Mini-Lessons for Contemplative Practice, Lesson One

Lesson One:

This week, the daily snippets will be about the Buddha - some of his teachings, some of the things I find interesting about his life and practice, and how we might use his teaching in our practice, whether or not we identify as Buddhists. Many of the Buddhist teachings are so delightfully packaged into brief bullet points or numbered lists.

Today, the Four Sights and the Four Noble Truths:

The Buddha was very sheltered as a child, as his father wanted to ensure that he would become a great and powerful king and not an enlightened one. The sages had predicted that the child would grow up to be one or the other. The Buddha grew up enjoying every luxury and distraction that his parent's wealth could buy. When he finally was able to escape this cloistering, he saw four things that he had been protected from: an old man (revealing the suffering of age), a sick person (revealing the suffering of sickness), a dead body (revealing both suffering an the impermanence of all things), and an ascetic (revealing that there were those who were searching for ways to end suffering). These sights led the Buddha to his search for a path to end suffering, and his realization of

The Four Noble Truths:

1. Life brings about suffering. (To quote The Princess Bride, "Life is Pain.")
2. The origin of suffering is attachment or desire.
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.
4. The way of cessation is by following the Eightfold Path.

 

The hunter and the exquisite noticing

Mary Oliver's "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac", first cycle:

Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles -
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.

The moment I received the cancer diagnosis, which came, for me, right out of the blue, I had the distinct feeling that the film reel had run out. The movie was running just fine a moment before and then ... nothing. No more sound, no more picture. I waited for the projectionist to splice the film back together again so that the movie could pick up where it left off or maybe start again from a few frames forward, but those of us watching would figure out what we had missed and would just carry on again like before, blissfully consumed by the action on screen.

The projectionist didn't come.

After days of cocooned haze, life did start to roll again, but the film was different. Everything was more vivid, more painful, delicate, and tender. We had stepped into Oz. Each interaction was so very precious and fleeting that it caused real pain. I was holding on to things - just regular things - a coffee cup, or a book, a TV remote, my phone - so tightly that my hands started to ache. And every time I looked at my children, or at the leaves changing to their autumnal hues, I started to weep.

I was holding on to things inside, too, holding things together, memorizing everything that happened, cataloguing it and filing it and remembering. I was doing this so ferociously that my insides started to ache, too. My chest felt like it would break apart from the pressure of holding everything in so greedily.

This time of exquisite noticing lasted forever - through medical exploration and hunting of the cancer, through fine-tuning the diagnosis and planning treatment, through the treatment itself. It was a time of being brutally, tenderly, excruciatingly awake.

People said I was being brave and strong, but I did not feel strong. I felt delicate, translucent, porous, and raw.

This is what we are talking about when we discuss waking up through the practice of meditation. This is why meditation is not for the faint of heart, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, and why we are warriors when we are brave enough to go inside and face what truly is happening around us and within us. Warriors go inside and let their hearts rip open with the intensity of their own pain so that they can offer compassion to others more readily and more fearlessly.

We practice because it is the only way through our own suffering and the suffering of others. We all begin from wherever we are. We all have a chance to begin again with each moment. We all can wake up at any time.