Today’s photo evokes the romance of the school dance. An oft used descriptor of that moment would be “innocence” although, events later in the parking lot might not be very innocent. Yet, we wistfully remember clumsily fumbling around another person in the dark because whether it was glorious, frightening or both, opening the heart was a powerful moment for us.
I sadly never got out of my head long enough to let my heart into the equation but maybe it happened at some point. It wasn’t until years later when meditation gave me the courage to allow vulnerability. But, whether it was groping on a high school dance floor, fumbling in the back seat, or sitting on the meditation cushion, the moment of frailty when we “fall” is an important step in our spiritual journey.
Falling in love sounds lovely, but falling can be a frightening experience. As it is scary to have our defenses pulled away, it is nonetheless very powerful when we allow ourselves to open.
The Tibetan Buddhist systems speak of “transmission”, which is a nonlinear communication that happens to us, despite whatever it is we are trying to do. Transmission is a seemingly instantaneous joining of our body, mind and heart. This happens when a realized teacher performs a ceremony, when we are in a car accident, and sometimes when we fall in love. Our body is responding, our heart is opening and our mind is clear. We are not trying to do anything anymore than a diver tries to dive, or a painter tries to create a masterpiece. Michelangelo famously said that he could not take credit for sculpting his statue of David. He said he simply removed all the rock that wasn’t David. He removed the obstacles and the truth was revealed.
Of course, there is a lot of trying involved in developing a skill. But the magic happens when we let go and let the transmission take place. The actual transmission of David was Michelangelo’s connection to the universe, not a triumph of his will. Our spiritual path is like this. Most of the time, we apply ourselves to hard work. But every now and then we lift our gaze and everything opens. We can learn, but realization comes from a surrendering of learning. Itis a surrendering of will. We fall. As in love, we might strategize our courtship. But when we actually fall, the world opens up and strategies are useless. We become lost in the music of life.
I was grew up in a tenement in New Jersey. My dad worked days and went to school nights, my mom worked in the city, but we would gather around the TV when we could like our forebears gathering around the hearth, or the fire. As with them, the TV allowed us to share sadness, happiness and laughter with our world. I still remember the extraordinary moment on the Ed Sullivan show that swept us away from the tension of our life and brought joy and love through those small rooms. After that transmission, my mom would gather brooms and mops from the closet for us to use as guitars. My mother, brother, and I sister would sing along to our first two Beatle songs, “She Loves You” and “I’ll get you.”. We went to church every Sunday in those days. A banner above my grandfather’s pulpit read “God Is Love”. We were an evangelical Pentecostal community and I had witnessed the Holy Spirit entering members of the congregation in a transmission of the power of the love of God. Speaking in tongues, ecstatic dance, and shaking are moments when body, spirit and mind become one. For me, it was standing in front of the mirror with my broom guitar jumping up and down. This presupposed Lennon’s infamous declaration that the Beatles were more important to my generation than God. And to this day, I can be lost in the pure joy of a pop song in a way that short circuits my doubtful, sarcastic mind, and gives me the confidence to fall in love.
Ecstatic moments join body, spirit and mind into a moment far greater than all the concepts or ideas that lead us to it. No one could have guessed that the power of love might take hold of the world from four boys who initially were just trying to impress girls. But it was the ecstatic explosion of the audience, drowning out even their own voices, that propelled us to see the world more fully than we ever had. With all the military might and bluster of the men who ruled society, the power of teenage girls to bring the world to its knees went completely overlooked. Yet, this has been an undercurrent throughout history. Helen, as Marlowe said, had a “face that launched a thousand ships”, Shakespeare’s Juliet, Garbo, Monroe, Cleopatra, Nefertiti and the iconic images of Quan Yin, Lilith and Tara all represent the disruptive and transformative power of love. In Vajrayana Buddhism there is a deity called Vajrayogini who is depicted as a teenage woman in the full prime of her youth. For many, she is a primary Tantric goddess of the “Dakini” class. Dakinis, or “sky dancers”, are depicted as young women unbound by temporal constraints The Dakini affects great change. She represents the transformative power of Love. You can study her liturgies, but it’s only through direct contact and a willingness to surrender to her flames that our transformation occurs,
While we can analyze platonic love, study spiritual love and try our best to bring about love on Earth, we cannot try to understand the transformative power of romantic/disruptive love. We can only experience it. And that experience can only happen when we are willing to let down our defences and surrender to the darked arms of the Goddess’ death embrace. As it says in the prayer of St Francis “it is by dying that one receives eternal life.” To Buddhists this refers to “ego-death” which is an essential step to liberation. Yet death of the ego feels like death itself. Like the “little death” of an orgasm, we cannot receive this transmission by trying. As the great master Yoda said, “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”
What if humans evolve to the point of surrender? What if we stop trying to fix, change and control and allow ourselves, instead, to discover? There is a school of thought that says past, present and future are just a construct and all events have already happened. Another school of thought suggests that until we can conceive a thing we cannot see it. And yet, it is only by releasing the concept that we can touch it. If everything we think will happen has already happened, then all we need to do is be open to the possibility. And believe. And then let go and receive.
What if instead of paying endless lip service to love, we just deeply kiss the world? What if our politics and our nations were organized around faith in the power of love? I guess the process is to conceive it and then believe it and then let that go and simply be it. Thich Nhat Hanh said, “BE love.” Believe it and be it.
What if we stop over valuing destruction and might and began to organize ourselves around a politics of love?
Imagine.
If you look closely at the picture above you’ll see a band playing for 18 people. They would not have guessed that in a short time they would change the world.
They were probably just hoping to meet girls.
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Contacting love in our life is possible if we are free of the turmoil that often occupies our mind. Sometimes this happens accidentally, as when something startles us and stops our mind. Sometimes it happens when our mind naturally notices a flower or bird that opens our mind. 
Compassion is natural to all life. But so is danger. Much of life does what it can to sustain itself and focuses its cellular attention on living, growing and providing, serene in its unknowing. Most life is a natural and necessary part of the dance of the planet. But, the greatest danger to the balance of life comes from the only part of the planet that sees itself. The one who’s acidic stomach is gurgling as it watches the rabbit hop merrily into the wooded shadows. The greatest danger lies within. This is as true of ourselves and our societies. This is the greatest danger because it is the one unseen. We are so attuned to the danger around us, we lie in vulnerable ignorance of the aggression we cause ourselves and others. It is the work of compassion practice to help us reprogram the mind to balance the openness of loving moments with the truth of the dangers in life. We do this by de-emphasizing the importance of ourselves to ourselves that is clouding the picture. THis is not to say that we are not important. We are just not as important enough to suck the air out of life. Humans are a little like drunken blowhards going on about their workout routine at a party. SIr Harold Pinter wrote a play called “The Party” in which a group of haute society people revelled in their intrigues and drama while occasionally, we have seemingly inconsequential references to turmoil in the streets. By play’s end it is clear the turmoil is a violent revolution that will end everything they know.
Over 
direction is too loose. Sometimes we rail against the authority of form, and this stops the flow, but it may be necessary to reboot the process or add freshness to a routine. But once we reboot, finding the groove and waking up in the rhythm of life. Navigating between the extremes of too tight and too loose we find the balance point for optimal creativity in life. A dancer needs discipline, but the point of the discipline is to let go into the piece. No one wants to see anyone work. We want to see them dance. We want the fruit of their labor. So, form need never be seen. The hand of the director should never be seen. The dance should feel as natural as the river.
the “Samatha” level of our meditation training. Samatha means peace, or cultivating peace in its active rendering. In Tibetan Buddism it is taught as a 9 stage process of progressive settling. These Tantric systems of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism endeavor to connect mind and body. Progressive settling in to the present is not just “being in the now” in a conceptal sense. But settling into ourselves as the working basis of our path toward full awakening. Yet “path” implies movement. All things, even when apparently still, are in motion. All things are in dynamic interaction with all else. Settling into that movement with unhurried elegance is “entering the stream”.
Awareness of our breathing is the perfect tool for maintaining the meditative flow state. Breathing is the intimate rhythm of our life. It describes a through line of our life from moments after birth to our last moments. Returning to the breath is a way of maintaining our meditative awareness on the cushion, but this process can be effectively carried over into our daily life. We can use awareness of our breathing to relax the nervous system and allow the mind to let go back into a natural flow. Breathing can guide us through turbulent waters. When in doubt, breathe your way through. Allow yourself to settle and then let go. Letting go INTO the flow is not running away from anything. It’s allowing yourself to move past it with minimal engagement. How many issues in life simply do not need the attention we give them. I worked with a shaman who told me my work was not to be anything or to accumulate things, but to learn from everything. Appreciation means not grabbing, but seeing clearly the value of something. We lose perspective when we grab things. We objectify them and interrupt the flow. When we appreciate someone, we have the distance to see them as they are. And if our desire or anger or need causes us to get stuck we have the tools of recognition and return. We see that we are stuck. We feel our stomach tightening, our mind scripting imaginary narratives, our heart aching for something that isn’t here. Then we know we are stuck in the past or the future. The present is a flow state. So when we are stuck, we recognize that and return to the flow of our breath. The breath will guide us back to the flow of now.
In meditation theory, the sun is used as a depiction of awareness. The sun shines on everything equally regardless of whether it is blocked by the moon, the clouds or the turning earth. Awareness is alive and awake in the universe whether or not we are conscious of it. It is the work of the meditator to uncover the veils of self-imposed obscuration that block access to awareness. We notice thoughts that are actually quite small in the scheme, and bring our attention back to the space afforded by the breath. As we do this, we are stepping back from the thought and revealing a larger context. Our blockage might appear less significant, even humorous. Over time, these obscurations become less solid and less imbued with “meaning”. They become right-sized. Sometimes they disappear altogether. Although the significant obscurations require less force, but more patience. Some will likely return. When that happens we are faced with the same task. Notice them as thinking, and return to the breath. This reconnects us to space, which is perspective. It sucks that we often have to be fooled again and again but that is the work of creating access to awareness. That sunlight will, in time, permeate our experience, but there is a lot of slogging to get there.
I tend to live life from one project to the next, believing that -despite all prior experience- this time I will get it right. This diet, this financial plan, this meditation, this love. Especially this love. True Love. That’s the one that gets me. Each love I fall into becomes my center of being. I have always failed to see that my relationship to loving has all the hallmarks of classic addiction. In his masterwork, The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm defined “true love” as two people who were both ready for the same thing at the same time. He specifically nudged the reader away from the idea that we were part of something special. But, despite the slight-of-hand of hormonal urges, true love is not destiny. True love, like life itself, is a random occurrence that happened to succeed. Life is opportunistic. Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. It seems, even a thinker as profoundly creative as Albert still searched for the occasional guarantee. If the universe doesn’t play dice it may be because dice only has 36 outcomes. The perplexing game of Go that has kept humans intrigued for 4,000 years, has less than 11,000 possible outcomes. If the universe is playing with us, It is using a much more vast and complex system than any game our brains can presently conjure. And, yet, within that ocean of possibility, we find that apple trees always breed apple trees. This interesting paradox is central to our existential being. Life is random and there are repetitive patterns throughout.
When emotions run high, the fear mind takes over and latches onto simple answers. And naturally, we believe we are right. This feeling of righteousness wants retribution and dismisses the inclusion of societal and familial issues as pandering snowflakery. The Buddha spoke of Karma as the law of cause and effect. He also spoke of the interdependence of every event to all else. Despite conditioned tendencies toward black and white binaries, the Buddha saw that the causes of any event are myriad and nuanced. This would seem frustrating to the raging defensive mind latching onto rightandwrong. But a reactive mind is generally devoid of nuance or compassion. Compassion doesn’t mean kindness to those who’ve caused harm. It means understanding those who cause harm.
