|
|
The book
begins with a Preface describing why the book was written, an
overview of chapter contents, and acknowledgements.
Part One,
the “Narrative,” begins with two very short items, one a Prologue,
the other a poem that I wrote during the healing process (and
which has since been published in the 2009 issue of the Santa Fe Literary
Review). The Prologue provides a glimpse of happier family times; the
poem, entitled “Moon Buddha: A Requiem,” combines narrative, memories and
nursery rhymes as a way of expressing my initial grief.
Chapter One, “Impact,” describes the onslaught of grief –
first the news, then the arrangements we had to make, then the emotional
impact and numbness, and then the crisis-flood of uncontrollable grief. It
summarizes events and emotions up through the departure of house guests
after the formal memorial service.
Chapter Two, “Abyss,” begins with an overview of prior signs
of trouble, of family events leading up to the suicide. It reveals that
Chris’ fateful action didn’t just appear out of the blue, but was a result
of preceding events, that in retrospect, at least, seem to provide a context
for understanding what happened. The second section of the same chapter
picks up the narrative where Chapter One leaves off and describes my
subsequent, dangerous descent into grief. It documents the destructive
effects that followed the initial blast of impact – the heat and radiation
effects, as it were, that followed detonation. It was a disintegration
that has been called the “second crisis” in grief’s unfolding after the
initial busy-ness and numbness pass. Our friends and family had returned to
their homes. With nothing to shield us anymore, the horror of Christopher’s
death overwhelmed us. All I could do was observe the grief unfold, and be
aware of how, as it did, it became ever more crippling and dangerous. I
was swept into the tempest. It was both a hellish and dangerous time for
me, requiring, eventually, a short clinic stay to ensure my safety.
Chapter Three, called “Roots of Sorrow,” interrupts the
narrative to trace relevant generational and family history and events
leading up to the tragedy. It makes clear how my background, history and
conditioning – and therefore Christopher’s too -- powerfully shaped and
magnified his suffering and my subsequent grief. The chapter also provides
an opportunity to assess my own role in the tragedy, and illustrates how
tragic acts like suicide emerge from a complex context of earlier events.
Perhaps if that is better understood, future tragedies can be warded off.
The narrative
in Chapter Four, entitled “Back From the Edge,” focuses on the
grief work I did to face and eventually heal from the assault. The story
picks up again at the clinic, which was a turning point marking a subtle
shift from hopelessness to a desire to heal. After returning home, a
maritime vacation then provided a brief respite. Immediately after
returning, however, I slipped back into a deepening sadness that involved,
over many months, my longest period of difficult grief work. Here I
describe the retreats, guided meditations, readings, counseling and other
therapeutic efforts that led very gradually to increasing signs of healing,
and from there, later on, to recovery. In the process, I learned that my
grief over Christopher’s death was being greatly amplified by unresolved
sadness from childhood.
The
narrative in Chapter Six, “Letting Go and Seeing the
Structure of Delusion,” describes the various techniques I employed to
penetrate and let go of my grief. These included keeping a grief journal,
writing various letters and poems, and engaging a series of powerful grief
meditations from such teachers as Stephen Levine and Jack Kornfield. Also
reviewed are the necessity of accessing unconscious aspects of one’s grief
and the means I used to do so, including insight meditation, techniques of
“noting” during meditation, Big Mind workshops and dream analysis. By such
means did I learn to see the repetitive, tape-loop nature of my suffering,
along with the very bad deal I had made with Mara (sanskrit
for “murder,” or “destruction”) – the closest thing in Buddhism to the devil
– during my earlier years. Finally, the chapter summarizes the continuing
signs of healing and renewed happiness that emerged as my radical acceptance
of self and sadness has deepened.
The narrative
of Part 1 concludes in Chapter Seven, entitled “Cultivating
Peace & Returning to Life.” This chapter begins by describing the place of
healing I have reached, and my increasing explorations of mindfulness
meditation, of the “four foundations of mindfulness,” of the “three marks of
existence,” and of practices encompassed by the Brahma Viharas (Sanskrit
for “Divine Abodes”), including structured loving-kindness
meditations. Because writing poetry has been so central a part of my
recovery, this chapter also includes five short poems reflecting different
points in my own grieving process. Further, having discovered that I cannot
really separate “healing” from “spiritual insight,” included here also is an
overview of my “opening” experiences, both before and after Christopher’s
death. As a way of both summarizing and concluding the narrative, I
describe how my spiritual practice now involves an ongoing “dance” of
relative and absolute, of delusion and enlightenment, of ordinary and
spiritual.
My grief
has not totally disappeared, and I am forever changed. But now there are
many times of joy and celebration. My practice increasingly has taken the
form of looking outward, as well as inward, and of serving others whose
obvious suffering I no longer have the power to ignore, since it is my own.
I have learned to happily dance with the demon.
#######
Part 2 of
the book explores the Buddhist teachings and numerous specific healing
practices for recovering from grief. Its first segment is Chapter 8,
entitled “The Truth of Suffering.” It begins with three “pillars” of strong
practice that can be life-savers for those caught in the throes of grief.
They are great “faith,” perhaps best understood as great trust; great
determination, or commitment; and great “doubt” – referring to great
questioning, not to disbelief. The teachings then turn to the importance of
one’s sincere intention to practice and to heal, and to willingness to make
the kinds of choices that are necessary for healing. The chapter concludes
with a review of basic precautions and healing practices for those shattered
by loss. These include coping with immediate dangers, finding social
support, and knowing you’re not alone.
Whereas the
previous chapter laid out, in effect, what is called the First Noble Truth
of Buddhism – that suffering is unavoidable in an impermanent world,
Chapter 9, “Origins of
Suffering,” explains why this is so, according to the Second Noble Truth.
This teaching expounds that suffering results for our attachments, or
graspings, which, sooner or later, because of the fundamental impermanence
of things, are frustrated, causing experiences of loss. These attachments
arise quite naturally from human desires, which are built into our structure
of self (ego). This “structure” leads, for virtually everyone, to the
notion that this “I-system” is real and enduring. When the self (“me”)
loses what it dearly loves (a child, for instance), its suffering can be
extreme. In Buddhism, however, due to the impermanence and total
interdependency of all things, “self” is an illusion, and deeply realizing
this reality, through meditation, is the way to transcend suffering.
Unfortunately, doing so is difficult, especially when one is “stuck” in
dysfunctional patterns of conditioning. The healing practices noted in
Chapter 9 pertain to surviving and coping with the initial trauma (and
sometime danger) of loss.
Chapter 10, entitled “Insights into the Self-origins of
Suffering,” delves into the predicaments identified in the preceding
chapter. For instance, the reasons why identification with “self” can be
such a problem, and even a trap, are discussed. The problem of maladaptive
life conditioning is centrally relevant here and therefore requires some
review of the Buddhist doctrine of karma (“action” in Sanskrit),
or cause-and-effect. Indeed, so powerful are the effects of conditioning on
how we react to trauma that some styles of meditation, like classical Zen,
can be very aggressive in their approach to transcending it. Gentler, more
assimilative approaches of mindfulness meditation are also available,
however, and they have the added advantage of having developed more
structured types of meditation than Zen for working with pain. Regarding
relevant healing practices, at this point it is necessary to introduce
elementary techniques of meditation and the most common hindrances that
beginners usually encounter when starting on the meditative path.
Particular emphasis is placed on cultivating intense physical awareness.
What may have seemed mysterious about the book’s title – “Fire Gate of
Healing” – is resolved in Chapter 11, “Entering the Fire Gate
of Healing.” My phrase “fire gate” refers to the central teaching in
Buddhism that suffering can be transcended only by facing and fully
experiencing it. This teaching seems so counter-intuitive to many that the
chapter is devoted to explaining and documenting it. Because the efforts to
fully know one’s own suffering are challenging, some space is devoted to
again clarifying the role of intention and commitment in one’s efforts.
Even more central is discussion of the reasons why and how mindfulness
meditation works, why it has such great healing power, and why one’s ability
to do it is so vitally important to the task at hand. Numerous examples and
quotations from the Buddhist teachings are included here, as well as many
specific meditative and other practices to foster healing. The healing
exercises place particular emphasis on working directly with grief and
accessing the afflictive emotions through physical awareness.
As explained in Chapter 12, “Healing, Emotional Alchemy, and
the Structure Of Suffering,” recovery from grief and the other dark emotions
of loss not only requires facing our pain, but also is greatly aided by
clearly seeing the structure of conditioning from which it arises. The ten
“schemas” delineated by schema therapist and meditation practitioner Tara
Bennett-Goleman provide an economical way of exploring one’s own pattern of
dysfunctional conditioning. The limits of the kind of healing one can
expect through such meditative self-exploration, however, require a review
of just what is involved. For this purpose, drawing on the work of Stephen
Levine, the discussion contrasts the more common understanding of healing as
a “cure,” with a more realistic and relativistic understanding of healing
as a deeper kind of spiritual adjustment and physical adaptation. The kind
of healing explored by Bennett-Goleman and Levine involves deepening
awareness that leads to a transformative “emotional alchemy.” The
mindfulness meditation promoted in the last chapter can now be applied,
using various relevant healing practices, to the job of interrupting the
automatic schema reactions to stress that have led to such intense grief and
suffering in the past. The chapter concludes with a review of guided
meditations that cultivate such positive emotions as forgiveness,
loving-kindness and gratitude.
The last two chapters of Part 2 explore more advanced dimensions of
spiritual growth and healing. In Chapter 13, “Letting Go into
Transformation,” the challenge of “letting go” of one’s grief, and other
dark emotions, is reviewed. Part of the problem is simply the difficulty of
releasing the highly conditioned behavior and emotions underlying the self’s
suffering, including grief. Accomplishing this transition enables one to
appreciate the teaching that, although life will never be free of pain,
whether or not we suffer from it is optional. But an equally
challenging issue is the question of just what or where it is one lets go
into. This is the challenge of one’s willingness to expand awareness to
include “Big Mind,” a process which can lead to the scary prospect of
“forgetting the self.” As the transition unfolds, there begins a kind of
“dance” involving, as partners, both the “relative” perspectives of little
mind and the “absolute” insights of big mind. The relevant healing
practices introduced at this point emphasize the importance of long-term
practice and identify techniques for retaking one’s bearings, as well as for
focusing one’s newly expanded powers of mindfulness on everyday activities.
Chapter 14, “Discovering Groundlessness & Forgetting the
Self,” concludes the book’s exploration of teachings with a
discussion of fairly advanced aspects of meditation that lead one right back
to a renewed embrace of ordinary life. Having now learned to engage the
more subtle dimensions of meditation, such as “choice-less awareness,” one’s
still deepening awareness continues the process of letting go, including the
experience of groundlessness and timelessness, and of experiencing
compassion for all those in the world who suffer. But instead of having now
been led to some esoteric spiritual plane beyond the reach of ordinary
people, we find ourselves right back in the midst of everyday life, albeit
with a vastly greater sense of vibrancy, beauty and freedom from suffering
than was true when our journey through grief began. Although perhaps not in
quite the way we first imagined, we have healed.
#####
Part 3,” Summary of Healing Practices, Bibliography and Short
Biography,” ties up loose ends. There have been so many references to
various healing practices that a summary and overview of them in
Chapter 15 seemed warranted. After noting the various general types
of healing practice, the chapter lists each one by chapter, starting with
Chapter 8. The nature of each practice is highlighted by being printed in
upper-case. Quite a few guided meditations and routines were noted in Part
1 (Chapters 1 – 7) because they were an important part of the narrative, and
all of them are included in Chapter 15. I am in the process of offering on
my website recordings of many of the guided meditations discussed in each
chapter’s “healing practices” sections. Some of the meditations are my own,
while others have been adapted from various sources
A bibliography is the second segment in Part 3. Embedded in
the bibliography are recommended readings, selected especially for
beginners. These suggested readings are marked by an asterisk.
The book concludes with a very short author’s biography.
|