opening to our lives

Love After Love
The time will come when with elation you'll greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, Sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life who you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. (Derek Walcott)

We call ourselves homo sapien sapiens, which means "to taste," to sense," or "to know." This is one of, I think, the great tragedies of our species so far is that so much beauty, science, art, music, poetry comes out of the human mind. And so much mayhem comes out of the same human mind, same human heart. In a sense — because in some sense we don't know how to run the apparatus that we've been given and sometimes it takes over. And on good days just blinds us and we sort of make mistakes. On bad days, it blinds us to other people's pain, and we can create an enormous amount of pain in the world out of our own pain and of our own ignorance and out of our own ambitious greediness, I guess I'd call it, to want things to be different "so that I will feel better." If we're not careful, we wind up with the kind of conceit that we are the center of the universe. It's an occupational hazard of being packaged in a body, that the whole universe is outside and you are obviously the center of it, and you relate to it through all your senses, including potentially this capacity for knowing. That, to me, is kind of a working definition of meditation.

What is meditation? It's not necessarily stopping in the kind of usual way that we would think of stopping. Stopping is good and, of course, we're all going to be stopped, sooner or later the ultimate stop. We work a lot with medical patients who have tremendous suffering. Our track record with the dead is not so good. [Laughter] So one of the sort of cardinal rules of thumb is that as long as you're breathing, no matter what's wrong with you, from our perspective, there's more right with you than wrong with you.

But can we learn how to pour some energy into what's already OK with us? Which you could call health in the most profound of ways, our own interface with not only the outer world but also the interior world of our own thoughts, our own emotions, our own sensory experience, in ways that would actually have some degree of balance, some degree of interrelationality, because all the senses are actually interrelational. Also, while you're the center of the universe, OK, so is everybody else. So is everybody else. So that means in a sense there's no center. Cosmologists know this. Topologists know this. There's no center and there's no periphery.

But the question is what if we were to take the name we gave our species seriously and actually train to familiarize ourselves with the full perspective, the full dimensionality of what it means to be really human? For learning, for growing, healing, and for that matter, transformation across the whole lifespan. (Jon Kabat-Zinn)