I will always be profoundly grateful for the wisdom,
compassion, and love of my many teachers,
very much including Pema Chödrön. - Molly
"Our own suffering, if we turn toward it,
can open us to a loving relationship with the world."
Before we can know what natural warmth really is, often we must
experience loss. We go along for years moving through our days, propelled by
habit, taking life pretty much for granted. Then we or someone dear to us has an
accident or gets seriously ill, and it’s as if blinders have been removed from
our eyes. We see the meaninglessness of so much of what we do and the emptiness
of so much we cling to.
When my mother died and I was asked
to go through her personal belongings, this awareness hit me hard. She had kept
boxes of papers and trinkets that she treasured, things that she held on to
through her many moves to smaller and smaller accommodations. They had
represented security and comfort for her, and she had been unable to let them
go. Now they were just boxes of stuff, things that held no meaning and
represented no comfort or security to anyone. For me these were just empty
objects, yet she had clung to them. Seeing this made me sad, and also
thoughtful. After that I could never look at my own treasured objects in the
same way. I had seen that things themselves are just what they are, neither
precious nor worthless, and that all the labels, all our views and opinions
about them, are arbitrary.
This was an experience of uncovering
basic warmth. The loss of my mother and the pain of seeing so clearly how we
impose judgments and values, prejudices, likes and dislikes, onto the world,
made me feel great compassion for our shared human predicament. I remember
explaining to myself that the whole world consisted of people just like me who
were making much ado about nothing and suffering from it tremendously.
When my second marriage fell apart,
I tasted the rawness of grief, the utter groundlessness of sorrow, and all the
protective shields I had always managed to keep in place fell to pieces. To my
surprise, along with the pain, I also felt an uncontrived tenderness for other
people. I remember the complete openness and gentleness I felt for those I met
briefly in the post office or at the grocery store. I found myself approaching
the people I encountered as just like me—fully alive, fully capable of meanness
and kindness, of stumbling and falling down and of standing up again. I’d never
before experienced that much intimacy with unknown people. I could look into
the eyes of store clerks and car mechanics, beggars and children, and feel our
sameness. Somehow when my heart broke, the qualities of natural warmth,
qualities like kindness and empathy and appreciation, just spontaneously
emerged.
People say it was like that in New
York City for a few weeks after September 11. When the world as they’d known it
fell apart, a whole city full of people reached out to one another, took care
of one another, and had no trouble looking into one another’s eyes.
It is fairly common for crisis and
pain to connect people with their capacity to love and care about one another.
It is also common that this openness and compassion fades rather quickly, and
that people then become afraid and far more guarded and closed than they ever
were before. The question, then, is not only how to uncover our fundamental
tenderness and warmth but also how to abide there with the fragile, often
bittersweet vulnerability. How can we relax and open to the uncertainty of it?
Please continue this article here: https://www.lionsroar.com/the-natural-warmth-of-the-heart/
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