You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.

I’ve been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.

I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out into the open.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart–
oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God — spend them however you want.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Original Language German, English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I’m conscious as I write that there are times in our lives where we can engage easily with positive ideas such as those often expressed in this blog, and there are times when this feels so very far away from where we are. At those times it can feel like the rest of the world are on another planet that is worlds away. It’s a very lonely place to be. Perhaps this poem is for those who feel this loneliness and devastation. It’s a gift from Rilke for anyone living one of those times now, from a man who knows that place.

The poem is incredibly creative and vivid in how it describes the feeling of this. A heartbreaking description of despair and the journey of compassion. The scattered pieces remind me of the story of the Tibetan Buddhist deity of compassion Chenrezig (Avolakiteshvara) and his moment of shattering into a thousand pieces at the foot of the mythical Mount Meru. After witnessing the suffering of countless multitudes of beings for eons, so it is said, Chenrezig was devastated and his body literally shattered. In the poem the brokenness, the scattering, the toxic, gutted and torn self is conveyed as the starting point, a ground zero – and also the ground of the prayer. In the story of Chenrezig he shapeshifts. His thousand shattered pieces become 1000 arms with an eye in the palm of each of his hands making him a supercharged force for compassion in the world.

On a more personal level Rilke is suggesting that, rather than clinging to a sense of self that is broken, perhaps we can surrender, placing the fragments of our broken self in the great hands of the Awesome One (or whatever name you choose).

For me it is the last few lines that pierce my heart. A feeling I know as compassion floods in. Deeply painful yet utterly and exquisitely human, a humble unbearably tender love that looks raw reality in the eye. I know how important it is to let myself feel this.

Questions are openings, beginnings and possibilities. Here are some questions that you may like to sit with:

Could you imagine placing the fragments of your life in the great hands of a Universal Heart?

Could you find yourself again, amongst the pieces of your shame?

Could you imagine letting go so deeply, that you allow the truth of your lack of control over yourself and your life to be as it is?

And from here, might a different kind of possibility for choice and action then come into view?

Ps. If you feel drawn towards compassion practice and have a previous training in mindfulness you may like to join our next Level 2 Responding with Compassion course.

If you’d like to connect with poetry in a mindful way there are two upcoming opportunities available. Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry 6 week course and Mystical Poetry for Slow Time retreat day.

The image is a detail from here.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance:
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

by Mary Oliver

Against the backdrop of spring, we accompany American poet Mary Oliver on her cot by the open window. Lying there, listening to birdsong, she – and we through her – connect with the infinite; to the countless moments since time immemorial, when one human or another has meditated in the sweet company of the birds.
Lying there Mary entertains the mind’s antics, contemplating the human compulsion to try to escape from grief, disaster and dying. With remarkable surety she is not swayed. She has enough insight to know that what Tara Brach calls ‘True Refuge’ can only be found by staying present and making ‘peace with the fact’; allowing the truths of life to be just that, true.

So much of the time, at the first twinge of discomfort we head straight to the harbour and jump on a boat heading for the horizon. We each have a repertoire of ways to not remain here when the going gets tough. When we ricochet into ‘False Refuges’ – addictions, technology or any habit that promises something nice initially but drains or disconnects us in the long run, we abandon the moment, ourselves, others we love or would like to respect, and reality as it is.

Mary Oliver recognises this deeply. She is resolved to stay to ‘sort the weeping ruins of her house’ even though her ‘wounds are leaping with impatience’. ‘Wherever you go, there you are’ says the grandfather of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn or in Mary’s words ‘Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts?’ Having the insight, tenacity and compassion to do this is no small feat, but the rewards are great.

What can we inherit from disaster? I find I’m often able to ask this question in the midst of the disaster! Standing there even in the thick of it, I already know and trust that there’s a gift somewhere hidden in this apparent wreckage. This doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and it doesn’t make life nicer. But it does feel real, and in my experience feeling real, is often better than feeling nice. Feeling nice can have a fragility to it, you somehow know it’s shaky ground, somewhere you are twisting yourself out of shape in order to resist the truth. Feeling real is connection. It is alignment with truth, and it brings resilience. You are with life rather than against it.

And this, of course, is the promise of mindfulness training and practice.

Ps. Do you feel inspired to develop the skill of ‘being real’ in order to find true resilience? Come along to our free live guided twice daily meditations on Zoom to start your journey, or sign up for an in-depth progressive training in mindfulness here.

At times I wish I could crawl in,
Because there are things
No one should bear alone.
I have to trust
That holding
Is enough.

At the end of the day,
I set the bowl down,
Returning it to something
Or someone
Who holds us all.

by Martha Postlethwaite

At times, we all walk at the cliff edges of pain. I first read this poem when feeling close to overwhelm at the pain of someone dear to me. It was a tonic. When I imagined listening to the pain in this way, receiving it in my ‘beautiful bowl’, it felt very tender, like honouring the pain as precious. This helped me to stay with it, rather than rejecting the pain to protect myself.

The power of listening and presence, rather than answers and advice, is something I’ve come to trust profoundly. I find that if I’m able to receive someone’s truth into the bowl of my listening, I learn more and more deeply what it is to be human. This is a great privilege. It is humbling and awakens the heart.

I still notice though, that I can have a habit of carrying the burden of pain, whether my own or a dear one’s, more than is necessary. I also hear a lot, especially of late, of how people are holding the pain in the world as a burden.

For me pain can get into my shoulders and jaw, chest and arms, showing up as tightness. The last stanza of the poem feels essential, but putting the bowl down is easier said than done. I imagine putting it down and there is a whisp of lightness, but the tightness is still there. Perhaps those who feel this, like me, are going to need to commit to a long, slow road of teaching our body/mind/heart to put down the burdens. So, this is a stanza to take with me as a mantra, to return to in my practice and to nurture as aspiration.

I’ll close with a little quote which I think is so very poignant. It points to the essential goodness of human beings, that we often miss if we forget ‘the bowl’. It is from Martha Postlethwaite’s book that contains the above poem Addiction and Recovery – A Spiritual Pilgrimage:

‘Once a person tells you their story, it is hard to see anything other than beauty.’

Ps. If you’d like to learn more about how to bring poetry into your mindfulness and compassion practice, take mantras from poetry to live out in your life and absorb the wisdom in both ancient and modern poetry, come along to our Mindfulness meets Mystical Poetry course beginning at the end of October.

Photo by Esra Afşar on Unsplash

by Nadia Colburn

In an article in Resurgence magazine Nadia Colburn writes with great eloquence and potency about how for her, from the combination of writing poetry, mindfulness and therapy a path of healing emerged where before there was only despair. You can find the full article here (worth a read in my opinion!). She centres her story on this arresting poem that she wrote when the effects of her childhood trauma began to paralyse her in her mid-thirties. Not only does what felt dead come back to life, but a new engagement with the world is born and she becomes an environmentalist.

I feel awe when I read this poem with her whole story as the backdrop. The poem has the agonising transformation captured within it. The stoniness of her trauma intractable at the start, line by line, is embraced into the elements and the Earth. The silence becomes a space of emergence. How can she say so much in only eleven lines?! From death to life, from absolute desolation to sisterhood, from paralysis to potential.

In reading this poem feel I become witness to the wonder of how we human beings can heal and transform. I also feel a wonder at how Nadia has tapped a poetic intelligence, which is far from rational, to enable this. Something within her spoke through the poem from beyond her thinking mind. A healing force which came from so deep within her that it was only much later that she came to further layers of understanding about what she had written. Her poem was her self-created medicine and she absorbed that medicine over a long time. It was a medicine both to cure and to become.

I’ll finish with by quoting her words:

‘As I had been taught to do in my practice as a poet, and also in my mindfulness practices and in yoga and therapy, I sat with that silence, that weight… as I sat with the stone itself, I saw that the stone itself was no ‘thing’. The stone, too, was part of something larger, a world in which none of us is cut off, but in which we are all interconnected.’

As I close this piece I am feeling the arising of a deep wish. Nadia gives me hope through her story. I wish for us each to nurture hope both for ourselves and for our world. Thank you Nadia!

Ps. Join me to encounter more poetry with the power to heal and open your both your eyes and heart. Our Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry Course starts at the end of October. Find out more here.

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It’s always a bit of a process, choosing the next poem to explore here. Not only do I have to like it, but it has to be relevant for me at that time so I have something to say about it, I want to feel some alignment with the poet and I strive for a diversity in the selection, and I try not to share too many poems by the same poet. But that last one is not always easy with a poet as prolific as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who has a practice of sharing a poem a day and has done so since 2006. You can find all of her poems here, or click here to hear her read the above poem. So with the amount of Rosemerry-poems already in our list, another one wasn’t the most likely choice for today – but when I came across this one just yesterday and it named exactly how I felt, I couldn’t resist.

Being with the swirl of okay and not okay, with the heartbreak and the gladness of any given moment, is quite a thing! And it’s not easy to communicate or have space for the presence of such different ingredients in the same instant, in the same world… Yet I’m glad it’s possible, for the alternative is not very appealing: having only what’s not okay in the picture could easily lead to the heart closing into breakdown, and only letting in what’s ok might lead to a polyanna flavoured denying that also doesn’t serve us well. For the glass is not only half empty or half full, it’s both – I’m so glad to be alive and have a glass at all.

When there’s something strongly in the foreground of my experience, I often ask myself the question: “and what else is true?” Not to deny what I’m experiencing, but to open up into the fuller, wider experience of the moment, which frequently is a mixture of different ingredients. Making space for the mixture usually feels honest and true, and rich in a multidimensional kind of way – like a musical chord with a dissonant included, or a beautiful day in autumn that holds the last of the summer sunshine alongside the chill and decay of what’s to come. It may be that these are the moments I feel most alive, most real and open to the fullness of living. So here they are, all these feelings, swirling together… how precious to be living in the midst of it!

PS if you’d like to become more awake to what’s present inside, there’s a new Level 1 Mindfulness course starting soon, which helps us show up in the moment with all its different ingredients, living life fully!

Photo by charles hsiao on Unsplash