Inside Out

An engineer had been a regular and devoted visitor to the monastery for many years. The meditation practice taught at the monastery was the only thing that made sense to him. In fact, the pragmatic logic of the meditation teachings gave him hope that he could overcome his chronic unhappiness and deeply felt pain. He tried all the meditation practices that the Abbess taught him. He began each practice technique with enthusiasm only to have each end with the same frustration. He would encounter a wall he couldn’t pass. The closer he came to the wall the more he would recoil back into trying to think his way out of his pain.

Offering him much support, the Abbess encouraged him to relax, trust the practice, and simply feel his inner pain without reacting to it. After many years the Abbess decided a different approach was needed. During his next visit to the monastery the Abbess told him that if he wanted to continue being her student and to be able to return to the monastery, he would have to take on a special practice. Once he had completed the assignment he could then return for deeper teachings. Once more feeling hope, the engineer quickly agreed.

The Abbess said, “For two years I want you to volunteer ten hours a week at the maternity ward at the local hospital. The hospital needs people to hold babies who are born prematurely. If they don’t receive enough physical contact, the babies will not grow healthily. When you have finished these two years, please come back to see me.”

The man was quite perplexed by this instruction. But because of his trust in the Abbess and his failure to find any relief elsewhere he plunged into volunteering in the maternity ward. He was surprised at how small and fragile the babies were that he held. He would hold them ever so carefully. He would watch their every breath because they all seemed in danger of stopping breathing. He spent a lot of time thinking about how he could more effectively care for the babies he held. But there was nothing more effective than simply holding them against his chest.

After about six months he started feeling something quite new. He started to feel a little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his being. Since this was a foreign experience that didn’t fit any of the ways he thought about himself, he ignored it.

Ignoring it was the best thing he could have done because it prevented him from interfering with the warmth by thinking about it too much. Over the following months this tender spot grew until it pervaded his body. As it did, the cold, dark wall around his heart slowly relaxed, thawed and dissolved.

When he had completed his two years of volunteering in the maternity ward, the engineer returned to the monastery. The Abbess saw immediately that he was a changed man. He was no longer desperate and he was no longer trying to fit everything he experienced into a conceptual framework. Now he wanted to learn what else the Abbess had to teach.

Giving him a new instruction, the Abbess said to him, “When you meditate, don’t think about what is happening. Rather, let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your body. If you do this, any meditation practice you do will be fruitful.” The man found this to be true.

Two Poems from Stephen Dunn:

Happiness

A state you just dare not enter
with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle
that doesn’t exist.
But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles,
and it’s doors forever open.

Kindness

In Manhattan, I learned a public kindness
was a triumph
over the push of money, the constrictions

of fear. If it occurred it came
from some deep
primal memory, almost entirely lost–

Here, let me help you, then you me,
otherwise we’ll die.
Which is why I l love the weather

in Minnesota, ever winter kindness
linked
to obvious self-interest,

thus so many kindnesses
when you need them;
praise blizzards, praise the cold.

Source: Poetry (December 1988