With a Trembling Heart

It is the yearning for wholeness that enables transformation to happen.

Very soon I'll be going back to Kripalu to help lead an Opening the Heart Workshop again. This workshop is the last weekend before the winter solstice (December 14-16). I think of this time in November and December as "The Dark Run"- a time of decreased natural light, a time of turning inward, of watching, waiting and contemplation- a time to prepare for the increased light to come back to us.

I have often referred to the contrast in the "energy" of a Friday night at Kripalu compared to Sunday morning. Friday night, as I look around at our first circle of the workshop, I often see doubt, fear, excitement, apprehension as I look into people's faces. By Sunday morning, the transformation is very dramatic. The energy in the room is lighter, peaceful, less heavy, and in people's faces I see no hiding, only compassion and kindness.

I find myself asking what exactly is it than enables this striking transformation to happen in about forty hours with a group of strangers. It is true that there is a warm and welcoming atmosphere at Kripalu. It is true that the leaders of the workshop are experienced and the safety and love they help to create is sincere and real. It is true that the music helps gather us in together. But this still doesn't answer, for me, what it is that helps bring about such dramatic change so quickly.

There is a prayer that I love that goes something like this:

With all my heart have I gone out to seek You, And in going out, found You coming toward me.

I think the deeper answer about what causes such deep change at a workshop lies in this prayer: that it is not the singing or the welcoming or the building that, in themselves, transforms. Not really. I believe it is the yearning for wholeness that each participant brings, hesitantly, cautiously, with trembling heart, into the workshop on Friday. What we have, I think, at every workshop is a kind of biased sample. These are the brothers and sisters who have come because they yearn- they want serenity, they long to see kindness in a stranger's eyes. It is in the risk of "going out," of longing, of yearning that one hears the "echo," the answer that we are not alone. The key to the dramatic change is that when we enter that workshop space, we have all suffered and we yearn to be known, seen and embraced with our past suffering: we are willing to take a chance to connect with our deeper self.

It is the suffering that leads to the yearning, which leads to the risk to do something out of the ordinary - like coming to an experiential workshop in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts with a roomful of people we've never seen before. It is easy, I think, to confuse the change agent and to give credit to "the workshop" or to the leaders or to "the place," but I think, truly, the real agent of change is carried into the workshop by each brave, trembling heart that dares to step into the extraordinary.

Just as the time of increased light at the start of the winter solstice would not be so yearned for without the Dark Run, so the opening of the heart would not be so powerful without the dark night of the soul that precedes it. In this time of increased light in the world, we wish you peacefulness of heart and we wish for each of us to come to the knowledge of our true selves. We are not alone- ever.

Come Alive

Becoming more loving to one another is the only answer I know to the violence and suffering in the world.

On Friday afternoon, December 14th about 3:30, I was at Kripalu setting up the circle for the Opening the Heart Workshop which would start about 7:30 that night. I was in the Mountain View Room, facing west, and the sun was streaming in the windows. I like going to Kripalu early on a workshop weekend, to hang out, have an iced drink, set up the circle, check the lighting, read, sit quietly. My mind was calm and focused on the participants who would be sitting on those backjacks in a few short hours.

Just after 3:30, my friend, Peter, who was on his way to help lead the workshop, called to tell me the heartbreaking news he'd heard on the radio about the murders in New Town, Connecticut. As my mind began to wrap itself around this unbearable news, I had a vague awareness that I'd stopped breathing. Then came the thoughts: "Oh God, not again! ... When, when will we have enough spine to stand up to gun lobbies and congressmen who are bought? ... How many more dollars need to be cut for providing seriously mentally ill people, before we realize how much damage we are doing? ..."

The thoughts came like an avalanche, released by the sudden shot of a loud gun. I watched my body continue to set up backjacks and pillows until a perfect circle was formed. Then I sat on one of the backjacks, breathed and let the circle begin to fill with the presence of 28 lives cut short in New Town. My heart began to beat as the circle continued to fill with twelve more souls killed in Aurora, Colorado; thirteen in Columbine; six at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin; nine more souls entered the circle, killed in Manchester, Connecticut; seven more in Minneapolis this past year. The circle continued to fill, all the way back to our violent birth as a nation. I just sat, one beating heart, and I cried. No more thoughts, the mind finally still, the heart broken and aching. I cried til the crying stopped ...

I'm not big on t-shirts or messages on t-shirts. I will go out of my way during the rare times I dare to shop for clothes by myself, to buy clothes that have no visible label or message. I know, I know- it's basically the same kind of snobbery that leads people to buy labels and messages. Anyway, when I was at Omega a few years ago, I saw a t-shirt with a message that I liked enough to buy: "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive."

These words made me think of what Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: The foundations of one's being form the basis of one's actions. I believe what this great Zen master is talking about is...