Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve.
Tears are only water, and flowers, trees,
and fruit cannot grow without water.
Planting with Color:
Allowing Emotions to Blossom
Working through spiritual transformation stirs up many emotions. In many spiritual traditions, emotions receive little attention. But they can be great inroads to Self-understanding. Getting in touch with them is like planting a very colorful garden that blossoms with many shades and hues in all seasons. So, along with dreams, the meditation practice helped me to train the mind, but it also opened up the raw emotional spaces that surfaced from underground. Spiritual growth can be hard work. Some mornings the dreams brought beautiful gifts and I felt exhilarated. At other times I felt very much alone since few other friends set out on the path with me.
After the Buddhist retreats the teacher’s words echoed through me again and again: Be in the eternal now. Be in the moment. Like a good student, I contemplated them over lunch with a bowl of creamy tomato basil soup, brie, and French olive bread. I worked to be mindful of each bite. Be in the present. It’s a gift. But my mind leapt forward into the future and worried about money. What would happen next in my book? When would I meet a good man? “Bring the mind home,” I heard the teacher’s gentle voice say. “Remain mindful.”
“Okay, I will. I will,” I said. This should be easy, I thought. I can do this. Just focus on my spoon, the black olives, and the sweet taste of tomatoes. I forced and forced and forced until there was a huge furrow between my brows. The more I forced, the more my mind ran rampant. I exhaled in frustration and took a sip of wine. At that instant a seagull flew past the window screeching, and I was fully present. The bird’s screech cut through the mental chatter and opened a space. It sounded like that gull was laughing at my struggle. “Gawk, gawk, gawk,” the gull laughed. Instead of enjoying that moment of presence, tears welled up and dripped into my tomato soup. Like it needed more salt! This inner work, planting and cultivating my inner garden, needed to be done in solitude and it felt like hard work. Tired and weary from digging up the trash and bones and letting go of all the old behaviors, I wanted a vacation and to go back to that more exciting life before I’d begun the spiritual journey.
Changing mental habits and elevating emotions seemed tough. It required constant vigilance and effort. I once loved big sensations, strong emotions, drama, and wild swings from despair to happiness. The lower mind thrives on intense emotions, but training it away from the urge for extreme emotional experiences felt tough. It loves the coarse, exciting, painful, eventful ups and downs of life. It loves passionate love affairs and intense relationships that engage strong emotions and bring about attachments. It loves living in the world of TV with bright lights, loud sounds, and strong visual experiences. It thrives on physical thrills, and if it’s allowed to rule it doesn’t make space for peace. In fact, it finds peace and exploring secret gardens to be rather boring. It cannot appreciate or understand and grasp the subtle, quiet, still inner world of the spirit.
The work to tame the mind and let go of lower desires felt daunting. Would it never end? The tears turned into a river now and left a transparent puddle in the creamy red soup. But I heard the Buddhist teacher laugh. She laughed at herself, at dying her hair to cover the gray because her mother told her to; she laughed at her tendency to grow rounder with age. She laughed at the nature of mind and the materialism in the world. We can work on serious things without taking it all too seriously, she seemed to say.
In my anxiety and pain I recalled the face of a visiting Buddhist monk who had recently arrived from Tibet to the retreat. While the teacher danced and wiggled with her students to the tune of “Twist and Shout” at the closing celebration, the monk sat in his traditional robe on a step above it all, watching with glee. His face beamed with joy. In fact, each time I saw him during the retreat his joy radiated out like the golden rays from Renaissance icons. Though he could hardly speak a word of French or English, all seemed constantly well with him. He radiated joy. I apparently had everything necessary for joy, but still hadn’t found it in my garden. Sigh. What was wrong with me?!
In agitation, I opened a book of daily reflections that lay on the kitchen counter. It said that when one begins a meditation practice, she often feels that her thoughts run riot and become wilder than before. But instead of the thoughts and feelings becoming wilder, you become quieter and can see just how noisy your thoughts have always been. Don’t give up, it encouraged. Just be present. I felt temporarily heartened and worked harder to focus on the now. But the more I forced my mind, the more it ran away.
“That sounds nice. Right here. I’m right here. One bite. Chew. Chew. Good. It tastes … I wish I had lobster. I used to get good ones in Montreal. Who wants to be vegetarian anyway?! I can’t believe the vendor at the fruit market cheated me out of a couple of euros this morning. I’m a regular. Not a tourist. Tonight I hope Julie arrives on time. She’s always half an hour late. Would I be happier if I lived in New York? What about Los Angeles or maybe Beijing? I’d like to see the Great Wall of China sometime.” My mind flatly refused to stay right here with me, right now eating one spoonful of tomato soup at a time. This constant chatter wasted so much energy!
Entering into the secret garden to find peace and joy sometimes requires hard work. My mind acted like a little child and constantly demanded that its needs be met, that I pay attention to it RIGHT NOW! I drew it back to the spoonful of soup, where it finally settled a split second. Resting in the quiet just a moment, just long enough for a tiny pause, a tiny space to open up between its ceaseless chatter of words, I breathed a sigh of relief and expected a feeling of peace and serenity. But pain gushed through the space to surface again.
Tears flooded down my cheeks like a spring creek after the snowmelt. Despite the sparkling sea, the brilliant noon sun, the white gulls dancing over the port, and the tourists carrying inflated whales and bright orange and blue parasols to the beach on the sidewalk below, I could not stop the tears. Pain flooded into the present, spilled out into my conscious wakefulness, and cut through hunger, desire, joy. Had it sat there beneath the surface all those years, buried like an old landmine? More pain not related to anything in particular welled up from deep underground passages; tears gushed down my cheeks and spilled into the soup.
“Live in the present,” I heard again, followed by more chatter. The sobs ceased. I dried my cheeks, sat down again, and heard the chatter once more. “Nice orange whales. Why can’t we go to the beach like they do? The sea breeze feels nice. This soup’s not bad, but we’ve had better. Better than Campbell’s at least. You should have made grilled cheese with it like Mom cooked. Remember Mom’s? You should call Mom. It’s been a while. Collages and magazines for the workshop. Bring the glue. Don’t forget it … Live in the present. I want a vacation from my mind!”
I tried to force the internal self-talk to halt, tried to enjoy one spoonful of soup in its full glory, let all my taste buds experience directly and come alive. I’d thought I would enjoy solitude, that I could excel at spiritual practice just as I excelled in studies and business. But controlling the mind and holding back the emotions seemed impossible. When I stopped and looked, great sadness from a broken marriage seeped in along with feelings of abandonment, rejection, stress, and fear brought on by the tremendous changes taking place at light speed.
“What’s so great about being in the eternal now?” I said aloud. Tears rolled down my nose and fell into my soup until the transparent pool in the creamy liquid started to look like a small lake. “Okay, now I’m present. It hurts. I feel like crap. What’s so great about being here now?”
The witness stepped in. As a writer, there’s an awareness of being part of an experience and also being the unaffected witness who watches events happen. I’m convinced we all have that witness in us who remains unaffected by pain, happiness, and changes. It is the eternal, unchanging, and immortal spark of the Divine. Hindus call this atman. I also know it as the wise gardener or higher Self. From the deeper place, from the quiet, curious perspective of the witness, calmness arrived. “Everything is perfect. Just look around,” the witness whispered, and I felt her peace. “You’re hilarious,” she said.
I looked up in shock. “How dare you make fun of me.” (“Me” being my mind and ego, of course.) “I need sympathy right now,” I said. She looked down at me and smiled. Her brightness lit a flame within my heart. Out the window the Mediterranean glowed and shimmered under brilliant sun. Seagulls chuckled and boat motors hummed. Sailboats bobbed past with white, blue, and green sails. Joy decorated my horizon. I sat at a beautiful teak table, eating from antique porcelain and drinking water from crystal glasses. My body had returned to good health. I had no financial worries. I had plenty to be grateful for, so I smiled, stared into my soup that had seemed so dreary a minute before, and then I started to laugh. I am so lucky, I thought. Stop moaning.
The laugh turned into a belly laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. In the silence of the present moment, a shift occurred. The pain rose up followed by feelings of gratitude for being alive. The suffering had to surface for the gift of joy beneath it to be revealed. Yes, there is a lot of hard work to do, I thought. Yes, it will challenge me to the core and I may not always feel happy, but it’s okay to cry. I decided to be content and grateful for the time to do the work and embrace both the pain and the joy that arrived in those moments of awareness between the thoughts. I learned to gratefully accept and welcome them both equally without judging either as good or bad. They both mean that I am awake and alive.
“Wit” makes up the root of the word witness. Humor, laughing, keeping a detached perspective helped me to smile even when I felt submerged by the weight of the world and the inner gardening work. Retreats became places to commiserate with others seeking to tame their minds, too. Lots of teachers share stories, and someone told this one:
Two Tibetan monks walk along on their return to the monastery. As they reach a river and prepare to cross, a beautiful young woman arrives. “I can’t cross this alone,” she says. “I don’t know how to swim. Would you be so kind as to carry me across?” The young monk crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head no with a disdainful look on his face. “I have taken a vow,” he says.
“I will help you,” the old monk says.
He picks her up in his arms, carries her across the river, and sets her down on the other side. The two monks continue on their journey alone. The younger one broods and fumes each step of the way. After a few hours the old monk turns and says, “You seem unhappy. What’s wrong, my friend?” The young monk huffs. “I can’t believe you picked up that beautiful woman and carried her.”
“Are you still thinking about that?” the old monk laughs. “I put her down hours ago. But you’re still carrying her around!”
The story’s message of detachment remained a gentle reminder to put down preoccupations about money, work, relationships, and even meditation, and leave them behind. An open perspective invites the universe to play. The whole world seemed preoccupied with money, me included. One lunchtime, as I worried about making money in my new career as a writer, the phone rang. A friend called to announce her next workshop on abundance. If you think of abundance and focus on how the world gives so much and always what we need, then you will be abundant, she said. (And I wondered how she had heard my thoughts from twenty miles away!) I shrugged, not really believing it, and went to make lunch.
You’ve got to work hard and force your way in this world, my mind reasoned. It’s the only way to get ahead and survive. Right? But my wise inner gardener chuckled. I’ve got a new way, she whispered. No need to force. Instead, learn to listen and to put in the effort when needed. Still concerned about how to marry the spiritual and material, I cracked open an egg for an omelet and, instead of one yolk, two appeared. My surprised, delighted laughter erupted out the open window. I ended up with two eggs for the price of one, and the universe seemed to be saying, “Relax. All’s fine!”
As if this weren’t enough of a divine joke, the next day when I went to make a quiche, another egg ended up having two yolks in one shell again! Now, what are the odds of that? With an open mind and heart and a sense of spontaneity, I danced with the cosmos and it danced with me; we moved like two partners in perfect sync. When I listened carefully and followed the rhythm, I could keep pace and stay in the flow. The pain, suffering, and negative emotions fell away and became fertilizer and compost for the rainbow of flowers that began to blossom in the heart of my secret garden.
Creating Your Bed of Roses
While spiritual practice and cultivating a secret garden may not always be a bed of roses, it’s still fun to imagine one that you can return to when life seems dreary and difficult. We often refer to a bed of roses as a metaphor for a place of comfort, peace, and love. Using your imagination, what does your bed of roses look like? Is it a flower bed or a literal bed spread with rose petals? Is it a place? Does it allow space for visitors? What kind of emotions do you feel here? Are there thorns to pluck out so you can enjoy it fully? Spend a few minutes writing about your bed of roses. This is also a good time to reflect on your emotional life. Are you connected with your emotions? Do you find healthy ways to express them or do you tend to repress? For many years I have struggled with allowing myself to feel and express emotions and yet not allow them to dominate me. Some people find themselves too caught up in their emotional world and allow themselves to be pulled out of a healthy balance. Which side do you tend to? How can you create a healthy emotional balance?
Choose Joy through Dance
Dancing is a wonderful way to promote and encourage the flow of joy through you. It’s a glorious way to connect with feelings, appreciate your body, have fun in community, and get great exercise. My Nia dance teacher reminds me to choose the sensation of joy through movement. Whatever dance style you choose, from belly dancing to tango, Nia, or freestyle, just move whatever wants to move. Invite a form of the Divine that you love into your sacred inner garden to dance with you. Notice the emotions and sensations that arise. Relax and enjoy!