Contemplative Practice

Six years ago, my body stopped feeling like mine. I was devastated by it. And deeply ashamed. What I've come to understand is that the whole of my experience, including the parts I would never have chosen, is what brought me here.

Letting go of old pain turned out to be, strangely, more painful than the original pain. Opening the module on joy felt like cracking a window. Not because it promised to fix anything, but because it reminded me that peace is possible even inside life's inevitable losses.

The simplest definition I've found: when love meets pain, you get compassion. Not pity. Not guilt. Not the performance of concern. Love, making contact with suffering, and staying there. That resequencing changes everything.

The cruelty I had experienced at the hands of others for making mistakes had moved inside me. A misspelling in an email. Pasta boiled too long. Small, weightless things that would spiral into a whole case against myself. This is what unexamined self-punishment looks like. It just becomes the weather.

There was a season in my career where my job, in part, was to tell people they no longer had one. That avoidance didn't make the suffering go away. It just meant I never fully accounted for it.

When tragedy happens, we intellectualize. We polarize. We perform grief in ways that are really arguments dressed up as feelings. What gets lost is the actual grief. The compassion that rises when we let ourselves be moved by what's actually happening.

Most of us walk around with beliefs about how the world should work that we never examine. And what goes unexamined has enormous power over how we live. Byron Katie's work offers a way to look directly at the thoughts that cause unnecessary suffering.

For most of my life, I believed my thoughts were reality. Waking up to the fact that thoughts are filtered, conditioned, inherited, and often just wrong was one of the more disorienting experiences of my life. It was also one of the most freeing.

I've been back in the United States for the first time in 13 years. And what I didn't expect was how much of my inner life would come with me, unchanged. This is the terrain where my metta practice has become most essential.

I start with the breath. Not because it's dramatic, or because someone told me to, but because it's always there. Even when my thoughts are dark and persistent, focusing on three breaths creates a small but real amount of space.

Wise effort rises up from the ground without my having to do anything. When it goes unwise, a self-improvement motivation takes over. I "should" sit. I "need" to sit. The practice becomes another box checked.