How Observing the Comings and Goings of Emotions can Lead us to Joy

Today, I stand in wonderment at the ephemera that are my emotions. I just learned of this word, having suspected its existence all along. It means "a person accommodated, a house guest." I add to this definition my own meaning: one who visits for a moment, just passing through, unable to be fully caught, like silk slipping through hands. I think of Rumi's poem, "The Guest House" (see below this post) and watch again and again my emotions knocking on my door, begging to be invited in, sitting for a while (and sometimes up-ending the furniture), and then leaving just as quickly as they came.

Today in my healing, I followed the contemplations of The Pilgrimage of Peace near Harper's Ferry, WV, led by Br.Stefan Andre Waligur. This is a beautiful three week rolling retreat  (come when you may, bring what you can, offer what's inside.) http://friendsofsilence.net/event/2013/08/09/fifth-annual-pilgrimage-peace

I am following the lessons on-line until I can be there in person next week. I am particularly drawn to a contemplation of the Beatudes. Here's a clip that captured me:

"Again, there is the movement through the beatitudes, which are each a gate of initiation. And this deep knowing and learning to know, is part of that journey through the gates. First: the gate of poverty, of inadequacy, of loss, of possessing nothing. Second: the gate of grief, of letting go. Third: the gate of releasing the anger and grief and being transformed to gentleness (notice, this is not a gate of meekness and wimpiness — it is a fierce gate, but a transformed one—the lion that chooses gentleness) 

I am moved by the third gate.I know how very hard it can be to release anger and grief and alchemize it into gentleness. For me, it is a choice to remain still when my instinct might be to lash out.The feeling in my body is one of melting. A sudden warmth that permeates breath, muscle, memory. A decision to sit with what is being offered. What am I learning in my stillness and willingness to sit in discomfort and watch the ephemera come and go and come again?

My last entry for me had a twinge of anger in it. Perhaps at the time I felt it was righteous anger. And I belive there is such a thing, but when I sat with my feelings and became still, I discovered grief instead. There was no right being wronged. My friends who had reached out despite their family obligations, were only trying to be helpful. That I feel an outsider here is true. That I try too hard to listen to others here and watch their lives unfold in the service of being supportive, yes. And there is an imbalance, because I don't talk about what scintillates my mind and my heart. I wonder what holds me back. But today, I found a way to tilt the balance so I wasn't falling off. Today, and this is a day with more physical pain than most, I turned my focus to my dreams. The question was, "How do you know when you are ready to help?" and my answer to myself was, "You feel alone because you are looking outside yourself for someone to talk about the topics you enjoy. Now, is the time to reengage those conversations inside. Now is the time to step beyond the idea of helping yourself through juicing and physical therapy and meditation, though all are necessary and good. Now is the time to write with one hand, to build a business, create a website, point your heart directly into the center of this luscious glowing pulsing energetic earth, pull the trigger, and shoot.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,
    translation by Coleman Barks
http://www.gratefulness.org/poetry/guest_house.htm

Following Joy

Last night, I decided to take this joy project to the juicer and chemically shift my internal hormone bath (which worked! Yay, endorphins!) Perhaps in no small part because I had chemically altered what I thought possible, I got an unexpected call from a dear friend of mine who was up on business. In the past, he has given me body work in exchange for writing mentorship. Out of our exchange has come a lovely relationship that continues to expand in new directions.

Today, we met for lunch and a walk. Note to self:  joy
                                                                               descends
                                                                                       from hope.

Why did I have hope, sitting with this man at our small table in a suburban shopping center? It was because we spoke of the things nearest to our hearts: relationships, the nature of intimacy, our individual writing, and our attempts to clarify the work we do in the world.

It was also because there was no judgement, one of the other. And the topics we discussed were ones that keep me so silent in the suburbs for fear of judgement, for fear I will not find an acknowledging nod.

My voice grew deeper and more assured . My skin softened because I stopped seeking to feel understood. A dolphin out of water is how I've felt here and that feeling has kept me in sadness and kept me from expressing the all of me and thereby healing. It isn't that I don't have people who care, I do. But this is the suburbs, and people live far from each other and exist in their family units, which fit better into other family units, puzzles with no pieces missing.

To feel ''normal," to feel accepted, to talk of the grandiosity of love and its complications and not feel that my less than conventional desires and visions are odd in any way, brings me joy.

My friend helped me brainstorm website ideas for my writing business. I helped him figure out a title for an article he is writing about sexual surrogacy. In weaving together strands of our experiences, we created new pathways. Doing so took heart and curiosity and a willingness to skirt the edges of the unknown and dive in when the temperature felt right.There was no map.

We hike voraciously through the woods, my arm in  a sling coming merrily for the ride without complaint. All the while, brainstorming, brainstorming.

This is where we are, my heart/body/mind/spirit. When we get angry, it is because something is not right for us. It's our way of getting my attention. I've been angry, I admit, perhaps for having listened to other people's stories and for not having shared my own truth. I take responsibility for not expressing myself, but each attempt felt like lifting a boulder and I see now that I've torn both my shoulders -- my lifting structure -- for having tried too hard. There are places I can be the self I enjoy being ~ Brooklyn, Cuba, Ocracoke Island.

There was a time after the first surgery and then after the second, that I worked to be okay with what was, in which I made the best of my circumstances and displayed a courageous and helpful face.

Sometimes, a repeat performance is not necessary, especially realizing gradually, like poison on a slow-drip, that having three surgeries was not necessary.

Sometimes, it's our anger that gets us out and back into love again.

The Healing Diaries (AKA: The Joy Cure)

In the muted skin of morning, I knew I would cry that day. Cry for the surgeries that hadn't worked. Cry for the dreams I thought I'd lost. Cry for the lies that had been told to my body, the ones I had believed. Cry for those who told them and, bless their hearts, believed they were true. Cry for the beginning of my healing.

It is evening now and night holds the sounds of cicadas close to its heart. I am all cried out. I have drunk my green juice and decided that it is up to me to heal my body. I am on a threshold, before which I listened to experts in the medical field and some in alternative health modalities. I still want them on my team, just the right ones who aren't afraid of death and so bow in awe at the feet of life. I need them on my side. But more than anything, I need me on my side.

And so my directive from headquarters (me) is very clear: I must follow each day my joy, even if it's only found momentarily in the forgetting of pain. I will track the process by which I invite my mind to discover and dwell in things that make me happy and I will watch how that practice affects the healing of my right shoulder from its third rotator cuff surgery, as well as my left shoulder and my left hip, which have tears in the labrum. I will also watch what my beginner's mind initially does in this process and where it goes naturally and if those places bring light or sorrow or anger or relief or desperation or helplessness or hopelessness or joy. And I will continue practices and add new ones to see if I can influence my mood and therefore my healing.

Mind Over Medicine, by Dr. Lissa Rankin, has been an inspiration and I have already seen results in my first effort: having the third surgery in Brooklyn with a doctor highly recommended by a dear friend. Stay tuned for a brief explanation of The Brooklyn Experiment. I write slowly just with my left hand. I think that means my right brain is running the show.

If I don't document this, I'm afraid I'll forget the intuitive healing power of the mind.

Excerpt from my Cuba Memoir

            “It cost me a lot of work to open my heart to you,” he wrote in his third letter to me. I felt the pause in his writing. The intake of warm air. The sigh protracted over as long as he could hold it. “Really, I did not want to suffer, but I don’t regret it,” he continued. “Because in my life there was a before Sarah and an after Sarah.”

            I put the letter down gently. I had been a landmark. Not a signpost directing his next step, but rather a fault line separating his life before and after my arrival.  How his presence had shifted subterranean plates in me, too, changing my surface landscape evermore. I did not know what to do with the movement, so I picked up the letter and cradled it softly like a baby in my arms. What we had created together had a life of its own and was undeniably extant and breathing. What we would do with it now confused me.

            Turning back to the page, I read, “Sarah, share with me this life, because it is not life without you. I want to enter in yours. I want your nights to be mine eternally, and we will age together.”

            I was aging now. Each turn of the moon shone empty space in my womb. My eyes closed against the backdrop of the early winter sun in Maryland. My mind settled on a memory

            He sits on the edge of the bed, naked. “I’m sorry. I forgot to be careful.”

            “I know.”

            His spine cuts an uneven river of bumps up his back and moves heavily up and down with his smoker's breath.

            I lay across the bed gripped in the immediacy of the moment and tied into an uncertain future.

            “Will you send me Cuban pesos when I have the baby?”

            He chuckles deeply and turns around resting his cheek on my belly. “Sarah, stay. You can live here. We can make it work. Everything that is mine is yours, Gatita. Everything.”

            “I could never go home if I stayed here.”

            He shook his head. “This will end. You'll be able to go see your family. They could come visit. I know this will end.” Cuban optimism always tastes like hope and chocolate, sweet endorphins covering up the reality of injustice. 

            I imagined the people and places I would never see again. It was the first time I thought of my freedom. Up to that point, when I thought of home, I thought of loneliness and a culture devoid of cafecito in the late afternoon sun. It was easy to think this way because I was returning home. Cuba had become everything the United States was not, and I savored the differences because I still had both. Now, thinking what it would be like to make the choice to stay which was also a choice not to return, my view of Cuba closed into a small pinhole, like the pupil of an eye that had suddenly seen too much light. But even in my contracting state, a small part of me hoped for a ball of dividing cells that would fill my belly and my life with something unexpected and lovely.

           

           

Autumn in Cuba

 Today, I sent an e-mail to my friend, Eloy, in Cuba, who teaches yoga in Havana. I wondered (again) why my words in Spanish want to be poetry as if it were their birthright, while those in English must be coaxed at times. Here is what I wrote:

Hola! Hoy es muy pero muy otono, con la respira del viento pasando por las ojas cambiando a sus colores magnificas, revelando sus colores verdaderos, como funciona asi, el velo verde cobrando su esencia por la duracion del verano.

Y en Cuba, recuerdo aunque no habia cambiar de los colores, el viento huele diferente como otono como una perdida de algo.

Here is what it means:

Hello! Today is very autumn, but very autumn, with the breath of the wind passing through the leaves changing into their magnificent colors, revealing their true colors, because it works that way, the green veil covering their essence only for the duration of the summer.

And in Cuba, I remember even though there wasn't the changing of colors, the wind smelled different like autumn, like the loss of something. 

I love this poem by David Whyte ~ it kind of says it all right now

 Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness

and the sweet confinement

of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

We are held in something large

When I was twenty-two, I lived on the verdant and craggy coast of Oregon and I studied the animals that lived inside the mud of the slough. When the tide went out, the mudflats glistened -- a globular, thickened mass of sulphur-scented habitat.

Each one of my friends was drawn to this dot of a coastal town because we couldn’t be away from the sea’s abiding pull. So, we lived in deference to the power of nature, which entered our houses at will and grew blackberry brambles across our living room floors. In response, we emptied our houses onto nature’s lawn, placing the bathtub on the bluff under the kitchen window and feeding a water hose down the face of the house to fill the claw foot with hot water. When we bathed, and if we were very still, a herd of forty elk emerged through the wooded barrier separating their forest from our meadow. Out they came, munching on grass and snorting at flies while the aged bull stood guard watching over them.

Those days were full of a sparkled innocence though none of us was young enough to be truly innocent. Beyond the tides of human failures and joys lay the immaculate pull of the Universe’s own creation. We came together over hand-picked meals and efforts to catch glimpse of the orcas in the sound, over knitting and car mechanics and weddings and departures. We joined forces in Frisbee and pool. The Oregon coast enchanted me, the way it whispered in my ear when we were alone, making me its daughter. I learned we are held in something large.

When I left and found myself in  New York City, I felt the same way about the wilderness of humanity. I became a part of a body outside my own. When I stepped one way, the person in front of me stepped the other. We were all a weaving tapestry of destinations and deadlines. When I dropped a dollar, a gentleman picked it up and handed it back. When I carried my luggage up the subway steps, the weight disappeared into the helpful gesture of a stranger holding the other end of my bag. When I danced outdoors, the stars reminded me they had always been there for me in a same but different sky.

We are held in something large.

And even in the suburbs, of which I complain of late, I can’t help but feel the urgency of trees and sparrows and squirrels to mark on this earth a hiding place. I see my own heart grow in its yearning, in its separation from wilderness and constant humanity. This place is a necessary space for me to explore. Without the ability to lean on that which inspires me directly, I must dig into the mud. I see divinity every day in the tug of my own heart to reconnect. Longing carves a channel to be filled. The rush of tidal water I await has its own shimmering quality of anticipation. There is nowhere else to go but toward hope and desire and a letting go of expectations. The reluctance I see in people here to reach out reminds me we are held in something large because its opposite exists. There cannot be one without the other.

We are held in something large.