Nothing Special

“If you search for the awakened heart, there is nothing but tenderness.” - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche                                                                    

"When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. With his heart pounding, he ran out, embraced his son, and kissed him." - Luke 15:20

Hidden beneath the often divisive chatter about “good vs. bad and do vs. don’t” there is, within every spiritual tradition, an invitation to an awakened heart. In each tradition we are welcomed  into our original home, a dwelling that, should we choose to recognize it, exists in every moment. Even so, most of us remain asleep, lost, unable to find a way out of life's confusing dream.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye asks, "Where can the crying heart gaze?"

Please take the single minute and one second needed to view the following video clip.

Are you freaking kidding me? Is he really using a mother cat and her kitten as a manifestation of the awakened heart? Blasphemy? Sacrilege?

No. Yes. No. And no.

What we just observed is the utterly ordinary, hidden-in-plain-sight, deep nature of things. This is what Zen teacher Joko Beck calls “nothing special,” our original nature as it manifests without need of external teaching or formal instruction.

As it turns out, what we most crave isn’t something extraordinary, something that must be conjured up or manufactured. What we most require is something utterly natural, without bells and whistles, our original default setting fully present at the moment of birth.

We were each born with an awakened heart. Somewhere along the way, often before we learned to remember in words, we felt pain that taught us to put our hearts to sleep. No infant is capable of sustaining the feeling of being all alone, an ongoing experience of pain without the comforting presence of another heart.

Daniel Siegel, a neurobiologist at UCLA who studies infant development, uses the term “sponge neurons” to describe mirror neurons (a particular kind of brain neuron). As he describes how infants come to make sense of their world he pays particular attention to how babies “soak up” the feeling state of their caregivers. We all know that infants pay close attention to what their caregivers do, but even more so, they drink in how their caregivers are feeling. This learning is going on in a hundred million micro-events beginning in our earliest days.

In my work with parents who aren’t considered at-risk, I’ve noticed that a majority believe they were raised by “good” parents. In many cases they're correct. We recognize that our caregivers were committed to “being good” and “doing good” as parents. Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between being good (often culturally sanctioned approaches to parenting) and being “real.” Being real includes permission to actually experience (allow and contain) certain difficult to regulate emotions. A quick survey of tricky emotions would include anger, sadness, fear, shame, and joy. As we think back on our own parents, at least one of these feeling states was likely over-represented and at least one was under-represented. So, for example, we may have been raised by a parent who, when stressed, exhibited too much anger and yet had no room for sadness, or a parent who was often anxious, but found joy problematic.

In the early years, when we were forming the generalized template that defines “how life is,” our sponge neurons were soaking up moments that were comforting and loving. But they were also soaking up more difficult experiences of "too much" and "not enough."  In those moments we were being overloaded by our caregiver’s distress and also being left with a sense of absence, where – as psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott says – “nothing [was] happening where something [necessary] might have happened.”

Yes, good things happened. That’s part of why we still function as well as we do.

Even so–even now–our history of too much continues to echo.

Even so–even now–our history of not enough tells us we are falling into a void.

Caught between the bookends of feeling overwhelmed and all alone, having marinated within a view of life that continues –unconsciously– to be both confusing and without comforting resolution, we inevitably learned to harden; we braced ourselves against further pain; we became certain that what we most need wasn't (and isn’t) actually available.

We couldn't not soak in the unresolved pain of those who raised us.

We couldn't not defend against the pain included in that soaking.

Our original, awakened heart had to asleep. 

This unconscious pain keeps recirculating untold feelings, pain we’ve absorbed without an experience of safe and tender connection.  It’s this continuing tension between too much and not enough– overwhelm and absence– that now haunts us. Is it any surprise that we’d then project onto our view of the universe a belief that it is disapproving or hostile or indifferent or unavailable? The daily struggles that–for many of us–seem chronic and without hope, often have very little to do with our present circumstances. Instead, they are the continual repetition of a learned certainty that when we struggle we’ll be met with too much intensity and/or not enough presence; that we'll be all alone in our pain.

It's precisely here that the heart is being invited to reawaken. It's here that prayer and meditation reveal themselves not as something we “do,” but rather as coming home to an unseen connection that always and already is.

Prayer and meditation return us to another dimension. Sacred practice takes us deeper than the programing our sponge neurons continue to define as "true."  Sacred practice is direct experience - here and now - of Presence:  deeper than thought, beyond language, available in this very breath.

To return to the video clip of the mother and her kitten, what we’re seeing is a simple manifestation of “enough.”

One and one.

And isn't learned, it’s who we are when everything else falls away.

Nothing special.

Novelist Philip K. Dick defines reality as "that which, when you quit believing in it, doesn't go away."

Heartache, goodnight kisses, standing at a graveside, adolescent anger, calling out in pain, fear of failure, good friends, lost friends – each and all are telling us who we are and what we most require.

Where can the crying heart gaze?

We're always gazing, even when we try not to. The only difference is that our gaze can finally rest when it returns home.

This returning is the awakened heart.

Hidden-in-plain-sight.

©-Kent Hoffman -2011

I just received an email telling me that my 94 year old Zen teacher, Joko Beck, passed away this morning, Wednesday, June 15, at 7:30 a.m., surrounded by her family.  Her final words: "This too is wonder . . ."

Charlotte Joko Beck

A Long Lifetime

A long lifetime

Peoples and places

And the crisis of mankind—

What survives is the crystal — 

Infinitely small—

Infinitely large— 

Kenneth Rexroth