13

The Raw Spot

 

NORMAN FISCHER

One day in January, feeling expansive and cheerfully open to being interrupted, I picked up the ringing telephone in my study. Sherril was on the line. “Alan just died in Baltimore,” she said. “Can you come over right now?”

Alan is Sherril’s husband and my closest friend. We’d known each other forty years, since our days as students at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, through years of Zen practice, through Alan’s becoming a rabbi, my ordaining as a Zen priest, our establishing a Jewish meditation center together, through retreats, teaching sessions, workshops, marriages, divorces, children, grandchildren. We had shared so much for so long that we took each other’s presence in the world as basic.

At first you don’t know how to think about it. You are bewildered. What just happened? I had co-led a retreat with Alan earlier in the month, and we’d parted company just eight days before he died while walking on a country lane one bright morning. He had been so completely present at that retreat, and now he was — or so they told me — just as completely absent. What to make of this?

Of course I could say — and have often said — many things about such losses. Alan and I had frequently taught together about death and dying and loss and grief. It was a subject both of us had been concerned with most of our lives. The Buddhist teachings on death and dying are very familiar to me, as are the many associated practices and reflections. It’s not that such practices and thoughts were not with me during the days and weeks after Alan’s death; they certainly were, and they made my experience of loss much more solid and poignant. But I had always known that these teachings do not explain anything or fix anything or armor you against pain. They only clear the ground for what there is to be felt at the time of a loss. They help you to feel what I felt: the supreme oddness, sorrow, and joy of our lives. We are here. We are gone. All dharmas are empty of own being, there is no coming no going, no increase no decrease, no birth, no death, no suffering, no end of suffering. So the Heart Sutra says. The Diamond Sutra says that all conditioned things are to be viewed as dreams, flashes of lightning, bubbles, dew drops, magic shows. Still, tears come. There’s no contradiction.

In the days and weeks that followed Alan’s death, I spent a great deal of time with Sherril and their children and with Alan’s siblings, who’d come from back East for the funeral. Alan had been the rabbi of a large congregation in San Francisco and had been connected to many other meditation and social action communities, so there was an outpouring of love and support from many people. I received cards and emails from all over the world. And I was really grateful that I could cry with others when I felt like crying, and I could feel so much love for so many people who also loved Alan. Loss does that: it wounds the heart, causing it to fall open. Love rushes into and out of the opening, love that was probably there all along, but you didn’t notice it because you were too busy with other important things to feel it.

In one of our last conversations, Alan shared with me an odd and funny teaching about death. This teaching involved his fountain pen collection, which was extensive and worth a lot of money. He had sold several thousand dollars’ worth of pens to a man he’d contacted online. Before payment was mailed, the man, some years younger than Alan, suddenly died. Since there was no good record of the transaction, the attorney who was handling the estate for the widow said he would not pay. Alan could have hired his own attorney to recover the money, but it wasn’t worth the trouble and expense, so he ate the loss. “But I didn’t mind,” he said, “because I learned something that I should have known and thought I knew but actually I didn’t know: when you’re dead you can’t do anything.” He told me this with great earnestness. As if it had never actually occurred to him that when you’re dead you can’t do anything.

In a memorial retreat we held a few days after Alan’s death, I repeated this story. I said that since Alan was now dead and couldn’t do anything anymore, we would now have to do something because we were still alive. What that something was, I didn’t know. I only knew that somehow, in the face of a great loss, one does something different than one would otherwise have done.

So this is what I learned (with Alan’s help) about the meaning of loss: that love rushes into the absence that is loss, and that that love brings inspired action. If we are able to give ourselves to the loss, to move toward it rather than away in an effort to escape or deny or distract or obscure, our wounded hearts become full, and out of that fullness we will do things differently and we will do different things.

The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa talks about a soft spot, a raw spot, a wounded spot on the body or in the heart. A spot that is painful and sore. We hate such spots, so we try to prevent them. And if we can’t prevent them, we try to cover them up so we won’t absent-mindedly rub them or pour hot or cold water on them. A sore spot is no fun, but it is valuable. In Training the Mind, Trungpa calls the sore spot embryonic compassion, potential compassion. Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action.

 

Our first response to loss, difficulty, or pain is not to want to surrender to what has happened to us. It seems so negative, so wrong, and we don’t want to give in to it. Yet we can’t help thinking and feeling differently, and it is the thinking and the feeling, so unpleasant and painful, that is the real cause of our suffering.

When sudden loss or trouble occurs, we feel shock and bewilderment, as I did when Alan died. For so long we expected things to be as they had been, had taken this as much for granted as the air we breathe, and suddenly it is not so. Maybe tomorrow we will wake up to discover it was all just a temporary mistake and that things are back to normal. (After Alan’s death I had dreams that he hadn’t actually died, that it had all been some sort of correctable slip-up.)

After the shock passes, fear and despair arrive. We are anxious about our uncertain future, over which we have so little control. It is easy to fall into the paralysis of despair, caroming back to our childish default position of feeling completely vulnerable and unprepared in a harsh and hostile world. This fearful feeling of self-diminishment may darken our view to such an extent that we find ourselves wondering whether we are worthwhile people, whether we are capable of surviving in this tough world, whether we deserve to survive, whether our lives matter, whether there is any point in trying to do anything at all.

This is what it feels like when the raw spot is rubbed. The sense of loss, the despair, the fear — it is terrible and we hate it, but it is exactly what we need. It is the embryo of compassion stirring to be born. Birth is painful.

All too many people in times like these just don’t have the heart to do spiritual practice. But these are the best times for practice because motivation is so clear. Practice can no longer be perceived as an option or a refinement, but only as a matter of survival. The tremendous benefit of simple meditation practice is most salient in these moments. Having exhausted all avenues of activity that might change your outward circumstances, and given up on other means of finding inner relief for your raging or sinking mind, there is nothing left to do except sit down on your chair or cushion and just be present with your situation. There you sit, feeling your body. You try to sit up straight, with some basic human dignity. You notice you are breathing. You also notice that troubling thoughts and feelings are present in the mind. You are not here to make them go away or to cover them up with pleasant and encouraging spiritual slogans. There they are, all your demons, your repetitive negative themes. Your mind is (to borrow a phrase from the poet Michael Palmer) a “museum of negativity.” And you are sitting there quietly breathing inside that museum. There is nothing else to do. You can’t fix anything — the situation is beyond that. Gradually it dawns on you that these dark thoughts and anxious feelings are just that — thinking, feeling. They are exhibits in the museum of negativity, but not necessarily realities of the outside world. This simple insight — that thoughts and feelings are thoughts and feelings — is slight, but it makes all the difference. You continue to sit, continue to pay attention to body and breath, and you label everything else: “thinking, thinking; feeling, feeling.” Eventually, you are able to pick up your coat from the coat-check and walk out of the museum into the sunlight.

Confronting, accepting, being with negative thinking and feeling, knowing that they are not the whole of reality and not you, is the most fruitful and beneficial of all spiritual practices — better even than experiencing bliss or Oneness. You can practice it on the meditation cushion in the simple way I have described, but you can also practice it in other ways.

Journaling practice can be a big help. Keep a small notebook handy during the day and jot down an arresting word or phrase when you read or hear one. From time to time look at these words or phrases (they need not be uplifting or even sensible, they can be quite odd or random) and select the ones that attract you. These become your list of journaling prompts. When you have time, sit down with your notebook (doing this in a disciplined way, at a certain time each day, is best), choose a prompt, and write rapidly and spontaneously for ten to fifteen minutes, pen never leaving the paper, whatever comes to mind, no matter how nonsensical or irrelevant it may seem. In this way you empty out your swirling mind. You curate your own exhibition of negativity. It can be quite entertaining and even instructive.

Another way to reorient yourself with your thoughts and feelings is to share them with others. If you are feeling fear or despair, you can be sure that you are not alone. No doubt many of your friends and family members are feeling this as well. Rather than ignoring your anxieties (which tend to proliferate like mushrooms in the dark room of your closeted mind) or complaining obsessively about them to everyone you meet (which also increases the misery), you can undertake the spiritual discipline of speaking to others. Taking a topic or a prompt from your notebook, cueing off something you’ve read or written, or simply distilling what you have been thinking or feeling into a coherent thought can allow you to speak to one or more people in a more structured, and possibly comfortable, way.

Bring a few friends together. Divide yourselves into groups of three or four. After five minutes of silence to collect your thoughts, have each person speak as spontaneously as possible for five to seven minutes by the clock on the chosen topic. The others just listen: no questions, no comments. If it seems useful, one person can give feedback to the speaker. Not giving advice (it is a much better practice if advice and commentary is entirely outlawed) but simply reviewing for the speaker, in your own words, what you have heard him or her say. Listening to what you have said repeated back to you in another’s voice can be extremely illuminating. And forgetting about your own troubles long enough to actually listen to another is a great relief. It is likely to bring out sympathy, even love. There is no better medicine than thinking of others, even if for only five minutes.

Working with these practices, you’ll get a grip on the kinds of thinking and feeling that arise when conditions are difficult. The goal is not to make the thoughts and feelings go away. When there is loss or trouble it is normal to feel sorrow, fear, despair, confusion, discouragement. These feelings connect us to others who feel them as we do, so we don’t want to eliminate them. But it can be good to have some perspective (and occasional relief) so these thoughts don’t get the best of us and become full-blown demons pushing us around.

Back now to the basic meditation practice: when you sit, noticing the breath and the body on the chair or cushion, noticing the thoughts and feelings in the mind and heart and perhaps also the sounds in the room and the stillness, something else also begins to come into view. You notice the most fundamental of all facts: you are alive. You are a living, breathing, embodied, human being. You can actually feel this — the feeling of being alive. You can rest in this basic feeling, the nature of life, of consciousness, the underlying basis of everything you will ever experience — even the negativity. Sitting there with this basic feeling of being alive, you might begin to feel gratitude. After all, you didn’t ask for this, you didn’t earn it. It is just there, a gift to you. It won’t last forever, but for now, in this moment, here it is, perfect, complete, and you are sharing it with everything else that exists in this stark, basic, and beautiful way. Whatever your problems and challenges may be, you are, you exist in this bright world with others, with trees, sky, water, stars, sun, and moon. If you sit there long enough and regularly enough, you will feel this, even in your darkest moments.

Based on this experience, you might reflect differently on your life. What is really important? How much do our expectations and social constructs really matter? What really counts? What is the bottom line for a human life? To be alive. Well, you are alive. To love others and be loved by others. Well, you do love, and it is within your power to love more deeply, and if you do, it is guaranteed that others will respond with more love. To be kind to others and to receive kindness is also within your power, regardless of expectations, losses, or circumstances. You need to eat every day, it is true. You need a good place to sleep at night, you need some sort of work to do, but probably you have these things, and if you do you can offer them to others. Once you overcome the sting and virulence of your naturally arising negativity and return to the feeling of being alive, you will think more clearly about what matters more and what matters less about your life, and you will see that regardless of your conditions you can participate in what matters most. You will see that you actually do have what you need, actually can feel grateful for what you already have, and actually do have plenty to do based on this gratitude.