Care of the Soul in a Time of Grieving

Along with the very real loss of income so many of our neighbors are experiencing because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very real anxiety that loss of livelihood produces, I also want to address a different kind of grief -- the loss of identity.

My work is interacting with rooms full of people. I have been a professor of philosophy for thirty years. For many hours a day I run groups of 45 students, leading them through a guided inquiry into the life-changing insights of the world's wisdom traditions. My tools? My voice, my face, my hands, my body, my mind, my heart, and my words. I tell stories. I make analogies. I cajole, I hover, I lead, I follow, I ask, I tell, I show, I wonder, I weave metaphors, I wax poetic, I orate, I preach, I pace, I stammer, I sing.

All of that is gone. Now I am forced to hammer all of that into screen and keyboard transactions. Every class is an online class now.

Experienced distance education (DE) instructors create highly interactive and engaging online classes, or so I'm told by people committed to online teaching. But in my years of informal surveying, most students see DE as merely a means to an end. What they love about it is the convenience -- no class meetings, no buses, no driving, no parking, no tardies. I have never met a student who preferred online education to face to face. DE is educational triage for students who for any number of reasons cannot attend traditional class schedules -- mothers of young children, 9 to 5ers, deployed military members, and now, pandemic isolators.

All of my judgements about online education should be viewed with great suspicion. I just don't know enough about it yet. I am a DE outsider. Here in the infancy of my abilities as a DE instructor I'm coming face to face with my woeful inexperience and deep ignorance as to how to use DEs many tools. So I feel pretty lost and pretty stupid. But there's something deeper going on, beyond simple technological frustration.

I'm grieving. I'm grieving the loss of my way of life, my life's work, my identity as a public speaker, as a weaver of spells with words and ideas. Canvas announcements, video snippets, discussion threads, and digital quizzes are a profoundly impoverished way of "interacting" compared to the living, breathing communion of an actual classroom. Human beings have been learning and teaching face to face for hundreds of thousands of years. That is a hard habit to break.

I know my students are feeling it too. And there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. We didn't even get to say goodbye.

None of this amounts to anything near the hardship so many of my friends in the culinary/restaurant/bar/nightclub world are experiencing. Or any of my many friends in the arts -- singers, musicians, actors, and all the production support surrounding the performing arts. They've lost their identities AND their income. At least I'm still getting paid, well, for my Southwestern College job anyway. I've lost thousands in off-campus gig work already. But I can weather that. It's the grief that's getting me.

Now is also not the time for sunny speeches about gratitude, or looking on the bright side, or not giving in to fear. People are raw. People are scared. People are lost. Things are falling apart. Be with that. Let that be true. Move through it with hearts and eyes wide open.

We can talk about Phoenix rising from the ashes later. What this is is the great burning down.

So know that everyone is hurting. Know that behind the "funny" memes and the brave faces there is confusion, fear, sorrow, and grief. We're all adrift and no one can see the shore.

Our physical health is in jeopardy. We're all taking precautionary measures to avoid infection, and to slow the infection rate so that others may survive. But now is also time for the care of the soul. Follow your soul down into the Center. The soul holds secrets, wisdom, and music we rarely hear. Listen. It will lead you through this dark forest, no matter how badly we stumble and sway down this path we cannot even see. Don't try to manage your soul -- let your soul manage you. Like a river, it knows the way.

After the Loss

So a loved one died, or you got divorced, or you didn’t get the job you wanted. Unforeseen health challenges make real your mortality. The recognition you worked so hard for went to someone else. The childhood fantasy of what your life was supposed to look like failed to materialize. Mounting losses threaten to topple over and bury you in a landslide of broken rubble. How do you keep going? How do you teach yourself to give a damn? Is there any way to rediscover your original, childlike enthusiasm and zeal?

Of course there is. But it isn’t easy. Healing the wounds inflicted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune requires a steady effort and the many hands of a community. Our innate tendency to isolate has to be overcome through sheer will power. And the paradox is this – healing and wisdom rise up from within our own nature, yet they are drawn to the surface by the pull of the love we share with each other. We rend in monologue; we mend in dialogue. We heal ourselves, but only when we give ourselves over to something beyond ourselves.

A lot of us walk around grieving. We are ringed round with loss. We are born wanting, and it’s inevitable that multitudes of our endless needs go unmet. We want those we love to live forever. We want the recognition, admiration, or at least acceptance of our peers. We want our friends and family to love us on our terms, not theirs. We want different bodies, different hair, and different settings in which to show off our new fabulous forms. We want more money, more things, and a solid gold guarantee that none of it will ever be taken away from us. These endless cravings orchestrate a steady background hum of anxiety, depression, and resentment that characterizes so much of modern life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In her 1969 tour de force On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages common to people in grief. Since then many others have amended and elaborated this typology, however, it still stands as a useful guide for people in grief. And that means all of us.

The first stage is denial and isolation. In grief and loss we tend to withdraw. It’s often rooted in embarrassment – we want to conceal the overwhelming emotional disintegration bursting through our carefully maintained façade. And on a more compassionate note, we simply don’t want to burden anyone around us with our pain – they’ve got their own to deal with. Or worse still we just plain refuse to acknowledge the facts before us. We wear our denial like armor.

The second stage is anger. Our unprocessed grief curls up like a snake and strikes at any convenient target – our loved ones, the doctors, the medical establishment as a whole, the bureaucracy that always accompanies death and dying, or even total strangers. How much road rage and domestic violence, I sometimes wonder, is the inappropriate purging of bottled up grief?

The third stage is bargaining. We’d do anything for a do-over. We blame ourselves and wish we could go back in time and make different choices. If only we had done this. If only we had said that. Knowing what we know now, every past decision and action gets subjected to the withering scrutiny of our self-loathing, judgmental second-guessing.

The fourth stage is depression. When it finally becomes clear that there’s no going back, a certain doom descends on the landscape. They really are gone. We really didn’t get that job. Our marriage failed. We really are getting old. Sickness and death will soon come for us. Why bother?

The fifth stage is acceptance. If we’re lucky, last long enough, and gain enough wisdom to arrive at this fifth and last stage, our hands unclench, our face softens, and we turn our attention away from what we’ve lost and toward the embarrassment of riches raining down around us. We suddenly see the whole wheel turning – the birthing, the living, the dying – as a beautiful river. Which part is the good part? The cloud? The rain? The mountain stream? The headwaters of the river, or the wide delta that merges into the sea? The cloud dies in the rain, the rain dies in the river, and the river dies in the sea, yet nature never grieves these changes. It knows that forms arise and fade, but the One from which all forms arise and to which all forms return is itself eternal and formless. Therefore emergence and dissolution is to be celebrated in all of its stages. Death is not wrong. It is not a mistake to be corrected. Why do we celebrate birth so joyfully and lament death so somberly? If we really understood the whole wheel, wouldn’t we honor birth and death equally?

In the face of loss the only sane stance is gratitude, and the mother of gratitude is acceptance. Instead of cursing the death of a loved one, we ought to be grateful they were ever born – especially in the case of a parent. I suppose it goes without saying, but if our parents hadn’t been born, we wouldn’t be having this whole grief problem. In other words, it is the very act of birth itself that ushers us into this terrible ordeal, this business of death, loss, and grieving. You can’t have one without the other. If you want to be born, then say hello to death. Life is death-defined.

This then is what it means to reach acceptance. We look the facts of living and dying in the face and we make peace with it, all of it. Sadly, many people die before they reach the stage of acceptance. They stay rooted in denial, anger, or depression. Sometimes those deleterious forces form the engine of their demise. Addiction, depression, suicide, and violent crime have many causes, but they clearly have roots in our inability to reach the acceptance stage. Prison is full of people who struggled to bring their inner lives into accord with the outer truths of existence. They gave into anger, rage, fear, addiction, and violence. Those outside of prison are not that different. We just haven’t been caught yet.

In some cosmic way it makes sense to say that each of us is responsible for our own inner lives. But claims like that are also cavalier and overlook the deep-tissue trauma that drives people to think and act like they do. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that “we are driven to action by our own natures.” And our natures are impacted and molded by our environment. Our hunger, our thirst, our sexual drives, our longing for love, acceptance, belonging, and self-expression all play a part in the formation of our consciousness and the forging of our choices and actions. Still, underneath all of these tiers of influence I believe we are free. No matter what, in each now moment we have a choice. I choose to believe that. I have to believe that. We may be driven by our natures, but we are not determined by them.

When we choose community, when we say yes to the messiness of relationship, when we forgive ourselves and others and learn to see with the eyes of love, we are renewed and restored to the center of our own lives. We come home to the beauty of being alive. But no one can move through these stages for us. We must put one foot before the other. There is a way to live after the loss, and we must take it.

Cloud Shadows

[This piece was originally published in my "A to Zen" column in the May/June 2014 issue of Unity Magazine under the title "The Wisdom of Embracing Change," and is reproduced here with permission.]

The ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu lived alone in the mountains. Legend has it that when his wife died, his Confucian friend Hui Tzu made the difficult journey up the mountain to pay his respects. When Hui Tzu reached Chuang Tzu’s hut three days later he found his old friend singing, banging on a kettle, and dancing naked around the fire. Hui Tzu was mortified. This was certainly not proper decorum in the aftermath of such a grievous event, and not befitting a philosopher of such renown.

Hui Tzu stepped into the clearing and chastised the old man.

“Chuang Tzu, how can you behave so outrageously? Proper etiquette demands that with the loss of a spouse one wears black and behaves solemnly for one year. And here you are dancing naked around a fire banging on a kettle and singing at the top of your lungs.”

Chuang Tzu looked at his old friend.

“Three days ago, when my wife died,” he said, “I fell apart. I sank to the ground, curled up into a fetal position and didn’t move for three days. I wept and gasped for air like a fish out of water. Then I realized that it was time to get up. My wife was not my possession, therefore she could not be “lost.” Each of us arises out of the field of pure potentiality and takes form for a while. Then we return to the great field of formlessness. Why mourn?  I did not mourn before she was born, why should I mourn now? Instead, I celebrate the time we had together. Now when my eyes fill with tears they are not tears of sorrow but tears of gratitude for the depth and beauty she brought into my life.”

Behind this apocryphal story lay a very important theme – things change. And wisdom is acceptance of change. Maybe it’s just that simple.

The Buddha taught that impermanence (anitya) was one of the fundamental qualities of reality. Not only does everything change, but everything changes into everything else. Each composite thing is built from bits and pieces of formerly composite things. Therefore everything is part of one, vast, interconnected web of being. Nothing is self-caused. Everything is dependent on everything else. Thich Nhat Hahn calls it “inter-being.” This boundless interdependency links each of us into the whole whether we’re aware of it or not. Forms may come and go, but the whole is intact. Learning to love the whole as much as the parts is the engine of our awakening.

A year ago I had the honor of performing a memorial service for a friend whose son had died of a drug overdose. All funerals are hard, but this one was particularly painful. The deceased was a vibrant, outgoing, talented young man, as well as a recovering opiate addict. He was doing well. Then he slipped and made a dosage error. His mother found him dead in his bed three days before Christmas. I recently spoke to her and asked her how she was doing now that it’s been over a year. She said it was hard. The first six months she could hardly breathe. Then slowly and for no particular reason the suffocating grip of grief began to lift. Nothing would ever be the same, but the strange clarity of peace began to penetrate and illuminate the sorrow. She misses him every day, and it will never be right that he died so young, but in her dawning wisdom she knew – everyone dies, it’s only a matter of when, and we do not measure the value of a life by its length but by its depth.

A cloud casts a shadow that passes swiftly over the surface of the earth, here and then gone. A cloud is just a coalescence of ice crystals and water vapor high in the atmosphere. It isn’t really a thing, but a collection of elements taking momentary form, sometimes even a recognizable form – a feather, a flower, the face of a loved one. Then high winds rend it apart, its form dissolving in the light of the sun. And the shadow vanishes.

As he lay dying the Buddha told his monks, “Remember this, all forms are impermanent.” Suffering, he taught, was the natural result of a cognitive error – the mistaken notion that we own any of this. Everything we have is borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. Living in the wisdom of impermanence enables us to be fully present in this now moment, the only moment there ever is. By coming out of the fog of the delusion of permanence, we awaken into reality – a place of love and interconnectedness that the mind and its ego attachments can never access. By saying yes to transition, we say yes to the unambiguous beauty of being alive.

Remembering 9/11

This article was originally published in the September/October 2011 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

We knew it would come. We knew that one day the hurt, the anger, and the confusion would recede like tide sliding back into the sea. We knew that pain so explosive and so blinding couldn’t last. One day, we would have to start breathing again.

Ten years ago, in the moment before the attack, America was a profoundly different place. But everything shifted at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit the south tower at 9:03, our hearts turned to ice and our heads struggled in vain to comprehend the inconceivable reality of large-scale warfare in lower Manhattan. When the Twin Towers collapsed to the ground our innocence collapsed with them.

Nothing we had ever experienced could have prepared us for the horror of that morning. News from the Pentagon and from the Pennsylvania crash made it clear that this was a concerted attack and that America was in fact at war. And it was not just an attack on America. Among the 3,000 dead that day were citizens of fifty six countries and members of all faiths, including many Muslims. On the seventeenth floor of the south tower there was an Islamic prayer room where devout Muslims from all walks of life met for daily worship. The murderous brutality of the attack staggers the imagination and defies logic. Across the country and around the world a crushing grief descended on us like a plague.

The stages of grief and healing unfold on their own schedule. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance each take their turn at the wheel. In our spiritual practice we focus on the last stage, acceptance, and for good reason. The consciousness of acceptance is both the end and the means of our deliverance unto wisdom. When we let go and surrender to what is, we move out of confusion and into clarity. But it takes time. It takes time for silt to settle back to the bottom leaving the water clear. It takes time for waves to soften into stillness. It takes time before the moon can once again be seen reflected on the surface of the water.

But it doesn’t just take time. It takes effort. After we let the body’s knowledge lead us through the necessary seasons of our grief, feeling fully every wrenching seismic shift, we gradually find the courage to take our lives back. Our prayer and meditation practice opens windows to the light. No longer satisfied to be a leaf in the wind we find our inner compass, that part of us that longs to thrive and be well, that yearns to heal and be a part of the healing of others, and we step boldly forward not knowing where the road will take us, but knowing that up ahead lies something beautiful and true.

We know that all forms arise and all forms fade. We know that to everything there is a season. We know that death and birth are two names for one circle. And we know that Life, in all its myriad forms, will go on forever and ever. We even know that this body we call our own is made of dust and will return to dust. But knowing all these things doesn’t stop the heart from longing. We long for that crisp taste of apple, that first kiss, the feel of sun on our skin. Life is just too beautiful to let go easily. But the beauty itself holds the key. Behind the veil of the world’s fleeting forms lies a Divine Ground, a changeless source known as God, Brahman, Tao or the Nameless. It is out of this formless Source that the world of forms arises. The beauty of the world is the beauty of the Eternal shining through the surface of things. It’s the apple we love, but it is the orchard, rooted deep in the ground, that expresses itself as the apple. When with sickening finality the Twin Towers collapsed we saw with our own eyes the undeniable truth of the impermanence of all things. And yet in precisely that moment, we knew in our hearts that the love and truth that gives rise to all things can never be broken, no matter how many apples fall to the ground in the storms of autumn.

When we come together to pray and sing and breathe in the silence, we stand on the shore of a sea of knowing that goes down and down and down to the place where we are all one. It is from this knowing that forgiveness and acceptance arise. Together, in our families, in our spiritual communities, in the boundlessness of nature, we feel beyond thoughts and know beyond words that despite the horror of the foreground, in the depths of the Source there is a peace that surpasses all understanding and we have only to allow it to carry us. When we stop struggling we feel ourselves begin to lift like a wing on a wind not of our own making. Let these hands hold us. Let this love lift us. Let this wisdom lead us. We cannot stop the arising and fading of forms any more than we can seize the setting sun. But we can feel in our bones the peace of acceptance.

Tragedy and loss are universal. When a terrible fire swept through 17th century poet Mizuta Masahide’s property, with characteristic Japanese minimalism he wrote his most famous two-line poem: “Barn’s burned down, now I can see the moon.”

With every loss we have an opportunity to see things anew – wonders that were right in front of us but for one reason or another we overlooked.

This is how we heal. By opening our eyes and our hearts to what is, knowing that none of this is ours, that everything we own and everything we love is only on loan to us, and that we must give it all back, every bit of it – often without warning. Wisdom means living in the consciousness of gratitude that we ever even got to touch any of it. Be patient and forgiving. Let your life be a proud testament, not a sad apology. You belong here, but only for a while. Stand up and be amazing. Release your mistakes. Rise out of the ruins.

We remember the dead and we will always love them. But memorials aren’t for the dead. The real purpose of memorializing is to affirm and celebrate the infinite value of this baffling mystery called life.

We have lost so much. But now we can see the moon.