When the darkness comes

Finding Our Way Home

There we all are, a group shot of all of us—the stars, the black holes, the super novas, the suns going in and out of existence, the galaxies, the oceans, the weather systems, the nations, the towns, the families, and each of us human beings with all our different perspectives and opinions on what should and should’t be happening and with all our vulnerabilities as human animals and all the storms of emotion-thought passing through, sometimes sending us into deep depressions, overwhelming states of anxiety or grief, or driving us into anger and acts of violence, big or small.

It’s not surprising that we sometimes feel lost and far from home. In fact, it happened to me just last week.

Many relatively minor things in my life had been pushing my buttons, and although the sciatica had subsided, my chronic back pain had been more flared up, and pain can be exhausting. I’d gone off coffee as well. I felt tired, unable to keep up with everything that needed doing. And the backdrop to all this was the much larger destruction and suffering in Gaza, Israel and Iran, not to mention Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Los Angeles and elsewhere. I found myself sinking into a familiar darkness.

When the darkness is threatening to pull me down into cynicism, despair and rage, as it did last week and as it sometimes does, what leads me back to the light and the love?

For one thing, loving friends. For another, the beauty of the natural world. And certainly the nondual understanding I wrote about in my last post is helpful. But perhaps first and foremost, what dispels the darkness is finally sitting down on my meditation cushion and simply being here, present and aware, breathing. Listening. No longer running away, no longer seeking relief in all the ways that don’t work. Finally just stopping. Simply being. Open, silent and still. Just this. So simple, and yet how long I can still sometimes avoid it even after all these years.

Another thing that helped this time was listening to a dharma talk by Fu Schroeder given recently at Green Gulch Zen Farm. Fu is someone I knew back in my Zen days when I practiced at SFZC, Berkeley Zen Center and Green Gulch. I always really liked Fu. I haven’t seen her in many years, and we’ve both taken rather different paths, and now we’ve both grown old and are each living in retirement communities.

Fu stayed in the Zen world, became a priest and then finally an abbot, while I went off with non-traditional former Zen teacher Toni Packer and then on into Advaita and radical nonduality, always circling back to Zen and Toni, absorbing all these different threads while engaging in my own direct exploration.

I’m no longer drawn to many traditional aspects of formal Zen practice such as robes, Japanese names and hours spent sitting in excruciating pain, all of which Toni Packer left behind, but the essence of Zen practice and the Zen perspective are right on the mark in my view. Fu articulates the heart of it in this talk very clearly, and in a way very relevant to the current conflict, violence and polarization in the world. Perhaps you will be drawn to listen:

A Word about Listening:

Listening is a great art. It’s becoming a lost art. We are moving so fast, being bombarded with so much information and so many emails and texts, that we find ourselves skimming through things, multi-tasking, never giving anything our full, undivided, whole-hearted attention. Listening, as I see it, is at the very heart of spirituality. And by listening, I don’t mean just with the ears. I mean with the whole bodymind and the whole heart. I mean seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling—being fully awake, right now, in THIS moment.

And, of course, we’re not always awake, and sometimes we need to multitask. So this isn’t about some kind of perfectionism or pseudo-holiness or trying to do it right. But I invite all of us, myself included, to notice when we’re needlessly busy, when we’re sinking or wallowing in the darkness, and I invite us to stop. To be still. To listen. To simply be.

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Beautiful words from a teacher at Springwater (my old home):

Richard Witteman is a dear friend and one of the people Toni Packer asked to carry on her work. He has a beautiful gentle heart, and I've always found him to be deeply insightful and open, as well as playful.

Of meditation and inquiry, he writes:

One of the things I love about this work is how practical it is in everyday life, how the spirit of inquiry keeps bringing me back to direct experience, to what is here, right now.

The spirit of inquiry has a quality of simple honesty. A willingness to be with the tapestry of feeling and sensation just the way that it is, no matter what the weather. An honest and intimate in-touch-ness with what is really here.

This doesn’t have a hard edge – it’s not a mechanical exercise, a willful overcoming of the wandering mind. There is the flavor of something familiar, a feeling of coming home after wandering lonely roads. A sense of moving from the black and white shadowy world of distracted thought, to the immediacy of vibrant colors and rich textures.

No matter how far thought and imagination may range, no matter how many times there is caught-up-ness in a story or impression, the possibility of taking a breath and waking from the dream is always present. Home is always here.

Recently, someone asked me what I have learned from years of experiencing this meditative way of being, and this answer spontaneously came, “I’ve become interested in what is here.”

How many days and weeks have been spent being interested in what was, in what might be, in what should be… in what was lost, in what I might get, in what I might lose… in what I want, in what I definitely don’t want? So many impulses to pursue the fleeting promises of safety and love, fulfillment and security, of finding happiness. Discovering, time and again that these promises lead only to labyrinths – where each turn leads deeper into an unsatisfying maze, into a deepening dream of separation.

Considering this now, I feel this is the heart of meditation: Simply being interested in what is here – being more interested in what is… than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

Being interested in what is going on here, in this moment, in this body – including everything. Getting to know that which is under our noses and yet seems so elusive and distant. The full resonance of sensation, of color and light and sound, of feeling, thought and imagination. The subtle realms of impression and feeling and vibration and resonance which go beyond the usual categories of thought and emotion. The full, rich current of being alive, the whole continuum of being… beyond any sense of what should be, what should not be.

— Richard Witteman (full article here)

(Richard divides his time between his home in California and Springwater Center, in rural northwestern New York, where he offers retreats in person and online. He’s at Springwater this summer, and will be holding a retreat there in person and online from June 28 through July 5, and he’ll be offering another in September. I recommend him very highly, and also all the others offering retreats at Springwater now—Wayne Coger, Sandra Gonzalez, Stew Glick, Les Schaffer, Bob Datolla and Stephan Bielfeldt. And I very highly recommend Springwater Center. It is a great place for silent retreats, and you can also go there outside of retreat as a guest or volunteer—there are a number of different ways to be there. It’s a beautiful place on several hundred acres of land with woods and open fields. No rituals, no hierarchy, no dogmas—very open, warm-hearted place, encouraging you to explore, question, look and listen directly.)

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Closing words: Each of Us Is a Light

Each of us is a light. A unique expression of light. The world needs all the light it can get. And that doesn’t mean ignoring the darkness or papering it over with spiritual platitudes and facile ideas. Indeed, in my experience, it is a lifelong, moment to moment, always THIS moment work of seeing through delusion and not sinking into cynicism, despair, self-pity, hopelessness or rage—and instead, finding the light, again and again. The light is always right here, closer than close, most intimate, in our very heart, and also everywhere once we see everything from wholeness and love rather than from separation and encapsulation. This “work” I speak of, which could also be called deep play, is not accomplished by straining. It is accomplished by relaxing, letting go, opening, dissolving.

But there’s a difference between the relaxation and letting go of a Zen Master or a great athlete or musician at the top of their game and the “relaxation” and “letting go” of the drunk who is passed out on the pavement. I think most of us have tasted both versions in some form. So it is a kind of delicate balance between effort and effortlessness. An effortless effort. Relaxed, deeply playful, serious and joyful work that dissolves into effortless being.

It’s not complicated. It’s very very very simple. Being right here, right now. Stop, look, listen. Simple, but not always easy. And yet, when letting go finally happens, it couldn’t be more ease-full and easy.

(I’ll add that in some cases, the relaxed open listening that I’m describing is not even possible without the help of psychotherapy, psychiatric care, psychiatric medications, and so on. There are many things that can affect our inner weather, and I encourage people to do whatever is appropriate for their situation).

Wishing you all peace, ease, light and love…