Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (17 page)

I bring the same people into this meditation every time I do it. Occasionally, when someone I know is ill or in distress, I will include him as well. I also include a few friends who are no longer alive, using each to represent one of my own fears. For example, two people I am currently practicing with are former hospice patients. One had a great fear of losing control; the other had a strong fear of physical pain. I bring them in for just one breath with the line “May you dwell in the open heart,” extending loving-kindness toward them in their fear. I then follow with one breath toward myself and my own similar fears. In doing this, I’ve learned to bring a sense of heart and spaciousness to fears that before seemed unworkable.

At first it may feel uncomfortable to experience the breath in and out of the heartspace. It may also feel foreign to silently repeat the words of loving-kindness. It’s worth the effort, however, to stay with your initial discomfort or cynicism. I know of no other practice so effective in undercutting the solidity of the judgmental mind or in helping break through our chronic state of separateness. The power of breathing in and out of the heartspace can’t be explained or denied. The only way to feel it is to make this meditation an integral and regular part of your practice life.

Don’t be surprised if doing this practice brings up doubt and resistance. We have a tendency to use practice as protection. The openness of this loving-kindness meditation can seem threatening. You may feel that you are deceiving yourself or that somehow the practice is not genuine. But even if you believe these conditioned judgments, it doesn’t mean that they’re true. The more you can suspend your judgmental mind, the more you can be open to what’s of value.

17

Awakening the Heart of Compassion

W
HEN
I
STARTED TO RECOVER
from the first prolonged episode of my immune disorder, I felt strongly motivated to stay close to the edge. I’d learned so much from being acutely ill that I didn’t want to fall back into a life routine based mostly on cultivating comfort and security. Having faced my fears related to dying, I wanted to keep the fact of death in front of me as a reminder not to go back to skating on thin ice. I knew how easy it would be to lose my deepened connection with the aspiration to awaken.

But I wasn’t sure how, realistically, to keep myself close to the edge. Hoping for direction, I took a class in “Death and Dying.” Although the class itself was of no substantial help, what came out of it was the opportunity to participate as a volunteer at the local hospice. Although I knew at once that I wanted to become a hospice volunteer, it was hard for me to imagine going into the home of a stranger dying of cancer, AIDS, or some other terminal disease. I would be going in as a volunteer to do what? Who was I to be in this situation? What was I to say? How could I possibly help a dying person in her suffering? In spite of my doubts, I took the training and began what was to become one of the most powerful learning paths I have ever encountered.

Be Open to Change

When I was assigned my first patient, Richard (whose name I have changed here, as I have with all the hospice patients and their families), a fifty-two-year-old with terminal brain cancer, I was still experiencing discomfort and self-doubt. I decided to get acquainted briefly with Richard a few days before making my first hospice visit. Although I made this unofficial visit on the pretext of making Richard feel more comfortable, in truth it was to make
me
feel more comfortable. His wife answered the door and took me to meet her husband, who was standing in a dark hallway. After speaking for a minute in a friendly way, Richard blurted out, “It’s hopeless!” and walked into his room, closing the door. As I turned to his wife, she said, “I’m terrified,” and started to cry. She quickly walked away from me, and not knowing what to do, I left the house. I was so stunned by what had happened that all I could do was sit in my car for a while.

When I got home, I called my hospice supervisor, who tried to reassure me. I meditated a lot over the next few days, trying to ground myself in the reality of the moment, but the anxiety and self-doubt remained. By the time I returned to Richard’s, I was braced for the worst, with a variety of contingency plans. When his wife answered the door with a smile and took me in to see Richard, who was cheerfully watching wrestling on television, I was thrown almost as off balance as on the first visit. In both cases I had gone in with expectations—based entirely on mental pictures—of who to be and what to do.

That I needed to be open to change, to the unexpected, without the illusion that I could substantially control or change anything, is a lesson I learned over and over again, not just from patient to patient but from one visit to the next. Often conditions were changing so rapidly that they could never be pinned down with a formulaic response. This meant giving up the comfort of my familiar identities of who to be and what to do. Without dropping my identity as “the helper” and my mental
picture of the patient as someone to be helped, I would never have been able to connect in a meaningful way. The challenge—and the opportunity—was to report for each hospice visit without expecting results or needing to fix the situation. Instead, it was just to offer my own being, my basic human kindness, even when there was no apparent personal connection with the other person. To participate fully was to be open without preconceptions to whatever presented itself.

During one visit Richard told me about the day he buried his father. As he was kneeling at his father’s grave, he heard his father say, “If you wish to see me in heaven, you’d better straighten up your life.” Only a year earlier, when his father had implored him to give up drinking and cursing, Richard had retorted angrily, “You live your life, and I’ll live mine.” But upon hearing the voice at the grave, he turned his life completely around. Not only did he give up drinking and cursing, he also began to pray every day. For the first time in his life, he felt a sense of equanimity. Although he didn’t want to die, he now trusted God’s plans and viewed death as a positive transition.

The experience at the grave had transformed Richard’s life. Though from my own perspective he did not exude deep spiritual understanding, I could not deny that he seemed to regard his illness and approaching death with genuine acceptance. To expect him to follow my agenda for what a spiritual experience should look like would have been irrelevant and would also have prevented our experiencing a real connection. His heart was truly attuned to his own understanding of God, and there was nothing that I needed to do or say. I could just listen and feel the beauty of this gentle human being.

It became clear to me that often all the path of compassion requires us to “do” is give up our need to control situations and to change other people to fit our preconceived notions. As we learn to be open to whatever presents itself and to offer our own being in return, we experience the basic connectedness that is the heart of compassion.

Don’t Hold Back Your Heart

Mary was a sixty-nine-year-old patient with heart disease and emphysema. She spent most of her time in bed, hooked up to a catheter and oxygen. In spite of her deteriorating condition, she was warm and friendly when I visited, though an underlying anxiety and agitation was undeniable. For example, she had to keep a video running or the television on twenty-four hours a day, and she was too restless to watch a movie or a show all the way through. Yet she was not interested in talking about her anxiety as much as she was in just trying to keep it at bay.

During my first visits, my only function seemed to be that of a glorified baby-sitter. But as I got to know Mary and see how difficult it was for her to cope with her fears, I began to feel for her. I practiced learning to speak to her from the heart, silently saying the words “May you dwell in the open heart. May your suffering be healed.” Though I never imagined I was having a spiritual communication with her or that she was even receiving my words of loving-kindness, as I continued the practice of silently speaking from the heart, a sense of genuine connection with her began to deepen.

On one visit while we were watching a video, I felt the impulse to hold her hand. Then I hesitated, thinking it might make her feel uncomfortable. When I got home later, I felt sorry that I had held myself back. Resolving not to let my doubts and anxieties get in the way the next time, I began to look forward to holding her hand and to having a warm visit. But the day I was to see her again, I received a call that Mary had just died.

What affected me more than the sadness I felt was the realization that I would never again have the opportunity to make the simple gesture of touching her hand. I had given in to the doubts of my small mind, and by the time I had become aware of this, it was too late to express my open heart. The lesson was clear and powerful: time passes swiftly, and with it, our only
chance. The words that were painfully etched into my being, and that subsequent hospice visits brought up time and time again, were: “Don’t hold back your heart in fear.”

Attend to Your Own Agendas

Maureen was only in her midforties, but by the time we met, the cancer in her liver had left her with only a few weeks to live. I was specifically assigned to Maureen because she had asked for a hospice worker who could talk to her about her spiritual practice. Upon sharing our experiences of both illness and meditation, we connected immediately. She seemed quite open to what I had to say, and she liked occasionally hearing the guided meditations I read to her from Stephen Levine’s
Healing into Life and Death
. She was the first hospice patient to whom I spoke about how, very specifically, to work with her experience.

Much of our conversation revolved around Maureen’s disappointment with her family. She felt frustrated that her husband and teenage daughters seemed unable to accept that she was dying. They related to her as if she were well, with the cancer being seen as a temporary inconvenience. But her bigger problem was with herself. A compliant person, she was driven to try to live up to their picture of her as essentially healthy. She would not ask for help for fear of disrupting their image-based world. I tried to help her see that living out of false pictures—both her family’s and her own—was causing her distress and disappointment as well as preventing any genuine connection with those she loved.

But Maureen’s sense of isolation and separateness increased as her body deteriorated. One day hospice called to say that she had suffered a major downturn and was probably near death. When I went to see her, she was too sick for more than a very brief visit. The pained and frightened look on her face sharpened the frustration I felt at not being able to help her.

Driving home, I felt the frustration change into a more
intense distress, complete with sensations of nausea and heaviness. When I arrived, I had a strong impulse to get busy, to avoid being with the discomfort. But knowing that my emotional reaction was a sign of something I wasn’t seeing, I sat down to meditate instead. I tried to stay with the physical feeling of distress, asking myself “What
is
this?” I was not seeking a logical or conceptual answer but rather an experiential one. I was nauseous, and my body was tight all over, suffused with vague feelings of gloom, defeat, and rejection.

It gradually became clear that my distress was a direct (and predictable) consequence of my own unrecognized agendas. I had seen myself as a person who could help, the hospice saint who would help ease Maureen’s pain and guide her to a “conscious death.” Of course, this was not my only motivation. But it was obvious to me that my hidden agendas had been getting in the way of any genuine connection. My need to help had prevented me from seeing that there was little I could have done to help reverse her or her family’s deep-seated patterns. As all this became clear, the feelings of distress dissipated. I then turned my mind to Maureen, remembering her pained, confused, and frightened face. I began breathing her presence into the heartspace, extending to her loving-kindness. My need to help, and even more so my need to be appreciated, had prevented me from making this genuine offering.

Although she died within hours of our last visit, I still remember Maureen regularly even today. I often breathe her presence into my heartspace, feeling the pain of living from fear-based agendas: hers of not being able to address her pattern of conforming to an image of who she was supposed to be, and mine of needing to be appreciated as someone who helped. In experiencing these all-too-human tendencies within the spaciousness of the heart, the warmth of loving-kindness replaces the heaviness of distress.

The natural impulse to help, to give, to connect, will often be enmeshed with more self-centered agendas—wanting to be
seen as a helper, wanting to achieve results from doing, needing to be appreciated. These smaller agendas will often impede the natural urge to act in a compassionate way. Only by seeing through them over and over, as well as by experiencing the havoc that they wreak, can we loosen their power to pollute our natural compassion.

Death Is a Closed Heart

Thomas was a sixty-nine-year-old Irishman dying of liver and pancreatic cancer. Even though we had little in common on the surface, we nonetheless connected from our first visit. As I found out later, people who are close to death often feel the need to tell their story. They don’t want us to reinterpret their difficult situation in a more positive way—they just want to be heard. With Thomas, it was apparent right away that this was what he wanted from our encounters; for me, it was equally important to learn how to just listen, beyond my normal agendas and identities. I would ask him a few questions and then simply let him tell his story, in his thick brogue. I didn’t comment on his story, nor try to make him feel better about his “mistakes,” nor let him pull me into its melodramatic aspects. Instead, I simply listened, as much as I was able.