Wake Up Call #402: Ordinary Moments, Bumpy Times

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 402. Today I want to talk about mindfulness as a place of possibility, no matter what’s happening inside or around us…because that’s how the practice is holding me right now.

It's been an eventful ten days. First there was my father’s death. Nothing has been bigger, for me, at this stage of life. I’m still not sure he’s really gone. It’s an impossible belief to hold. 

Then on Monday my daughter & I got some news about a project that’s going off the rails. It might still right itself, but it’s definitely tilting, and it created a big tilt for us.

At the same time, it’s been an ordinary ten days. I ate the usual meals, did the usual practices, spent time with the usual suspects, took a quick trip up to Bend, Oregon, to be with my daughter and even up there, in the midst of the sadness, and the midst of the tilt, did the usual things like ate at our favorite taco place and went out on our favorite hike.

So it’s been an extraordinary time, and also an ordinary one. And what I want to say about that, from a practice perspective, is that it’s not so much that in the midst of the ordinariness of life, extraordinary things – extraordinarily sad and difficult things – have been happening. That’s one perspective but it’s not the one that strikes me the most. The one that strikes me is the flipped perspective: that in the midst of the extraordinary, heartbreaking, and shattering moments of the last week, it’s been possible, and even easeful, to remember the ordinary. And to delight in the ordinary.

Looking in – the practice of exploring body, mind, and heart, I’ve been noticing a lot of sorrow, of course. Sometimes sorrow comes like a tornado and takes me down, literally to the chair or the floor or the ground. Sometimes sorrow is just a whisper that barely calls my attention. In both cases, sorrow has been with me like a friend, the way Naomi Nye says – before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. And I would also say, at least in my experience right now, that it’s not only that you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing, but that that “thing” of sorrow, must become a friend.   

Pema Chodron says, mostly we regard discomfort in any form as bad news, but to spiritual warriors, who have a hunger to know what is true, feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, [and I think she would include sorrow] instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is we’re holding back. We feel bad about ourselves and there’s no way to manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good.  No matter how hard we try it just won’t work: life has just basically nailed us. A moment of having the perfect teacher and lucky for us they’re with us whenever and wherever we are.  

This invitation, as I hear it, is to go deep. To plumb the depths of sorrow, to climb down deep inside, and see what it holds. To ask, what lessons there are, and how to relate better or differently to the emotion. That’s what I mean when I say that sorrow feels like a friend. That in going in, going down, there is only one way to be with sorrow, for me, right now: as a friend. 

When my daughter and I got the news about the deal tilting, we were heading out for a hike. We kept our plans, which were to go for a hike by the Deschutes River. It’s a spectacular place. 

As we hiked, we named the emotions as they arose: frustration, anger, shock, disgust. Dismay. And then what choice did we have? We could have let them loop us in. We could have gotten caught in their vortex. But we decided to make them our friends. We examined them without taking them too seriously. We looked at the whole situation as completely serious, and not serious. That’s when my daughter called out the red-tailed hawk, and the butterflies playing in the milkweed, and the tree that, when she scraped off just a fingernail of bark, smelled like vanilla. We invited our anger and frustration to take their places along the trail, with the others who were there with us: wonder, amazement, awe.  

And that was the thing we realized: that no day, and no life, is “ordinary.” That there is no stable, easeful, place to stand, and from which, if we’re lucky and good, nothing terrible happens. 

That instead it’s the opposite: that every day, especially in the world as it is right now (and maybe as it’s always been, for us humans – and maybe for other beings as well), there is only the way that tumultuousness and sadness are coming, in a completely reliable way, day after day. And that what we can do is look in, and see that there’s also gladness, and peace; and look up, and see that there’s also a hawk and a tree that smells like vanilla and a good person, offering us a delicious taco with a big, beautiful smile. 

We can yearn for less strife – less sorrow, less tumult, fewer deals going sideways, less stress. But then there’s the world, and maybe there’s karma (who knows?), and we just have no control. As Chögyam Trungpa said, the bad news is, we’re all just falling through the air, nothing to hold onto. The good news is, there’s no ground.

Looking in, looking up: ordinariness within the extraordinarily bumpiness, day after day after day. 

Let’s sit.

Constant Contact Blurb (also for Podcast)

Ordinary Moments During Bumpy Times

Sometimes for me it's easy to get caught up in how bumpy things are. How loss is so powerful, how things go wrong, how people aren't who I think they are (or should be).

Mindfulness has been a great friend to me in these times. It's the friend that whispers in my ear to look inside for what else is present: gratitude, optimism, amazement.

And it's the friend that reminds me to look up: at the trees, the red-tailed hawk who glides by my window, the people I love. 

What is mindfulness if not those two reminders: to look in, and see everything; and to look up, and see everyone?

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