Category: Relationships

Love is Being Present

How do we stay truly present to whatever is happening in our lives?  How do we practice living from the deep gratitude that each of us has experienced in fleeting moments?  How do we remember, with every breath, the miracle of simply existing, the miracle of this body that sustains us from the moment we come into human form until the moment we go out again—while remembering also that our true being is not confined by the body, did not begin with birth, and does not end at death?

Truthfully, for me at least, it’s hard to navigate daily life from this place of grateful remembrance.  It’s hard not to get caught up in bills and deadlines, irritations and disagreements, until life begins to feel like a series of problems to be solved or tasks to be crossed off the to-do list.  Sometimes it takes the shock of the unexpected to open us again to a truer sense of who and what we are.

A month ago, my Uncle James came down with what he thought was bronchitis.  By Thanksgiving, he’d been given supplemental oxygen to cart around, but still no one knew what was going on.  A week ago, with breathing an increasing struggle, he went to the hospital in hopes of finally getting an accurate diagnosis.  After a series of biopsies and CAT scans, the news came back: idiopathic interstitial lung disease.  There’s no known cause and no treatment.  In fact, idiopathic means simply “arising spontaneously from an obscure or unknown cause.”  I guess one could say the same about life itself.

Today, my uncle is headed home to enter hospice care.  He’ll be surrounded by his sisters and brother, his nephews and nieces, grand-nephews and grand-nieces.  His kindness and his humor remain intact even as his body fails.  He’s not afraid, he says, of death—only of dying.  I have been through this before, with my father.  I know the strange stew of thankfulness, sorrow, love, regret, joy, loss and celebration that comes with the imminent loss of one you love.  In times like this, it’s easier to be absolutely present, knowing it might be the last moment we spend with someone dear to us.

But every moment could be the last moment, and every breath along the way is cause for celebration.  It’s an absolute miracle that we’re here at all; that there’s something rather than nothing.  These bodies, these lives, these relationships we have with other beings—all of it is miraculous.  That being pours itself unceasingly into existence to experience all this—as earth, sky, stars, wind, water; as you, as me, as my Uncle James—is miraculous.  And when we can remember this, even in the midst of the most ordinary tasks, then we really live the miracle of our own being, and know how vast we are.  Through all our losses, nothing is lost. Through all our changes, what we are is unharmed, unchanging, eternal.  The great German modernist Rilke captures this sense beautifully in his poem “Autumn”:

We all are falling. Here, this hand falls.

And see—there goes another. It’s in us all.

   And yet there’s One who’s gently holding hands

 let this falling fall and never land.

Whatever life brings, may we not forget those gently holding hands.

Postscript: James Mitchell passed away on Friday, December 27, surrounded by family.  He was 67 years old.

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There is a light alive within the darkness

Will you hold another who has been touched by the darkness within? Will you love them enough to allow them to fall apart in your arms? To unravel, to become unglued, and to feel unbearably lost as the wisdom of their process unfolds? Will you be the space in which they can finally meet the feelings and emotions that have been kept at bay for a lifetime?

To love another in this way you must touch everything that is unresolved within you – all of your own unmet sadness, abandoned shame, discarded grief, and deserted aloneness. You are willing to no longer stay safe on the sidelines. You are willing to get messy. Even gooey and drippy.

Will you set aside your need for the other to change, to be different, to be “cured,” to be transformed, and to be healed? Will you resist the temptation to talk them out of their embodied experience, to tell them everything will be okay, and to dishonor the creativity hidden inside the unwanted? Will you allow your heart to break with them, and endure the urge inside you to put it all back together again? Will you fall into the unknown with them, holding them close, and provide a home for their brokenness?

To care about others, yourself, and the world in this way you must stay radically embodied. You are no longer interested in transcending suffering, confusion, and neurosis, for you see these as thundering expressions of the path itself. Please don’t turn away. As your attention moves out into the conceptual world, return to the wild intelligence of your body, for it is there that love is working behind the scenes, giving birth to its sweet activity in this dimension.

It is in this factory of love, which is operating as the temple of your own body, where the sacred world is revealing its essential secrets of healing: there is no “other,” there has never been an “other,” and there could never be an “other.” There is only the reflection of your own being.

Love is taking the pieces of your heart and is using them to re-assemble the world in front of you, each as an invitation sent to reveal to you the preciousness of what is really happening here.

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The Forgiveness Challenge: Shifting from Narrow Mind t...

Tami Simon speaks with Rabbi Rami Shapiro, the co-director of the One River Wisdom School. Rabbi Rami writes the column “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler” for Spirituality & Health magazine, and hosts the How to Be a Holy Rascal show on Unity Online Radio. With Sounds True, he has created The Forgiveness Challenge, a three-week online intensive course on radical acceptance. In this episode, Tami speaks with Rabbi Rami about dealing with situations where we find it challenging to forgive, the importance of asking others to forgive us, and how looking deeply into the areas of life that require forgiveness can illuminate meaning in our lives. (71 minutes)

Peter Fenner and Jeff Foster: Unconditioned Awareness ...

What is it that is here no matter what’s going on around us? Why does the experience of pure awareness seem so hard to hold on to? Tami Simon speaks with Sounds True authors Peter Fenner and Jeff Foster about the nature of awareness and how we can begin to offer the gifts of our realization to those around us. (75 minutes)

The Practice of the Imagination, with David Whyte

In this short video, poet David Whyte takes listeners on a journey into the nature and practice of the imagination. For David, while we ordinarily think of the imagination as the ability to think up new things, the poetic tradition sees the imagination as the ability in each of us to form a central image which provides a container for our own belonging. As we explore this image – and as it unfolds within us – we come to discover our innate aliveness.

David is the author of three inspiring audio learning programs with Sounds True:

When the Heart Breaks: A Journey Through Requited and Unrequited Love

Clear Mind, Wild Heart: Finding Clarity and Courage through Poetry

What to Remember When Waking: The Disciplines of an Everyday Life

Enjoy this short video with David on the practice of the imagination.

The Art of Empathy, Part 2

Tami Simon speaks with Karla McLaren, an award-winning author, social science and empathy researcher, and educator. With Sounds True, Karla has created the book and audio series The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, as well as the new book and audio series The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill. In the second half of this two-part interview, Tami speaks with Karla about two unusual skills she teaches called “conscious complaining” and “ethical empathic gossip”; the concept that there is no such thing as a positive or negative emotion; and how a feeling of hatred can be an important key to working with the shadow part of our psyche. (66 minutes)

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