intuitive sense that every one of us was born with. Only then can we determine the best way to proceed. Only then can our feet find the path likely to be the most helpful and effective.

Chodron shares another Tibetan concept inherent in this process. Shenluk translates as “renunciation”, another word with layers of meaning. “Renunciation isn’t about renouncing food or sex or your lifestyle,” Chodron clarifies. “We’re talking about loosening our attachment.” In this context, we renounce that strong push to respond in habitual ways. We recognize that pausing is in everyone’s best interest, including our own.

Chodron tells of a gift she once received~~a bone~shaped piece of jewelry engraved with the words, “Sit. Stay. Heal.” We don’t heal by acting in the same unconscious and unhelpful ways we always have. Chodron encourages us to, “learn to stay with uneasiness…so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger.”

We are all in training, not just our pooches. By learning to sit and to stay, we open to that which is Sacred, no matter the name or conceptual framework.

We heal a bit more. And in so doing, we welcome that Light more fully into the world.

Shine on!

Loanne Marie

*No, I haven't read this book yet. A lovely excerpt was included in the Winter issue of Sacred Journey, the Journal of Fellowship in Prayer. A special "Thank you!" to dear Bonnie who, in true recycling fashion, always passes this mag on to me when she's finished with it.

I most often write what I need to learn, and it was a discussion with another dear friend (you know who you are!) that prompted me to learn more about shenpa. Thank you as well!