Tag Archives: love

Mistakes

Part of the wisdom of spiritual soulful self-presence is to be able to let certain aspects of your life alone. This is the art of spiritual noninterference. Yet other aspects of your life call urgently for your attention; they call to you as their shelterer to come and harvest them. You can discern where these wounds are in the temple of memory, then visit them in a gentle and mindful way. The one kind of creative presence you could bring to these areas is compassion. Some people can be very compassionate to others but are exceptionally harsh with themselves. One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit again the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging. This art of integration is very precious. You have to trust your deeper, inner voice to know which places you need to visit. This is not to be viewed in a quantitative way, but rather in a gentle, spiritual way. If you bring that kind light to your soul and to its wounded places, you can effect incredible inner healing.

John O’ Donohue, Anam Cara (with thanks to What’s here now?)

I have found recently that this process of discovery and forgiveness is something that has been happening, unbidden, in my own practice. Memories arise, and arise again, despite the usual recourse to the breath. Something like O’Donohue’s “inhabit[ing] again the rhythm you were in at the time” seems to take place of itself, and somehow through this sequence of arising and returning a healing appears to take place. For me, certainly, this is not a willed thing, by the way; it happens (I use the word advisedly) within the flow of practice, not in place of it.

I am aware of the tentative nature of my own words here. (Interestingly, I only stumbled across the passage from Anam Cara on the ‘What’s here now’ blog some time after the process had established itself, and found John O’Donohue’s description uncannily close to my own experience.) This is a delicate process, and not a thing I could ever have envisaged, still less willed, consciously for myself. (Initially, it appeared no more than a distraction.) The normal turning back to the breath, despite the sometimes overwhelming emotional energy of these memories, seems to accomplish something very like O’Donohue’s sense that “[i]f you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself.”

The mistakes and their wounds of the past are unavoidable anyway. They happened: no amount of regret will change that. In any case, they were part of the sequence of cause and effect we have come to inhabit merely by the accidents of our birth and our place in history. The love that is inherent in the mindfulness of our practice was always waiting for just this chance; now at last it can do its own work of bringing us to rest.

Gratitude and water

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Gratitude is a more subtle emotion than it seems, I think. Oh, it is easy enough to be grateful to someone for a gift or a kindness; that’s not what I mean. There is another kind of gratitude – we might call it metaphysical gratitude, maybe – that is a deep sense of thanks merely for what is. To begin with it might have an object – gratitude for a clear test result, perhaps, or for the safe return of a missing cat – but underlying these there is an objectless gratitude that is close to a simple joy in isness itself. It has to do with accepting what comes to be without wishing it were otherwise, without trying to impose a mechanical order on the organic. Accepting what is given as it is may be the highest form of gratitude.

In theistic religions, of course, the pure impulse towards this kind of gratitude is always subverted; one must be grateful to God for this or that. The heart’s sweet clarity is clouded by forms of words: “Thank you, Lord!” we cry, and the initial flood of joy is diverted into acceptable canals of meaning.

Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way… It is because it does not contend that it is never at fault.

Tao Te Ching VIII

Free gratitude is like this – flowing like water, it follows the patterning of what comes to be, the organic order that you can see in the path of an ivy strand climbing a brick wall, or the eddies in a river downstream of a fallen tree. To love what is simply because it is – not for how it might benefit us – is the cleanest and truest kind of gratitude, that comes, as Lao Tzu would say, very close to the way itself.

Love, friendship and solitude

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I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.
Rainer Maria Rilke (with thanks to Maria Popova)

Solitude, that contemplative necessity, can be a difficult thing. Perhaps it requires the solitary to relinquish all relationships and move out into the desert, either literally or metaphorically, as so many have done over the years. Or else it may be a thing of closed doors, of jealously guarded time in a study, or a bathroom, metered out in hours or minutes and maybe feared or resented as infidelity.

But it seems as if another way is at least possible, as Rilke explains: a delicate and sometimes perilous adventure in shared risk and trust, whose rewards can be as great, perhaps, as those of the relationship itself. I once used the phrase “married eremitism” here, and clunky though it is it does seem to sum up this companionable solitude, and how, eventually, it can become somehow a comfortable thing, sturdy and quiet but eager, almost, in its own way. It may be one of the loveliest gifts two people can give to each other.

Groundswell

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I use the phrase “The Ground of Being” – though I don’t normally capitalise it – often on this blog. It is usually credited to Paul Tillich, who used it in his Systematic Theology to refer to God as being-itself, though I doubt if he was its originator. The concept itself has been around for centuries, in Christian mysticism, in the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition, in the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao…

The ground of being is there, and only there, when we come to an end of ourselves. It lies far beyond all we know as self, or other – though it can appear to us so utterly other that we are tempted to hide from it – and yet the way to it is inward, into the extreme depths of what we are. In Cynthia Bourgeault’s words, “it is the spring at the bottom of the well of our being through which hope is continually renewed.”

Ontologically, the ground of being is the source of all that is; in Paul’s words, “He [Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) It is hard to get away from what would appear to be religious language here, though it is as approximate and metaphorical as any other. Matthew Fox writes, “Divinity is found in the depth of things, the foundation of things, the profundity of things. We all have a depth, a ground, a presence and there, says Eckhart, lies divinity, for ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.'”

Yet the ground of being is no thing: it precedes thingness. One can’t really use it, in any meaningful sense, as the object of a sentence, and yet it keeps us wanting to use it as a verb, which is perhaps the reason why the writer known as John opened his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 NIV)

It seems that actually to encounter the ground is way beyond our pay grade. All we can do is to be willing to be encountered by it (though to be without it would be to be without existence at all). Cynthia Bourgeault has a quote for us:

Bede Griffiths, one of the great contemplative masters of our time, claimed that there are actually three routes to the center. You can have a near-death experience. You can fall desperately in love. Or you can begin a practice of meditation. Of the three, he said with a somewhat mischievous smile, meditation is probably the most reliable starting point.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

The ground is the end, that to which all things return. Kathleen Dowling Singh wrote, “[Death] is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being…” It is the safest place, out of which one cannot fall: it might even be called Love. In Dowling Singh’s words, again, “Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process, love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the formless.”

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice