welcome everything

“A spiritual practice is not about becoming good our saintly or boring or a doormat. It’s not really about becoming anything. It’s just about being, allowing being. It’s simply about allowing our awareness to be unfettered, to be released from its pattern of ignorance, so that it naturally blossoms into fruition.” ~ Kathleen Dowling Singh [1]

♥

I frequently urge others to welcome everything, to push away nothing, reminding them (and myself) that it “doesn’t mean we have to like it, and it doesn’t mean we have to agree with it,” writes my teacher Frank Ostaseski, “it just means we have to be willing to meet it. With welcoming comes the ability to work with what is present and what is unpleasant.” [2]

In that spirit I’m ‘welcoming’ the recurring matter of I-wish-it-weren’t-so as part of senectitude (the final stage of the normal life span). With body parts past their best-by date and memory functions misfiring with alarming frequency, I catch myself ruminating on what was (–> life review) and what is yet to come (–> death preparation). All quite normal even necessary pursuits if done with openness and self-compassion. “Openness welcomes the good times and the bad times as equally valid experiences. … To welcome everything and push away nothing is an act of love”, says Ostaseski.

♥

“Les bulles de savon” by Manet

Again and again I feel a deep longing for romantic and sexual intimacy. Nothing new here: it’s part of the human experience. Looking back, it’s taken my through happiness and disaster, bliss and loss. And yet, and yet … the longing keeps gnawing at my heart as that bitter-sweet craving for intimacy collides with clear thinking. Buddhist teaching is that “Even painful feelings give rise to craving. When a painful feeling arises, we do not like it. We wish to get rid of the pain. Both wishes are craving.”[3]

Enter Welcome Everything. Instead of pushing away the momentary pain, I soften my heart to longing as a sensory experience, as what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe” of living. By not pushing it away, by not seeing myself as flawed, I now savour desiring as a passing phenomenon. Much like a soap bubble: mysterious one moment, gone the next.

Rumi wrote this eight centuries ago:

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, suffer the pain.

[1] Singh, K.D. (2014). The grace in aging: Awaken as you grow older. Wisdom Publications, p. 40.  [2] “A 12-Minute Meditation to Welcome Everything” in Mindful, no. 55, 2022. Frank directed the End of Life Practitioner Program which I completed in 2006. [3] Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. “Desire and craving” in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Fall 2012. [image] Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.