My Coyote Teacher

I live in San Diego. I know, I’m lucky that way.

Yesterday as I was doing yoga on the back deck, my dog began to bark. The breeze through the Eucalyptus trees and the coos of mourning doves were instantly replaced by the most jarring alarm calls my dog knows how to make. My breath quickened and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I guess I’ll meditate later.

I peered over the back fence into the field of chaparral that slopes down to the lake in the distance. There he was, six feet from the gate – the biggest, healthiest coyote I’ve ever seen.

Coyotes are a part of life around here, as they are in many places. In the dawn’s early light they’re often seen trotting home after a night of foraging. We’re regularly awakened by their yipping, mewling, howling, and barking as they convene their mysterious meetings in these fields beneath the stars.

But this was different.

He was alone, walking slowly, deliberately through the mid-morning light. His coat was thick. He looked strong and at ease with the world. Something opened inside of me – a wordless knowing, a content-free awareness. Being beyond all categories was showing itself in the simplicity of this moment.

His slow-walk recalled the walking meditation of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen teacher who used to lead his students meditatively along the dirt paths around the monastery, aligning each step with a breath, moving silently, deliberately, lovingly through the garden. This was holy like that.

Then he stopped and stood in the shade of a tree, turning away from me. I stood too. We stayed like that for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I don’t know. Time skittered off its rails.

I felt his presence, his absolute aliveness, his unadorned being-ness, without a whiff of artifice or pretense – how unlike him we are, caught up in the never-ending pageant of trying to make a good impression and checking our look in the mirror. His naturalness started me. His shocking authenticity slapped me across the face.

What would it be like to be free from the never-ending plans, desires, and so-called needs that torment us? What would it be like to show up without apology, without explanation, without excuse? What would it be like to live always in harmony with current conditions, without the burden of endlessly wishing things were different than the way they are? What would it be like to be free of endless speculations, ornate plans, egoic ambitions, and the need to be special?

These were the questions my visitor elicited in me.

Then he turned and ambled off.

Great teachers don’t tell you what to think. They help you ask better questions. My coyote teacher inspired a whole series of bracing, transformative queries. Of course I want to stop short of anthropomorphizing that wild animal, and imposing all kinds of stories and qualities on him that are purely the fruit of my own fervid imagination. But this fact remains: coyotes have been living in these hills for 400,000 years. Our civilization is a blip on that time-line – here and gone. Yet in the timeless eternity of this now moment, when we meet one another in authenticity, we all enter the heaven that has no name; a condition of consciousness the great religions can only point to. This is the holiness ever-present that we miss solely by paying attention to the wrong things.

[This piece was originally published in my column "A to Zen" in the Nov/Dec 2021 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

In The Presence

Standing in the darkness of Notre Dame Cathedral on a rainy Paris morning, the faint light pouring through the stained glass windows all rose red and indigo, a mixed men and boys choir began to sing a choral arrangement of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, their voices soaring between the towering stone walls. The tourists, already in whisper mode, fell silent. Every soul in the room unfurled. Then softly, another sound – people all around me quietly weeping. So I wasn't the only one.

In moments like that, seared into your memory forever, you feel the presence of something bigger, something more vast and real and beautiful and true than the ordinary world. You feel it in every fiber of your mind-body. It startles you. But deep inside you recognize it, and you know that this presence is always near, hidden just behind the veil of ordinary consciousness. You don’t need to fly to Paris to feel it (but it doesn’t hurt). You can experience it right now, wherever you are, if you learn how to grow quiet and still and open enough. Presence isn’t achieved, it’s allowed.

Call it the Kingdom of Heaven, nirvana, awakening, or simply the presence – whatever it is is beyond all of our pretty names and concepts. Still, the mind hungers to understand. So we struggle to identify and describe the sacred presence. And that’s when the trouble starts.

This isn’t easy for me to say as a philosophy professor, but when considering the mystical realm, for once it is true – feelings are more valid than facts. Facts have to do with the mind, conceptual thought, discursive reasoning, logical structures, careful definitions of words, and – shudder – empirical evidence.  But in the realm of pure, trans-conceptual experience mere empirical evidence shimmers and shifts like a mirage revealing still deeper and truer forms of knowing. This is what every meditator knows – that in the depths beneath the thought-stream there rests in immense field of boundless, content-free stillness. And the wordless knowing that we are that stillness.

Once your meditation practice reveals this depth authenticity you realize that you can endure anything – that you carry within you the solution to every problem. You shift from human perspective to holy perspective. You see the big picture, and you are filled with a peace that surpasses all understanding. “Welcome all appearances with benevolent indifference,” writes Rupert Spira. “This leads to spontaneous meditation that is our true nature and the experience of causeless peace.” When we let go, we are always meditating.

When we realize the spiritual presence that we are, every room becomes a church, every thought a prayer, every conversation a benediction, and every action a ritual. Our sacred work is the transformative alchemy of our life. It is how we strip away the veneer that hides presence from us. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.” And as Meister Eckhart put it, “Our bodily food is changed into us, but our spiritual food changes us into itself.” Our spiritual practice does not improve us, it reveals us.

The presence never leaves us because it is us. The question is not How can we enter the presence? It is What made you think that you were anything other than the presence? 

[This piece was originally published in my "A to Zen" column in the July/August 2019 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Three Breaths

I woke up, again, at 3:30 in the morning. Outside in the Eucalyptus trees a pair of Great Horned Owls called across the chaparral. The stillness wrapped the world like a blanket. But inside my mind there was anything but stillness.
            It’s not that I wasn’t exhausted – it’d been another tough week, and I was only halfway through it. Deadlines, challenges, and a thousand expectations loomed ahead in the darkness. How was little old me going to meet all those lofty goals? Was I even the right guy for the job? Who did I think I was anyway?

Hoo, hoo, hoo?

The Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes and teaches about the importance of mindful breathing. In his work he often focuses on the deceptively simple act of breathing in and breathing out, and turning that natural function into a focal point of meaningful transformation. Lying in my bed in the dark, I began to practice a version of his mindful breathing technique – three deep, intentional breaths, each with its own affirmation: letting go, being here, and opening up.

            With the first breath, inhale, paying attention to the way your body instinctively draws in air. As you exhale, silently say the words “letting go,” allowing your exhalation to empty you out. Inhale again, noticing that this inhalation is a little longer, a little deeper than the first. As you exhale, silently say the words “being here,” coming out of your mind and into this present moment. Inhale a third time, feeling the way your body is enlivened by the vital breath the cosmos so willingly provides. Exhale in the consciousness of gratitude, silently saying the words “opening up,” allowing the doors and windows of your small sense of self to swing wide. Feel yourself becoming diaphanous, borderless, unified.

            Letting go. Being here. Opening up. Feel the stillness spread throughout your mind-body system the way ink spreads in water. Witness yourself growing calm as the thoughts that plagued you dissipate like clouds in a clear desert sky. Emptiness. Spaciousness. Boundless awareness.

           

Letting Go

            When you practice letting go, you are relinquishing the illusion of control. You simply drop the pretense that you’re in charge. You affirm the fact that everything is transitory, and that we don’t really own anything – it’s all borrowed, and we have to give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. As we let go we shift from fear and covetousness to love and gratitude – gratitude that we even got to touch, enjoy, or experience any of it. As we let go, we feel a deep sense of freedom and joy welling up from within. We know that our being, our essence, is not defined or supported by outer forms – the things we own, our houses, our cars, or our job titles and reputations. Even the dear loved ones who fill our days and nights with love, laughter, creativity, and surprise don’t belong to us. We walk alongside each other for a while, then we part ways, one by one, until we stand alone again at the precipice. We’re born alone, and we die alone. These sweet lives we’ve been given are a fleeting gift of infinite value, but they are not our private possession. The great paradox: only when we let go do we truly receive. Grasping, clinging, craving, and attachment produce only suffering.

Being Here

            When we mindfully decide to be here now, a great transformation begins. Moving into present moment awareness is a simple shift, but it requires on-going recommitment and affirmation, so tenacious is the old habit of living in the past or living in the future. One of the things we let go with the first breath was our story, that long and laborious narrative we drag around with us where all of our so-called disadvantages and all of the wounds inflicted on us are replayed ad nauseam. We think we need our story, because it is an archive where we store the evidence used to prove our unworthiness. All of the messages we ever received from harried, distracted teachers who didn’t notice us, emotionally distant parents whose self-absorption kept us at arm’s length, or the lovers who retaliated against us, not realizing that the pain they felt was self-inflicted – when we come into this now moment those old messages lose their meaning and power. We are free. And when we let go of fantasies of the future, whether worried anxiousness or utopian escapism, we put both feet in the here and now, the only place there really is.

The past doesn’t exist. What we call the past is a thought that occurs only in the present moment. The future is even less real than the past. There are no memories in the future to cling to, only imaginary projections. Like the past, all future-thoughts occur only in this present moment. Returning to the now moment of pure awareness, we feel a certain groundedness and immediacy, something you just can’t get in the thought-realm. The present moment isn’t a thought, it’s a vibrant, lived experience prior to thought. The present moment is the only place where you stand a chance of coming out of the ethereal world of the thought-stream and into the real world of experiential awareness. Only here can you experience real freedom, real love, and on your best days, glimpses of bliss.

Opening Up

            When we let go and enter fully into the present moment we feel a great unfolding, an opening up. No longer girded like a warrior in battle, we show up vulnerable, full in our faith that the universe is a nurturing, supportive, abundant, and generative place. We are not strangers here – that was part of the illusion we released – we are part and parcel of the totality that arises from its own infinite intelligence. When we open up we commit the final act of absolution. We know that there is nothing left to seek, nothing left to defend, nothing apart from anything else. We are home right where we are, in this skin, in this house, in this town, in this beautiful, miraculous world. We are divested of all notions of hierarchy. We are humbled and proud all at the same time – paradox like that no longer has any hold on us. We see past duality and conflict to a spacious peacefulness and loving-kindness. We know that all work is service, and we show up earnest and cheerful and do the work that is ours to do.

            Three breaths. Letting go. Being here. Opening up. It’s a practice you can carry with you anywhere you go. It works at the office, in traffic, on the tarmac, at the awkward family gathering, or in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep. Wherever you are, take the opportunity to move into the freedom of your own essential nature. You don’t have to seek it, create it, or understand it; you have only to allow it. And breathe.