So this week we're exploring the cultivation of compassion and one of the practices that I offered on Tuesday was repeating one word to whatever energy or whatever challenge you have in your life and that one word is yes.
Yes to this anxiety.
Yes to this helplessness.
Yes to this sadness.
Yes to this longing.
Yes to this despair.
Yes to this pain.
Yes to this loss.
Whatever is happening.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And maybe at first you don't mean it.
Maybe it just lands flat.
But you may notice that when you can say yes to your life as it is and really mean it,
There is a letting go that happens that you can feel.
You're not letting go.
Whatever it is,
Is letting go of you.
So I encourage you to check that out.
The poet Pesce Joyce Gettler puts it this way.
Finally,
On my way to yes,
I bump into all the places where I say no to my life.
All the unintended wounds,
Those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again.
And I lift them up one by one close to my heart and I say holy,
Holy,
Holy.
So given that many of us were not raised to hold ourselves up as holy,
Given that our culture is more about me first,
Competition for the right schools and the big jobs and the being with the cool people.
Given that,
It's not really surprising that we all have some degree of doubting our adequacy.
I think it's true that many practitioners,
No matter how many years they've been practicing self-compassion,
Self-compassion is a practice.
It's a practice.
It arises quite often by turning towards those habit patterns and conditioned labels that somebody else put on you.
Or maybe you put them on yourself.
Like when you were around six or seven years old.
It's an extraordinary thing to have something,
To have somebody put a label on you.
You know,
You're this or you're that.
And then we believe it.
The conditioning factors that affect us,
The impressions that we take in,
Shapes us.
It shapes our minds,
It shapes our hearts.
And if we can understand and see them,
See these conditionings,
Then we'll have an opportunity to shape our own hearts.
But first we have to see how we've been shaped by these conditions.
My father was a pretty verbally abusive man.
Some of you have learned in my sharing.
And his speech was often mean.
And name calling was actually normal in my upbringing.
One label that he placed on me was that I was the sensitive one.
And that sensitivity was actually wrong and bad.
The message was,
You better quit your sniveling and get out there and prove yourself.
That was the message.
Because otherwise I wouldn't be loved.
So I developed a heavy,
Thick brick wall around myself,
Around my heart.
A wall that I'm still deconstructing.
So these are conditioning factors.
We believed what we were told.
And if we live in the memories of them,
As if they're true,
We reinforce them.
So building those walls propelled me out of that house away from that abuse.
And it ultimately propelled me into practice,
Into the deconstruction of the walls,
Into being in my body,
Belonging in my body.
The poet John O'Donohue puts it this way.
He said,
Our bodies know,
Our bodies know that they belong.
It is our minds that make our lives homeless.
So I had made myself almost physically homeless,
So that I could teach my body to listen to my belonging.
Sometimes it works that way.
And so much of the practice of cultivating self-compassion,
For me has been through the practice of forgiveness.
When I can remember that I am not my fault.
I am not my fault.
I heard this phrase years ago,
From the dharma teacher Wes Nisker.
He was a spirit rock teacher and he recently died.
He was a lovely man.
Funny.
And he would say this.
You are not your fault.
You are not your fault.
And it stayed with me.
That phrase.
So much of the self-hatred that I carry,
It's not even mine.
It's my mother's and my father's,
And her mother's.
It's ancestor after ancestor,
Who were fed on this not good enough story.
So we are not our fault.
That's kind of the first step of forgiving yourself,
Knowing that you are causes and conditions,
And letting yourself feel the fullness of that pain,
Those messages,
That ancestral hatred.
So in the first stages of sort of forgiveness,
And self-compassion,
It doesn't feel good.
And nobody likes to feel pain.
It's really natural to not want to feel it to distract ourselves from it or to avoid it.
And there's this practice in meditation,
Where we learn to touch the pain that we carry,
And then ground back into the breath.
So you touch this shame,
You touch the self-hatred,
You touch it,
You touch it in the body.
And then you ground,
Just like coming back to the breath,
Coming back to the body that we do because the mind,
The mind makes us homeless,
Right?
So this touch and go practice is a way of working with and seeing the story that tells us that we're unworthy and not quite good enough.
We touch it,
And then we ground back into the breath or back into the body.
And in this way,
We're creating a healthier condition.
We're creating resilience to being with that which is uncomfortable.
That's hard to bear.
And in part,
This is the function of meditation,
To develop a certain kind of well-being and ease with all the conditions of our lives.
So we condition ourselves in this touch and go process with safety and with openness.
And that begins to change us.
We have a role in creating this well-being.
It's very different in like trying to change ourselves by going to the gym.
Because we're not the agent of the change.
We're just willing to touch those darker places within ourselves.
We're willing to touch in and find ease and well-being in the midst of it.
It's like the change arises from being receptive to that which is hard to be with.
We're receiving all of ourselves.
All parts of ourselves are holy,
Even those parts that we don't like.
And when we can get beyond the liking or the not liking,
The story that we've overlaid,
Or the story that others have overlaid,
If we can hang in there with the discomfort and just give it room,
Our relationship to it changes.
It's like Wendell Berry says,
To go into the dark with a light is to know the light.
To go to know the dark,
You go dark,
Go without sight,
And find that the dark too blooms and sings and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
To know the dark,
Go dark,
Go without sight.
There's a trust there,
Trusting in your practice,
Your capacity.
We start to see some value when we go into the dark,
When we're able to be with it.
Our suffering is school.
Life is school.
Are you paying attention?
Because if not,
You get to repeat that chapter.
And with that,
We can respond with kindness,
Because there's no other sane way to respond.
There's no other sane way to respond than kindness.
So take a moment and consider,
What are you conditioned by?
What are you conditioned by?
And we'll use the time left together to consider this question in community.
Thank you for your kind attention and your practice.
