Be Quiet, Hear the Roar

I've been thinking of family, which began with a rare phone call from my Uncle James, my mother's only sibling, now 85, wondering what to do, where to live now that his wife's advanced Alzheimer's has permanently separated them both mentally and geographically. Struggling with health and financial issues, struggling with not knowing, yet facing life with an incredible sense of humor and independence. As a kid I remember him as tall and lean, thick light red hair, an outdoorsy kind of guy like an adult boy scout. For 7 consecutive years he drove from New Orleans and took all of us on extended camping trips to Camp Riverview on the Frio River, not too far from Garner State Park. It was always magical for me, sleeping on cots under an open sky, snorkeling and swimming every day, tirelessly riding the water on our air filled plastic rafts, nursing sunburns, listening to the constant flow of the river and the wind in the sycamores, late evening hunts in the shallows for crayfish. Always my uncle could built a campfire using only one match. I am guilty of all too often dwelling on childhood memories that were wounding--hence needing attention and processing--and forgetting the safe, nurturing, and peaceful moments that are also important collections of one's personal history. Is it me, or is it human nature to want to feel good, happy, joyful, contented, safe...most, if not all the time? My uncle reminds me, yet again, of the importance of learning to find peace with our troubles when they arise. Remembering to ride the breath, like all those countless moments of floating down the Frio, the fast moving shallow rapids, the slow moving calm of the deeper water, the step by step feel of earth and rocks beneath toughened feet.

Yoga training is nearing an end, and I'm glad for that, although I know I will miss the structured learning and growing process I sought, and found, and I'll miss my classmates (two are with child), and most of all, my teacher. It's been an enriching experience on all fronts--deepening my practice, meeting and interacting with new people, paying attention to that which resonates, moving into zones of discomfort, and much more, but in summary, feeling more awakened and alive to life and growing into that, growing into yoga. What I missed is staying home with my partner, and our pets, working in the yard. The accumulated projects will provide for a busy spring spent outdoors, getting my hands dirty, working with plants, painting the unfinished part of the gate and courtyard wall, digging up the bamboo and separating and replanting the lilies. Feeling the sun. Hearing the chimes. Hearing the quiet. Yes, the quiet.

We baked an Angel Food cake yesterday, and will serve it up today covered with sweetened, sliced strawberries and whipped cream in celebration of several birthdays. Little nieces running around the house just being kids, being very noisy, coloring one moment, crying the next. I look forward to it, and then I'll look forward to it being over. Yes, the quiet, but not too much quiet, not for me, not for too long.

I had a brief but wow moment yesterday when I ran into Mary K R, and she wanted to know why I didn't return to the immersion a year or so ago. So in response to her gentle probing I was totally honest and told her I found her to be cold, unloving, detached, and not very friendly! And in saying the words out loud, to her, the truth revealed itself so clearly. I just wasn't ready at that time. I had projected my hypersensitivity on to her, and made up a story which I bought into and acted on by leaving, by not returning. At the time, I think it's what I needed to do as I just wasn't up to that particular struggle and learning process. It was a moment of synchronicity. I hope to learn more from her in the future, if it's in the cards.

The Prevalence of Fear

Lately, as I'm preparing for bed, I hear the haunting call of the owl. In the darkness of predawn I hear the owl again, but this time I hear two owls, engaged in their song of call and response.

Something deep within me stirs, something sacred, mysterious, and slightly foreboding. I wonder if I'm dreaming--each time I fetch my roommate to come and listen, there is only silence. Doubt arises. The sound I hear is deep and guttural, a string of connected multi-syllable vibrations, legato, that float like notes on the wind. It's very much like a chant, a mantra, coming from the darkness of night when the earth has spun us away from the light of the sun.





It's hard to read of the devastation the Australian wildfires have brought to thousands of animals--burnt, scorched, seared, wounded, dehydrated, frantic, panicked, and dying; for most there is nowhere to go. These kinds of disasters make me wonder about the realities of life that are baffling, both in their beauty and in their incomprehensible horror. My two cats have been acting particularly needy of late, vying for a spot on my lap, curling up against me so close that I wonder if something has triggered feelings of insecurity. Both are rescued and adopted from shelters with "no-kill" policies, while thousands of others are euthanized. Is it any wonder that most of us, who strive for some kind of awareness, are often visited by the many faces of fear?




In the Spring 2009 issue of tricycle magazine, Ezra Bayda tells us that by truly getting to know our fears, we begin to break the spell they hold on us. He describes three basic fears: fear of losing safety, fear of aloneness and disconnection, and the fear of feeling unworthy. Within each of these categories he includes just about every fear known to mankind. Bayda tells us that these multitude of fears are not just mental, but are written into the cellular memory of the our bodies, particularly in a small part of the brain called the amygdala. Therefore, he writes, simply knowing our fears on an intellectual level will not free us from the dominion they hold over us. So how do we deal with these fears? We face them head on, we do not run away from them or deny them, we sit with them and see them for what they are. And what are they? Illusions? Most of our fears are not rooted in reality. They are imagined and created. They are stories that our minds spin out like long threads of cotton candy, with thousands of sticky strings that melt away once we touch them. There really is not much substance there, but there's little comfort in knowing that. The recent issue of the Shambhala Sun has a series of articles on fear: Anxiety Soup by Alice Walker, The Fearless Lineage by Carolyn Gimian, Beyond Fear and Hope by Margaret Wheatley. The cover of the magazine invites us to "Smile at Fear".





I'm struggling much more than I'd like with an injured shoulder. I'm learning that I don't know how to align my shoulder properly, and despite all the attention given to this matter, I still don't have it down right--it's all counter-intuitive. The needed muscles are undeveloped. I'm still learning. I've been doing it incorrectly for so long. The physical therapist fusses at me and I tell him to be nicer. Fear creeps in and want to find another therapist, I fear I won't be able to do yoga again, I fear the pain won't go away. I make up all sorts of stories. But I do show up and I do the exercises, and I know my imaginative fears are like a runaway horse on the wind that I try to rein in. It's particularly comforting when I realize I'm not alone. That's only one reason why community is such a potent antidote to fear. Fear is with all of us, and learning to rest in that, to smile at that, is a task we are called on to tackle regularly. I guess that as long as we strive to be steadfast warriors on our paths to find truth we are doing all that we can do. And so that is that.

This most resembles the sound I hear. Click on this only if you have an updated version of Quick Time, otherwise one's computer gets "stuck".

http://www.naturesongs.com/ghow1.wav
Great Horned Owl

The Nonsensical Expressing of Pineapples with a Hoot

We watched a whacked out comedy last night--Pineapple Express--filled with shoot em up pot smoking drug dealing bloody murder and mayhem with car chases and explosions and I was totally laughing my ass off. I really needed that--just crazy, nutty entertainment to let go off all seriousness and be goofy and silly. Comedy makes us laugh at life, at ourselves, at others, at our condition, and I think that holds high healing value. Hasn't it been proven in some scientific lab somewhere that laughter releases some chemical that is healing? At any rate, common sense says laughter is very good for us. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the movie, but it was certainly just what I needed after a weekend long yoga intensive that was both energizing and tiring. I am SO grateful for learning from Mark F how to position my shoulders (Anusara) during asana practice to prevent injury. The head of my right humerus bone has come both up and forward out of its stable position and therefore certain muscles need to be trained and strengthened to bring it all back into proper alignment. This has been bothering me for over 6 months, and gotten progressively worse, so I'm now working with a physical therapist 3x a week. After the long weekend of study and lots of asana practice incorporating the proper alignment of the shoulders, I noticed yesterday morning when I got up that I could feel no pain at all, as if some profound healing had taken place, which is pretty amazing. Recently I've been feeling slight discomfort in my left shoulder as well, which probably means the same thing is going on over there. Last night in bed I could hear the hooting of an owl, not that unusual out here, but very unusual to hear it from inside the house, so I knew the owl was perched nearby, probably doing a call and response with another owl. As I sit here writing, I can still hear the hooting. In most cultures the owl is ambivalent as the symbol of wisdom and darkness/death. Over the years more than just a few yoga teachers have told me to not be so serious; many more have corrected my shoulder position. Obviously there was wisdom and knowing in those words of advice, but I'm not sure I knew how to heed their cautions. Now nature is telling me to be wise with my body or I'm going to injure it, and perhaps I need to lighten up and come out of staying too long in the "darkness" of seriousness and step more often into the light of laughter. Hoot hoot.

Carry the Banner of Love and Acceptance

I watched a powerful and touching documentary the other night--For the Bible Tells Me So.

I wept.

Earlier in the day, after class, I saw Devon and he continued his intense work on my shoulder, then I saw an excellent MD who gave his affirming opinion that I probably don't have a rotator cuff tear but rather tendinitis with some calcification in my upper right shoulder along with some impingement. Prescription: evaluation and physical therapy 3x a week for 8 weeks! (and a cortisone injection if I want one). No painkillers and no anti-inflammatory prescriptions! I like this doctor! I was so excited about his referral to a clinic that specializes in shoulders only to learn they do not accept my primary insurance carrier and therefore my secondary insurance carrier won't cover me at all. Just another Catch 22 in the American system of escalating medical costs and dramatic decreases in insurance payments, hence the epidemic dropping of many insurance carriers, especially Medicare.

So what now? Find a clinic that accepts my insurance, if there is one, get another referral to a different clinic, or work out a payment plan and pay out of pocket. This system is really broken. It's just shocking how many doctors and clinics no longer accept Medicare. What in the world do retired people do if they can't afford to pay out of pocket? (We should all know the answer to that if we simply watch the evening news or know retired people who paid into Social Security and MUST accept Medicare as their primary carrier).

How does this tie in with the documentary? Maybe it doesn't, but clearly the ignorant and uneducated leaders of the influential christian right propagate the totally false notion that the Bible, being the word of god, condemns homosexuality. It is hatred in action, which is rooted in fear, that's been used for centuries to condemn women, Jews, blacks; to justify slavery, to justify concentration camps, to justify condemnation of fellow humans. It's the opposite of love and acceptance. It's selective perception, literalism of a few select passages from the bible yet ignoring all the other passages that are equally absurd when interpreted out of the context of the time, the culture, and the language in which they were written.

"It's okay to have a 5th grade understanding of the bible so long as you are in 5th grade" stated one Biblical scholar. As a result of this preaching of hatred against gays, families are torn apart when they learn of a gay family member. Parents reject their children based on what their church leaders have been telling them--it really is brainwashing at its worse. Gay teens are 5 to 7 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers, and 20 times more likely to attempt suicide. It gets me all riled up, and brings to memory the homophobia I've had to deal with in the past. The homophobia that begins with oneself. The shock and total rejection that this could be happening to me. The painful loneliness and isolation. The excruciating fear, followed by the months of conversion therapy I underwent, thank goodness not with a fundamentalist, but with a misguided Freudian shrink, a Rhodes Scholar, who thought he was doing what was best for a frightened 16 year old who could barely utter a word. To be honest it wasn't so much conversion therapy as it was a means to get me back into high school, back into my home, stop the "incipient delusional formation"and get back into some semblance of normalcy in a typical small town high school filled with people I felt totally alienated from.

Years later, out of the closet and in a long term relationship, I learned how homophobia can be rampant in the workplace, and how it finally, in it's relentless berating and humiliation can bring you about as far down as you'd ever want to go. In a most dramatic exit, like a scene from high drama, I left my workplace on a stretcher, surrounded by medics wheeling me down the long corridors of learning, with throngs of curious onlookers, many of them sympathetic fellow co-workers, watching the scene unfold. Yet another crowd awaited outside, as the ambulance, with sirens screaming, headed for Breckenridge Hospital. I just didn't have the energy to wave at all my fans. :-). Act II, the hospitalizations, the therapy, the consultations with shrinks, social workers, psychologists, tests and more tests, and lawyers. Act III--he's totally nuts, he's so fragile, he brought this on himself, we were rather mean to him, he didn't have a clue how to take care of himself, it's all his parents fault, let's donate 12 months of paid sick leave from the pool! It's Religion! It's the worse of institutional bureaucracy gone awry! What do you expect from a deviant? Let's say he's mentally ill!

If only we can be taught to learn to love and accept ourselves and others as we are, as they are. It sounds so simple, it seems so easy, and in fact it is. But people are taught otherwise by people in positions of authority and the cycle of hatred begins falling like a long row of dominos, gaining momentem, spiraling out of control, and is easily justified because our great leaders told us so.

(As one of Hitler's henchmen said, "If you tell a lie long enough, people will begin to believe it." )

I like to think the same theory applies to telling the truth, and that ultimately it yields far more power. I hope so.

http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org/

Touching Souls

I'm sitting in a waiting lounge, in north Austin, at a car dealership, surrounded by 3 flat screen TV's, each one turned on. I can hear an unpleasant cacophony of sounds --cell phones, an intercom system broadcasting dialog, a crying baby, the voices of office workers in cubicles, the ssshhhwww of the cappuccino machine. In a mild, non-panicky sort of way, I can't wait to get the hell out of here. The lounge has bright red chairs and love seats atop a dull gray wall to wall carpet, brown grass paper contrasted with stark white walls, a sea of glass, a coffee bar with an assortment of goodies--caff, decaff, chocolates, ice cold beverages, cinnamon rolls. If there was grass nearby, I'd go sit on it. I'm waiting for this coaster looking device to start blinking red and vibrating and in general going totally berserk to signal that the car is serviced. I've been fantasizing about yoga retreats for this spring or early summer, set in the mountains, with secluded hiking trails, or on a beach, with the sound of rolling waves lulling me into total relaxation, guided meditations, a deep tissue massage, which reminds me of something I read last year regarding touch:



Unfortunately, we are a touch-starved culture. The deep wounds we suffer from the harsh, often brutal touch of caregivers--the wound of unlove--spirals outward and pervades the whole of our society, creating an epidemic--the fear of touch. However, true touch, when it comes from the heart, possesses profoundly healing qualities, and when we are able to both give and receive heart-felt physical affection from another, deep understanding and healing begins. Caplan writes:

"though we cannot heal the soul-wound by an affectionate pat on the back, for those who have felt unloved all of their lives, a small act of kindness can shake their whole perspective about who they are in the world. Touch, when done with heart, is always healing--period. Whether given by a trained professional or a nervous friend, IT HEALS."

Many of us suffer from not having true, intimate, connective bonds with others; all too often touch is merely a prelude to sex, so fear sets in and we frown upon touch. "TrueTouch"--that which comes from the heart, helps to counteract the effects of *damaging touch*....I like the book "Untouched, the Need for Genuine Affection in an Impersonal World" by Mariana Caplan.

Early one morning in a hospital setting I awakened to the sound of relentless pounding. Why would workers be busy at work long before dawn when everyone was fast asleep? In these kinds of settings, you are drawn to certain people for inexplicable reasons, a kind of fast friendship that gets you through your stay. At least that's my personal experience. Turns out it was my new friend and she was pounding her head against the wall, and the proof wasn't
pretty. She couldn't stop one of her selves from doing this. Such a condition used to be called multiple personality disorder and was/is very difficult for professionals to diagnose. Remember the book scripted into a movie called Cybil? The condition is now mostly called dissociative identity disorder. When the child has suffered severe abuse, and usually such abuse is inclusive of unspeakable acts of cruelty--mentally, physically, and sexually--the need to escape into a newly formed personality(s) who cannot feel the pain is created, and this is totally understandable. If you ever meet such people you may get your heart ripped out. You may want to love and save them. If you get very involved with them they may unknowingly screw with your mind and your heart until you just KNOW the only choice before you is to walk away. Usually, after you've tried your best to lead them toward some source of healing, you come to realize your own weaknesses and flaws. There seems to be a universal law that says when you begin playing the role of savior, you are playing a game of self righteousness doomed to come to naught. Such dissociative personalities, in my experience, are often highly narcissistic, from a pathological point of view. You love them, you feel for them, you show them compassion; however, the lies, the deceit, the manipulations, the very craziness of the dissociative personalities has the potential to wreak havoc on he who chooses to play caregiver. There's an inability of the narcissist to escape from his own prison of self-centeredness, and in the end, you count for nothing. Such has been my experience and I know there are exceptions. No two people are alike, no two syndromes or illness are totally alike. I find it fascinating. It's yet another facet of the bejeweled and beguiling human condition.

I like to recall how important and healing it can be to be touched by others, and also to touch others, in an appropriate and healthy manner. Mostly I'm talking about hugs. For some people, this can be extremely frightening when they might have a history of being touched from a place of "unlove." It may feel really yucky to them. It's important to learn to read people's body language, to try to hone in on what they may or may not be saying to you, to always honor and respect boundaries. But for goodness sakes, if someone makes a gesture of openness that's an invitation to a hug, and you just know it's a good thing, go for it. It can be healing. It's a complex proposition to fully understand the language of the body, both our own and that of others, but sometimes a basic understanding can be of tremendous value.

I can't seem to make this link work, so just google "you tube video hugs" or "free hugs campaign" and watch this very popular video on hugs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

The coaster just went berserk. Time to get the hell out of here.

"Old, Broken, and Ugly, But We Still Get Hot, Cold, and Hungry"

On the way to practice Thursday afternoon with the loving (and fun-loving!) Anusara yoga group, at the Love Yoga Coop, I saw a woman at an intersection with a handmade sign in her hand that read:

Old, Broken, and Ugly, but We Still Get Hot, Cold, and Hungry.

I swear she looked like a saint, like a nurturing mother earth goddess with a scarf that framed the sweetest and warmest features of womankind, a Mexican mama with hordes of children at her feet as she moves with stoic deliberation through her primitive kitchen preparing all sorts of hot spicy dishes to feed the members of her large, extended clan. Or maybe one of those gifted doctors or nurses who really know how to make you feel comfortable and safe before the big old needle gets jammed into your vein, or before the catheter finally gets pulled out. I can even see the face of a pious nun caring for the masses of spiritual seekers who have made a pilgrimage to some holy site that has drawn her to assist them on their journey, maybe offering a drink of refreshing water or a garland of freshly strewn flowers. I can envision her lighting candles and offering them up as prayers to her god to please bring some much needed peace to so many parts of our troubled and suffering world. I can see her wandering the rows of a little garden, pulling weeds, watering, hoeing and tending to leaves and shoots as the sun makes his daily ascent lighting the sky. I couldn't seem to see the reality of a woman at an intersection begging for money so she could have her next meal and maybe find some respite from the cold winter winds blowing in from the north. She glowed with an earthy yet ethereal radiance. Clearly I was projecting, or was I? I wanted to know her story, her history. What brought her here to this busy intersection on far south Lamar soliciting money from people sitting behind the closed windows of their warm automobiles? I once read that it's important for us to try to get to know the names of the people who are often invisible--the janitors, the garbage collectors, the house cleaning crews, the people who perform the jobs at the bottom of the pay scale and who often play a significant role in the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables and many other goods that are available to us. Say hello to them, ask them how they are doing. Connect with them. Often these souls are the very essence of what is most humane in our world. Some people believe these underprivileged bodies are the temples of advanced souls, more evolved than most, hence they have chosen a life that is difficult and hard, knowing an easy time doesn't afford much opportunity for spiritual growth. A testament to spiritual stagnation--best expressed as an inner poverty--can often be seen in the empty lifestyles of the priviledged and powerful where there is no such thing as enough, and more is perceived as better but is in fact often ruinous to themselves and to so many others.

Earth mother, I hope you had a good meal last night and found warm and safe shelter. In my eyes you are not broken and you are not ugly. You deserve to age with grace and dignity, as we all do. I am sorry that hunger has become your companion. You touched me, you brought tears to my eyes, you triggered feelings of gratitude and the kind of humbleness I need regular injections of. It doesn't seem right and it certainly doesn't seem fair. The world is filled with injustices that often get mislabeled as mysteries. There is no mystery to being old, cold, or hungry with no place to sleep.

Andrew Harvey advocates "sacred activism." John Friend speaks of our interconnectedness and how we should honor that and suggests many ways that we can do just that. My friend Roger and his friend Maggie are a couple of examples of the good work many people do. Connect with someone you would normally not even notice. I'm going to try and do that. You can find Roger and others at:

http://www.discoverhopefund.org/

The Fruits of Compassion vs. the Blues of Aversion

This blog entry, or blog entry endeavor, is going to be a difficult one, but I feel I need to own it and confess it, so to speak. I say endeavor because that's all it may be, an attempt, without an end, without conclusion. But isn't that part of the human experience? It's beautiful to view events and experiences as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe it's just NOT the end we wanted, or the beginning, or middle, or the whole package, for that matter. I got so totally caught up in my own anger and frustration the other day that I couldn't find any passage out of it. I just stayed there, stuck, in that pretty awful place the whole day. Angry, frustrated, stuck, knowing what was going on, even being aware that it would eventually end, but feeling totally helpless, totally unable to snap my fingers, or chant a mantra, and say okay, that's enough, I'm out of this shit hole. It didn't happen that way. Perhaps my ego, or some inner injury that got triggered, decided that I was going to be stuck all day long, and be pretty miserable the whole time. I felt embarrassed, humiliated, and immature. I felt small, like a child having a temper tantrum. Something failed, something collapsed, something came falling down, and until the tears finally came, and until I sat down with it and began reading passages from an inspired text was I able to sail out of the maelstrom and into a sea of calm. I lost touch with myself for most of the day. Or did I? I just love it when Pema Chodran tells us to stay with our stuckness, feel it to it's fullest, try to find peace with feeling really uncomfortable with what's going on, try to learn to be able to use that experience to go deeper. For me, when I'm in it, there's little peace or learning going on that I'm aware of--it comes afterwards, IF I put in the work. Like right now. I'm feeling pretty okay about it all. I suppose we are going to have visitations from our emotional selves that we'd just as soon slam the door on and say please, not now, not today, not ever!! Then we beat ourselves up for thinking we have not succeeded in working our program, or we have failed to reach into that healing part of ourselves that we've worked so hard to cultivate. In The Guesthouse, Rumi not only tells us to invite all these things inside, but to welcome them openly and with love. Pema writes:

"When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance."

"Stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion." For me I think that's a key. I can get all tangled up in struggling with distress to the point that I feel I like I'm tied into a thousand little knots.

One of my triggers centers around being told or asked to do something that I don't want to do. Really, it can be that simple. And I don't feel okay saying no. Or maybe more accurately, it's the whole concept of being told to do something when I don't know how to do it, and kind of want to. I think that happened to me over and over again as a child, in countless ways, and when I sense it happening again that very frightened little kid in me wants to shut down, wants to scream out please teach me how and I will do it, please show me how, please be with me and let's do it together, can we let it be a fun and loving learning experience? It's part of my history that I have to process and accept and learn from. Over and over I come back to the events of my childhood. Undealt with, these fearful experiences that are part of our history "take purchase of our souls" (James Hollis). As a child I was painfully shy, withdrawn, had very little supervision, no discipline, no structure, and an environment often shaking to its foundation with chaos, craziness, and at times a violence that can be difficult to revisit. When you watch someone you love getting beat up repeatedly and you can't do anything about it, and you really want to, it's quite a burden to carry, for anyone, especially a little child who thinks his mother will probably be killed. The scene plays out again and again. The child is called upon to be the adult, and of course he can't. He becomes hyper-vigilant, trying to become the protector, the keeper of peace, the one who soothes. He gets chastised and criticized for not knowing how to do something he's never been taught how to do. He wants to give up and simply be a kid. But there are times when that is not allowed.

So I conclude that the root of anger and frustration is fear. So what's the fear? For me, and for many others, the bottom line, the core, the center of the fear is fear of not being loved. Fear of not being worthy of love. It gets me every time, and it hurts like hell. You sort of hang your head in the most humble of ways and say I am afraid that no one loves me because I'm not worthy of love. Pema calls this buying into the old storyline, the old storyline that is not true, the old storyline that never was true. We were taught so many falsehoods, it can take a lifetime to unlearn them.

Noah Levine writes: "Aversion isn't the enemy; it is just the normal reaction of the mind and body to pain. Whatever the hurt we feel, our biological survival mechanism tries to get rid of it. The problem is that we don't actually have the ability to escape from all the painful experiences in life. It can't be done. Thus the revolutionary's practice is to learn to break the habitual reactive tendency of aversion and to replace it with a compassionate response. The good news is that although aversion or anger toward pain is common but unhelpful, compassion is a response that decreases suffering and brings about an internal and external experience of safety and well-being." "A compassionate response can, at times, be as simple as seeing clearly the pain we are meeting with anger or aversion, and just letting go of the attempt to push it away and relaxing into the experience itself with mercy and care."

Pema Chodran writes: "Befriending emotions or developing compassion for those embarrassing aspects of ourselves, the ones that we think of as sinful, or bad, becomes the raw material, the juicy stuff with which we can work to awaken ourselves."

A lot to think about, to ponder on, to work on, to process. It isn't easy and sometimes the going gets pretty rough, but if we can recall that if we stop and try to connect with the feeling of compassion that resides in our heart, and sometimes most especially self-compassion, it will help make riding the waves of anger, pain and aversion to those feelings a bit smoother.