Love and Breathe, For Everyone’s Sake

If breath is the focus, the anchor, refuge from an uncertain world, then maybe love is the antidote.

I’m not saying I know much about love other than that it feels absent in so many places, and crucial in even more.
 
I do know that love isn’t about two (or three or four) humans and our stary-eyed moments. It's about finding some way to keep our hearts open, available, and un-barnacled. It's about going down into the deep, to the belly of this remarkable vessel we call home, and ever so gently and lovingly scraping and prying off the detritus until the old, varnished, and luminous hull shines through. 

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 480. How are you? It’s been another week of a lot. So maybe check in with yourself. Are you breathing, first? I mean of course you’re breathing, but are you breathing right now, and are you aware that breathing is happening?

Or maybe when you’re quiet, when you meditate, it’s more supportive when you pay attention to sensation in the body, do a body scan, or when you attend to sound in the environment. Take a moment and check in: are you aware, right now, of breath? body? sound?

Awareness, usually of the breath but it could be body, sound, or something else: this awareness is the cornerstone of our practice, right? We practice paying attention in the present moment, and to the present moment. And what we’re doing, initially, is calming down, downregulating our nervous system. I need to be doing that regularly right now, don’t you? I mean, I need to be doing that regularly always, but especially right now. I notice the impulse to open the paper or turn on the radio in the car, decide whether that’s the best thing to do (or find myself in front of the paper or listening to the radio without having made a decision), and so often what comes next is either a vague or a powerful sense of dread. 

Turning away from the news and all other “invited” stimuli – meaning my screens, my work, friends & family – in order to down-regulate, feels crucial right now. Doing that intentionally, regularly, at a certain time each day, for a certain amount of time, also feels crucial. Sometimes I feel like there isn’t time – and that’s not a feeling unique to this moment – and remember Suzuki Roshi’s instruction, “If you don’t have time to sit for 30 minutes, sit for an hour.” 

But downregulation isn’t all that’s happening. During formal practice, when we’re resting the attention on the breath or sensation or sound, another thing that’s happening – and this can be uncomfortable and maybe it’s the reason a lot of folks come and go in the practice – another thing that’s happening is this realization, from a really visceral perspective, that life is challenging. Sometimes that comes with recalling a difficult conversation or situation, or when the mind falls into a loop that goes something like, “what the heck is happening?” or, “how do we get out of this in one piece?” Whatever it is, awareness of the mind and the stories it’s telling, and awareness of the difficulty of that, is another important thing that’s happening along with downregulation: awareness that the difficulties, the vicissitudes, of being human right now, are true. That being human isn’t easy or always pleasant or even close to perfect, now, and really ever.

Noting that and also the realization that the imperfections and difficulties of being human are similar for everyone – that’s another thing that happens in addition to downregulation: seeing that no matter where we sit in the hierarchy (or patriarchy) or who we voted for or the color of our skin or our religion or race or anything else, everyone who sits down to pay attention, is inevitably going to bump up against the difficulties of being human. Another way of saying it is, it’s not about me and it’s sure not just me – it’s everyone. It’s nothing personal - we’re all in this together. We’re all authors of our own lives, but we’re also each just one chapter in the vast book about being human. 

And not only that, but that that unfathomable book, which stretches from time immemorial to time unimaginable, is written in invisible ink. Events in our lives come and go, people come and go, world leaders and world events and empires and tiny island civilizations and everything in between, comes and goes, and we do, too. Everything arises and then eventually, passes away. Nothing is permanent, which is the sad news and for some situations, the great news.

Those insights are what’s happening, along with downregulation, when we sit quietly in formal mindfulness practice – or at least that’s my experience. Maybe that’s true for you, too.

So then what about love? The title of today’s Wake Up Call is “Love and Breathe, For Everyone’s Sake.” We know we have to breathe, whether we’re practicing breath-centered mindfulness or body-centered or sound-centered. And I’d submit that we also have to love…even though we humans seem to think we can do without it. But jeez. Look what happens when we try to do that? 

So I feel like love – and I’m talking about the kind of love that doesn’t discriminate, doesn’t say, “you’re worthy and you’re not,” is crucial, and like we’re practicing love, cultivating love (if we are), for everyone’s sake. Everyone including all the beings, and the earth. And the kind of love I’m talking about is love that opens the heart to whatever’s happening – which could even be a fight to the death…of at least an idea, or ideology - and because it’s that kind of love, it has this incredible benefit to everyone. 

The kind of love I’m talking about began for me in the quiet of mindfulness meditation, with a commitment (or really initially just an attempt, and then a commitment) to take a loving approach to whatever was happening in this mind/body/heart, no matter what. That beginning was powerful and I go back to it pretty much every day – it’s not something I’ve “learned” and never have to revisit, but the opposite: it’s something I have to practice. 

But it’s still the beginning. Pervasive love, love that pervades and endures, takes another practice. That practice can be as simple as wishing everyone well: every friend, every family member, every talking head on TV, every client and student and opponent and person who’s unhoused in my town, everyone I never voted for. Or it can be deeper and broader: the practice of sitting in metta or lovingkindness practice day after day, cultivating a warm, open, heart.

I said a minute ago that I’m practicing – and we’re all practicing – this kind of love for everyone’s sake. And we are. But first, we have to soften and open our crusty, barnacled, old hearts. These hearts that every time we think are open as far as they’re ever going to open, if we are honest, we can say have a hundred more steel doors that have been slammed shut by anger or greed or fear or sorrow or pain, and that need opening. 

We’re looking at love in class at Berkeley this week but other than that, I can’t say why I’m drawn to love right now. It seems completely anathema given the news of the world. But I am, and I guess maybe it’s because I hope that if we all do that, and we send this particular kind of love out into the world, maybe it won’t change the world, but then again maybe…it will.