Part Two: Bring Your Whole Self into the Situation

Beauty lies in the imperfections of life, like hand woven tapestry. We are each unique, beautiful, and transitory. The best we can do is to open fully to what is. We need to listen more closely to the essence of our hearts and spirits.

Steve Jacobsen, Director of Hospice of Santa Barbara, defines spirituality as “a form of consciousness and activity in which people are aware that they exist in a profound state of interconnectedness with all life and seek to live in a manner which nourishes and honors that relationship at all levels …”

Yet in modern life, we fear deep connection, intimacy, fear vulnerability, looking foolish, our own power, our own essence, life. We have a lot of fears. One is to be truly who we are; we are not who we pretend to be – we are not just separate independent beings; we are not wholly our ego, but twined in the roots of interconnection with all beings. We fear that if we allow ourselves to be fully who we are on the deepest levels, they will lock us up.

Working with the dying reinforces my loyalty to a deeper aspect of being. I can no longer be untrue to myself. For me, death is more terrifying if I allow myself to think about it. One of the things I’ve learned from the dying is that I need to be true to myself no matter how crazy it may appear in the outer world.

I had a conversation with Carl, an 84 year old man, at Sarah House where I volunteer. I serve him breakfast one day and ask if he’d like me to stay while he eats. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed wearing a long sleeve T-shirt and diapers. He nods. I look around, pull his walker up to the bed, and sit. He has his bowl of cream of wheat with a dab of jam, tea with milk, and buttered cinnamon toast sliced diagonally, which he had daily. We sit in silence for a period of time.

Finally he speaks, ”Nature is a way to observe reincarnation because of the constant change”. I listen silently, he continues, “Nature has no beginning and no end”. I ask, “If we’re part of nature, then does that mean we have no beginning and no end?” “One form just becomes another”, he says “like the leaves become compost and we are all part of the whole.”

I’m thinking to myself, “Wow, who is this man who never comes out of his room?” “What did I discover here? Is this a teacher? Is he a guru…a god?” I have no idea how long I’m with him - time dissolves. I enter an unfamiliar space – feeling as though I’m in a great presence. As I’m leaving, I pause at the door and look back at him. He simply says, “Let nature be your guide.”

That’s one of the last conversations I had with Carl before he died. I don’t claim to know what happened in that room – but know it‘s less about words than connection. We met somewhere else - somewhere profound. I wondered who I could talk to about this experience. They’ll think I’m nuts, lost in my own trip somewhere – thinking an old man in diapers is a guru. “Crazy old Carl” someone called him. He definitely was not crazy.

So I asked various teachers I’ve met along the way. Shinzen Young explained that I entered Carl’s field – “when people get close to death” he said, “the layers start to drop away and what’s left is an experience of love” Then he said to me, “your homework is to learn to do this with the living.” When we sit with the dying, we learn to treat the space between us as sacred. Honoring this space keeps us connected as we bear witness to another’s journey.

I began to notice a contradiction in the way I worked with the dying as compared with the living. With the dying I worked more deeply, more real, more present, less bound by external constraints. I began to get curious about this, and questioned it - and still am questioning. I wonder about the implications for a psychotherapy that goes to the roots of humanity.

We‘ve been told that the tools are most important – that the knowing is most important. It may be bad advice. Our knowledge and tools are only reference points – our beings, our presence is what’s most important. Perhaps vulnerability and wounds are the meeting places. We often hide these from each other, but they are the empathetic bridges that connect us.

One of the things I’m still learning from the Metta Institute is one of Frank Ostaseski’s precepts: “Bring your whole self into the experience”. Working with the dying, I began to do this in a way I had not done in the past. To bring in my strengths and skills, and also my weaknesses and helplessness, my own fears and grief and vulnerability.

My own heart is the only way to truly meet another person. If I haven’t investigated my own fears, my own grief, my own shame, can I meet the other person’s in theirs? When I’m afraid, what happens in my own body – in my chest, my belly, what are the thoughts? Are you intimate with the state of fear? How does sadness or shame feel? Where in the body?

We have to be part of the equation where we intimately know fear or grief or shame or whatever comes up – the darkest, scariest places - where my fear can meet your fear, my sadness, my feelings of loneliness can meet yours, abandonment – whatever comes up.

We need to do the work to understand our own relationship to illness, death and to life. If your loved one had a month to live, what would you do differently, or not? We need to have access to all parts of ourselves - these are our guides. The tools are just tools - avoid tripping over them.

In Still Here (38), Ram Dass writes, “When our models of who we are fall away, we are free simply to meet and be together. And when this sense of being encompasses all – one another, the park, the rain, everything – separateness dissolves and we are united in compassion.”

The root of the word compassion is ‘to suffer with’ – it implies a certain kind of intimacy, a presence – with ourselves and others. It’s not our expertise or our knowledge, but the exploration of our own suffering that enables us to be present with another person. It’s the awareness of what is.

Our inability to look at our own suffering often gets in the way of being present, so we find it difficult to witness the suffering that goes with death and grief. Huge amounts of effort and money are spent avoiding suffering, avoiding being present. We pay to push suffering away. We spend great effort to not be present. One of our jobs in life and in our professions is to be as present as we are able. Awareness of death allows a greater relishing of life.