On Sylvia Boorstein's webpage, she is described as a meditation teacher, psychotherapist and storyteller, my favorite title, by the way. Added to this list of titles is an ellipsis, indicating Boorstein's many other significant roles: mother, grandmother, Buddhist, author, and founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. While I have not yet attended a retreat or workshop featuring Boorstein, I have read articles she has written and many more books and articles in which Boorstein's teachings have been shared, cited and offered as valuable lessons learned by others on the path toward awakening, living more peacefully, or seeking a fuller experience of life. In Dani Shapiro's memoir Devotion, Boorstein is featured prominently. From Shapiro's writing, I learned the following, by proxy, from Boorstein. She said, "The whole world is a lesson in what's true."
The whole world is a lesson in what's true: I love how inclusive this view of our lives is. It contains both compassion and forgiveness, and most of all, a sense of relief in its ability to confirm that this too, this too--as Buddhist Jack Kornfield teaches--has been true for me. This morning while finishing my breakfast, I read the obituary of actor, director, comedian, and writer Harold Ramis who died at his home yesterday at the age of 69. In a 2005 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Ramis talked about directing the film "Groundhog Day," which he described as "one man's desperate search for meaning." He told Gross, "There is no universal meaning to life that applies now and for always, for each and every person. Our job--and it's a tough job--is to figure out what it all means and to fulfill a personal destiny that we each figure out for ourselves."
Ramis sounds like the Buddha. Perhaps upon his death yesterday, Ramis was no closer to the answers to the big questions than I am, but I heard the echo of Boorstein's words in that 2005 interview of his. I like him even more now because he was not afraid to be caught seeking, too.
Some days prove more difficult than others to pick our paths through this world, to convince ourselves that this too is a way to the answers we need. When I first lived on my own as a young 20-something, I had a quote by poet Rainer Maria Rilke thumb-tacked to my wall as a reminder for me to keep going even when I did not understand, even when I felt lost. Actually, it was particularly valid for when I felt lost because more often than not, that is precisely how I felt.
Rilke wrote:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
The whole world is a lesson in what's true feels a bit like that distant day and the answer it promised. But I know better than to mistake this one truth for closure, that elusive, seductive myth as Shapiro calls it. The flip side of living into our answers is the difficult state of grappling with the past that keeps on living inside our bodies while trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves into a future that has not yet arrived. Devotion shows Shapiro bravely grappling on the page with the questions she lives with from her past in her present, or the immediate present of the book as it was being written. She has learned that prayer, meditation, and yoga do not bury the past, rather, these practices unleash it. Of our seeking, Shapiro asks why bother if what's discovered is hard to take? Sometimes the discoveries I make in my practice, whether on my mat or at my cushion, remind me of the challenges Harry Potter faced when laying waste to Lord Voldemort's horcruxes. Exorcising the past is never pleasant. And yet, I am beginning to learn that the better way or the Middle Way is to make peace with what resides within. Instead of removing the past like a tumor that we want out, we learn, breath by breath, how we might go about embracing it. This too is a piece of our whole world. This too, then, is a lesson in what's true.
Patanjali did not shrink from listing the obstacles or distractions the practitioner would encounter when he set down his theories for the practice of yoga. In Satchidananda's translation of yoga sutra I. 30., Satchidananda is equally fearless in calling the yoga practice an obstacle race. We cannot make steady progress always, Satchidananda explains. Otherwise, there is no challenge. Instead, our practice purposely puts us in the path of obstructions. We need to live through the depths as well as the heights. The obstacles "are there to make us understand and express our own capacities." In other words, everything becomes necessary, and all those true lessons from our lives are alive in the whole world.
As my yoga teacher told us yesterday during practice, "yoga is not just about working out; it's also about working in. That inner journey is infinite. My practice is helping me to discover what poet Lawrence Raab shows us in his poem My Life Before I Knew It:
...and then
the life I'd never been able to foresee
would begin, and everything
before I became myself would appear
necessary to the rest of the story.
The whole world is a lesson in what's true: I love how inclusive this view of our lives is. It contains both compassion and forgiveness, and most of all, a sense of relief in its ability to confirm that this too, this too--as Buddhist Jack Kornfield teaches--has been true for me. This morning while finishing my breakfast, I read the obituary of actor, director, comedian, and writer Harold Ramis who died at his home yesterday at the age of 69. In a 2005 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Ramis talked about directing the film "Groundhog Day," which he described as "one man's desperate search for meaning." He told Gross, "There is no universal meaning to life that applies now and for always, for each and every person. Our job--and it's a tough job--is to figure out what it all means and to fulfill a personal destiny that we each figure out for ourselves."
Ramis sounds like the Buddha. Perhaps upon his death yesterday, Ramis was no closer to the answers to the big questions than I am, but I heard the echo of Boorstein's words in that 2005 interview of his. I like him even more now because he was not afraid to be caught seeking, too.
Some days prove more difficult than others to pick our paths through this world, to convince ourselves that this too is a way to the answers we need. When I first lived on my own as a young 20-something, I had a quote by poet Rainer Maria Rilke thumb-tacked to my wall as a reminder for me to keep going even when I did not understand, even when I felt lost. Actually, it was particularly valid for when I felt lost because more often than not, that is precisely how I felt.
Rilke wrote:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
The whole world is a lesson in what's true feels a bit like that distant day and the answer it promised. But I know better than to mistake this one truth for closure, that elusive, seductive myth as Shapiro calls it. The flip side of living into our answers is the difficult state of grappling with the past that keeps on living inside our bodies while trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves into a future that has not yet arrived. Devotion shows Shapiro bravely grappling on the page with the questions she lives with from her past in her present, or the immediate present of the book as it was being written. She has learned that prayer, meditation, and yoga do not bury the past, rather, these practices unleash it. Of our seeking, Shapiro asks why bother if what's discovered is hard to take? Sometimes the discoveries I make in my practice, whether on my mat or at my cushion, remind me of the challenges Harry Potter faced when laying waste to Lord Voldemort's horcruxes. Exorcising the past is never pleasant. And yet, I am beginning to learn that the better way or the Middle Way is to make peace with what resides within. Instead of removing the past like a tumor that we want out, we learn, breath by breath, how we might go about embracing it. This too is a piece of our whole world. This too, then, is a lesson in what's true.
Patanjali did not shrink from listing the obstacles or distractions the practitioner would encounter when he set down his theories for the practice of yoga. In Satchidananda's translation of yoga sutra I. 30., Satchidananda is equally fearless in calling the yoga practice an obstacle race. We cannot make steady progress always, Satchidananda explains. Otherwise, there is no challenge. Instead, our practice purposely puts us in the path of obstructions. We need to live through the depths as well as the heights. The obstacles "are there to make us understand and express our own capacities." In other words, everything becomes necessary, and all those true lessons from our lives are alive in the whole world.
As my yoga teacher told us yesterday during practice, "yoga is not just about working out; it's also about working in. That inner journey is infinite. My practice is helping me to discover what poet Lawrence Raab shows us in his poem My Life Before I Knew It:
...and then
the life I'd never been able to foresee
would begin, and everything
before I became myself would appear
necessary to the rest of the story.
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