Nothing to Attain

We are so brief.
A one-day dandelion.
A seedpod skittering across the ice.
We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird.
I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal
and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

~ Louise Eldrich

We looked at sacred darkness and emptiness a LOT over the five-day intensive that finished about dinner time yesterday. During those five-days humans were living this. Joan was with Bob at the hospital. Pneumonia. His dementia complicates things further. He would be going to a care facility rather than coming home. For how long? Virginia had Paul to ER. Bleeding. Awaiting emergency surgery for a massively enlarged prostate. Barbara Brodsky‘s carefully selected caregiver for her husband, Hal, had to call off when his young daughter tested positive for Covid. The second had to call off when his wife was hospitalized and he was in charge of their 18-month old. John is in a sciatica flare, and we have to cancel the 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure study he was scheduled to start this morning because he cannot ambulate right now.

The opening line from Aaron this morning: “People seek safety, and they believe that safety is in stability and no change.”

During this intensive we were encouraged to let ourselves go into the darkness and learn to be the light. Profound sadness washed over me as I had total cellular memory of surgery in 1992 to correct my having been born tongue-tied. A lingual frenectomy removes a band of tissue that connects the underside of the tongue with the bottom of the mouth. At birth, this is a relatively simple procedure. I was forty-two years old….

I felt the depth of the trauma from the point of view of the tongue. It was traumatized by the surgery. Then it was lost. It was not able to get back to the familiar. It did not feel like it belonged and it did not know what to do. Thirty years later, I am noticing the stress in my jaw and the pull to the side of my neck, aware now that this has been a chronic situation.

I cried, reporting all of this to my dharma family in Group 2. I heard the words and I recognized the correlation to the human incarnation. Even the simple shift from living in the fluid world of the womb to the instability of the room is traumatic. Sounds are startling, light is harsh, energies feel like an assault.

Aaron quoted from Dante’s Inferno: In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.

Humans see and feel so much, often it appears too much to process, and, yes, it can feel like a cruel trick.

One beloved introduced us to Jeff Foster’s “Guru of Darkness” on his Facebook post. Jeff’s writing was woven into our intensive with the skill of a world-class weaver.

…we are not here to destroy, eradicate, fix, transcend, or even ‘heal’ our darkness — the grief, the terror, the anger, the shame, those deep feelings of guilt from childhood. For these are just places in ourselves that we haven’t been willing or able to illumine yet. They are not inherently evil, sinful or dangerous. (www.lifewithoutacentre.com)

Another beloved suggested speaking to the contraction of the self where there is suffering, “I feel you. I love you. I care, and this is important.” I have begun speaking this to my tongue and jaw and neck. I can be patient since we have thirty years of my ignorance to soften the impact from.

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.” ~ Edward Everett Hale, American Author

“To see myself as on a journey through the universe is delusional. To come to know myself as the universe journeying is awakening.” ~ Falling into Grace by Adyashanti

Letting my heart open to the pain and loss that had been pushed away or ignored or deflected led me right to the heart of SCS, which has not been active since 2012 following the surgery I had to remove the ovarian mass. The Osho Zen Tarot card (8 of Water Letting Go) so direct: A recognition that something is finished, something is completing, whatever it is — a job, a relationship, a home you have loved, anything that might have helped define who you are — it is time to let go of it, allowing any sadness but not trying to hold on.

SCS was all of that: a job, a relationship, a home I have loved (and the cats I have loved), and my identity.

The Osho card continues, You are past the point of no return now, and gravity is doing its work. Go with it — it represents liberation.

We were guided in the meditation by Aaron: “There is nothing you can hold onto forever except the essence of your being, and you do not hold onto that, you simply are that. This is your truth; this is what you are. I move ahead of my own free will, with the intention of releasing suffering in this universe, of helping beings wake up — including myself…. This is my intention to support release of suffering, an increase of happiness for all sentient beings.”

OMG – All semester I have thought of Aaron’s teaching the SCS material Joel and Debra developed from Steven Karpman’s Drama Triangle. I write in my journal: It’s not Aaron teaching Debra’s material, Debra has been teaching the dharma as Aaron does!

I look down at my Fitbit and it shows 9,999 steps. I don’t want to move but I have to move to reach my goal…. I dig out a CD and listen to Everlasting Peace, my own voice telling me “Circumstances have changed and it is time now to look to new directions to learn how to fly once more….”

The last morning of the five-day intensive, Barbara shares that the mother of the caregiver who had been pulling the weight of the week as Barbara was teaching the intensive fell overnight and broke her hip….

As Barbara says, “There is always going to be something. If it needs to slide away; let it slide away.” Barbara begins to share her process of coming back to the light right there in the darkness. Although deaf and off tune, we listen to her chant:

Hari Om, Dear One,
Sat Nam, holy name
When I call on the Light in my Heart,
I come home

Mary Magdelene incorporates and notices Barbara’s voice is hoarse from so much teaching time this week. Mary takes a sip of water, then tells us there is never any hurry. She quotes a poem by Karen Weber: I am the place where god shines through, where god and I are one not two. Mary tells us that our beloved teacher, Aaron, was so helpful because he was not yet fully awake but he knew how to not get caught up in negativity. To see the negative story as it is, and to know that right there with fear there is love. Hari Om. When I call on the love in my heart, I come home. Mary tells us to just keep coming home. To remember why you have come. To hold the darkness as a sacred energy. There is nothing more powerful than love.

My closing sharing was to see that what is in the way is the way. I mentioned Jana Stanfield’s song If I Were Brave and how we know we are all brave became we came! Someone quoted Nelson Mandela’s quoting Marianne Williamson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”

I do a drawing from the question, “What is released as we fully manifest the true self?”

I can’t find the beginning and wonder if that mean none exists.

I write Mary’s last question to us: “At the end of attaining, what remains?”

An answer comes, “The tapestry of attending to without giving it substance.”

I title the drawing from the Heart Sutra: for there is nothing to attain.