PCB (POST CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT) life

A video from last month's Centering and Wayfinding Retreat, of Shiné folk engaging the Laban Circle meditative movement I wrote about last week - one that we'll practice in the first Centering Movement session this Wednesday!

My best friend Lizzy dragged me on a 2-hour hike last Saturday. I'm not a big fan of hiking, maybe because as the smallest member of my family, the Saturday hikes of my childhood tended to just make me tired and crabby. So with Lizzy, the best part was when we stopped - sweet, sweet sweetness of STOPPING! - and she pointed straight ahead at the stillness of the tree trunks, and then up at the tops of the pines, which were swaying wildly, as though in a different world. This week in classes we embodied the rootedness and wildness of trees. AKA lots of balancing poses standing on one leg-trunk while the upper body shifted in space. Inside the transitions we turned our gaze around the full 360 degrees, taking in the pine trees and the gorgeous perfect weather through the open doors. It brought to mind the ee cummings poem many of you already knew and loved: 

i thank you God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should any tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

It's a gratitude prayer! A second-person direct address to whatever it is you want call the great creative force currenting through the universe. Yes to the leaping greenly spirits of trees and yes to a blue true dream of sky and yes to the yes, that emphatic renewal that doesn't come from us but from outside us and maybe it might be called mercy and it might be called rebirth where we come alive again today that emphatic YES that continually (infinitely) somehow rescues us from the depressive slump and opens the world back up to be experienced.
And speaking of run-on sentences - which this whole poem IS... If we separate some clauses in the third stanza and pare it down to its bones, it's not just a gratitude prayer, it's a statement of faith as experienced by a human, be-ing! (Richard Rohr's ever-useful contrast between a human being and a human doing). When we are just being, when we are abiding with our tastingtouchinghearingseeingbreathing, this sense-based awareness leads us right to an experience in and of the divine. cummings asks his God - who is not a dude with a white beard in the sky but something vast and unimaginable - how could any human doubt the divine? Or more specifically, how could any person who engages their full, sensate, whole-self being-ness, allowing it to lift them out of that black hole feeling of nothingness, not have some kind of understanding of... Divinity/Presence/Truth/Ultimate Reality... that which is beyond words and images. The unimaginable, mysterious, infinite YES. Our physical senses can lift us/drop us/shift us into a radical experiencing of and inside what cummings calls God. Like the first of Patanjali's Sutras: "NOW, the practice of yoga." Sutra is Sanskrit for thread - like, suture - and in the classical form, the first Sutra or thread encompasses and weaves together all the threads to follow. The first sutra states that Yoga - yoking, or oneness - happens whenever you're fully in the now. When we are present, in the present, gifting all of us as a present, the ears of our ears awaken and the eyes of our eyes open up, and we come into the Presence.

The extraordinary scholar/mystic Cynthia Bourgeault calls this the apophatic mode of experience. As part of a 12-month program on deepening Quaker ministry, on Labor Day weekend our School of the Spirit cohort was lucky enough to have Cynthia Bourgeault come to Pendle Hill and teach us more about this apophatic register of Oneness.

Here I want to bring in another poem about pine trees, from the September week 2 entry of Thinking Feelingly: Ama Codjoe's "Slow Drag with Branches of Pine" 

     Here I am, holding one more
mirror. This time smoke, winding
                                                like a river. I close my eyes,
not because the smoke stings—it
does—but because it’s a way
to examine myself, like looking
                                  at your face in a river certain it is not
              your face. The smoke combs
like a mother through my hair
or like searching the shoreline
for shells unbroken. I sing to myself
and the smoke drags my voice on its back
                just as the breeze heaves it.
                                   Here, in my half-singing,
I’m reminded how to slow drag.
I watch the pine trees creak
                                                and sway. Here, I am
my own twin. I rest my cheek
against my cheek; I barely move at all.

In the book I talk about this poem in conversation with others by Ruth Forman, Thomas Lux, Daniel Nester, and Zora Neale Hurston, as models for alternative, non-guilty-making gratitude practices. I write about how Codjoe resuscitates the sensual from its cultural configuration as profane, placing it firmly back inside the realm of the sacred. Smoking, in this poem, isn't just a ritual of elemental rapture - smoke is wind is fire is a river is a mother's touch is shells on the shoreline - but also  a mode of self-companioning - a solitary reprieve where we can reconnect with self. Codjoe's speaker lifts their face to the swaying pines, closes their eyes not because the smoke stings but because "it's a way to examine myself, like looking/ at your face in a river certain it is not/ your face." This sense of self-confrontation, self-examination, self-companionship brings two presences as closely together as possible without losing their separateness - "Here, I am/ my own twin." What does it mean, to rest your cheek against your cheek? Resting along the midline of your face, or, I suppose, your butt? Or the inner cheek resting against the outer cheek, mirror-like? I dunno but it's such a close, intimate experience of nearly-oneness that it brings about the stillness it describes. I can't help but STOP at those final lines. Like the speaker, "I barely move at all."

But now, in my PCB life, Post-Cynthia-Bourgeault (to say Cynthia is too familiar, and Bourgeault is too cold because I'm in love with her), this poem hits me differently. For starters, it hits me in all my longing places. It's like a Rumi poem about the Friend, so close so near... this excruciating yearning for oneness. Which is maybe why we smoke - as a friend once said, "I smoked because I was trying to shove my heart down into my lungs." Lungs, the seat of grief. Grief, the seat of longing. Longing, for Sufis at least, the evidence of our connection to God. We long for it because we've gotten a whiff of it! (or a drag of it, if you will...) It is in us - we have experienced oneness with it!

In the words of Kabir Edmund Helminski (who we were asked to read in preparation for the retreat with Cynthia Bourgeault), "In the Sufi tradition it is written that the absolute Spirit said, 'And I breathed My Spirit into humanity.' We are each enlivened by this inbreath. The essential Self, the soul, can be understood as this individualization of Spirit. The soul, however, is such a fine and subtle energy that it can be obscured by coarser energies of our existence..." So much gets in the way of these little moments of abiding in our essential Self. This launches Helminski into description of the seven stages that separate the false self from this "essential Self," in classical Sufism. In a subtle, careful passage, he explains, "This reveals a fundamental truth of the essential Self - that it is infinite and can never be fully comprehended by consciousness alone - but it is only a partial truth, because, at the same time, we can see with the eyes of the essential Self [now the eyes of my eyes are opened], hear with its ears, [now the ears of my ears awake], act with its will, forgive with its forgiveness, and love with its love." 

Cynthia Bourgeault helped us with this tricky fundamental/partial truth, dancing with the oh-so-subtle slippery ground between the two-ness and oneness, or duality and non-duality. She simplified the seven stages for us simple Quakers, offering the image of a Bell Rack. There are many voices within us (and here she referenced the "987 little selves" joked about in the Work of Gurdjieff, the teacher she shares with Helminski). These little selves operate like a rack of bells, each with its own tone, and if we wish to spend more time in our essential Self, more time with Spirit, our job is to bring the separate tones into their proper harmony. There are three broader categories into which these bell tones fall: Heart, Soul, and Nafs, a word borrowed from Sufism. Nafs represent the defensive mechanisms operating in us to keep us safe, the operating system alternately referred to as the ego, the False Self, or charmingly by Thomas Keating, "the homemade self." I'm going to use the term "little selves" for NAFS, because it steers me away from my critical, judgy voice and towards a more parental, forgiving mode.

​To proceed from lowest to highest (oh yes, this system is 100% hierarchical), I'm going to stay pretty faithful to my notes, with some tweaks in places where my scribbles are less than coherent:
The Nafs, or little selves, represent the smaller, passional self, motivated by anger and full of emotional issues and agendas. This part of us carries the shadow (all that we disown and stuff and numb against and project onto others) and it came into being in response to hurts. There is a need for deep tenderness and thanking, in approaching these little selves. They stepped in to protect you. They gave you hope. The goal is not to override them, but to get them on your side. To speak to them in such a way that these voices release their stranglehold on your life. Silencing these voices is spiritual bypassing. To bring them into harmony within the highest form of being - Spirit - you must first engage Soul, and then Heart.

The Soul is your true self essence. It is authentic. It emerges when you are speaking and feeling from a deeper and more qualitatively real and spacious, connected state. Much of our work is Soul work, where we're closer to our true or natural tongue. It is the most real and intimate and authentic taste of self that we can have, as mirrored through the ego structure of consciousness. But as in a mirror, this operating system is still dual. It is a self-reflective consciousness that is still about how we are unique, special and different from everyone. It is a way of being in relationship with the image of yourself. Which brings us to:

The Heart. Swoon, y'all. In the Sufi tradition, accessing the heart requires a jumping ship from one mode of consciousness to another. In this system of thinking, the heart has nothing to do with our personal emotional life. The personal, emotional passions get in the way of the heart being able to do its thing. In our culture, we often imagine passion as some driving force within us that inspires our highest actions. But "Passio" from the Greek, is to be acted upon. The passions have to do with stuck, reactive emotions. The Heart, in Sufi thinking, is much higher than this. The Heart, as a cosmic reflector and magnifier, sees directly. When you are in a Heart space you coincide with your being. It requires a strong moving and feeling center (the centers of self from Gurdjieff Work, which I wrote about in the last blog entry.)  You don't reflect on your being, you just step into it. The awakening of the Heart brings us into a kind of unreflective, unconflicted knowing. It is a free, clear awareness. The price you pay for your Heart is your meta-narrative. The Heart voice is not an equal player, it kicks in a bit later. It is the real agent mediating between the smaller aspect of our makeup and our entry into Spirit. The Heart coming online provides the alchemy.

In this analogy of the Bell Rack, it's about harmonizing these parts. We need to hold and honor the tension between the Heart - the part of us that knows - and the needs of the lower selves. The Heart takes care of the little selves, when they feel frightened and wounded, and the Soul, with its sad story of being an orphan (or whatever the story is). Pain and uproar can't be stuffed. Our woundedness is our angle of deflection from being able to live out our highest truth. But we can't live it until we bring order into our "lower house," in the language of Gurdjieff. All parts are needed. As the Heart comes online, it takes the sting out of the hurt and enables movement. An alternative path arises.

So we need to find practices that bring us into contact with the Heart space, in order to alchemize Soul into an experience of Spirit. We need to tune into the heart, to bring its bell tone to the fore. I guess that's what we make space for, when we come to practice. It's not that every class you're going to dive so deep into apophatic Heart reality that you're transformed. It's that we're practicing this way of being unified within ourselves - balancing the tones of our sensations, thoughts, and feelings,  without sacrificing or demonizing or privileging any of them, with deeper parts of our being-hood. And the hope is that tuning our bells a few hours a week will, over time, make room and way for more moments outside the practice of experiencing oneness and Presence, however we configure that in our own cultural or faith tradition. May the ears of our ears awaken, may the eyes of our eyes be opened.