June 7, 2021 Monday Morning, Dharma Path Intensive
The Power of the Open Heart
Barbara: With the long darshan, they said they prefer I not channel Aaron now, so I am to talk.
What is the power of these Brahma Vihara practices for us? How do they support us?
I want to share some of my own personal experience; how the heart closes, how it armors itself. How it opens, then sees something threatening and closes again. I am just going to talk about some of my experiences over the past few years.
Most of you know that a little over three years ago I got up one morning, walked into the kitchen, and found Hal, not unconscious, but clearly very sick, on the kitchen floor; unable to move, unable to speak, waving one arm at me, blood and vomit on the floor. He could not move himself.
It was shocking.
I called 911.
It was a major stroke, a bleed in his brain.
We were told he had only a three percent chance of surviving a week.
I was in shock. His health had been really better than mine. He was 81, but he was on zero prescription medications. He went to the gym with me a few times a week. Had had a recent check up that had shown that he was healthy. Suddenly….
We were to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary that spring, planned for just two months after his stroke. We were going to Hawaii to celebrate. We had some other plans for trips too. Finally, we had time and enough in our retirement fund – not a lot, but enough to do some fun things in our late seventies for me, and for Hal, early eighties.
We both were reasonably healthy. We wanted to celebrate life together and we also had plans to spend the summer – that whole summer – out at the cabin, each of us working on a book. Hal wanted to write something, and I wanted to write a new book.
So, we had exciting plans and intentions.
I experienced a lot of grief, of course. My habitual impulse was to cope, to do the best I could to take care of Hal, take care of his needs, to make sure he was safe. To take care of myself too, but I was numb. For me, the habitual pattern of taking care of myself was to armor the heart. I would be “taking care of myself” by not allowing myself to feel the pain, the loss, the lack of control of my life – the helplessness as it seemed to me these threatened my ability to control the situation and create a good outcome.
Grief! “Don’t go there now. Just take care of what is in front of you,” was the idea.
And it was a full-time job, and more, just taking care of what was in front of me, the practical things. There was so much needed, so much to do, to manage, to learn.
I had seen myself follow this pattern before when I lost my hearing when our first child was born, way back in 1972. I had to cope. We had a newborn infant. I couldn’t hear. Hal was angry. He was scared. He kept saying, “I have a deaf wife.”
Well, I kept thinking to myself, with anger, “I am the one who’s deaf, but, yeah, I can take care of Hal….” I could understand. I wasn’t blaming him. It was sudden and immense for both of us. The question was survival, how to cope? For me, in coping… close the heart. Don’t enter that place of pain.
It didn’t work then; I learned through the years that it never works, long term. That path is just a temporary bandage on a wound. Through 50 years, I really thought I had learned how to keep my heart open.
Surprise! Or no surprise – still something vital to learn. How to keep the heart open.
Said better, I think: how to invite the direct experience of the open heart right there through the armored outer shell of the heart. It’s not to hammer through the armoring, but to find the place where the heart will allow access and to learn how to rest in that unarmored place. And, for me, more important, in these past years (and I have been looking a lot at this) what is keeping me from willingness to enter into the tender heart? In other words, if I open the armor, what am I afraid I may find and that might destroy me (the ego me)?
Our hearts have such great capacity for love and though that love, such great capacity for holding the pain of the world; our own pain and all pain. But, we (I, at least) have developed a habit of thinking, “This one is too big.” Whoosh…. The heart armors itself. And I am even mindful of it. I see the heart closing, but I want to get away from the pain; that which I fear will destroy me. I don’t trust my capacity to hold space for it.
The various lovingkindness practices, spoken and as chanting, all of the Brahma Vihara practices, just reciting the words, hearing them, the steadiness of it, helps me to remember, beneath this armoring that protects the heart, there is a loving, tender, pulsating heart that can hold everything. It is the heart we all share, and my part of that great Heart. Can I trust the heart?
I have been asking myself a lot this past month, “What is it that I don’t want to know?” because I feel that the heart is quite armored now.
I see anger. For myself, and for the world. The devastation of this virus. The pain of so many hundreds of thousands of people. The families who have lost loved ones. Those empty chairs at the table. The anger. “It’s not fair.”
The personal anger. The sadness.
We have an almost three-year-old grandson that we have not seen for almost 18 months. That is a long time, from 18 months to three years. Normally I would have seen him several times for long visits. “Not fair!”
We have bigger grandchildren we have not seen for the same 18 months, but at least they can Zoom with me, and do occasionally, but that is not the same as hugging.
The longing. The anger. The grief. The feelings of helpless.
And then I see the need to trust the heart’s capacity, that the heart is so enormous, that it has enough space in it to hold all of this grief, that it won’t destroy us. It takes a lot of trust.
I may think, “I can hold this grief,” but then again, “if I don’t, maybe it will destroy me and those I love.” I am afraid of my human limits.
I gently, or not so gently, dip into the waters of helplessness, rage, and confusion. Also, into the “I should: and all the burdens that come with that phrase. My mind swirls at 4AM with, “Where will the money come from for next month’s caregivers? Is it safe for Hal to be with this person who is not vaccinated? How will this pandemic affect my grandchildren? All the world’s grandchildren? How do we love in a world gone so crazy?”
Just your typical 4AM thoughts!
What helps then is when I can remember the heart of the Mother, the heart of the world, the enormity of the love that is available to us; then slowly I can begin to trust and allow the heart to release that outer shell, to allow myself to touch the vast tenderness therein.
It is not about me. It is not about you. It is about our whole world remembering its capacity for love and its capacity to hold the vast pain that has been really offered to us as a path to healing the pain of this heavy density earth plane.
Aaron keeps reminding us we came here willingly, at least pre-birth willingness, with the intention to help shift the vibration of this heavy density earth into a higher vibration. To show that given our free will choice to enact our fear, our pain, our anger – or to enact love, to hold the love and to hold space for whatever is going on; that this is really what we came to do, and we’ve been given millions of opportunities to do this work through the centuries.
There’s never been an incarnation and there never will be an incarnation in which loved ones have not been killed or died of disease. We have been through this so many times.
Can we begin to greet this with a sense of ‘holding space’ for this process of arising and dissolution? Do we understand this? I do. I think you do.
“Whatever has the nature to arise, has the nature to cease.”
We can’t hold onto it. We can only love it while it’s here. But it is so hard, because we want so much more. We want to be able to control, to have some firm ground that we feel we can stand on. And in the mundane world, there is no steady ground.
When we can relax into the reality – no steady ground – and stop looking for it, only then can we hold onto this moment and cherish this moment. Otherwise even in the joy of this moment we are looking for that steady ground, something to hold on to.
This year with Hal at home has been very hard. It has been wonderful to have him home and I find myself grasping, because I am with him so much every day, wanting him to get better. It’s not going to happen. Improving? Yes. But he is not going to be up dancing; he is not going to be up sitting at the table talking to me at length. It’s not going to happen.
When he was in the nursing home, it was easier in some ways. I saw him maybe 3 or maybe 4 times a week for a few hours each visit. When he became tired or agitated, I would tuck him in, suggest, “Take a nap,” and as he closed his eyes, I would leave. I was learning how to get on with my life, and put the whole Hal compartment (this man I had lived with for over fifty years) to put it to one side, and to say to myself, “Okay, so where am I going now?” Compartmentalizing that area which I had loved and now brought such pain. I thought I was moving through the so-called stages of grief and moving on.
And then we brought him home in March 2020. It is right there in my face constantly: His stroke. The loss. The pain. My frustration, my anger, my helplessness – and his.
Looking for that steady ground… the only steady ground I can find is love.
I need to be careful. It is easy to move into and rest deeply in a place of unconditional love, easy for me. In deep meditation I rest firmly in the Dharmakaya – for that period it is something that is steady ground. Coming back into everyday mind, but stably on the bridge, and the Dharmakaya is there… for a few minutes… steady.
I may be in here meditating in this office early in the morning, and I have moved into a place of joy, bliss, and spaciousness, no self, and then – VIBRATE/ FLASHING LIGHT! My Hal alarm goes off, my helpless husband in his bed saying, “I need you.”
And the grief comes back, the anger, and the frustration, and also deep love – a willingness to go in there and care for him. Get him up out of bed, or see what he needs. He cannot sit himself up. He cannot do anything for himself. To get him up, washed, dressed or just keep him company until the caregiver arrives to start the day.
But my heart breaks over and over again each time, each day that I do this because it is such a strong reminder, I am not in control. I cannot fix this. All that is available to me is love. Can that be enough?
My heart armors because it is so painful: “I don’t want this.”
Okay, I don’t want it, but I have been given it.
How do I hold it with love? That’s really the only question. How do I hold it with love?
We have been talking about the need for intentions. I’ve been exploring the difference between intentions and expectations. I can have an intention to be with myself and with Hal as lovingly as possible. I can hold the image of Hal gaining in strength, as he has been, becoming increasingly able to communicate – a little bit more.
I can hold that intention without trying to see it as an end: this is going to happen. We are going to be able to have a normal conversation. No… just communication. Whatever form it takes. Communication.
Hal in less pain. Whatever form that takes. Not so much physical pain, he is not in much physical pain right now. Holding that intention for less frustration for him.
But as soon as I create an expectation, it is out of the realm of intention and trying to see some result that I am attached to. I have to be non-attached to the result to hold an intention, a carefully understood intention, that Hal and I somehow will continue to be able to move through this loving each other, holding each other in the light, helping each other.
Any, yes, he helps me. I come in in the morning and he wraps his good left arm around me and gives me a big hug. And that helps. And he says, with loving eyes and hand sign, “I love you.” That helps.
Mostly I am just looking at the places where I am still holding armor around the heart, because it is so afraid of being further wounded. Watching in meditation and in daily life when any kind of fear comes up and feeling the experience of the heart sheltering itself through separating itself. And without condemning myself for that, just breathing love into the heart, inviting The Mother, Aaron, Jeshua, others to help me hold the heart open.
Being willing to walk out of the room where Hal is if I must. He is in a safe place in bed or recliner, and I can leave him and I have to leave, not forcing myself to stay. Going out. Giving myself five minutes to breathe. Holding space.
Looking at all of the “if only” – the things we wanted to do. That summer writing a book at my cabin. It is not going to happen. Obviously, it is not going to happen. Actually, I’ve sold the cabin. It’s never going to happen.
But I have a lovely deck, and a dining table looking out on the back deck and the flowers.
I am sitting here at the computer and I can see the trees beyond. If I am going to write a book, I can write a book. It does not need any special setting. I don’t have to have a cabin to be able to write. I don’t have to have anything to write except an open heart that is increasingly free of the armoring.
I cannot write freely if the heart is armored. I can’t give a dharma talk from a closed heart.
As you are with The Mother this morning, please think about what holds your heart closed, and envision beneath that armoring the very tender, pulsating, radiant, open heart. And if it feels appropriate to you, ask The Mother for help to open into that radiant heart.
She is loving us all…. And she is reminding us, “I am here. Will you let me in? What blocks you letting me in? What are you afraid of? Let me help you enter into your radiant heart so you can open to the love that is our fullest reality.”