Crabapples and Coronavirus

The crabapple trees have passed their peak here in the Temple garden. The extravagance of white blossoms is giving way to equally miraculous but more ordinary looking green leaves. Soon, their glory days will be behind them and they will hide through the summer as unremarkable trees of medium size.

Spring’s extravagant bloom passes to the slower work and pleasure of summer.

This late May morning, as the social constraints of the pandemic are beginning to loosen, I wonder if the bloom of Covid has come and gone? Experts disagree and politicians use scraps of information to construct a banquet of questionable projections. Yet each one of us has to make important decisions for ourselves and those we love.

Governors are allowing, state by state, the reopening of certain businesses and allowing the re-gathering of certain groups. Interestingly, beauty salons and churches are at the top of many of the lists. And we here at Boundless Way Temple are beginning to think about when it might be safe to gather again in person for Zen meditation. (Though some of us with very short hair remain unconcerned about visits to the barber.)

No one says the virus is gone. People are still coming down with the virus and people are still dying at an alarming rate. In some places, the rates infection, hospitalization and death are holding steady or diminishing. In others, rates are still rising. But it all depends on where you look and how you measure.

When is it safe to go out? When is it safe to come together? Is it now enough to have the windows open and masks on? The future course of the virus is still closely dependent on our individual and collective behaviors. Some of us are still sheltering in place. Some of us are having our close friends over for drinks and dinner.

A recent poll here in Massachusetts found that nearly 80% of respondents report that they are maintaining social distancing behaviors strictly. These same people also reported that only 25% of the people around them were doing the same. Both of these observations cannot be true at the same time. We humans are irreparably biased. The obvious truth of our observation is likely to wildly influenced by our hopes, histories and fantasies.

Yet we have to make our best choices. We should all be careful to read (and watch) widely and to check the inevitable biases of our sources. Being provisional in our pronouncements and being diligent in looking for new data will serve us well. It might also help us be more accurate in our speech and actions as well.

But the crabapple trees are not bothered by their fame or their obscurity. They stay firmly grounded in the season of the moment. Blossoms and birds come and go without regret as the nascent fruit of the unimaginable fall begins its slow swelling toward fullness.

Personal Practice – Be aware today of how your opinion is shaped as much by your previous opinions as it is by what you are encountering in the moment. Notice the emotions that arise unbidden when you consider certain people and situations. Don’t try to change anything, just see if you can perceive and appreciate whatever is arising in the infinite interplay between perception, thought and feeling.

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Working With Realms

Many years ago a wise friend and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner taught me about the concept of realms in everyday human life. While Buddhist thought and iconography posits many different realms or worlds of existence, she used the term to describe a specific state of being that comes when we are overwhelmed by our lives. In these times we ‘fall into a realm’ in which our normal functioning is overtaken by strong emotion. The neuro-scientific language, we could say the pre-frontal cortex, the seat of reason, is hijacked by the amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates emotion.

Realms are quite common for most of us; especially these days. The continued stress and uncertainty of the pandemic leave us all more vulnerable to these states of anger, anxiety, discouragement and despair. Realms are not bad, but they are quite uncomfortable and can be difficult to manage. Though you cannot force your way out of a realm, it can be useful to at least know where you are when you feel lost and hopeless. Let me try to explain.

Almost all of us have times when life feels like it is more than we can bear. We find ourselves in situations that feel impossible. We have tried our best and failed. There is no way out. We feel powerless. These feelings might arise from a situation at work or from an intimate relationship at home. It might be triggered by something someone says to you or something you read in the newspaper. Intense discouragement, anger and despair are all signs that we might be in a realm.

Realms often happen quickly. We may be feeling fine, then all of the sudden we’re lost in powerful feelings that seem to have come out of nowhere. It’s as if we were walking down a street minding our own business and we fall down a manhole where the cover has been left off. Suddenly we’re in dank darkness and we have no idea how we got there.

While it sounds quite dramatic, it’s actually hard to know that we are in a realm.

Realms are perfectly self-justifying and autistic. When you are in a realm, you are caught in a self-reinforcing view of reality. Your distorted view perfectly shapes all your perception to verify itself. No new information gets in or gets out.

When someone is in a realm of discouragement, you may be tempted to give them a pep talk – to explain to them all the possibilities of their life and their situation. Rarely will this be helpful. (You may have noticed this from personal experience.) For every thing you say, they will have a counter-example that proves otherwise. Likewise, when you realize you are in a realm and try to talk yourself out of a realm; nothing happens. Realms are not reasonable places.

Realms are a naturally occurring circuit breaker that disconnects us from reality. It’s like all our circuits are overloaded and they all shut down at once. When it is too much, reasonable functioning shuts down and we retreat into the seeming safety of our own private world. While it’s rarely pleasant, it does serve the function of isolating us until we can return to our senses.

The good news, however, is that realms are self-releasing. These states of emotional overwhelm have their own duration and naturally find their own ending. When you, or your partner or friend are caught in a realm, you can rely on the fact that it won’t last forever. At some point, you will be released.

Realms are difficult to manage. While caught in a realm we can say and do things that are hurtful and even damaging to ourselves and to the people around us. We are tempted to act out our worst impulses of greed, anger and ignorance while feeling quite righteous and self-justified. Not a pretty sight.

So what can we do when we are find ourselves lost in a realm? How do we behave so as to do as little damage as possible to ourselves or others? Or perhaps even learn from the experience?

While our options from within a realm are quite limited, it can be enormously helpful to at least recognize we are in a realm. We each have our own particular ‘tells’ – particular things we do or experience that we come to recognize as indicators that we have lost our reason and are in a realm. For me, there is a familiar quality of discouragement and aloneness that I begin to sense. For you it may be a heaviness or a quality of anger that is familiar.   Or something else.

If you know or suspect you are in a realm, patience is your friend. Doing nothing is a powerful antidote to this intense emotional place. Being kind to yourself is also a good strategy. Blaming yourself or others for your realm is not helpful. Realms are part of the functioning of normal human beings. No need to panic. Remember that it doesn’t help to try to force your way out.

Curiosity is also a wonderful, though difficult to summon, tool. While in a realm, can you notice what it is like? What is there here I have never noticed before? What is this place really like? What can I learn while I’m stuck here?

Personal Practice: Pay attention to your moods today. Can you notice the small irritations that arise for you throughout the day? What disturbs you? What happens inside you when you are irritated? And if you’re lucky enough to be really disturbed today, can you notice what it’s like to be overcome with negative emotion? What is it like for you when you are in a realm? What do you notice? How long does it last? Anything you learn will be helpful.

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Why Sesshin?

Our recent virtual retreat was a great success. Forty-one of us gathered from around the region and across the ocean to practice Zen together. For two days, we wove formal silent meditation practice with everyday life—going back and forth between sessions on Zoom and informal practice at home. By our final gathering, it was clear that even though we had not been in physical proximity, the power of our combined efforts over these past days had touched us all.

Every spiritual path I know of involves at least a periodic withdrawal from everyday life to gather in community for intensive practice. Even the great spiritual teacher Jesus periodically withdrew to the hills to escape the crowds and pressures of his life. Stepping back from busyness appears to be essential for human beings who want to see beneath the surface—who want to break free from the trance of everyday life.

In the Zen tradition, we refer to these retreats as ‘sesshin’—a Japanese word which literally means ‘to touch the heart-mind’. Sometimes we also call them ‘training periods’ because, as anyone who has been on a Zen meditation retreat can tell you, ‘retreat’ is a rather misleading term. We are up early in the morning and spend our days sitting in stillness and silence. Though sitting meditation alternates with walking and with other practices such as eating, chanting, listening to Dharma talks and meeting individually with the teacher, a sesshin requires great effort on the part of each participant.

But the point of sesshin is not simply to work hard or to be uncomfortable, but to practice cultivating a basic friendliness toward ourselves. As human beings, we usually spend a lot of our time evaluating and judging ourselves and our situation. We want to be comfortable and peaceful. We don’t want to suffer or be agitated. However, the truth of human experience is that discomfort and pain cannot be avoided.

No matter how positive you are or how many skillful techniques you have for calming your mind, your life will not always go your way. You will not always get what you want, people you love will go away, you will sometimes be sick and, ultimately, you will lose everything you think you have. I don’t say this to be depressing, but rather to honor the truth of our experience as limited and mortal beings.

The question then is not how to escape the natural suffering of being alive, but rather how to meet and appreciate this life of ten thousand joys and sorrows. One of the wonderful things we can learn on a sesshin is that even though almost nothing is happening – we’re just sitting and walking – our minds still run through the whole spectrum, from ease to anxiety, from clarity to confusion. No one outside us is ‘causing’ us to feel however we are feeling.

On retreat, with the time and the simple structure of practice, we can begin to see that the difficulties of our lives actually come and go within the boundaries of personal awareness. The problem and our subsequent suffering that seems to be generated by our situation or by the people around us is in fact the transient (and natural) working of our minds. Over time, if we are willing to stay, we see that sensations, thoughts and mind-states simply arise and pass away. It’s almost like everything that feels so personal and real is just a kind of weather that comes and goes on its own.

Of course there are wonderful ways to work with the mind and powerful techniques to meet our life more skillfully, but in the end, our life is beyond our control. We can, however, learn to appreciate our life for the wonder it is. We can cultivate the capacity to meet whatever circumstances we encounter, even when we are overwhelmed and lost, with this basic friendliness. Rather than judging ourselves and others, we can open our hearts, see what is here, do what needs to be done and appreciate this precious and fragile gift of life.

While this may be easy to read or even write about, it takes a lifetime of practice and intention to live in this spirit. This is why we go to sesshin.

Personal Practice: Play around with the idea of meeting your life with this ‘basic friendliness’. Maybe take ten minutes to sit still and just allow yourself to be as you are—being present to whatever thoughts, sensations and feelings are present—without having to evaluate or change anything. Let yourself be as you are. You don’t have to like what is arising or feel good about it—but you can just let it be.

Or maybe hold this spirit of basic friendliness with you as you go about some of the activities of your day. What if it’s all OK, even right now? What if you can just be who you are and allow others to be who they are?

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Sudden or Gradual?

One of the debates that has enlivened the Zen school for centuries is the debate between sudden enlightenment and gradual cultivation. The Rinzai school of Zen is famous for working with koans and for emphasizing the power of achieving a sudden flash of understanding that is called enlightenment. The Soto school is usually associated more closely with ‘just sitting’ and with the ongoing nature of practice. Rinzai practice traditionally focuses on the notion that there is something to accomplish, some realization to be had. While Soto practice maintains that we are already awake and that any effort we make to achieve something is based on our deluded thinking.

You can see what a delicious and endless argument this could be. Each side can easily stand in the fullness of their position and look down on those poor people with incorrect understanding and inferior practice. And, as you may have observed, we human beings sometimes save our harshest judgments for people who are closest. The feelings that arise between committed partners can swing quickly from great fondness to strong aversion. The criticism and judgments that appear between different branches of the same religion can be especially energized as well.

One great Zen master of 13th century Korea, Chinul, settled these seeming polarities in this way: sudden awakening leads to gradual cultivation. He maintained that enlightenment is not something you practice Zen to achieve, but rather that you would not begin a meditation practice like Zen unless you had had some kind of realization.

The Zen way asks that we take on the practice of sitting still and being present with what is here. Anyone who has tried this, even for ten minutes, has a sense of what difficult work this is. So much of what arises in the mind and so much of life is unpleasant. Why would anyone want to sit still and feel what is here? Better to be busy running around distracting yourself or trying to fix what is wrong.

Chinul maintained that those who are willing to try this arduous path have had some moment when they have seen through some of the illusions of daily life. These moments of seeing through can be very brief – just a moment of walking out into the coolness of a spring morning, or when a toddler runs toward you with delight and throws his arms around you with unreserved love and trust, or while sipping tea reading a book with a beloved pet curled up nearby. These are moments when the endless struggle of life drops away and we are touched by the fullness of life itself.

Every human being has moments like this, but often we are looking the other way. We are too busy to even notice these micro-joys that appear spontaneously. Some of these moments of intimacy with life are so strong we are stopped in our track. But mostly they come and go, like fragments of a dream.

But some of us notice these moments of ease and peace and want more. We begin to see that our usual strategies of effort and accumulation don’t work in this field. Because the habit force of the human mind is strong, our daily worries quickly overwhelm any moments of intimacy and freedom we have. This is where gradual cultivation is necessary. This is where Zen practice begins. Only by looking deeply into the matter can we begin to find a sustainable way of living the freedom that is our birthright.

A moment of insight, even a life-changing experience of the oneness of all life, quickly fades into memory—becomes something we talk about, think about, and even torments us with its necessary passing. What is left to us is to commit ourselves to the path of gradual cultivation.

Hongzhi, the Chinese Zen master who lived a few centuries before Chinul, put it this way: “The field of boundless possibilities is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.”

Daily Practice: Noticing moments of ease and intimacy. As you move through your day, see if you can tune your attention to the moments ‘in between.’ We all have a narrative of what we are doing moment to moment, but what if our day is actually filled with moments of ease that are not included in the story we are telling ourselves and our situation? Let the sights and sounds, the smells and textures of your life come to you. The sound of the cars going by on the street. How the eyes blink of their own accord. How the breath comes in and out as if God himself were watching out for us. Notice the generous life that surrounds you—that is you.

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Making the Right Choice

All these reflections on the transformational power of choosing can veer into an apology for an inflated sense of self-importance and control. We can slip into a sense of entitlement where we begin to think that if we’re clear enough and choose wisely, our lives will be smooth and pleasant.   Or we take the good fortune of our current circumstances to be something that we have earned through our enlightened choices and hard work.

Here’s a true story that illustrates that our choices may not be as important as we think.

Many years ago, a friend introduced me to a new mountain bike trail loop. It was a lovely ride—five or six miles of winding trails through woods and pastures, over hills and through valleys. I rode the route with him two Saturdays in a row. The next week I decided to try it on my own.

Everything began fine—I remembered the familiar landmarks and enjoyed being my own company on the narrow forest paths. Then I reached a fork in the trail that I didn’t remember. Did we go left or right here? I couldn’t remember.

I was just a little nervous. But I paused, took a couple deep breaths and tuned in to my deeper intuition. Left felt like it was the right direction to go, so I took the left fork and rode on. Things soon looked familiar and I was at ease again. Until it happened again a second time. An unfamiliar fork in the trail. Again I was a little nervous, but found my inner equilibrium, trusted my intuition and rode on.

I was delighted and just a little proud of myself when I completed the loop back where my car was patiently waiting. Instead of panicking when I didn’t remember, I had paused, trusted, and found my way to some deeper kind of knowing. A good life lesson, I thought.

A week later, I rode the same trail again by myself. This time I decided to be adventurous. At the first fork, instead of going left, I went right. And to my surprise, after a short while, I was back on the same trail. At the next fork in the trail I did the same thing. Again, to my surprise and delight, this other fork also led back to the main trail.

I arrived back at my car that day with a revised sense of my own self-importance. It was not my deep powers of intuition that had served me, but rather the path itself that had taken care of me. The correct answer was both right and left. I realized that the only way I could have failed would have been not to choose.

I’m reminded of the wonderful adage ‘You can’t steer a parked car.’ When the car is motionless, playing with the steering wheel has no impact on the direction of the car. Sometimes, the most important thing is simply to get the car moving. Even if you are headed in the exact wrong direction, when the car is moving, you can eventually turn it in the direction you want.

Perhaps the choices we agonize over are not what they appear to be. Sometimes there is a clear choice, one option that ‘makes sense.’ But other times we have to make decisions without enough information, we can’t know how things will turn out. What if all our choices lead us back to the main trail? What if many choices are not a matter of right or wrong, but rather simply moving into the future? What if our lives are not just a matter of ‘getting it right?’

My teacher’s teacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn, once had a student come to him who was trying to decide whether to stay in the monastery or go back to graduate school. Seung Sahn listened patiently to his troubled listing of all the reasons to stay and all the reasons to go. Then Seung Sahn said in his pigeon English: ‘You got coin? Flip coin and do what coin says.’

Daily Practice: As you move through your day, be aware of some of the choices you are making. Notice when you feel the pressure to make the ‘right’ decision. What if all your choices led to your one true life? What if there is more freedom to choose than you think? Once or twice today, see what happens if you take the ‘other’ trail and choose to do something you don’t usually do. Notice what happens.

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Choosing Ourselves

This choosing is a subtle thing. We certainly don’t have the freedom to choose to do or be whatever we want. The liberation we talk about in Zen is not about being masters of the universe. We humans are fragile and limited creatures. And when we begin to pay attention, we can see that most of the important things that have happened to us in our lives have been partially or wholly caused by factors and synchronicities beyond our control.

A psychologist friend of mine once told me that the goal of therapy is to choose to be who you already are.

You might wish you were taller or shorter—wiser or less anxious. You might wish your parents had been different or that someone else had won the last presidential election. You might wish that you didn’t have to wear a mask and gloves when you went to the grocery store. Most of the universe is beyond our control. Everything that has happened in your life and in the universe has already happened. You cannot go back and change it. In this exact moment, you simply are who you are. No amount of wishing you were different or ‘things’ were different will change what is already here.

Byron Katie once wrote “When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100 percent of the time.” So perhaps the path to freedom and ease lies acceptance—in giving up our ancient argument with reality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “There is a time in every man’s [or woman’s] education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe if full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. (Self-Reliance)

Emerson speaks of self-acceptance–to take ourselves ‘for better, for worse’ as we are. Our ‘nourishment’, our freedom, comes from cultivating the ‘plot of ground’ which has been given to us. The plot of ground is you, exactly as you are, and the circumstances of your life, exactly as they are. In Zen sometimes we say that the precise situation of your life right now is just what you need to wake up. No need to wait for more favorable conditions or some other time. Right here. Right now. Everything you need is already present.

This is perhaps one of the most incomprehensible perspectives on life, that we, as we are, are enough and that this moment, whatever it is, contains everything we need. Most of us are firmly believers in the inadequacy ourselves and our circumstances. The billion dollar self-help industry is powered by this sense that we could and should be better than we are. The deeper truth of the self-help movement is that cultivation is required, but the real work required can only start from this basic ground of acceptance of what is already here. (This acceptance, of course, includes the acceptance of realizing that sometimes I just really wish things were different than they are.)

Ursula K. LeGuin had this to say about choice: “You thought, as a boy [or girl], that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought once. So did we all. And the truth is at as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.”  (The Wizard of Earthsea)

Our essential choice is whether or not we align with what is already true. This truth is subtle and ever changing. It’s the truth of what is deepest in our hearts.   It’s the truth of the current circumstances of the world around us, whether we ‘approve’ or not. As we slowly give up our ancient addiction to objection, we can begin to see what is really here and to work in skillful ways with ourselves and everything we encounter.

Daily Practice: Can you notice the objections as they arise within you today? Notice when you wish it were different or when things seem ‘wrong’ or when you don’t get your way. Can you just observe what it is like to object? No need to change or even analyze. The practice is not objecting to objection. Just observe and observe. Be curious about what is really going on.

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Living With Uncertainty

Many commentators refer to these days as a time of uncertainty. This uncertainty is often cited as one of the most challenging aspects of our lives in the pandemic. But is this uncertainty really a bad thing? And whether it is or not, if this really is a time of uncertainty, how can we meet it in creative and constructive ways?

The human mind seems to like a clear and simple stories that explain the world around us. Our minds naturally move toward binary categories: Is our current uncertainty good or bad? Are we safe or in danger? Will we be OK or not? We just want to know.

Once the mind forms its opinion, we often feel a sense of relief—‘Well, at least I know.’ The opinion does not need to be true to be comforting. I don’t have to be accurate or complete in my thinking to feel right and settled in my opinion. The settledness of mind simply feels good. As long as there is uncertainty, some part of me is thinking and wondering and trying to solve the problem.

But one of the problems with ‘knowing’ is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency human beings have to notice the things that confirm our opinion and either not see or not give the same weight to things that contradict our viewpoint. We tend to like people who agree with us (the ones who see the world as clearly as we do) and struggle with or avoid those who have other opinions.

In the Zen tradition, we say not-knowing is good. Rather than a problem to be solved, not-knowing is a way of directly meeting the reality of our lives. (As I write this, I am aware that I am now encouraging us to put ‘not-knowing’ in the binary category of ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’. While this is slightly ironic, creating the same feeling of certainty I was recently criticizing, it does seem useful in helping us meet and work skillfully with the ever-changing world around and within us.)

Shunryu Suzuki, the teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, once famously said “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”   Being an expert means approaching a situation with a lot of experience; you already know what is going on and you know what you are going to do. While this can be wonderfully beneficial in some situations, for life in general, this kind of ‘knowing’ causes a narrowing of engagement with the world around us and fewer options going forward. We don’t see what is here, we simply see what we expect.

Part of our Zen training is learning to be comfortable with the discomfort of this sometimes unsettled feeling of not-knowing. As long as we think we ‘know’ we are stuck in the world of the past – the world of the mind. When we realize that we don’t know everything (or even very much at all), we can move with greater ease in the world that is constantly changing and evolving.

The truth is that we don’t ever really know what is coming next. You may think you know what the day will bring, and you may be right some large percentage of the time, but you never really know. Instead of trying to base our lives on how much we know, can we begin to create a foundation of not knowing – of openness to what arises from moment to moment?

Can we notice our natural desire for certainty and rather than trying to fix it by making up some fixed position, can we simply to allow ourselves not to know? Can we be more curious about what is here than about our opinions about what is here?

The great 20th century poet William Carlos Williams carried a pad of paper with him as he moved through his work day as a doctor making house calls. The top of the page was always titled ‘What I noticed today I have never noticed before.’

Maybe today we can all keep our eyes open just like he did.

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Days Like Lightening

Last night, in our Zoom Zen meditation gathering, we read a short passage from our 13th century Korean ancestor Chinul. Chinul is credited as being the founder of the Jogye school of Korean Son (Zen). My teacher’s teacher, Seung Sahn, founder of the Kwan Um Zen school, was his 78th successor. So through my teacher, George Bowman, I am Chinul’s 80th successor. Yikes!

I suppose we are all the successors of so many geniuses and ruffians. If you could count back 80 generations, I wonder what you would encounter? What lineages we could all claim—women and men of great courage and faith as well as people of questionable ethics and behavior. Those who lived in times of prosperity and those, like us, who lived in times of crisis.

But sometime around 1200, somewhere on the Korean peninsula, Chinul wrote this reminder for us all: ‘The days and months go by like lightening; we should value the time. We pass from life to death in the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out; it’s hard to guarantee even a morning and an evening.’ I have read this passage for many years and each time it brings me up short. But in this time of uncertainty, even familiar words seem to contain some new import.

Days and months do go by like lightening. I am constantly amazed to find myself an old man of sixty-seven, when I remember so clearly being a young man. ‘Just the other day’….can now mean last week, last month or several years ago. My grandson, now nearly fourteen months old, was born just the other day. How quickly our lives pass and how surprisingly easy to miss this wild evanescence in the pressure of our daily responsibilities.

Life, as Chinul says, is not guaranteed. Our usual sense of the solidity and stability of life is a delusion that, while necessary and comforting, is ultimately not true. We all have many different reactions when we remember or when we are forced to confront the ephemeral quality of life. Chinul, I believe, is not trying to scare us, but to turn us to wake up to the preciousness of our lives in this moment.

Reminders of our shared mortality and fragility are now woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Walking down the street, I move to the other side of the sidewalk when I pass someone. I am afraid that I might either contract or spread this novel corona virus. But these reminders work both ways. Now complete strangers walking by the Temple will sometimes stop and smile and ask about my health as I work in the gardens. We smile at each other, remembering that we are connected.

So as we live into the full extent of the pandemic, whatever that may be, let us remember to value the time. Remembering the momentary miracle of breathing in and breathing out, let us take delight in the people and the fullness of life that surrounds as is us.

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Deep Democracy: An Invitation

In the early 2000’s, I traveled out to Yachats, Oregon to attend a workshop with a teacher named Arny Mindell. Arny had studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, but had broken with the Jungian orthodoxy to create his own way which he called, Process Work. I had randomly picked up one of his books, LEADER AS MARTIAL ARTIST, while visiting a friend in California. I was captivated by his ideas and was amazed at how ‘Zen’ he sounded.

In particular, I was struck by Arny’s idea of ‘deep democracy’.  ‘Deep democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world become whole.’ This perspective of a reciprocal relationship between the self and the world mirrors the Buddhist teaching of dependent co-arising—that the self and the world create each other, I wanted to learn more from him. We are not actors moving about on a large stage, but we are constantly collaborating to create the world around us. Breathing in and breathing out, we are not separate from the world in which we live.

Arny also wrote ‘Deep democracy is that special feeling of belief in the inherent importance of all parts of ourselves and all viewpoints in the world around us.’ Each of us is a multiplicity of voices and parts. Rather than privilege some voices and suppress others, we should learn to welcome all the parts of ourselves. We don’t have to let the dark voices take over, but we do need to honor and listen to them, because they too have value and contain necessary wisdom.

Likewise, we need to be actively open all the voices in the world around us, not just because everyone has a right to be heard, but because only when we see what is happening from many sides can we fully appreciate what here and act effectively. Reality is a collaborative construction and we each see it from a unique and valuable perspective.

The coast of Oregon is wild and rural. The waves crash constantly on the rocky shore—on clear calm days as well as stormy ones. The week with Arny and his wife and teaching partner Amy (and 100 plus other people) was wonderful and challenging for me. Two things I remember most: first is meeting a person who has become a life-long friend. We have gone on to lead workshops together and she remains a dear friend and collaborator to this day.

The second thing that is still vivid these many years later is Arny’s amazing presence. He’s a small man with a huge grin. Everything that arises seems to delight and intrigue him. During the workshop, he met everything, even disruption, with a level of curiosity and trust that I had never witnessed before.

In LEADER AS MARTIAL ARTIST, he put it this way: ‘Deep democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world become whole.’ This perspective deeply contradicts our usual sense of life as struggle and the heroic individual who fights and subdues the dangerous territory around her. A Tibetan Buddhist teacher once expressed this same radical sentiment when he said: ‘The world is kindly bent to ease us.’

What if it’s really true that ‘the world is here to help us?’ What if, even in this time of uncertainty and fear, there is some particular opportunity opening for each one of us to learn and to grow in new ways? And what if, in some way, our individual thoughts, words and actions are important to our collective response as we learn to cope and perhaps even thrive as humans in this new world?

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Grieving What We Have Lost

With the arrival of the corona virus and our necessary social precautions to curb its spread, we have lost some of the fundamental rhythms of our lives. We are living into a new world that none of us had planned for. I find myself strangely caught between a sense of normalcy and a quality of surrealness. I still get up every morning and still have steel-cut oats for breakfast and still talk to people on the phone. But everything, including the future, feels deeply different – so different that when I talk to people I haven’t spoken to since this all started, I find myself at a loss for words to describe this what is happening.

Some part of the foundation of my life has been taken away. Things I didn’t even know I counted on are no longer here.

I went for a walk with a good friend yesterday. We’ve been walking and talking and eating lunches together for over twenty-five years. We always hug when we meet and when we say goodbye. It’s not a big deal, it’s just what we do—or did. Yesterday, both in greeting and in parting, we stood some small distance from each other and bowed. Now I love bowing as an expression of greeting and offering, but to bow to my good friend made me feel sad and slightly disoriented.

To lose what we had relied on, especially the things we didn’t even know we were relying on, is traumatic. Not only do we lose the particular behavior or experience, but we lose a sense of certainty about life itself. We realize, in these moments of traumatic loss, that our whole world is much more fragile than it seems.

On some level, we all know that everything changes and that we will all die. But most of the time, we unconsciously count on everything being pretty much the same as it was yesterday. We depend on knowing what there is to worry about—it’s the project that’s due next week, it’s making sure to get to the grocery store before we run out of bread, it’s dealing with a upset friend or child. But when we see that our whole life is more like a dream than anything solid, we are shaken to our subtle core.

We are all grieving the world we knew and the unwitting certainty we have lost. At times like these, remembering the many stages and conditions of grief can be helpful: denial, anguish, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – to name just a few. These are not a linear progression, but rather a way to understand the many emotions and mind-states that we may cycle through after a significant loss.

The wonderful Zen advice for what to do when you find yourself in any of these states (or any other), is to ‘do nothing.’ While we all have ongoing responsibilities, we also need to cut ourselves some slack as we adjust to the new world in which we now find ourselves. If you’re having trouble focusing, instead of just trying harder, it might be helpful to realize that you are going through a necessary and useful response to a traumatic loss. Take a break. Accept that you’re not going to be as productive for a while. If find yourself being more emotional and reactive than usual, realizing that this too is a normal response to a time of unusual stress and change can be helpful in stopping and taking time to recover before moving forward.

So my advice for the day – don’t try harder. When strong emotions or strong dullness arises, know that this is part of a healthy response to these unprecedented times. Instead of powering your way through, notice where you are, consider that it might be an important place to be for a while, and see if you can learn whatever it has to teach you.

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