“I don’t believe in moving on or moving forward,” says author Yiyun Li. “It’s more that something big happens, like the death of a child, but then you make space from within so you can contain that something and still live another life.” In her latest story collection, Wednesday’s Child, Li explores the landscape of loss, a terrain she herself has navigated since the suicide of her 16-year-old son in 2017. Vital and heartbreaking, the stories delve into motherhood and marriage, love and friendship, aging and death, illuminating the struggle to come to terms with the losses that life brings. 

Born in Beijing in 1972, Li earned a BS from Peking University in 1996 and an MS in immunology at the University of Iowa in 2000. She planned to pursue her PhD but changed course when she became interested in writing; she completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She has published eleven books, both fiction and nonfiction, among them Where Reasons End (2019), a novel written as a dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after she loses him to suicide.

Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and director of the University’s Creative Writing Program. Her many honors and awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Malamud Award, and a PEN/Hemingway Award. 

Li spoke with me over Zoom about existing in liminal spaces, discovering how loss can expand us, and finding meaning and joy in even our saddest moments. 

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In Wednesday’s Child, the characters are often in between-states, including the liminal period after immigrating to a new country. You’ve lived in the US for nearly three decades. Do you feel rooted in America, or like you’re between America and China? That’s such a good question. I think I feel in between. I don’t fully belong to either place. I grew up in Beijing and left when I was 23, but even when I was there and fully immersed in that society, I didn’t really feel a sense of belonging. At the same time, it was hard to set myself apart from others, because China is crowded and there’s no personal space. I’ve been in America for twenty-seven years now, and though I don’t feel entirely at home here, it’s easier to set myself apart from others. I live among people and I teach, but psychologically I feel apart, and that’s very important to me. 

Why is it so important? I like to think carefully about a lot of things. So I need space—physical space, but mostly mental space. I need to not be in constant communication with people. My ideal way to spend my days is thinking on my own. If I’m with people all the time, I have no time to think, no thoughts.

When you came to the US to attend the University of Iowa, were you planning to emigrate? Yes. There were many things I was not certain of, but one thing I knew when I was in China was I did not want to live in China. The urge was so strong that I never had a moment of doubt. 

Why did you want to leave so badly? There was a lack of resources when I was growing up. Now China is booming, but when I was in college, in the 1990s, it was dire. In my junior year, my boyfriend—now my husband—and I went to a job fair in Beijing. Every single job had a sign that said “Males only.” I thought there was no future for me in the country, or for the country itself, so I decided I must leave. 

One concept in the bardo teachings is that we’re the protagonists of our lives, in the sense that the choices we make determine our trajectory. Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you’d stayed in China? “If I’d stayed”—that’s exactly how I look at fiction. Fiction is all about someone’s alternative lives. I always think about my characters’ alternative lives, but I’ve never wondered, “What if I had stayed in China? I would have married this person, I would have had that job.” I closed the door to that. There was one moment in my American life when there was a reunion for my middle school. These middle school friends in China emailed and asked me to send my current picture for an album they were making. Of course, I did not send it. 

Do you think of yourself as Chinese, American, Chinese-American, Asian-American? I wouldn’t say I’m Chinese because I did give up my citizenship. I have an American passport, but do I feel American? Probably not. Still, I’m more American than Chinese in the ways I approach the world. I don’t really think of myself as an American writer though. Nor do I think of myself as a Chinese writer because I don’t write in Chinese. When Kazuo Ishiguro first started writing, people were always asking, “Are you a British writer? Are you Japanese-British?” And he said he wanted to be called an international writer. I think that’s a very good way to answer.

That in-between is important. I’m just here in the between, living mostly in the world of books. In that sense, I have a country, made up of books by writers from all over the world. That’s my point on the map.

Who lives in that country? Well, the Russians: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev. A lot of British writers, some American writers. In America and China, there’s this urge to expand, invade, claim property, like how the early Americans pushed westward, but in my country of books, you don’t have to expand: you go in rather than out. My tendency is to go inward, rather than outward.

Not to be acquisitive. Right. I tend to be inquisitive, rather than acquisitive. 

For you, going inward also means exploring the dimensions of loss and grief, as you do in Wednesday’s Child. In the story “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” which is about a couple who has lost their son to suicide, you write that perhaps “grief was nothing but disbelief” or “the recognition of having run out of illusions.” How has your understanding of grief evolved as you’ve experienced it and written about it? I used the word “grief” in that story even though I have such a big argument with that word, because its etymology is “heavy burden.” There are certain things that are burdens in life, but I know now that if you lose someone, it’s not a burden. You carry them on. You don’t want to put them down, you don’t want to forget them. 

The other thing, for my characters and for myself, is that grief changes your relationship with time. You feel more patient and have a more philosophical view of how time works. Our lives are so intertwined with time. When we talk about life, we’re actually talking about time: “I have to go to a meeting.” “I have too much to do.” “I don’t have enough time in my day.” Time is the centerpiece of our lives. But now I feel I have some distance from time. Time is important, but if there’s a lot to do and I cannot finish it, it’s OK. 

So grief has created a feeling of expansiveness. That’s the opposite of the common idea that grief narrows your world. I’m working on a piece for the New Yorker, and I was just talking with my editor about this. We were discussing the word “anguish,” what we feel when we lose someone. I looked up “anguish,” and it means “narrowing.” But in my experience, even though it feels like narrowing, it’s the opposite. Grief doesn’t narrow you down, it expands you. 

What’s it like for you to write about grief? My editor and I were working recently on a nonfiction piece of mine that dealt with a loss that I’d experienced, and she said, “When you write, you’re putting the words under anesthesia. You’re putting the story under anesthesia, and then you can do dissections.” We weren’t so much looking at the life story behind the piece as looking at words, at commas, at adjectives. Just by paying so much attention to how the story is written, or how the words are arranged, you’re removing yourself to a certain distance. It’s either before or after you write the piece that you feel the feelings in it.

In a recent New York Times essay about love and the death of your son, you say, “I raised myself as a warrior queen.” What do you mean by that? People say, “You had to overcome a lot to become a writer.” Maybe so, yet I don’t look at it that way. Losing a child, though, is a big thing. The most important lesson I’ve learned is that there are moments when you must have willpower. You have to make a meal, or not only a meal but something delicious and attractive, even as you wonder, “What’s the point of a nice-looking meal?” Or to take another example, there’s the willpower to garden, even when you wonder what the point is when life can be so terrible. People are dying in Israel and Palestine—what’s the point of planting flowers? 

It’s easy to feel there’s no point, and doing these things anyway is willpower. You have to have some will, and you have to use it. That’s why I say I’ve raised myself as a warrior queen. I may not have a lot of ambition or desire to communicate with people. I don’t want a lot of things. But the one thing I want is to have this willpower. I live by it. So many horrible things happen, but you still have to hold your life together. And what holds life together are the little things. When you’re really sad, you can find joy in baking a cake or doing some gardening.

In spite of the tremendous loss you’ve experienced, you have a lovely, upbeat manner and are quick to laugh. Even the saddest story has a funny moment, right? My biggest regret is that very few reviewers say my writing is funny. I would like people to see the humor in my writing. The ability to laugh is one of the most important things. And I do laugh, all the time. You have to, even at the saddest moments. 

I also make a huge distinction between sad and unhappy. Unhappiness and joy oftentimes do not coexist, and unhappiness is more like a bitter state, which is not good. But I don’t feel unhappy. I feel sad. I can say I’m very sad. I have a sad story. But I’m not unhappy, because sadness and joy can coexist.

The post On Grief, Willpower, and Finding Happiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

21 days after the death of his mother, Jin and his father navigate loss, grief, and their new lives without her.

This film will continue to be available to the Tricycle audience, thanks to director Mun Chee Yong. Learn more about her here.

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Photos courtesy of Mun Chee

Photos courtesy of Mun Chee

Photos courtesy of Mun Chee

Photos courtesy of Mun Chee

Photos courtesy of Mun Chee

The post 21 Days 二十一天 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As the founder and senior teacher of the Israel Insight Society (Tovana), a leading organization teaching mindfulness, Vipassana, and dharma in Israel and beyond, Stephen Fulder has been called upon by numerous organizations over the past few week to deliver wisdom and insight during a time of great uncertainty. While his ecologically minded home village of over 1,000 inhabitants is usually teaming with young people, today that is not the case. Many, including Fulder’s own family, have fled to safer regions following the Hamas attack on Saturday, October 7th and subsequent Israeli retaliation that has left thousands dead.

With war at his doorstep and rage flaring across the political spectrum, Fulder is remarkably calm and composed. As a Buddhist author, teacher, and practitioner, he is involved with peace work in the Middle East. He was a founding member of MiddleWay, an organization that used to hold peace walks across the country. Fulder talked with Tricycle about the role of the Engaged Buddhist during times of political strife, how to generate compassion when it seems like the last thing the mind wants to do, and why some of the Buddha’s last words remain more relevant today than ever before. 

Are there Buddhist passages or sutras [Pali, suttas] you turn to in times of despair, confusion, and fear? I personally don’t turn to passages to shift my inner world because I move straight into practice, but I think some really important Buddhist texts can help all of us. I’ll mention one or two. 

One sutra is a discourse of the Buddha close to his death, when he told his monks, “be an island to yourself.” “Be an island to yourself” is a beautiful statement on autonomy despite the stormy seas. What’s important in that text is that [when the Buddha was asked], “OK, how do you do that,” he told his monks, “Go back to your basic truth.” When there’s a breath, there’s just breathing; when there is seeing, there’s just seeing; when there’s thinking, there’s just thinking; go back to some basics of our life experience. That truth will ground you in times of crisis and despair. 

A second group of sutras that might be relevant are the Angulimala Sutra and the story of Patacara. Both of those talk about a situation of extreme violence. In the case of Angulimala, he killed a large number of people, and in the case of Patacara, she lost all her family in sudden accidents. Both tell us in such a beautiful way that karma can shift radically, that there’s nothing fixed in stone, that there’s somewhere bigger than us that can take us in another direction, and we just need to be open to it. 

The third set of sutras remind us of nonduality like the Heart Sutra. They tell us, “What you feel as solid is also empty.” The Heart Sutra expresses the emptiness of form and feeling, and perception and samskaras (formations) as constructions in the mind and consciousness. It’s such a beautiful reminder that if we see what’s happening now as being transparent, empty, and passing, [we can shift into] a totally different perspective.

What do you see as an Engaged Buddhist’s role during times of war and crisis? All Buddhism is engaged. There isn’t such a thing as nonengaged Buddhism. It’s an oxymoron. Maybe we need to change the word Buddhism to Buddhist practice, or Buddhist-inspired practice. Then it has to be engaged, because it’s about our meeting with the world and in the world and our embodiment [of] the world, and what that means. I’ve done years of Engaged Buddhist work with Palestinians and Israelis, and I’ve often been asked, “What’s the point?” One point is to keep a small flame burning that shows another way of doing things, like a candle that brings a little light into total darkness. You don’t know where it will go, but that’s what you can do. 

But today, in this critical situation, where people are dying as we speak and there’s huge destruction and rage, Engaged Buddhism may need to be different. It might need to be a kind of first aid, bringing qualities of kindness, love, and care to replace fear. It may need deep listening. Or demonstrating that equanimity and steadiness are possible. 

How do we process anger without losing our goodwill, and without diminishing the imperative nature of the outrage? Sometimes, we need righteous anger against injustice and cruelty. It’s needed at times by people who have no other tools. But it’s our responsibility to replace righteous anger with more effective and helpful Buddhist tools. There are better ways of dealing with violence, oppression, and injustice. 

One way is more trust, our readiness to meet and see the other, putting ourselves in the other’s shoes. For example, people often report that they go on a demonstration, but are full of anger against the right wing and the far right who are creating so much destruction and fear. How can they be in a demonstration and call for change from a place of deep compassion and joy within? It can come from feeling the energy of being together with others, and acting from trust. This doesn’t mean that we assume that things are going to be better because we are demonstrating—it means we are ready to see things as they are. We wish to make a change here, but not on the basis of trying to control or fight the demons. It’s a different use of energy, of joy and kindness, but still a source of action.

Have you been working on generating compassion and helping others to generate compassion over the past week? I have to say something personal. When the invasion of Hamas first happened on Saturday morning, I heard about it quite early in the morning. When I realized there was so much killing going on for two days, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I had no interest in being in a public situation. My heart was heavy, a deep heaviness inside, a pain. All I could do was spend two days quietly beaming compassion. I needed this sense of quiet, holding in my heart the pain of others, and just letting it move into compassion. Sometimes, we need to make sure that we have space for this, that we give space to our compassion. It’s quite difficult to call up compassion in an automatic way in the middle of difficulty and crisis. After the first two days, I started to give lots of Zoom meetings. 

A second [point to consider] is not to try too hard to be abstract about compassion. Sometimes, it needs a very specific address. I remember a Mahatma Gandhi quote that says that if you’re not sure what to do, “think of the poorest and weakest person you have seen and ask if the step you are contemplating will be of any use to him.” If [general compassion feels too] abstract, go to someone specific. Often, it can be [for] ourselves. For example, if we don’t feel compassion in our hearts, we can feel compassion that we don’t feel compassionate. That’s also a source of compassion. Or if we hear blame and anger and rage, it can trigger sadness which moves to compassion. 

What are some Buddhist tools that we can use to create a more balanced and productive dialogue? For dialogue, firstly, I think you need to go into [the other person’s] shoes. Shantideva in the Bodhicharyavatara says it’s sacred to go into someone else’s shoes. The main tool here is listening, deep listening. The dialogue needs to really feel the other, giving respect to the other, a sense that the other is valuable, and a precious human being. Sometimes, dialogue is impossible. We can’t expect it to work all the time. Today, I met a woman in a local town. I felt pain in my heart when I heard [her call for violence]. I felt the impossibility of changing that view. I hadn’t the power to change that view. But I could do two things. I could express compassion to her. Secondly, I could ask some questions. I said, “This war in Gaza is the fourth or fifth time [this violence has] been going round. Every few years, it happens again. So if there is more violence and punishment and destruction and death, isn’t that [just] preparing the ground for the next one?” I also mentioned that there are children growing up now under the bombs [and seeing death], and they will grow up to be violent, because that’s the language that they learn. So I asked her, “What are the consequences of this view?” 

There’s a very nice sutra about that. The Buddha said, if someone has strong views and strong hate or anger, you can’t really talk to them or change anything. But never forget the power of equanimity. Your equanimity can help. And equanimity is one of the [tools] that you can bring into a dialogue, to show that it’s possible to stand, to be an island [onto yourself], [to] be steady, and [to] show another way. The other side [also] needs to feel safe. [To have a balanced dialogue you need to create a] safe space [through] friendliness and equanimity and kindness and a sense that we are equal. Then dialogue can start. One direction of dialogue that works is to share pain. Because sharing our personal pain and difficulty is, I would say, a deep place of honesty and listening, where something radically changes; you can’t really be an enemy anymore if you’re listening to each other’s pain.

As Buddhists, how do we combat violence? And are there any particular passages or sutras or anecdotes from the canons about Buddha’s penchant for nonviolence that you’d like to call on during times like these? From the Dhammapada: “For not by hatred do hatreds cease at any time in this place, they only cease with nonhatred, this truth is surely eternal.” I think that’s the core sentence, the core teaching here. It’s very simple and very direct. In a way, it’s what I said to that woman that I mentioned just now—that more violence doesn’t solve the problem. And any of the Buddha’s teachings that teach on causes and conditions would be in that realm [as well]. Because one of the problems is that if you’re acting from instant reactivity, it doesn’t give space to understand causes and conditions, pratītyasamutpāda, dependent arising, that things happen because of the conditions. The conditions create the result. What are the conditions that you’re creating now? This is not a question that’s asked by politicians very often. They’re just reacting and responding, often emotionally, sometimes increasing anxiety and fear. So anything that helps us to see causes and conditions here, pratītyasamutpāda, I consider to be very helpful.

What steps can everyone take to support their own personal healing and integration at this moment? Firstly, we really do need to forgive ourselves. If we feel anger and blame and primal emotions like that, we need to not blame ourselves, because we’re beings born in these bodies. Survival mind is very strong, and samsara is very strong. So do not take it personally but say, this is the nature of things. This is what’s arrived in my existence right now. 

Secondly, remember all the joy and well-being that we’ve experienced in our life, all the practice we’ve done in our life, which is needed now. We can remember: I’ve experienced joy in myself and my tissues and my breath and my being. And here it is, again, I’m going to go reconnect with the joy that I already know. 

And one final point, as much as we can connect with our ultimate nature, our buddhanature, we also connect with perfection. We are fundamentally perfect. Life hasn’t made a mistake; Dzogchen, the Natural Great Perfection, says it beautifully, that in the ultimate place, there aren’t mistakes. There is completion, perfection, if we look at things inclusively, in a nonpersonal way. The nature of existence is bigger than us, we need to allow life to take us, to have a life point of view instead of a personal point of view. That gives a lot of healing and support from a more nondual and ultimate place.

The post ‘Keep A Small Flame Burning’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“I’m a chaplain who works at the largest social media company in the world,” writes Breeshia Wade in a blog post on her website entitled “From Codes to Compassion: The Story of a Chaplain Working in Big Tech.” She describes how her chaplaincy background informs her work as a UX (user experience) content strategist at Meta, despite assumptions from others in the tech industry that the two roles are mutually exclusive. “Suffering isn’t bound by the walls of hospitals or prisons: it’s pervasive, attaching itself to everybody, at any time,” she writes. “So, chaplaincy is needed well beyond the walls of hospitals and prisons, churches and temples.

“Titles, ordination, and job tasks do not define a chaplain; chaplains are defined by their intentional awareness of spiritual suffering in every context, allowing us to truly serve all beings. Chaplaincy isn’t something we do: it’s a way of being.”

Rich with an education that spans her Southern Baptist upbringing in South Carolina, a BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity from Stanford, an MA in religious studies and philosophy from the University of Chicago, completion of the Upaya Buddhist Chaplaincy program, four units of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), lay ordination in Shunryu Suzuki’s Soto Zen tradition, and experiences as diverse as birth doula and hospice chaplain, Breeshia is also a speaker, consultant, and teacher whose current focus is “grief-informed antiracism.” Against all odds, she still finds time to write. Her book, Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, received excellent reviews and is now required reading in a number of graduate-level university courses. Plus, Breeshia volunteers as a hospice chaplain. Does she ever sleep? “I do,” she affirms. “That’s a different conversation.”

What does your week look like? Of late, in addition to my corporate job as a content strategist, it mostly has looked like partnerships. Working on institutional partnerships, getting proposals together, planning programming and presentations around grief-informed antiracism—that has been the bulk of my time. There’s a lot happening right now; there is no consistency in how things look.

What is grief-informed antiracism? Essentially, instead of focusing on the grief experienced by people who are suffering from systemic trauma, I focus on the fear of loss or impermanence, which is a future sort of grief. My primary audience is usually white people, but it’s applicable to any background. Attending to what we’re afraid of losing can keep us from stealing resources in the present to avoid losing them in the future. Unexplored white grief or fear of loss is what leads to concrete grief for Black people, so I focus on addressing white grief for the sake of Black liberation.

Equity is fine and dandy until we recognize, hey, equity means I don’t have access to the same things—say, the same number of jobs—because what has been privileged and seems like the norm for me is being broken up. Now, I’ve got to share opportunities with that person over there, and that’s a problem.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having things that you want to keep. I get it—everybody has that. But when that is stretched into a system where an entire group of people have created circumstances to protect their ability to live longer and more happily at the expense of everybody else, that’s where we start having issues.

If we look at systemic racism, we see the stealing of life, of monetary resources, of land, of peace, of medical care. We see the stealing of jobs. There’s this constant taking of things that are to some degree tied to our ability to live comfortably now and in the future. That’s where this concept around the fear of loss, specifically for people who experience racial privilege, comes from. 

I will also say that the experience of grief or fear of loss is applicable across space and time. It is not specific to white people. If we got rid of white supremacy today, I can guarantee you that another system would pop up to replace it. Educating people around systemic racism is important—people need to become aware—but this is more than a cognitive issue. It is fundamentally a spiritual issue.

How did you get from your studies and your different experiences to this particular sort of niche? There aren’t many people doing what you’re doing. Honestly, it’s difficult to pinpoint where, when, and how. I posted a blog recently on how Buddhism helped me come to the conclusion that antiracist work is grief work. Once I reached a certain place in my practice, this was where I wanted to be because it seemed most relevant, and not just because of what’s going on in the world and its topicality. Anti-Blackness and antisemitism are the foundations of a lot of systems of oppression in America and have been throughout its history, so that’s where I focus. 

What called you to Buddhism? First of all, I want to say that I’m still culturally Baptist. I say things that are specific to African Americans who are Baptists. I love my culturally Baptist family. I will 100 percent go to revival and a cookout, and I see no contradiction, because that is where the culture is for me.

I also find peace and solace in Buddhism. When I was 20 or 21, I was studying Mandarin, and there was a three-day intensive workshop on something called Sudarshan Kriya—the Art of Living breathing practice. I remember going to class and talking to my Chinese professor about it. She thought I was talking about zazen, which I’d never heard of. She invited me to sit where she sat, which I think was Mountain View Zen Center. Then I saw that Oakland Zen Center was holding a three-day sesshin. I showed up and said, “I want to do this.” The teacher asked, “Have you ever sat before?” I was like, “Nope.” And she said, “Maybe you should try it for a couple of hours or just come and sit with us another time.” And I was like, “Nope. I’m ready. I am here. I will do this.” So I sat sesshin for three days, and from there on, it just felt like a necessary practice.

People often ask me how I reconcile my upbringing as a Southern Baptist Black woman who grew up in South Carolina with my Zen Buddhist practice. I don’t view these things as being in contradiction. I would say that my Southern Baptist tradition gave me spiritual depth and breadth, and my Zen Buddhist practice gave me courage and a shovel to go deeper than I can ever express. 

You’re a Zen Buddhist married to a white, Jewish woman. How does your South Carolina Southern Baptist family feel about your life choices? You know, my grandma may have had a little bit of difficulty at first, but at the end of the day, the family wasn’t going to lose their relationship with me. All in all, my family tends to be forgiving of my decisions and behavior even if they may not be the decisions they would have made for me.

What was your path to chaplaincy? I did the MA and paired it with the Upaya chaplaincy program to create an MDiv equivalency. I did my first three units of CPE at Rush University Medical System in Chicago—nine months—and then I moved to Los Angeles and did the last unit through Emory’s online program.

I had some great CPE supervisors who really helped me develop my emotional and spiritual awareness. My last CPE supervisor in particular left a profound impression on me. He’s an Orthodox rabbi. I feel touched just talking about him—I cried when that group ended. I randomly tell him this—every four or five months, he gets an unexpected thank-you message for all he’s meant to me.

That said, I found working within the medical system as a queer, Buddhist, Black woman to be very challenging. In the US, both medicine and religion tend to be heteronormative, patriarchal, and racist. There are a lot of behaviors that are allowed to fly from some parties, and people like me are expected to disappear themselves in order to accommodate those behaviors. And while my own spirit was being depleted, I had to turn around and provide spiritual care for people at their most vulnerable. 

I continue to volunteer once a week as a hospice chaplain. The thing about death and dying is that it’s honest; that’s really what drew me to it in the first place. There’s no running, there’s no room to be disingenuous. You get to the core, the root of it—it’s real, you know, and it’s raw. However, because it is so deeply meaningful to me, I do not feel comfortable tying it to my livelihood full-time at this point. There have been things I was asked to do within the medical institution that I was in conflict with, and I just don’t want to be in a situation where I feel coerced. I find it important to do other work so that I can maintain a sense of integrity. 

Working with people who are in pain—whether it’s spiritual pain, trauma, pain that has roots in racial identity, or any other form—can be very demanding. What keeps you going? Having enough comfort and familiarity with my own pain. There are a lot of people who would say that they sit because it’s relaxing or they want enlightenment. I don’t sit for those things. I sit out of necessity. When I sit, it often is not pleasant. That’s cool. I’m not coming for pleasantness. I’m not coming expecting a certain outcome. I sit, and, as a human, I experience suffering. I see that suffering. I am not abandoning that suffering. Because I’m present with myself, I can be present with other people who are suffering.

The post ‘I See No Contradiction’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have always been what can be described as ‘sensitive’. This is shorthand for, literally, some days I can’t get out of bed because the Amazon is burning, or I have to recover each time I remember that Selena is no longer alive. Another way of describing it is my diagnosis of anxiety and depression.

There is a disconnect in these instances, between what I know and what I feel. While I recognize the complex structures and causes behind these feelings, I still struggle painfully not to see them as failures or weaknesses. I shame myself thinking of how many people do not have the luxury to shut down like I do, which only worsens things. Until now, I have only devised ways to survive these periods, and every time I return to this state, I struggle anew.

My inherited faith prescribes plenty of solutions for what I experience, plenty of explanations for its occurrence. When I have dared to share my struggles, the well-meaning and serotonin-privileged, in a special kind of irony, suggest meditation or yoga.

So far, excluding a brief run of antidepressants, the feelings always return—an undeniable fact, an unstoppable force. Here, I attempt to derive logic, to find a thread that connects a new way to understand what happens to me. 

*** 

This essay began when I learned the name Ahmaud Arbery, the twenty-five-year-old Black man killed by three white men in Georgia while jogging, about his life and those who love him, and the horrific circumstances of his murder. I felt sickening, devastating, exhausting grief and rage, and a twinge of horrible recognition as the murderers were shielded by the very institutions that are supposed to uphold justice. I felt it spread through individual cells, communities, planes of spirit and ancestors. I knew, too, that this rage never really left. For far too long, the story has been the same.

As the summer of 2020 boiled into a global uprising, distractions kept me functional, until they didn’t. For days, I was moody, irritable and quick to anger or dissolve into tears. I could not focus on anything. I stopped and started two yoga videos in a row. I left the grocery store with none of the items on my shopping list. I sat still, seized by mounting anxiety, rising dread, rushed to distraction, and the cycle repeated itself. My mind darted around my brain, desperately avoiding something.

It remains alarming that it requires years of unlearning for non-Black people to acknowledge the wrongness that pervades our world. It remains alarming how unwilling we are to change, with each instance of mass rebellion against these systems of murder, of absolute violence and immense, oceanic pain.

There exists some rage that cannot be fixed by breathing. Some things are felt through the body. 

At some point in this writing process, sometime in the interminable summer of rebellion and uprising and liberation, I recognized that I could not bring my world back into order. The bad feelings were not internal failures, they were indicators. I cannot cut the threat down any further. I confront it at its true size. 

*** 

When anxiety begins, I cycle through a brutal, exhausting mental list: potential antidotes, reasons to not be anxious, and reasons I am a let-down to myself and the world. If I am lucky, the solution is simple: I am over-caffeinated and have forgotten to eat, a biological force-quit. Maybe I’ve been on a search engine or feed too long, and I shut them off and go outside. If I am unlucky, I fall into a depleted, empty state and remain there for days.

Anxiety is a disproportionate reaction to a perceived threat, so if I guide my body to perform actions that slow the spiral, my perception shifts, and the threat fades. What if you have assessed the threat correctly? I had not devised this protocol, and my body was sounding the alarm. 

***

The problem is trying to fix an experience of the body with a solution of the mind.

I am a writer. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of words to make and change worlds. But I also have a literal, whole heart that pumps life through my literal body. Our bodies hold what we ask of them, but they are not infinite. They are the most finite. Bodies crumble, contradict themselves, get sick, age, and die. Things like epigenetic trauma and myofascial release therapy show us that bodies hold and can pass on trauma.

I miss Tibet through my body. I do everything I can to feel close, but the loss feels immense as the sky, wide as the grasslands.    

There is nothing like being on the land. So, nothing I have done is like being on the land. There are things I may never get to feel. There are things I may always feel. I cannot think my way out of this. Some things are felt through the body.

No matter how much I love reading writer Robin Wall Kimmerer’s world-altering words on planting corn, I have not yet planted corn. To reap the benefits, I must actually eat tsampa, not just rhapsodize about its many virtues, its centrality to Tibetan ancestral lineage and living tradition and survivance.

This is embodiment: there is an unbreachable distance between the intellectually known and the physically, materially felt.

Land is a body. I am a body. My body is land.

We attempt to discipline, control and marshal the body because we don’t like what it tells us. We do not want what it offers, terrified of the poison or medicine. We try to outrun the terror or the pain to which it alerts us, and in these attempts at control, we miss the joy or the possibility of love. 

***

Any measure of success I have attained has been through betrayals of my body.

Foregoing sleep, exercise, food, and other fundamental needs, I have moved mountains and performed miracles. Once, during a particularly stressful period, I developed an ulcer. Consuming coffee threw my body into incapacitating nausea. Deprived of its usual fuel, my body, ever faithful, pushed through on pure adrenaline.

Afterwards, ensconced safely at home, I sobbed so violently that my terrified family members could not understand me. I fell into a deep sleep listening to the Heart Sutra. My body, having served so well in the heat of battle, had finally come to collect the many debts I owed. Some things are felt through the body. 

I cannot help but think of these feelings as results of the struggle against deep colonial structures of violence. Maybe practising the truth of having a body will allow me to slowly disentangle the structures of ableism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that my wise body rejects, even as my mind tries again and again to force her into acceptance.

*** 

I wonder if I write because of the feelings of my body. I have learned—or learned how to make it so—that grief can be generative. Sometimes it comes out of the body and creates things. And so, I am grateful to the grief, for what it has spurred me to create. I am trying to let the grief move, hear it say: ‘I am alive, and it hurts.’

Here are three elements: pain, joy, and the body. The first two deepening the other; the third, the conduit, the vessel, the barometer of it all.

What I have gleaned from my inherited, patchwork understanding of Buddhism—to grossly oversimplify—is that pleasure and suffering, joy, and pain, are two sides of the same coin. One hollows out space for the other, an immutable bond. The path out of this cycle, we are taught, is to recognize their connection, and to sever our attachment to both.

Perhaps this is the link I so often miss. We are taught that as we attune to our own experience of suffering, it enhances our ability to empathize with others and recognize our inextricable connection with them. We should allow this to increase our desire to end the suffering of all beings. Isn’t this, the heart that breaks with grief at the horror of the present, the beginning of the desire for a better world?

Feeling things through the body, especially when unaccustomed to doing so, is near unbearable. Perhaps I am learning to be a body in the struggle. Perhaps I am learning, for the first time in this life, to have a body. I am learning how not to think, but to pray and use my body to access the sacred; to locate the sacred of my own body.

Perhaps my body is the intermediary for my existence on this earth, the vessel through which I receive the message. Perhaps I need to stop thinking, even listening, and start feeling. 

⧫

Excerpted from The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays with permission from Penguin Random House India. Listen to a conversation with editor Tenzin Dickie about the book on a recent episode of  Tricycle Talks here. 

The post Some Things Are Felt Through The Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Frank Ostaseski is considered one of the most important representatives of the hospice movement in the United States. Inspired by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the teachings of Zen Buddhism, he is one of the co-founders of the Zen Hospice in San Francisco and for decades has shared his insights and knowledge in lectures and workshops worldwide. Ostaseski’s book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully does not provide any ready-made recipes for better living in the face of the finiteness of life and death. Rather, its author—sometimes in the guise of a poet and storyteller, sometimes as an existential psychologist, then again as a phenomenologist of concrete experience—provides tools and suggestions for how to bring your full self to being with people who are dying. The media scholar Bernhard Poerksen met Ostaseski on his houseboat in the harbor of Sausalito, California.

Poerksen: You are one of the key voices in the American hospice movement and have spent all your professional life thinking about dying and death. In recent years, because of the pandemic, illness, dying, and death have dominated the public discourse. My question is: How has the pandemic shock changed how we feel about dying and death? Has there been a societal learning process?

Ostaseski: I see a double effect. On the one hand, thanks to the virus, the insight that we are all interconnected has been transformed into an experience. Today, we have to acknowledge that such a pandemic can only be met collectively and globally, only through cooperation, mutual consideration, and through vaccinating as many people as possible. On the other hand, dying and death have come out of the closet, so to speak, and moved to the center of public attention. By now, pretty much everyone knows of at least someone who has died of COVID-related illness.

We are talking about more than one million Americans and more than six million people worldwide so far. That’s right. Of course, death has always been there; it is, after all, part of life. But now it has an undeniable presence—and it is cutting across all classes and milieus.

So would it be fair to say that the pandemic has democratized the risk of losing one’s life? For suddenly each and everyone was at risk, irrelevant of social power and position, status and hierarchy. I would put it differently, because the certainty of death has always been democratic. After all, everybody must die. But now death has got our attention. Suddenly, the elephant in the room is visible everywhere. Whether this will lead to a permanent shift? I am at best cautiously optimistic, for cultural change is slow, sluggish, and rarely traceable to an individual event such as a pandemic. So I would say that, on the one hand, death has become more present. On the other hand, throughout the pandemic, most deaths were not concretely visible, death was not tangible as an immediate, direct experience. It was and is death at a distance, an impersonal, sanitized death, as it were.

What do you mean by that? When the AIDS virus was raging in San Francisco in the early 1980s, death was in our face, so to speak, on a daily basis, and it was very concrete, because it was possible to sit with the dying person in their home, hold their hands, wash them, change their diapers. This highly immediate, direct experience triggered an enormous wave of empathy and compassion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people died lonely and invisible deaths on some intensive care unit. We learned about their death from the media and in the form of abstract numbers and statistics. We received second- or third-hand accounts of their suffering and were confronted with their dying through the stories told by exhausted nurses and doctors. We developed empathy with these health-care providers, because it was them we saw and because they had to work so hard. But we could not be close to the dying people themselves, we could not see them or touch them, we could not be there to experience their last breath. The risk of infection had forced them into isolation and removed their bodies from our sight and touch.

You have repeatedly collaborated with nurses and doctors working in emergency rooms. How was it for them who in fact had contact with their dying patients? My proposition is that they suddenly became ambassadors and reporters for the media and the families, going back and forth between the hospital beds, the relatives, and the public… …and in this new multiple role as intermediaries and carers, they also had to take on, time and again, the tasks of loving family members, because the real family members were not allowed to come inside the hospital. As a result, there was much more intimacy between them and the people who were dying. And much less intimacy between the people who were dying and their actual relatives.

In my view, there was an ambivalent virtualization of dying and death at the height of the pandemic. On the one hand, we had final messages via FaceTime calls, livestreamed funerals, the shared grieving via Zoom and in the form of candles that you could light online for others. On the other hand, all of this lacked the immediacy of direct experience. May I tell you a story? A while ago, a friend came to me asking for my advice. She was in a kind of shock, for she had experienced her father’s last breaths on her iPad, her face pressed to the screen, in a desperate, surreal attempt to produce closeness that was, however, quite removed from direct experience.

There is another kind of grief, an ambiguous, strangely diffuse grief, brought about by this pandemic.

We are talking about a distant intimacy enabled by the media, which is actually an utterly paradoxical phenomenon. It is an attempted but not really achievable intimacy. This friend wanted to kiss her father who was in a hospital in a different country, so she kissed the screen and the image of her semi-unconscious father. And he was dying that very moment. You could say that she kissed an idea of her father, but she missed the immediate experience of touch, of smell and bodily presence.

The screen and the iPad are what the internet sociologist Sherry Turkle has called “evocative objects.” Because they so obviously shape our experience, they make it possible to experience what is at the core of human experience—the closeness, the physical touch, the sudden, surprising depth. What’s more, the screen and the iPad show us what it means to be fully human—precisely because we cannot live our full humanity under the inevitably constrained conditions of digital communication.

What are the consequences when intimacy and contact—like in the example of your friend—cannot be lived and experienced fully? One consequence of such an experience is that grief is highly delayed—because you could not see the death, because you don’t have the certainty of seeing these last moments for yourself. Another consequence is a hard-to-define feeling of loss that is not only about the death of a loved one. What have you lost when you could not say goodbye to someone who is lying on their sick-bed or death-bed, when you could not give your father a real kiss, no longer see your own father, and thus authenticate his death? What I am trying to say is that there is another kind of grief, an ambiguous, strangely diffuse grief, brought about by this pandemic.

What is this other kind of grief about? It is about the loss of familiarity, of normalcy and tradition. Suddenly, we were sitting in our homes, isolated and bewildered, separated from friends and family; we had strange haircuts, were unable to lead the lives we used to live, stop by our favorite pizza place in the evening. Weddings were postponed. And postponed again. Graduations were canceled. Birthday and dinner parties no longer took place. And our normal everyday life—the separation of work and leisure time, of one’s work life and one’s personal life—dissolved. Was this simply inconvenient or already dramatic? Did we even have the right to be sad, especially compared to those who had lost their parents without being able to say goodbye to them, bury them, and grieve together with relatives? Wasn’t our own bewilderment a luxury problem, compared to those who got seriously ill or who had to bury their career dreams basically overnight?

What are you getting at? My point is that there were many individual, accumulating stories of loss, big and small. But there was also a comparing of the very different sufferings and fates and the question: Is my own sadness even legitimate when I have not lost anyone and have not become seriously ill myself? And there was a curiously ambivalent, not really quantifiable and qualifiable pain, caused by the ambivalence and indeterminacy of the whole thing.

So if I were to distill a key conclusion from our conversation so far, would it be correct to say: In times of pandemic, it was rare to have a good death and to have the fortune of grieving successfully together with a community of friends and relatives? I guess you could say that. In hospitals and nursing homes, crematoriums and cemeteries, strict rules applied. Sometimes only a handful of people, if any, were allowed to attend the funeral, and they had instructions not to touch or to hug under any circumstances. I am a little allergic to the idea of a good death, to be honest with you. Dying is messy, exhausting. It is a labor to die just like it is a labor to be born. And each death is unique and different. The romantic expectation of a good death and the hype about the last moment of one’s life only create enormous, unnecessary pressure—as though there was a universal assessment grid and as though it was a personal failure not to leave this earth smiling, in a state of bliss in the lotus position.

As founder of the Zen Hospice in San Francisco, you have companioned more than 1,000 dying people, many of whom were homeless, drug addicts, dying of AIDS, and without any money or health insurance when they came to you for help and support. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, sometimes 30 to 40 people were dying in your hospice in a week. At some point, when your work became better known, a documentary filmmaker invited you to a conference to talk about death and dying. On the flight there, you noted down five key principles—your key insights and experiences from being with dying people—which you later turned into a book. Would you mind telling us these principles? I’d be happy to. I call them the five invitations, because it would be absurd to see them as provisions. The first invitation is: “Don’t wait.” Waiting for a better future makes us miss the present moment and life in all its fullness and abundance. And at some point it is too late. The second invitation is: “Welcome everything, push away nothing.” This call for radical openness and a fearless, loving acceptance of life as is sounds impossible, maybe even a little bit foolish. But it means taking the situation of the dying person seriously and accepting as it is— its wretchedness, its messiness, but also its beauty. The third invitation is: “Bring your whole self to the experience.” When we are with someone who is dying, it is all about showing ourselves as a whole human being and getting in touch with our own fear, grief, and helplessness.

That means letting go of an ideal of perfection, of the illusion that we have everything under control… …and it means opening up the space for real dialogue, real encounters. The fourth invitation is: “Find a place of rest in the middle of things.” We always think that we should treat ourselves to a break only when the circumstances are perfect, when everything is under control, when everything is finished. But this is not true, this does not work. So why not find a moment of rest here and now, for example during this interview? And finally, the fifth and last invitation: “Cultivate a don’t-know mind.” When we carry around too much knowledge, ready-made concepts and seemingly one-size-fits-all recipes, there is no room for surprises, curiosity, and a sense of wonder. The idea is to cultivate a beginner’s spirit, as the Zen Buddhists say, to be awake, seeking, and ready to learn.

What these principles suggest is that the art of dying and confronting the finiteness of one’s existence is in reality an art of living. Because everything that you described are not just maxims for dying well but also… …for living a life of meaning and purpose. Yes, of course. What I have learned from people who are dying is that death can be a teacher hiding in plain sight that shows us what’s really important, which is leading one’s life deeply and authentically, with vulnerability and compassion. For this, you need no grand, highly complex philosophy, no esoteric knowledge, and no spiritual idealism leading us away from who we are really. Actually, it is very simple: Living deeply into our humanity makes life fulfilling and dying easier.

And what comes after death? That is and remains a mystery.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Is he right? Not really, no. We could talk forever about the mystery of existence after death. We could talk about this until the cows come home, as we say here. Depending on tradition and religion, we will encounter different stories, attempts to bring light to the mystery, and to ward off the horror of death. However, we will not find the single, definitive answer. But it does not matter. Life itself is a mystery that cannot be fully solved—so why shouldn’t this also apply to death? I personally don’t believe in the reincarnation of my personality but I have faith in the idea that impermanence is not simply about loss and that every ending gives rise to a becoming, an opportunity for transformation—like a tree that falls in the woods and rots and gives rise to more becoming.

You said recently that for some years you have experienced the proximity of death also “from the other side of the sheets.” That’s true. I have survived a heart attack and five strokes and I am half blind. I had temporarily lost my sense of time and had difficulty finding the right words and keeping up with a conversation. And let me tell you, it’s damn hard for me, too, to accept my own helplessness. And yet it is instructive, also for others. When I returned home after my heart attack, one of my students who saw me as his Buddhist master came to help care for me. One day, he helped me get into the shower. And I felt so completely helpless and powerless that I began to weep. I remember crumbling onto the floor and weeping. First, he did not know what to do, because for him I was not an ordinary human being but his teacher and role model. But then something wonderful happened. All this specialness that separated us was suddenly gone, and there was simply Frank who was crying. Suddenly an entirely different dynamic was possible.

How do you feel today? I am in fairly good shape. Of course, since I live on a houseboat, I am sometimes afraid of stumbling and falling. But I take good care of myself, I am practicing mindfulness, I give online lectures and seminars, and I have the privilege of living in this very beautiful environment defined by the tides, the water, and the wind. I come up and down on the tides. You see, I live here surrounded by all these other houseboats in a floating, fluid, mutable and unstable world, not in a static, forever solid universe that knows no change. It is a wonderful environment to remind yourself of the fragility of life and to tell yourself: “Make plans, but hold them lightly!” Everything changes.

♦

This article was first published on December 23, 2022.

The post The Many Flavors of Grief appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Is there a disconnect between what we love and how we live?

For the last thirty years, anthropologist Amanda Stronza has been investigating this question through her studies of the relationships between humans and animals. Her research and work in applied conservation have taken her around the world, from Botswana to the Amazon, where she has investigated what influences humans to care about and interact with certain species the way we do. 

In recent years, Stronza has become known for her practice of rescuing the bodies of animals killed on roads, taking them to a soft and quiet place, and creating intricate memorials for them. Her photographs of these memorials, along with her writings about each animal she honors, are widely shared on social media platforms and displayed in photography exhibitions. In a conversation with Tricycle, Stronza reflects on what this practice has taught her about the dynamics between animals and humans, as well as how we understand death and experience grief. She also discusses the significance of creating these animal memorials alongside her beloved companion, a cattle dog named Matilda, who recently passed away. 

Can you describe your practice of honoring the lives of animals killed on roads? I find animals in many places—on trails and sidewalks, as well as in my backyard—but most of the animals I find are on roads. If I’m driving and I see an animal that appears to be in a condition where I can move or lift them, and if I can stop my car without causing anyone else danger, I stop.

I move the animals for a few reasons. My aim is to restore some kind of dignity. It’s so hard for me to see animals left the way they are. I understand why they are killed, and I understand that we can’t all stop because it’s too dangerous. But I also believe that leaving them there like trash or treating them like the word many people use to describe them—roadkill—is so insulting. I want to show some respect and love to this animal, acknowledge that they’ve already died, and allow them to rest in peace. 

I also want to show respect and love for the animals who come and feed on the dead animal. Many vultures get killed by cars, so I move the animal to help other animals who come and live from the dead. 

How do you go about creating the memorials for each animal? Creating the memorials feels very meditative and sacred to me. When I can, I bring the animals that I find to my home so I can spend more time creating something beautiful. I never bury the bodies. Instead, I place the body in a soft, quiet place where other animals—like coyotes, vultures, opossums, or foxes—can eventually come and take the animal. For the memorial, I look for whatever is around me that is available. In the winter, I usually gather and arrange dead leaves, branches, weeds, and rocks. 

If I don’t have much time, or if I’m far from home, I create a memorial on the side of the road. I choose someplace that’s soft because I don’t want the animal on the asphalt. When I’m on the side of the road, I’m aware of the silence of the space where I’m creating the memorial. In the corner of my eye, I can see the whoosh of the traffic and sense the violence of where they died compared to the space where I am trying to memorialize and honor them. I believe they feel that respite and the sanctuary of that quieter space.

A big part of my process is also writing about each memorial. The stories I write and share feel like obituaries or testimonies to the life of the animal, so I consider these stories part of the memorial. The written word is meant to be an homage to that particular animal. When I write about a squirrel that died, I want to honor that individual squirrel. I want to honor where I found the squirrel and how the squirrel died. That animal is not just another dead squirrel; that squirrel had a life and a personality and a family. That squirrel had memories and stories. Creating the memorial honors the life of that animal the way we would honor the life of the human.

Part of your practice is photographing the memorials. You wrote in one Instagram post: “I photograph the animals not to sensationalize or objectify, but rather the opposite—to show what we fail to see, to look rather than look away, to honor what we tend to ignore.” Can you share more about that? Before taking the photos, I consciously try to make the memorial beautiful. I pointedly cover wounds. I don’t show blood. If the body is contorted, I photograph the animal in a way that they don’t look contorted. I’m not trying to hide death or the horror of how they died on the road. I just want people to feel comfortable to look. I am afraid that if the images were gruesome in any way, people wouldn’t look. So I try to make death beautiful. 

Through my photos, I’m also asking us to not be afraid to look at death. I feel like we can be so afraid of death in our society. We are conditioned to look away and to talk about dead animals as gross. It’s so objectifying. Many people can’t even bear to look at an animal killed on the road.  

By creating the memorials and photographing and sharing the stories of the animals, I’m asking us to look more closely and to think about the life of that animal. I also want us to think about who we are as humans and what our role is.

Your dog Matilda was, and very much still is, a special person in your life. Can you talk about Matilda and how your relationship with her shaped the way you think, understand, question, and experience life? Matilda was with me for almost every memorial I created. There was something astounding about her approach to the memorials. She saw many dead animals in front of her: snakes, squirrels, doves, bobcats. I never kept her away from their bodies. She would smell them and step gingerly over them, or move around them in a respectful way. She would tap into me and the circumstances and sense that there was reverence around the animal.

Since she died, I’ve been thinking about hierarchies of grief, or the different forms of grief we’re allowed to give different kinds of animals in our lives. When a human we love dies, we have all these rituals, norms, and tacit understandings of how we are allowed to grieve. When a companion animal dies, it’s understood that these animals are family, and of course we grieve for a dog or cat. But I can’t take bereavement leave from work even though Matilda was the most important person in my life. We acknowledge that companion animals are family too, but only so far. 

There are also almost no norms for grieving wild animals. Is there a place to grieve the dead squirrel? Or is that mocked? Sometimes people even respond to what I’m doing with chagrin. There is so little room to grieve the animals who live among us and to think of them as family. That’s part of what I’m exploring and asking us to think about.

You’ve quoted Thich Nhat Hanh and his teachings on interbeing in some of your writings. How have your experiences shaped your understanding of interbeing and interconnection? I have been reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book No Death, No Fear. It gives me so much peace to think about the concept of “no birth, no death.” To describe this, he writes about ocean waves and how we don’t grieve when an ocean wave transitions into the surf. The wave just becomes one with the rest of the ocean. I’ve been thinking that Matilda was this beautiful wave, and I’m a wave, and you’re a wave, and waves are very real. We’re all water, after all. I’m wondering if I can feel that way about Matilda too. If I can see her as transforming into one with me.

Nhat Hanh also talks about interbeing in the example of clouds transforming into rain. I understand that concept, and yet it’s the human condition to hold on to our attachments to the cloud. I’m so attached to Matilda, and it has been very hard to let go. I suppose that’s why it takes many lifetimes to figure out.

Another way I think about interconnection is witnessing how much love there is for Matilda in the world. After she died, I worried about posting and sharing the image of the memorial I made for her body. There’s that hierarchy of grief again—I wondered if people were going to be able to bear seeing Matilda memorialized in the same way that I memorialize a squirrel. The most common response I heard, however, was from people thanking me for sharing that very private and intimate moment. So, in this way, Matilda wasn’t mine. She wasn’t my dog. She was a person in the world so many people loved. I just happened to be her best friend who could help everyone grieve. 

Every day, people all over the world send me photos of memorials that they made. People write to me about death and grief and human loved ones they lost and how seeing animal memorials has helped them grieve. It also helps them talk to their kids about death and honoring animals. 

It’s so affirming to me how people want to talk about death and grief. Instead of death being perceived as gloomy and gruesome and scary, I believe we can talk more about the beauty of death and its connection with life. There can be a space for that.

⧫

You can view more of Stronza’s work on her website and her Instagram page. 

The post Restoring Dignity to Our Animal Kin appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Since the Buddha’s time, many different ways of meditating on death have been devised in Buddhist communities. In their religious rituals, Tibetan Buddhist monks blow ceremonial horns made of human bones, and they sometimes eat their meals out of bowls made from human skulls. In the temples and monasteries of Thailand, one will often find pictures of skeletons hanging on the wall. They might depict, for example, a middle-class family—father, mother, and child—with half of each body clothed and face smiling, while the other half is a bare-boned skeleton.

In some sense, the act of mindfulness meditation itself could be understood as a practice of dying—to each moment. If you get good at it, your last moment will be easier. Mindfulness meditation can also be thought of as learning to let go of the ideas we have about ourselves, and those may be all that are holding us together in the first place.

Contrary to what most people might believe, meditation on death is not about morbidity or denying life. Many meditators report that contemplating death brings them a renewed appreciation for being alive. Suddenly, this very breath can seem to be enough. After reflecting on death, one’s life needs no other justification than itself.

As you reflect on death, you might acknowledge that it is not only you who dies but everybody and everything. Death happens to people, cities, civilizations, knowledge, and fashions, even planets and world systems. Scientists believe the universe itself will either die in what’s known as a “cold death,” thinning out into nothingness, or in a “big crunch,” collapsing into a very dense point or singularity. Which do you prefer?

In some sense, the act of mindfulness meditation itself could be understood as a practice of dying—to each moment.

When you contemplate your personal death you might also consider that from the perspective of quantum physics, there is no such thing as death. Matter-energy continues to dance on through space-time, moving to its own rhythms, oblivious to whether we call it one thing or another. Everything is alive and continues to live, whether it has your name on it or not. However, that knowledge may not be much consolation, especially if you are very attached to your current name and form.

Nothing is ever at rest—wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago.

–Mark Twain, Three Thousand Years Among The Microbes 

Each of us humans goes from womb to world to tomb and, some would say, back to start again. Every ending is also a beginning, and death must lead someplace, perhaps back to life. And, of course, we know that without death for a comparison there would be no such thing as life. Death is indeed one of our best friends. And with friends like death, who needs enemies?

Not to Be: Death Reflection

Without being mindful of death, whatever Dharma practices you take up will be merely superficial. 

 –Milarepa, The One Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa

Close your eyes and bring your attention inward. First establish mindfulness of your body, becoming aware of its shape and weight, its warmth and vitality.

Bring consciousness to the pulses of your breath and heartbeat, one pulse gathering in energy and the other pulse pumping it throughout your body. Be aware of your strength, and that you can hold your body erect as a result of these pulses.

Next, take a few minutes to become aware of your current state of mind. Check in on your mood and your thoughts. Are you curious, anxious, impatient, contented? Remember that death may come to you in an ordinary living moment, just like this one. Wouldn’t it be ironic if you were making some long-term plans or worrying over some trivial pursuit?

Now begin to imagine that you are in the final process of your dying. Sense that the muscle of your heart is weakening and beginning to slow down. Imagine that in a few minutes your heart will quit beating, your blood will stop circulating, and due to a lack of oxygen and other nutrients your flesh will begin to grow weak. Imagine your entire body growing heavy and lifeless. Meanwhile, your mind, having recognized death at the last minute, will probably be running quickly through scenes from your life, an experience that those who have survived describe as rather chaotic. Finally, all the thoughts and images will begin to disappear like a fading radio dimming out into static and white noise.

As you imagine your death, what feelings arise? Is there an alarm going off in your chest? A systems alert lighting up in your head? If you can truly imagine your death, chances are you will begin to hear some strong signals. Your survival brain speaks loudest when death is hanging around.

It is quite possible that when you imagine the death of your body you will feel deep sorrow or fear. Whatever emotion arises, let it be there in mindful awareness for a few minutes. Let the feeling become as strong as it wants to be, even exaggerate it if you wish. To reactivate this feeling or to make it stronger, once again imagine your body dying.

Bring your awareness back to your breath for a few minutes to reestablish mindfulness. Then turn your attention to your current plans, concerns, desires—the issues of your life at this particular time. Then again return to the feeling that in a few minutes you will die. All of this mental life that you call yours will disappear—all the thoughts, political opinions, financial schemes, jealousies and vendettas, regrets and sorrows, everything you had to get done this week—feel all of that floating away into nothingness. When your body dies, so will your mental life.

Does the fear return? What other emotion accompanies the imagining of your own death? Regret for things not done, life not completed? Experience these feelings, hold them, let them grow, explore them.

You may want to do death meditation lying down. Then you can let your body go limp, sinking into the floor or ground. You can even imagine that you are on your deathbed or in a coffin.

If you happen to feel a sense of happiness or relief during the death meditation, it doesn’t mean you are a self-loathing individual. In fact, as a separate reflection you might even try looking at the upbeat or brighter side of death.

Once again, establish mindfulness and imagine your body dying, only this time realize that after death you no longer will have to struggle with gravity. You will no longer have to work in order to pay for shelter or to feed and fuel this particular form.

What a deep rest it will be! No longer do you have to react to the stimuli of the world (at least not in this form or this world). Furthermore, the demands of your needy, vulnerable, and all-too-human personality will be ended. You won’t have to satisfy it with special experiences, or struggle to make it happy. You will get to take a long rest from reacting to yourself. Although no one knows for sure what happens after death, some reports of near-death experiences describe it as delicious peace. Maybe we have nothing to fear from death but nothing—and nothing is the best thing that ever happens to us.

Before you bring an end to any of the death reflections, be sure to return your awareness to the breath and heartbeat, at least for a few minutes. Once again experience the pulses of life. Feel the warmth of your body telling you that metabolization is continuing; feel the strength of your muscles and flesh, your ability to hold yourself erect and move your limbs. Feel yourself come back to life.

♦ 

From Being Nature by Wes “Scoop” Nisker © 2022 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.innertraditions.com.

The post Making Friends with Death appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Funerals have always frightened me as grim and formidable events. They remind us of injustice and mortality, and they reveal the inevitability of death. Death is simultaneously so simple and so complicated, and while we cannot romanticize grief as a mere celebration of life, it’s a crucial time for our deepest expressions. Those of us who continue to live must take our time to send sacred spirits to their afterlife. For years, I treated grief as if it were an unimaginable taboo. I raced toward mythical sunny utopias where sadness does not exist. I tried to escape the grief that required me to facilitate many funerals in my head. I have spent so much time running away from my looming grief, sprinting toward a purely joyful existence with intrepid speed. When I looked back at the tiny speck of me, I saw with widened eyes my deep neglected grief and my flowing sadness: the only thing I distanced myself from was me.

The Western world is obsessed with binaries, splitting joy and sadness into enemies. Life and death are classified as direct opposites too. Human beings have long understood the ecstasies of happiness and the heaviness of sorrow. Joy never ceases to be beautiful, while grief never seems to get easier. Binaries create fragmentations and opposing forces, and do not regard joy, sadness, life, and death as intrinsic to the wholeness and balance of being. While sorrow and death are difficult and scary experiences, instead of being taught how to feel and navigate them, we fear them so much that we strive to completely avoid them. It is not surprising that in the Anthropocene, human beings are obsessed with inventing technologies to achieve immunity to both sadness and death.

In his debut novel On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong wrote, “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.” If we befriend only what feels good, we alienate our hurt. When we are judged by others and ourselves for weeping about separation, heartbreak, trauma, tragedies, accidents, and death, we push vital parts of ourselves away. The binaries of good and evil categorize our difficult feelings as evil, and our happy feelings as good. When sorrow is seen with self-judgment, it can generate a great sense of fragmentation within. Suppressing our sadness can grow into a cruel cynicism, making us scared of our own feelings and doubtful of the fullness of life.

We are taught that grief is dysfunctional and unproductive and that it gets in the way of our work. Or we are encouraged to milk our grief and capitalize on our experiences, generating trauma porn for the masses to consume. Either way, we are dissociating from grief and isolating ourselves in the process. When I was presented with the urgency of my mourning [following the end of an abusive relationship], I did not know what to do with my feelings. Instead, I dedicated myself tirelessly to work, to production, to proving myself immune to suffering. Even though death is inevitable, and loss occurs every day, it seems that we are less equipped to deal with it than ever.

The Western world is obsessed with binaries, splitting joy and sadness into enemies.

When our grief is neglected and unfamiliar, we begin to isolate ourselves in confusion. We cannot see that there are whole and multidimensional beings around us who have experienced heartache, and we become ignorant to the fact that we can be supportive to one another during these painful times. In a world dominated by performances that encourage us to portray ourselves as our most joyful, we begin to assume that everyone is free of grief. Perhaps we just want to cry with one another without judgment, or weep by ourselves and know that we can process our grief with somebody we trust. What happens when I am no longer embarrassed of my grief, and I am surrounded by humans, plants, and animals who hold me while I cry?

Amid our tumultuous global circumstances, we are experiencing much collective premature and unnecessary loss. Ironically, we are losing so much because of greed. We are in collective mourning, and we need to acknowledge our grief without exploiting it. Right now, collective grief is just as important as collective joy. Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude. Funerals are opportunities for us to express unconditional love. There is much to learn from swimming in the deep shades of our grief, and we will emerge from it basking in the sun. If we cannot honor our endings, then how are we supposed to usher in new beginnings?

When I was a teenager, I attended my po po’s (grandmother’s) funeral in Hong Kong. It was a traditional Buddhist ceremony held in a temple, and my extended maternal family had all come to pay their respects. As part of the sacred ritual, we prayed and chanted for nine hours to usher my po po’s spirit to the afterlife. Several monks guided our chants while we were kneeling, standing still, or walking in circles. It was pivotal to chant out loud so that her spirit could hear us, and the louder and more repetitive we were, the better. We had to commit to the melodies of the chant so that our message of grievance was clear. Her spirit needed to hear our grief so she could travel safely.

I noticed that with repetition, the chants began to envelop my body. They allowed a vital energy to be released from my soul, an energy that had long been constricted in my chest. During the lengthy ceremony, some of us wept in between chants, some of us chanted loudly then softly, and some of us needed moments of silence. There was no judgment, no hushing, and there was always immense respect. It dawned on me while I was chanting that this was the first major death I had experienced. I realized that the purpose of chanting was not only to usher my grandmother peacefully into the afterlife, but also to release our grief into the ether. It gave us a safe space to express how much we missed her and loved her.

The next day, our family shared a meal together. I remember sitting at a round table opposite my gong gong, my po po’s husband, with at least fifteen of my relatives. We were sharing food and conversation and eating our favorite dim sum dishes. I looked up from my bowl and noticed that there were tears streaming down gong gong’s face. He did not say a word, but he also did not stop his tears from flowing. He just sat there eating, sitting with the foods that he’d shared so many times with his wife and his children, and cried. His tears did not make anybody at the table uncomfortable, and I do not think they made him uncomfortable either. After a while, I gave him a hug and began to cry as well. We did not say anything to each other and just allowed this moment to unfold. Our grief was connected as we held each other through it. I learned so much about grief that day.

How do we mourn the relationships that we have lost with people who are living? I have heard many friends describe breakups as a kind of death. X [my ex-partner, who was also my abuser] had not died, but our relationship was long deceased despite our toxic efforts to revive it. Our relationship had a soul of its own. 

Sometime after the rekindled relationship ended, I performed a long overdue funeral for the soul of our lost love. On small pieces of paper, I wrote every slur he had ever called me that was etched into my mind. This was an extremely painful practice, because I had to recall so many of the vulgarities that still lived within me. Each time I wrote something down, it felt like an extraction of poison. Looking at these slurs on paper allowed me to see that they were not inherent parts of me but lived outside of me. They were projections used to invoke fear in my spirit, and at the same time were reflections of the fear that lived in X’s heart. Twenty scattered pieces of paper surrounded me in a circle, and I read each of them out loud, burning them one by one. I cried as I read them, and I felt myself missing him too. This was a ritual of release. I watched them turn into ashes and realized that I was initiating a long overdue funeral service of my own. I allowed myself to weep as loudly as I needed to. I wept about the pain, the violence, the abuse, and for the first time in a long time, I wept for me.

Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude.

The funeral for our relationship helped me to express all my complicated emotions in an alleviating synthesis. In that moment, I no longer compartmentalized my feelings in binaries of good or bad. I stopped chasing utopias and allowed myself to steep in the depths of my grief. I let all the nuanced feelings that were held in both/and to come together and coexist. I finally gave myself permission to miss him as all the joyful, loving, painful, and violent memories played out before me. I wept and sobbed and lamented out loud, sending the lost soul of our love affair to the afterlife. Grieving my life without him meant that I had to usher in a new life. The ceremony simultaneously honored the death of our relationship and celebrated a new mysterious beginning that awaited me.

I do not believe that grief ever disappears. Grief morphs and shape-shifts as we honor it, as it begins to entwine with the contours of love. At times, it can tug at your heart and break it, especially on days when you feel vulnerable and tender. On other days, it can fill your spirit with immense gratitude for a life that was shared and a life that continues. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I learned that death is not an ending but a transfer of energy. As our tears send spirits to the afterlife, their energy is transmuted to new life. Our grief transforms, too, into an energy of love.

When I finally grieved my relationship with X, I was able to acknowledge that my capacity for tenderness did not die along with our union; I just needed to be redirected toward myself. I grieved our relationship to make space for new possibilities of true love. When I grieved my po po, I deeply appreciated her life and my own, and I watched the seeds she planted blossom into illuminating seedlings of her legacy. Each time I have explored the murky waters of grief, I have become profoundly closer to myself. To this day, grief has shown me that love does not die at the face of death; it is transformed. Our funerals are commemorations of life, and they honor what needs to be released. When you grieve deeply, you are shown your abounding capacity to love. Love does not die. Love sprouts from the ground that we have nourished with our tears.

⧫

Adapted from Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection by Mimi Zhu (Penguin Random House 2022) 

The post Grief Is an Ancestor  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I cry when I read the news periodically.

Graphic details of the war in Ukraine, disturbing reports of climate chaos, the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York here in the United States all remind me of the ignorance, hate, and violence in our world. It’s a lot to be with. 

Making space for the truth of our feelings is essential for keeping the heart healthy and finding a wise response in this complex world.

The pain is valid. The grief is valid. The anger, fear, and emotional exhaustion are all valid. 

I’ve been teaching this week in central Massachusetts, where spring is in full force: the trees are in bloom, the scent of lilacs fills the air, warm thunder showers roll through the afternoon. The other day, between retreats, I sat outside with a good friend, drinking tea and catching up about our lives.

The contrast between the beauty and love in my life and the deep human suffering in our world is hard to hold. It’s a continual reminder of my own good fortune, privilege, and the deep inequities in our world.

Toward the end of a recent call, one person asked just this: how do we hold the dissonance between gratitude for the blessings in life, and grief over the suffering and pain in our world? 

The question is a koan for our times.

Both are true, and living in the tension and discomfort of this question invites the heart to open more fully.

It’s when we stop asking this question that I become concerned, for what are the alternatives? We either sink into despair, consumed by sorrow, or we turn away and ignore what hurts, focusing only on the goodness or distracting ourselves from the fear and pain. 

Neither is an accurate perspective or a helpful response.

I am continually exploring the difference between true compassion and its decoys, sorrow and despair. I keep learning to recognize the difference between true equanimity and its false cousins, indifference and apathy.

I believe there’s no easy way forward, no simple answer to these questions. 

The road to freedom is long and though we may feel helpless individually, we are not powerless. We can bring more goodness and love into the world through our words, actions, and choices. We can speak out against violence and oppression, and work together to pressure elected officials to make policy changes for more equity, dignity, and safety in our communities.

We don’t act if we’re lulled asleep by comfort or convenience, nor can we act if we’re overwhelmed with grief.

This is why we need to stretch the heart to include all of it. This is why we need both the immense beauty and gratitude for blessings in life to keep us afloat, and the deep sadness and grief to urge us to action. 

♦

This article was originally published here on Oren Jay Sofer’s blog.

The post Why We Need Both Grief and Gratitude appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.