Pain, Fear, and Grief archive
Session 1:
https://vimeo.com/737539453
Password: Nepo
Session 2:
https://vimeo.com/739497195
Password: Nepo
Session 3:
https://vimeo.com/742019986
Password: Nepo
COURSE MATERIALS:
Session 1: Pain, Fear, and Things As They Are
A Way In
Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.
—Megan Devine
Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s.
—Jodi Picoult
Let everything happen, beauty and terror.
No one feeling is final. Keep going.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
My barn having burned
to the ground, I can see
the moon more completely.
—Masahide (1657-1723)
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
—Ambrose Redmoon
Erosion
Mark Nepo
On a still morning, you
may stumble and wonder
why you’re carrying
what you’re carrying,
why you’re never
where you are.
It seems a trick: to feel
so much and not be able
to hold it. But the clouds
can’t hold the sun and
the waves can’t hold
the wind.
When worn of our secrets,
we become temporary
blessings, like flags worn
free of their signs.
Lose your grip on what you
want and what others tell you
you want, and life becomes
simple. There is less to do.
Like a pearl washed ashore,
we just wait to be found.
Coming Alive
Mark Nepo
We run everywhere
when it’s only the moments
we are stopped that matter.
No matter how we are stopped,
by pain or beauty, by remembering
in the midst of crossing a street in
New York who you are and all
you’ve done for those you love.
No matter if it’s hard to get up.
Just stay down a while longer, so
you can see all the way through.
It’s in the stopped moments that
the music hiding in silence is
released.
If we can carry that music in our
heart, we will become tender.
And once tender, the Universe
can thread the eye of the needle
that is our one and only life.
Outstretch Your Arms
Mark Nepo
Along the way, people we love
fall from the tightrope and vanish
and we wonder, why not me?
Then, there is a pandemic and
thousands cough and die with
no warning.
Or simply getting older, the view
widens but the path narrows. As
if we’re dancing on the edge of
a cliff.
But it has always been this way.
We are only now aware of it.
This is what the ancients were
honoring when they painted
their faces and danced around
the fire.
As if pain is the bark and joy
is the sap.
What other dance is there?
About Joy
Mark Nepo
Often, what keeps us from joy is the menacing assumption that life is happening other than where we are. So we are always leaving, running from or running to. All the while, joy rises like summer wind, waiting for us to grow in the open, large as willows it can sing through. Yet failing to grow in the open, we can be worn to it. Though working with what we’re given till it wears us through seems to be the grace we resist. Like everyone, I’ve spent so much of my life fearing pain that I’ve seldom felt things all the way through. And falling through more than working through, I’ve learned that if we can stay true to our experience and to each other, and face the spirit that experience and love carry, we will eventually be reduced to joy. Like cliffs worn to their beauty by the pounding of the sea, if we can hold each other up, all that will be left will be wonder and joy.
Bad Needles
Mark Nepo
I was on an examination table with an IV needle in my left arm. It was nothing serious, but Susan was concerned. Some test was being done. Someone was next to me, also having blood drawn. The nurse was busy with this other person. The needle in my arm was sore and my bicep was beginning to swell. Susan noticed the swelling and said, “Something’s wrong. Why don’t you tell the nurse?” I said, “No. It’s nothing serious. They just didn’t do a good job of putting the needle in. It’s alright.” The nurse, without looking up, jiggled the tube collecting my blood, while treating the other patient. I said, “Thank you.” She said, again without looking up, half-sarcastically, and half in admiration, “We treat him like hell and he thanks us.” Part of me took it as a compliment. But Susan was furious.
Now I realize that, for much of my life, I have accepted bad needles and said it is alright. I’m almost polite, accepting ill treatment in order to be seen as good and kind. I feel, all too often, that if I say the needle has been put in badly, I’m causing trouble or being ungrateful or complaining. Worse, there have been times I’ve pretended that there isn’t even a needle stuck in me, so as not to hurt the one poking. For the first time, I see how I’ve colluded in my suffering. Like a fish who dreams the hook will save him.
The Thing About Fear
Mark Nepo
We try to avoid it, distract ourselves,
even put others in the way. Because it
makes what is necessary seem monumental.
It makes what is needed seem uncrossable.
Yet when we stumble over the line, or are
loved over the line, or, in our exhaustion,
fall beyond our pain, what we feared
was a fall to our death turns out
to have been the next step.
Tu Fu’s Reappearance
Mark Nepo
The great Chinese poet Tu Fu (712-770)
has appeared to me in dreams
as a guide.
Out of the yellow mist
he came again, his Asian beard
in tow. We were on a healthy shore
and he sat cross-legged in the sand,
scratching delicately with a branch,
his slender head down. I crouched
and put it to him, “How do I block
the fear?” He kept scratching the sand
as if he hadn’t heard. I grew angry,
“How do I block the fear?!” He lifted
his head and shrugged,
branch waving above him,
“How does a tree
block the wind?”
With that, he
disappeared.
Fighting the Instrument
Mark Nepo
Often the instruments of change
are not kind or just
and the hardest openness
of all might be
to embrace the change
while not wasting your heart
fighting the instrument.
The storm is not as important
as the path it opens.
The mistreatment in one life
never as crucial as the clearing
it makes in your heart.
This is very difficult to accept.
The hammer or cruel one
is always short-lived
compared to the jewel
in the center of the stone.
It’s Everywhere
Mark Nepo
It was there when I followed your
presence into what would be our love.
There, when I took the path that led to
the sea and stayed for days, putting down
all the names I’d been given. There, in the
dropped book of poems by George Seferis
when a clump of wet grass pointed up his
instruction to speak plainly. And there in
the small light that brought me back while
I was slipping away during surgery—there
in the crack of dawn promising so much,
if I could just return and walk beyond
death’s slim tree. And here I am, all these
years later, mouth open, still in awe. I’ve
tried so many times to seek the truth,
only to find it everywhere, if I can
step through my pain and put down
my want for things I can’t have.
Praxis
Mark Nepo
Whether pacing in a waiting
room or enduring a sudden throb
of pain, take a long breath and float
like a lily pad, spreading yourself
before the world while looking
for your tether to the bottom
of things.
Just float until your grip is
loosened. It will be alright.
I mean, nothing less than death
will frighten you. And nothing less
than life will bring you back.
In Your Hand
Mark Nepo
I know you can only see red right now
through the cut in your trust. But most
cuts mend and then, the courage is in
finding an open boat so you can row
far enough out that you can drift.
And only when you have given up
going anywhere might you be drawn
to pick up the oars and start rowing
at the pace of clouds.
Then, as your hand is one with the oar
and the oar is one with the water, your
heart will be one with your life and
your life will be one with the ancient
drift that joins all things.
Take Home Journal Question: Questions for the Deeper Teachers
Surface and give voice to the most pressing question you have for each of these deeper teachers: Fear, Pain, and Grief. What is it you need to know about each?
Take Home Journal Question: Bad Needles
Describe a bad needle you are accepting. Describe how you are colluding in your own suffering.
Session 2: Loss and Grief
The world is incomprehensible, but it is embraceable.
—Martin Buber
You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them.
You grieve with them in order to know them.
—Valarie Kaur
Though Loss Is Everywhere
Mark Nepo
Your mother has died and you feel her
tenderness everywhere you turn. You reach
for her and come up empty. You long to pick
up the phone and call. You look for things
of hers to hold. But the dearest thing she
held was you. Perhaps her greatest gift
in going is that to feel her now,
you have to hold yourself.
You ask how I can go on? Why don’t
I have regrets? I guess I’ve been worn
to where I no longer reach. This is
neither better or worse. This is just
how it’s happened to me. I am not
removed. I just feel like a pebble
scoured in the middle of the stream.
The losses hurt and I struggle too,
to stay in the light, to get up and
try again. But the shore crumbling
into its beauty gives me strength.
Like the sun which changes everything,
those we love vanish, but their light
returns and another day begins,
like it or not.
So look to your open hand that has
held so much. What it has known
now lives in you, in a place
you can’t always reach.
I will hold you every chance I get
but this won’t compare to holding
yourself. Perhaps grief is how we exhaust
our reach for things that have gone,
and acceptance is how we slowly
learn to hold ourselves in
the middle of the storm.
Where Are You?
Mark Nepo
My teacher appeared to me
in the midst of my grief for him.
I was on a bench in a park in the
city. Buses were coughing by and
small shops were opening. And
since my teacher no longer has
hands, he swept a bird in my face
to break up my sadness. And since
he no longer has a mouth, the light
off the windows twenty stories up
drifted through the leaves. I said,
“I miss you.” And I thought I heard
him say, “Do everything while you’re
here.” Then it began to mist, though
the sun was shining. As if the Uni-
verse were crying at what it does to
us in order to keep going. Just then,
a child lost a ball. It bounced my
way. Now my teacher was in the
bounce and I thought I heard
him say, “Enough of this.
Pick up the ball and live.”
Adrift
Mark Nepo
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
Unraveled
Mark Nepo
It’s as if God squeezes this
beautiful, terrible day like a
lemon and those caught in
the grip grow so tender that
there is nowhere left to go.
Others, not caught in the
squeeze, don’t understand.
There are things to do and
bills to pay.
But all the plans against disaster
have been squeezed out of you
and the bee nuzzling its face
in the nectar of the peony
seems now like the end
of all our questions.
Back to You
Mark Nepo
You would have been 102 today
and I wonder what you would say
now that all that was hiding us
has fallen away.
I imagine you now as bare as the
trees outside my window. Despite
our tumble through the years,
I miss you.
For some reason, I keep returning
to the moment you dropped your
cane in the driveway and kissed
my neck.
It’s all I ever wanted. Yet, it took
fifty years to unfold, the slowest
flower I have known on earth.
Unseen
Mark Nepo
Listen, if you can, for the angels
waiting to pollinate your emptiness.
No, you can’t see them. They are not
big and swanlike as we’ve been told
but thin as dragonflies that tickle you
with their drift. They float behind
your eyes, as your softer face reflected
in the rain, as the lightness you feel
when a headache is lifted, as the urge
to drop the stone you’ve carried for
years. They escape from the furl of a
sheet and land as the sudden warmth
that makes you help someone untangle
a knot. They dance like atoms around
the weeds in our heads. They help us
help others till we drip honey from
our trouble on the fire of life.
Take Home Journal Question: What Are You Grieving
Identify and personalize one of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief that has been working you during this time: denial, anger, bartering, depression, or acceptance. What are you grieving? What are you being asked to accept?
Take Home Journal Question: Closeness Through Grief
Tell the story of someone you have become close with for sharing either their grief or yours. How did this experience bring you closer?
Take Home Journal Question: Connecting Through Grief
Identify someone you have lost in your life and identify someone important to you now who didn’t know them or didn’t know them well. Write a letter to the person you have lost describing your living friend to them. Then, write a letter to the living person in your life about the person you have lost. Later, meet with your living friend and read both letters aloud.
Take Home Journal Question: The Chords Under Everything
From his Spanish guitar teacher, Leonard Cohen learned the six basic chords of all Flamenco music. He later understood that all of his music came from these six chords. In truth, we each must learn the basic chords under everything that help us through life. Begin to describe what one of these basic chords is for you; that is, what do you experience as a basic agreement of life under all our trouble that help us find grace through our humanness?
Here are links to the Rufus Wainwright version of “Hallelujah” sung with 1500 souls in Toronto, Canada on June 11, 2016, as well as to Leonard Cohen’s acceptance speech on October 11, 2011 for the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award, and finally, to a live excerpt of Leonard Cohen singing “Hallelujah” himself in mid-life:
Choir! Choir! Choir! Epic! Nights: Rufus Wainwright + 1500 Singers sing HALLELUJAH!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=AGRfJ6-qkr4&feature=emb_logo
Leonard Cohen’s Prince of Asturias Speech (video and transcript)
https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/leonardcohenhowigotmysong.htm
Leonard Cohen Hallelujah (live excerpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=kzWeN-bVDUc&feature=emb_title
Session 3: We Are More Than What Is Done To Us
The Great Opening
Mark Nepo
It was the son of a soldier,
a soldier who killed his own people.
It was that gentle son who went
in despair to his grandfather’s
bridge to ask in his
solitude why.
And that night he dreamt
that everyone who’d been hurt
and everyone who’d done the hurting
met on that bridge. And in their
awkwardness and pain, it began
to rain flowers which grazing
their skin opened their faces
and they were healed.
And the flowers, falling
into the water, brought
the fish who thought
the petals were food.
And the son of the soldier
woke committed to the building
of bridges and to the food
of flowers raining
from the sky.
Disrobing in Time
Mark Nepo
Nothing is easy, but to tell the truth.
The truth of what I see and feel.
This somehow cleanses my eye
and it becomes clear what to do.
In my pain I forget to admit what is
true and things get worse. Because
I don’t want to be sad, I don’t admit
that I already am. Then I feel like
I’m drowning.
Because I don’t want things to change,
I don’t admit that they already have.
Then I feel like the wheel of life
is tearing me apart.
The greatest power we have when
feeling powerless is to admit what
is already true. Then the stepping
stones of Eternity rise out of the
mud, showing us where to go.
To Be and Belong
Mark Nepo
Let go your want for greatness
and feel the tool that’s in your hand.
Let go your fear of emptiness
and receive the wave still reaching
from the beginning.
It only wants to enliven you
the way water refreshes every hole.
So let the web of things
entangle you.
Only stars are free
and they are so lonely.
Curse what you will
but give thanks
that everything alive
wants something from you.
The Appointment
Mark Nepo
What if, on the first sunny day,
on your way to work, a colorful bird
sweeps in front of you down a
street you’ve never heard of.
You might pause and smile,
a sweet beginning to your day.
Or you might step into that street
and realize there are many ways to work.
You might sense the bird knows some-
thing you don’t and wander after.
You might hesitate when the bird
turns down an alley. For now
there is a tension: Is what the
bird knows worth being late?
You might go another block or two,
thinking you can have it both ways.
But soon you arrive at the edge
of all your plans.
The bird circles back for you
and you must decide which
appointment you were
born to keep.
The Pool of Grief
Mark Nepo
We each climbed our lives, which
turned out to be different sides of
the same mountain.
At the top, we saw ourselves and
all we’d been through in the same
pool. Behind our swollen heads
was the magnificent sky.
Realizing we each had been crippled
by loss, a few of us cried and our
tears broke our reflections till
we were, finally, as we had
begun, of the same water.
Then, the inconsolable one drank
from the pool of everyone’s grief
and, strangely, was able to go on.
Then, we all drank.
In a day or so, we reluctantly
went back into the world.
Now, when lost, we recognize
each other by the dark cloud
that hovers in the center
of our love of life.
I Need to Know
Mark Nepo
How the willow catches the wind
without falling over, so I can leave
the house.
How birds sing at the first sign of
light, so I can stop living in the past.
How starfish grow another point,
so wounds won’t cripple me.
How elephants find their way to
the river, so nothing will stop me
from living my life.
The Love of Everything
Mark Nepo
After more than seventy years, I confess that, even when struggling, even when lost, I have never stopped loving—everything. And this has enabled me to inhabit life authentically. In the beginning, there were goals I was taught to work toward and these longings for worth were honed in time into personal ambitions, which all fell away. For staying true to the love of everything as our teacher has turned out to be the most enduring ambition of all. This love has made me get up when I have fallen, and has given me the strength to enter the breaks in my heart where I have retrieved my gifts. And so, I have very little to offer beyond the affirmation that unending love without preference will lead us to drink from the Mystery without leaving the world. Unending love without intent will fill every contour of existence the way light fills every hole. So, there is very little to teach. Just that love awakens everything. And care erases the walls we keep building between us.
Take Home Journal Question: Giving and Withholding
Describe a time when your heart hardened and then at a time when your heart softened. What led to each of this instances and what does this tell you about your own rhythms of giving and withholding?
Take Home Journal Question: The Blessing of the Ordinary
Describe a moment you came upon that you were able to enter when still enough. What opened for you in this moment? How did entering this moment affect you? How would you describe what this moment opened you to?
Take Home Journal Question: The Work of Flourishing
Explore a self-assessment of the five practices of flourishing:
How are you doing with the work of Being Opened?
How are you doing with the work of Being Broken?
How are you doing with the work of Being Transparent?
How are you doing with the work of Being Vulnerable?
How are you doing with the work of Finding the living center that we have in common with all life?
What behaviors or practices are helping you flourish?
What behaviors or practices are keeping you from flourishing?
