Love in the Time of COVID-19

With each passing hour there are more announcements of closures on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. I won’t even bother listing the latest ones here. By the time you read this, there will be many more.

Social isolation is keeping us at home as much as practically possible. We are drawing inward.

            It looks like for the next few weeks and months the patterns of our lives will be dramatically altered. There is reason for fear. Many people will die. Many more will have their family savings decimated. Businesses will be crippled. People will lose their homes. The suffering will be real, and it will be widespread.

            Differences in class pull into focus. Those of us privileged enough to be able to work from home, and who have money in the bank, will be alright. Most Americans do not. The average American cannot work from home, lives paycheck to paycheck, and has a cash reserve under $1,000. That’ll be gone in a few days. Then what?

            But this is also true: there is an opportunity in the heart of this deep and real trouble. This looming disaster is a pathway to a startling authenticity, a vibrant aliveness that our soul has been longing for. As the veneer of our oh-so-organized ordinary life is ripped away, a normally hidden depth is exposed. As they say, this shit is about to get real.

            Real is good.

            In any social upheaval the best and the worst of us is revealed. Be prepared to come face to face with who we really are.

            In a matter of days everything-all-the-time America has vanished. Wholesale disruption is the new norm. We have all become refugees in our own homes.

            Sure we haven’t seen real social breakdown yet, and we probably won’t. The water still flows from the faucets. The stores are well-stocked, despite early flourishes of panic-buying. The pharmacy is open. Basic services remain uninterrupted. But it all feels so…different.

            What’s happening is this: we are being thrust into the realization of our oneness. COVID-19 has made one thing patently clear: there is no such thing as my health. There is only our health. We do not practice social distancing or social isolation for our own wellbeing alone – unless you are over 65 and have underlying conditions, you are in relatively little danger. We practice social distancing as an act of loving-kindness for the most vulnerable among us. Our health is their health.

            There aren’t enough tests. There is no vaccine. There is no treatment. There is no cure. The only tool we have is social isolation, and all of the scientific projections indicate that if we can flatten the infection curve we will save tens of thousands of lives. Socially isolate as much as practically possible, not for yourself, but for the beautiful strangers whose lives you are saving. Again, social isolation is an act of loving-kindness.

            In the book of Genesis, when God finished making the world, he rested. Nothing in the world needed his further manipulation or interference. He stepped back and let it run according to the natural laws with which it had been imbued.

            So too now is the time for us to let the world run without our manipulation or interference. Now is the time to shelve our self-importance. Our absence from that thing we were going to do isn’t going to kill anybody. But our presence might.

            Now is the time to let the song of the universe sing itself.

            Now is the time to step off the hamster wheel and turn away from this incessant doing.

            Now is the time to feel more than to know.

            Now is the time to shift down into the center.

            Now is the time for releasing others from their obligations, and relinquishing the commands we place on ourselves.

            Now is the time for a deep and final forgiveness.

            Now is the age of love, and the epoch of mercy.

            Now is the time to know that this breath, this air, this light, this aliveness, is enough.

            As Rumi said, there are many ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Let your kitchen counter become a holy altar. Let your bedroom become an ashram. Let your garden become a tabernacle and the canyon path a Camino de Santiago.

            When you awake at three in the morning, savor the darkness, wait, and listen. Hear the world sleeping, worrying, praying, crying, longing. Feel it all in your bursting heart. Be startled by how much you feel it, as if it were your own worrying, praying, crying, and longing.

            Know your oneness with all that is – all matter, all energy, and all consciousness.

            Know that love in the time of COVID-19 is a light in the darkness of our unknowing. Let our chaos, uncertainty, and suffering be a cleansing salve that purifies us of triviality, strips us of banality, and drives us deep into the heart of our boundless, brilliant aliveness. Let this upheaval overturn our complacency in the face of each other’s pain. Let the beauty that we are finally, finally reach the surface. Let the wonder of this being alive lift us over every obstacle.

            We are buried in fear, encased in self-obsession. Let the love that we are find its way to the surface the way a seed bursts forth from its muddy grave.

            May we be the bursting forth.

            Amen.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Everyone in the healing professions understands this strange paradox – that they don’t heal their patients. No matter how clever, committed, or well-trained, doctors, nurses, and therapists cannot impose healing from the outside. At their best, they simply co-create the conditions within which our mind-body system can best restore itself to wholeness. We are largely self-regulating systems, in a million ways continually seeking to reset and restore the optimal conditions of our natural design. The only thing healers can do is remove the impediments to this innate process.

            When you cut your finger oozing blood flushes out foreign bodies. As it contacts the air blood begins to coagulate, forming a scab and sealing the wound. White blood cells rush to the area to fight infection. Around the wound blood vessels swell bringing an abundance of oxygen which accelerates healing. Red blood cells help form collagen, a tough connective substance your body uses to build new tissue. As the wound heals beneath the surface, the skin begins to close over the opening. Eventually, it’s as if the cut never happened – we are wholly restored.

And not one single aspect of this complex process is accomplished intentionally.

You do not have to will yourself to heal – it happens without your knowledge or consent. The body restores itself to wholeness. In this sense, we are all physicians.

This same principle is at work in our efforts to heal one another’s broken hearts. When we get the horrible phone call – one of our friends has suffered a sudden and shocking loss – we rush to their side. On the drive over we struggle to find the right words. But how can words buoy us over the depths of our grief? They cannot. Instead, we wander together through the labyrinth of despair and somehow keep breathing. By our presence alone, and through the space we hold together, healing begins to arise.

In Judaism this core principle is formalized in the ritual known as “sitting shiva.” For observant Jews, this shiva (seven) day mourning period ritualizes and facilitates the natural healing that slowly arises after the death of a loved one. For seven days the bereaved stay home and sit in low chairs as close to the ground as possible, signifying the wisdom of coming out of lofty abstraction and settling down into the stability of immediacy. A torn black ribbon is worn, symbolizing the impermanence of forms. All of the mirrors in the home are covered, to shift us away from self-centeredness and toward universal, sacred consciousness. You allow the quiet to envelope you. You let people come and take care of you. Simply being together in the stillness, in a period of focused presence and contemplation, you leave space – space through which the soul’s own healing power can rise up the way ground water seeps into a meadow. Soon, the flowers of our lives will once again bloom.

A century ago missionaries in Africa were on a three-day trek with a group of local tribesmen. On the second day the tribesmen stopped in the early afternoon and began setting up camp.

“Why are we stopping?” asked the missionaries. “It’s still early and everyone appears well.”

“Yes,” replied the tribesman, “but we covered so much ground yesterday, we must rest to allow our souls to catch up with our bodies.”

In our increasingly fast-paced and fragmented lives, it’s more important than ever to create rituals in our lives that, in the words of the tribesmen, allow our souls to catch up with our bodies. Practicing conscious stillness whether in formal meditation or in more spontaneous acts allows our natural restorative processes to convey their many blessings. Maybe healing, health, wealth, and wellness are not achieved as much as they are allowed.

It is not our cleverness or ambition that draws infinite richness into our lives – it is our willingness to leave gaps in our busyness through which it may enter. In this way, we heal ourselves.

 [This piece originally appeared in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2018 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.] 

Optimal Health

In our quest for optimal bodies, optimal skin, optimal hair, and optimal minds, we face a danger – the delusion that life is a consumer product and we the disgruntled customer. We believe that if things aren’t quite right, we’ll just keep shopping until they are. As soon as all my desires are met, we think, everything will be fine. But life is short, and death inevitable. We can’t shop our way out of that. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about health a little differently.

           Health is not mastery and control. Health is cooperation with the will of nature. Our best healthcare practices augment and amplify the restorative processes already underway. When we pray for healing we are not issuing marching orders to an otherwise indifferent supernatural entity. God, or nature, will not be coerced. True prayer is a sacred opportunity to abandon fear and come into accord with what is. “Prayer doesn’t change God,” said Soren Kierkegaard, “but it changes him who prays.”

           It’s a miracle that any of us are even alive. When you consider the baffling complexity of the human body-mind system it staggers the imagination. How on earth did such an intricate web of consciousness and matter ever arise, let alone survive? But it did. A round of applause, please, for Mother Nature.

           Optimal health is a noble pursuit. We have every right to feel good, be strong, and thrive. For Aristotle, this innate urge for optimization sets us on the path toward our best lives. It’s only natural that we put these big brains to work finding and perfecting ways to increase our well-being. Science has brought us a long way. We understand things we didn’t used to understand about the workings of the mind and body. But all our collective knowledge is still a façade, a veil behind which lays a vast and unknowable mystery – the namelessness of being.

           In Greek tragedy, the fatal flaw of the protagonist is called hubris, or excessive pride. Most of the time this malady manifests itself as thinking erroneously that we’re in control. It is the downfall of Oedipus, and it is our downfall too. Our medical and scientific prowess has spawned an illusion, namely, that we’re running the show. Again and again nature rears up to remind us of the folly of our collective hubris.

           There are three mistakes we make.

           First, we view death as a curable disease, an enemy to be vanquished with our cleverness. Instead, we must learn to see death as a part of the natural cycle, as beautiful and welcome as birth.

           Second, we view healthcare as overcoming nature, rather than cooperating with it. We falsely frame our efforts as combat – the war on cancer, the war on Alzheimer’s, the war on mental illness. Instead, we must frame our healthcare efforts as cooperation with natural processes already unfolding.

           Last, we mistake influence for control. Thanks to modern surgical practices, increasingly insightful therapeutic modalities, and modern pharmacology, we exert enormous influence over our mind-body systems. But we are still gnats flying in a hurricane – so much of what transpires is far outside our influence, let alone control.

           The bottom line: We are self-healing. It is the body’s nature to correct its imbalances, and to eventually wither and fail. At their best, our healing modalities are an effort to co-create the conditions in which the body can best heal itself, and when the time comes, let go and accept our impermanence. We are not in control. We never were. Health is not a consumer commodity to be purchased and possessed, any more than a beautiful sunset is. You can’t own the sky, and you don’t control the movements of the stars and planets. So too we don’t control our health. Health is not something you have – it’s something you are. The best and brightest healthcare professionals understand this. They see their role as optimizers, not controllers. They know what the rest of us are still learning – that health is our natural state, and it is more allowed than achieved. 

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column as "How to Thrive" in the November/December 2016 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Mindfulness

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Buddha likened our normal, everyday awareness to being asleep. Vedanta teaches that the world presented to us by our senses and framed by our conceptual thought is an illusory portrait called maya. And in his letter to the Corinthians Paul said that “we see through a glass, darkly.” For all its boundless potential the mind limits us as much as it empowers us. As the Maitri Upanishad says, our mind is a prison, but the mind is also our liberator.

            There’s nothing “wrong” with our minds. A craftsman never blames his tools. The breakdown comes in the manner in which our tools are used.

            Of all the academic disciplines philosophy is the one most specifically charged with the task of thinking about thinking – an inherently problematic task. Using thought to examine the nature of thought is like trying to see your own eyes – it’s hard because you use your eyes to see. The American philosopher William James said that trying to understand consciousness is like trying to understand the dark by turning on a light – what you hope to examine is obliterated by the act of examination. That’s why the Zen Buddhists counsel us to practice no-thinking, an inelegant term for simple awareness. In contrast to ordinary thinking where the phenomena of the world are run through a mediating filter of preconceived judgments and conceptual structures, simple awareness sees the world as it actually is.

            The irony is this – it’s difficult to keep things simple. As Zen practitioner and Apple founder Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there you can move mountains.”

            The mountain we have to move is our own monolithic, over-wrought busy-mind. And the method that best moves that mountain is mindfulness.

            The Buddha left behind an eight step process for reducing self-obsession and thereby reducing suffering known as the Noble Eightfold Path. Item number seven is Right Mindfulness. It means gently monitoring and shaping mental content. Simply put it means paying attention. Really paying attention.

            Mindfulness means coming out of the fog of past and future thinking. Mindfulness means dropping the habit of endlessly comparing, judging, craving, and pushing away. Mindfulness means coming out of the agitation of the thought-stream and settling into the serenity of boundless awareness. Instead of fighting anything and everything you move into simple acceptance of what is.        

            The practice of mindfulness may be thousands of years old, but in the modern era it came into prominence largely through the efforts of one man, Boston professor of medicine and Buddhist practitioner John Kabat-Zin.

            After being introduced to Zen Buddhism by renowned teacher Philip Kapleau, Kabat-Zin went on to found the Stress Reduction Clinic and later the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In a brilliant move, he dropped mindfulness meditation’s explicit association with Buddhism and began to refer to it simply as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR. Buddhist traditionalists weren’t pleased, but Kabat-Zin was right. By teaching thousands of patients and health care professionals to quiet their thoughts and come into present-awareness, he opened the door and changed forever the way the Western medical tradition viewed pain management and the intimate link between consciousness and physical health.

            But it wasn’t until the publication of his ground-breaking and perennially best-selling book Wherever You Go, There You Are in 1986 that Kabat-Zin took mindfulness into the mainstream. Suddenly, millions of us were learning about mindfulness.

            Today there are mindfulness training classes in elementary schools, prisons, sports teams, corporate executive retreats, and medical facilities all over the world – even in Congress where it is perhaps needed most.

            A quick survey of the growing body of research around the efficacy of mindfulness meditation shows that not only does mindfulness reduce stress, it also bolsters the immune system. And the benefits don’t end there. Cardiac recovery patients who practiced mindfulness meditation experienced a 41% reduction in mortality rates compared with those who did not. The connection between mind and body has been irrefutably established.

            But no one saw this coming. It’s one thing to experience reduced stress and improved health as a result of the practice of mindfulness. But now we’ve learned that the transformation goes much deeper. The regular practice of mindfulness spurs the brain into building new neural pathways and circuitry resulting in long-term, permanent benefit. When we give new shape to our thoughts, we give new shape to our brains. And when we transform the instrument with which we process the world, we change the world.

            Twenty five centuries ago the Buddha said, “Our life is a product of our thoughts. Our thoughts of yesterday shape our life of today, and our thoughts today shape our life tomorrow. Our life is a product of our thoughts.” We are learning more and more about how this is true. And more importantly, we can learn to experience this for ourselves.

            Take gratitude.

            The decision to view one’s life through the lens of the consciousness of gratitude instead of fear and scarcity has measurable benefits. When we cultivate gratitude with practices like keeping a daily gratitude journal we create new neural habits. The decision to focus one’s attention on what one does have instead of on what one does not have reaps a harvest of well-being. Not one single thing in the outer world changes. But the way in which one views the outer world will never be the same.

            With the dawning of gratitude, a feeling of freedom and joy gradually replaces the self-obsession, pain, and victim-consciousness so many of us allow to fester in our lives. In the conscious practice of mindfulness we learn a valuable lesson – we are the authors of our own experience. This profoundly empowering insight emboldens us to drop our self-serving narratives as beleaguered combatants and realize our unbreakable communion with all that is. We no longer squander energy resisting what is but instead gain energy by moving into accord with what is becoming. We no longer fight with everyone and everything. We realize that there is no such thing as private happiness, that your well-being and my well-being are one inextricable whole. Our religious views shift, our ethical views shift, our political views shift, and we begin making different decisions as spouses, neighbors, consumers, and citizens.

            By simplifying our minds we simplify our lives. By simplifying our lives we come into immediate contact with the essence of all that is. We are reconnected. We come back home to the vibrant center of our own aliveness. No longer lost in the exile of the thought-stream, we realize the simple truth – who we are and what we are is enough. And the healing begins.