Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst,
You look,
You look.
And instead,
Here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
You'd be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding.
The two as beautifully balanced and contorted as bird wings.
Jilal ad-Din Mohammed Rumi.
What is intimacy?
Have we ever really thought about it?
Have we ever taken a class on how to be with another in the presence of another fully devoted,
Listening,
And being in the presence of another fully devoted,
Listening?
In life,
We're always expanding and contraction.
Is intimacy simply allowing someone to be who they are in the presence of another without judgment?
That's kind of what we've been told.
Yet,
Even when we say I totally accept you,
There's a value judgment within it.
It's a subtle judgment.
Within it,
You're really saying I accept you and all your flaws as we open and close our eyes and all the time in each other's presence.
Well,
It's what we learn from a young age.
It's survival.
As children,
The openness we are born into,
Our true nature always present is at some point ridiculed,
Most likely reduced within us,
Causing us to close that part,
That tender part,
Or that part that just is able to be.
Even beautiful flowers close their petals when the sun sets.
So,
When we are engaging intimately,
Sometimes the tendency is braving the pain or the trauma to force one's self to remain open in the presence of another's grief.
But what if,
As in the poem,
We're able to hold up the mirror in each other's presence?
What if we are able to hold up the mirror in each other's presence and simply to reflect or even embrace that grief and allow it to be the mirror of our own pain,
Our own anger,
Or whatever it is inside yourself that you are bravely working,
As the poem goes.
As meditators,
Dharma seekers,
We come to the cushion,
We come to the cushion to cultivate our own sense of openness,
Of emptiness,
Or empty awareness.
We sit to cultivate that moment where we can get beyond the identity or the story or what it is we think we are to the place of authenticity.
And within that place of authenticity,
There is an opportunity to hold our beloveds openly and empty with deep listening and compassion.
Because in this place,
We can hear things clearly.
We can hear them clearly.
And in that way,
We can open and close organically without forcing ourselves to stay open nor closing ourselves to not feel what is true of our own pain.
And there's choice there.
In presence,
There's everything outside of trying to fix or change them or fix or change yourself.
So perhaps the mirror that Rumi wrote about is that place of emptiness,
Is a place of just deep presence and awareness.
We can cultivate that.
And as a teacher of mine says,
It only takes everything.
But then again,
Everything is why we're here,
Isn't it?
