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Published: October 24th 2011
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I arrive at the potluck. I had convinced myself that I had no time to make the salad I was now holding. Baby spinach, green onion curlicues, sharp cheddar, smoked almonds, dried cranberry, sesame oil, fresh from the back of my car: trunk salad. Yes, I had placed it there before dance, but after the coffee date which came after the faculty meeting following a French toast breakfast n’ phone call. I have arrived. I am holding a cool salad….I smile, being cool…feeling as if I’ve been on a loop d’ loop all day long. There is so much happening, happening here.
I make my way through the entry -waving, sloshing the salad bowl to the kitchen onto the table, a plentiful spread. I open a beer, head to the back deck, a second story offshoot overlooking the yard. Children…playing with flashlights, and straws…Children. Someone’s dad runs spritely after one of the sprinters. I watch joy impelling these boys to chase each other in mad circles, falling down, seizing laughter. I smile. I turn. Here is Sharrel. I know I haven’t seen her since I’ve returned to Bloomington. We first met in Hakomi one afternoon. I remember gazing into
her face, my body remembers our resonance. We talk.
“I appreciate how strong you are…. and also so gentle.”
Thanks. I think to myself… if she could see how this has happened to me…then…she’d know. I wasn’t sure what she’d know if she’d want to, so, I just stood there with my beer and said, “Thanks.” After some space, I added,
“I have to be this strong to allow the gentle to happen.”
Did I just say that? Huh. Well, I surely wouldn’t need to follow that up….
“Could you write something about how strength can be in service to the gentle?”
She asks.
That’s a good question. I don’t know if I can, but I can remember the first time I recognized what she was seeing in me, in someone else. I was painting. It was morning work period at the Zen center. I splashed white paint onto my black meditation clothes, set my brush down and went to clean it off. I wondered, was it okay to stop for this? I did it anyway. I went to the bathroom, tried to wipe it off, but it had already set in. I
went back to painting and let it go. When the bell rang for tea, I headed up the stairs to meet the group and he noticed the paint on my sleeve.
“You’ve got paint on your sleeve.”
“Yep.”
“I can help….that’s a good shirt you are wearing”
He went downstairs and came back with a rag cloth. He focused his entire attention on the speck of paint and dabbed at my sleeve with such presence and grace I thought I might die. I learned more about Buddhist practice at that moment, in the way he held on to the edge of my shirt and dabbed, than in the next three years of sitting. There was something in the touch.
I noticed the desire to follow him around, not knowing what I wanted, if anything. I tracked him for a long time, enamored with the quality of his touch and the way he moved his hands. I had only a sense of the conditions around it and I wondered deeply about this presence and gift. I felt like a “peeping tom” a few times…those times I was accidently seeing him through window shades, at parties,
holding pints of beers, eating pizza, reading poetry, or sewing. I watched how he folded paper plates in half to save them for recycling, and held his water glass with two hands. I had every sense in the world that this man was either the love of my life… or, a being that was living so completely in the love of life that there was nothing other than this to him. It was like watching love in motion.
What I think I was learning in all moments of our exchange was that he had embodied a type strength that had to do with quality and kind of attention. And, when this type of strength is transmitted, it manifests as gentleness or grace. I think this is a subtle virtue. It didn’t matter how long he had been sitting, or what his real name was, or what he did. It was all in how he was.
When I think of gentle strength, I think of opposites inside a human being, being held and acknowledged so mindfully, with such compassion and integrity, that the only result is love. I think of the beautiful difficulty of reckoning with the necessary suffering
of seeing oneself full of contradictions and habits, and the courage to continue to sit in the fire of this paradox burning hour after hour… no wonder gentleness is what is left.
I think suffering is related to this, and suffering is something that we all have beliefs about. We especially have ideas about what to do about it. So…I’m going to hang out around the edges a bit to explore, and say that I feel that it is through the conscious choice of being with suffering without becoming lost in it, or trying to fix it, that we birth gentle strength. The more I have become conscious of suffering- my own suffering, the more that my gentleness emerges. It has emerged, slowly over time, from the strength to be with my own suffering consciously, and to do nothing…not to fix it, hide it, run away from it, ignore it, or inflate it….just be with it. It has never been a matter of thinking about these things as concepts, or trying to get over them, but to have actually discovered them and let the natural course of transformation happen.
I know in Hakomi, part of the purpose of
the work is the relief of “unnecessary suffering,” and so, as a student, I’ve practiced how to become clear of the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering. And to become clear of the difference between the two, I’ve had to go back through the way I learned to organize my experience of reality. Some of the way I learned to organize reality is not so helpful in my present life, and has caused unnecessary suffering for me. It is painful at first to see how I’ve constructed my reality based on false assumptions and learned habits, but over time seeing these, and choosing to act more in accordance with present reality has been a great relief. Letting go of old, outmoded beliefs has allowed room for the natural emergence of gentleness and love. I think these qualities…love, empathy, compassion, capacity for intimacy, grace, passion, and gentleness, are always there for all of us, but harder for some of us to access, and very difficult for all of us to continue to cultivate and nourish. It takes a lot of love to nurture love, and we all need support.
Becoming conscious of the ways we tangle ourselves into patterns of unnecessary suffering, and to go back through these formations require courage and strength. I’ve found that the courage to discover who you are in order to be who you are, is a journey of paradox whose yield is grace, more comfort, accurate self image, and a sense of belonging here. I think without the foundation to embrace the yes/no, sun/moon, opposites without breaking off into either/or and becoming rigid, there is no chance for gentle strength. It is an active paradox of principles….. the result of all of the friction of watching oneself sway between maddening moments of yes and no, push/pull, backwards/forwards. I think now of all the courage and strength I’ve seen at work crafting the gentle/strong heart of meditators, yogis, self-studiers, artists, spiritual and psychological explorers… those who have chosen to dive into the mystery awake to truly see the cross of one’s own life. There is great courage in the ability to stay open during moments of not knowing, and to continue to trust the emergence.
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Rebekah Spivey
non-member comment
Gratefullness
Hi Allison, Thanks so much for sharing this today of all possible days. I needed to hear/read this today and really focus on unecessary suffering v necessary suffering with the outcome being what I will or will not allow in my life. Sidebar. I really miss your special energy in our class this semester. Rebekah