We must survive the night come what may. And the only way to survive the night is to affirm authenticity, personhood, and people.
—JOEL ELKES
AS I TRAVEL to offer workshops and retreats, I enter a depth with willing others who’ve been opened and shaped by life. Through that depth, we create a path to what matters by which we enter the temple that is the world. I remain humbled and excited by the mystical fact that, try as we do, this depth can’t be opened alone. We need each other to do this, even though no one can experience life for you. And so we journey as pilgrims of the heart, alone and together, crossing this threshold of depth whenever we dare to tell the truth of our lives.
I open these gatherings by admitting that I have no answers and that we’re here to compare notes, because no one knows how to navigate the mystery of being alive. I then try to open a heart space through which we can enter the realm of all that matters, which is always waiting just below the interruptions of life. When followed beyond our wants and fears, what matters will lead us to the bareness of being that informs all life. I open this heart space by reading poems, telling stories, and sharing metaphors that reveal the unseeable architecture of existence.
I remind everyone that gathering like this is part of a lineage that goes back to the earliest of times. For when winded by fear or pain or stalled by clarity or inexplicable beauty, human beings have always stopped to gather, to try to make sense of things. I imagine in prehistoric times, after outrunning a mountain lion, after dragging the one member of the clan maimed by the lion back into their cave, they all assembled, out of breath, to ask each other, “Is this all there is? What are we doing here? Is there any meaning or sense to all this?”
And while we need to pause to look at life and what it does to us, while what we discover by looking into our experience together is helpful, we’re always thrown back into life, where everything is of a whole: beautifully tangled and enmeshed in a numinous aggregate of shimmering forces that lift us up and knock us down repeatedly.
So my job when entering these gatherings is to start more things than we can finish, so that the space of our gathering and the relentless stream of life happening outside of our time together are understood and accepted as one. Our job is to help each other remember that pausing to make sense of life—whether in a cave or workshop or sangha or temple or church or a university classroom or in the belly of the night with a dear, trusted friend—pausing to gather like this is a resource and not a refuge.
I’m heartened by the tradition of Native American elder councils, which always meet in circle. Not just for equity, as there is no head to a circle, but so that each person has a direct view of the Center. The sacred assumption is that we need everyone’s view of the Center to grasp it. We need everyone’s view of the Center to open it. We need to listen to everyone’s view and put our meanings together in order to enter the temple that is the world. And so the need to gather meaning, not choose it.
When we can come together like this—ensuring everyone has a direct view of the Center, honoring our deepest conversations as a resource and not a refuge, when we can open a heart space between us and enter the depth of life, all to share the truth of our lives—then the teacher moves around the room. Then the wisdom of an open heart appears here and there, revealing a deeper mosaic of truth that no one person can surface alone. In moments like this, our stories cure into a remedy that anyone can drink. As a teacher, my hope is to step aside so everyone can be their own teacher, so that everyone can be their own remedy.
During the last year, I’ve gathered with hundreds of people, good souls living tenderly and resiliently through their rough and ordinary days. In Connecticut, the teacher appeared as a mother who felt vacant of love as she tumbled from bad relationship to bad relationship. Her son is a heroin addict who tried to kill himself after desperately feeling lost. On the way to the hospital, she kept asking herself, “What can be so bad that you would try to kill yourself?” But in the ER, behind a gray curtain, when looking deeper into her son’s eyes than she had ever looked, she saw herself. Stunned, she cried and took his hands, only to see her hands. She looked around at the rest of us and said, “From that day, a veil that had kept me from life was torn apart, and a veil that had kept me from my son was pulled aside. Yellows are more yellow now, pain is hard but clear, and when I touch my son, I feel this being who came through me into the world.”
In Seattle, the teacher appeared as a quiet dentist, who, after years of removing decay from others, after years of softening their pain, saw a deer come up to his window while he was filing down a crown. It stared at him and he began to well up. The deer leapt away, as if taking a cloud from his heart, and he suddenly felt completely alive. In our group, he went quiet, then said, “Speaking and listening from the heart clears the fog.”
In Santa Barbara, a grade-school nurse was the teacher. She asked, through her tears, “Why?” after telling us that her sister-in-law set herself on fire. All we could do was lean toward her, bearing witness to the fire in her heart that she can’t put out. All we could do was hold her with a kind silence and listen to the lessons of that fire.
In New York City, a fireman was the teacher. He cares for his aging aunt, who told him the other day that she’s been looking for something for a long, long time and she just found it. It was there all the time. But she wouldn’t tell him what it is. She just said, “You’ll have to find it for yourself.”
And in Vancouver, a lawyer who defends inmates on death row was the teacher. She said she carries them with her everywhere, especially their faces at the end. On the way to our retreat, she was stuck in the airport with more than a hundred people, when she saw her dead convicts among the living and held them as the living angels that they are. She said, “When I saw how precious and irreplaceable everyone is, I fell to my knees near my gate. Someone nearby came over and asked if I was alright. I took his hand and confessed, ‘I’ve never been better.’”
Meeting like this is always an unexpected blessing. When we show up like this, we help each other stay awake. When we hold each other’s pain, we knit together into a net that catches truth. When we dare to let life move through us, though we don’t know what it means, we enter the temple that is the world. It doesn’t get any better than this.
When we can open a heart space between us and enter the depth of life, all to share the truth of our lives—then the teacher moves around the room.