“The first step in spiritual practice is to know ourselves to be lovable and allow ourselves to be loved."    - John Main, O.S.B.                                         

 

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
    to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
that No will behead us
and shut tight our window onto Spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
we shall be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence,      Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
we shall be a mighty kindness.

                                        Rumi 

What Is There Beyond Knowing?

What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can’t

turn in any direction
but it’s there. I don’t mean

the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s
silk song, but the far-off

fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning

theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;

or time that’s always rushing forward,
or standing still

in the same—what shall I say—
moment.

What I know
I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

Mary Oliver

Simple

I've been reading a book by Ken Segall about the culture at Apple under the direction of Steve Jobs. The book's title says it all: "Insanely Simple." This singular rule regarding the centrality of simplicity was the key to each decision Steve Jobs made when designing products or mapping strategy about the advertising of new products. (He famously kept sending the iPhone back to the designers with the edict: "one button" and nothing more.)

Steve Jobs understood that we just can't handle too much complexity. He understood that we need the deep value of complexity, but that accessibility needs to be simple in order to be utilized. (What Oliver Wendell Holmes called "simplicity on the other side of complexity.")

This, of course, is my attraction to bringing simplicity to prayer.

One Tender Breath.

One Tender Touch.

One Tender Word.

Slow, calm, rhythmic breathing.

Quiet, gentle touch (hand over hand or hand on forehead or hand on side of head or hands in lap).

One word mantra.

Dropping below thought and concept. Dropping deeper than our overly developed minds.

This past weekend I had the huge privilege of spending several days with 38 Jesuit Volunteers - young adults who have given this past year after college working with those struggling with poverty. Deeply committed, these JVC's carry such promise for our shared future. My only goal was to offer a pathway to spiritual practice that was accessible and simple.

One Tender Breath.

One Tender Touch.

One Tender Word.

To this end I made the suggestion that they begin each period of daily prayer or meditation with a simple prayer designed to touch into the nooks and crannies of their lives, allowing Spirit access through their permission to be Held in ways deeper than typical asking.

 I offer above, for your consideration, this simple prayer.

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

What I trust most: When my breathing allows me to include all three: Doubt, the Abyss, and Wisdom. This seems to be the only way I can avoid "absolute conviction," the defensive certainty that I can know what can't be known.

When a Tender Breath encompasses my doubt and my terror, wisdom emerges.

Wisdom, for me, is when unknowing rests into trust.

The Book of Jonah

Underneath all his [her] preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter)  there is, quite simply, a person tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

                                                                                                                - Lawrence Durrell

Jonah Mowry is a 13 year-old  middle school student who risks sharing his pain with any who will listen to his four-and-a-half minute story. 

Commentary is unnecessary.

Your internal response will be commentary enough.

Imagine you are dead

The "signature" statement of the Thirst blog is dated June 15, 2011. Anything written after that date is commentary.

"Imagine you are dead. After many years of exile, you are permitted to cast a single glance earthward. You see a lamppost and an old dog lifting his leg against it. You are so moved you can’t stop sobbing."       Paul Klee – 1905

Lights in the hallway

Twilight on the water

Jazz

Heartache

Heartburn

Crab grass

Winking

Getting lost

Skipping stones

Standing at a fresh grave

Family quilts

Flossing

Unanswered letters

Harmony

Sprouting leaves

Dirt

Burnt pancakes

Indecision

bad poetry

Running out of toilet paper

Storytelling

Roundness

Irony

Menstrual blood

Rust

Belonging

Raking leaves

Bedtime stories

Walking

Humming off key

Noisy next-door neighbors

Eyelashes

Falling asleep

Turns in the road

Forgetting

Belly buttons

Insomnia

Forgetting

Hand-me-downs

Nervous laughter

Breathing

Turning the soil

Doubt

Lists

Leaky faucets

Saying good-bye

Drying the dishes

Coming home

  ©- 2011 Kent Hoffman

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 

The Tender Care That Nothing Be Lost

When I was 17 years old I spent an introductory evening with Allan Hunter, a man in his early 80’s.  He shared two messages that night that changed my life. The first had to do with his description of God as “the Tender Care that nothing be lost.” The second was his introduction of a simple prayer practice, one in which we sat in silence with our hands open and receptive to Tender Presence. Over the next 10 years I studied with this man, learning the foundation of a meditation practice.

Eventually, being offered opportunities to study with teachers within the rich tradition of Zen (Robert Aitken and Joko Beck), I chose a more formal approach to meditation. I followed this remarkable path for almost 30 years, a journey for which I am profoundly grateful.

Now in my 60's, I have returned to the very simple form of daily practice I first learned from Allan Hunter: stillness without knowing, silence within Presence, trusting deeper than thoughts or words.

The Thirsthome website (www.thirsthome.org) and this blog will focus on the simple gifts of a gentle, unforced daily and momentary practice. The  epicenter of practice will be breathing deeper than words, trusting an unseen Tenderness, receiving at a level beyond conscious awareness. 

I look forward to the dialogue that is to follow.

Kent Hoffman


kenthoffman1422@comcast.net