Category Archives: awareness

Stories Our Parents Tell Us

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Just back from a dip in The Arabian Sea.

I’m sitting on the wooden balcony just outside our room, watching the mid-morning calm waves, really ripples, just as I’ve been contented to do most of my waking hours over the past four days.

There’s a rhythm to the sea. Several actually. And a rhythm to life here dictated by the sea.

The waves arrive from the south and break on the shore traveling northward, but oddly seem to recede back into the sea at the same time along the shore for quite a way. I’m sure there are physicists among you who can explain that phenomenon to me in language I wouldn’t understand.

In the morning the sea is so calm that the ripples have no sea froth. By mid-morning they are already small waves complete with white caps. In the afternoon the waves become quite healthy. At night they are loud and powerful and often stormy.

When they are at their calmest the fishermen in this small village of Thumboly are out in force. They employ several different techniques but none of them catches much, and the few fish they catch are tiny. We’re told there was a time when fishing was a viable industry here but that time is long over.

By mid-morning there isn’t a soul on the pristine beach other than the occasional tourist. By mid-afternoon the fisherman are out repairing their nets or playing card gambling games , sitting on the sand in groups of six to ten men.

It’s a bit of a mystery where the women are. Home, I suppose. We see the occasional woman shopkeeper and saw a little girl out playing with a little boy on their shared bicycle on one of our afternoon walks. But mostly we see men and boys. Playing soccer. Playing volleyball on the beach. Walking the village streets.

Our days are quite serene.

My partner takes a morning beach walk early every morning. He always comes home with a new adventure to tell me about. One morning it was two children out walking their crab…on a leash.

We have a breakfast of some kind of unfamiliar grain dish in various forms, a vegetable in soupy sauce to put over it, papaya or some other fruit, and tea.

Once breakfast is digested I spend an hour on my yoga mat. My practice immediately returned to its full glory with the first unfurling of my mat opposite The Arabian Sea. It had sadly stagnated for the past six months.

We read, write, and chat most of the day to the accompaniment of the sea’s music.

In the late afternoon we take a walk through the narrow byways of the residential area, where people happily greet us with a friendly “Namaste” and often ask us in to eat (which we politely decline) or into the small commercial area just past the large church.

Today, we decided, was the day we would venture into the water. We were out there at 9:45 when the waves were just starting to be more than ripples. My partner went in first to scout out the drop off and reported that it was sudden but not too steep. The water was warm and delightful.

In I went. But not far and not for long.

Sixty years ago my mother told me about her good friend, Joseph. They were childhood friends and both enrolled at Northwestern University in Chicago. He was an engineering student and she was a drama major so they didn’t share classes but they shared social circles.

In their sophomore year they went to the beach one afternoon with a group of friends. A beach on Lake Michigan they often frequented. Like Israel’s Kineret, Lake Michigan could be treacherous in the afternoon, with a strong undercurrent.

As the story went, on that fateful day Joseph decided to go back in the water long after the others deemed it unwise. As my mother and her friends watched helplessly he was rolled over and over, dragged under and drowned. No one could save him without endangering their own lives.

I love the ocean. If I have a few free hours I sometimes jump in the car and drive an hour or more to walk along the beach. On my way home from visiting grandkids I often take the slower, longer route to stop off for a half hour of breathing sea air and watching sea birds hop in the shallows.

I’m not convinced that my mother’s story about her friend, Joseph, was true or just a cautionary tale, but it accompanies me to the beach every time I go. I rarely go in the water past my ankles or, if I do, it’s only a little above my waist. I need both feet firmly planted. I have what I like to call a healthy respect for the power of the ocean, while recognizing it as anxiety that’s not always justified.

I enjoy my grandchildren’s fearless frolicking in the waves and beyond but only while keeping an eye on the lifeguard to make sure she remains alert. I’m happy that some of my children and grandchildren surf; proof that Joseph isn’t a filter through which they experience the sea.

I’d love to ask my mother if she actually had a friend named Joseph and if she actually watched him drown in Lake Michigan. But she’s been dead for twenty years and, really, does it even matter?

Beware all you parents out there. Stories our parents tell us are powerful beyond logic.

Whatever happens, I’m satisfied

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In Israel parents teach their children a saying very early on in life – Whatever happens, I’m satisfied. It rhymes in Hebrew and expresses a futile hope on the part of parents that it will nip complaining in the bud.

Pretty ironic since Israelis (and maybe Jews in general) are among the most, ahem, discerning (read critical, judgmental, complaining) people I’ve come across in my extensive travels. And I am one, so I’ve had plenty of experience.

On the positive side, perhaps that’s why we’re the start-up nation with more technological and medical innovation than any other place on earth. That squinting one-eyed gaze at everything around us and thinking…hmmm. I could do that better.

On the not-so-positive side, it’s a pain in the rear end to be so often surrounded by people who are almost never satisfied with the way things are. The food in the restaurant is never quite right even after an order reminiscent of Jack Nicolson in Five Easy Pieces (I’ll have omelette plain, with a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no butter, no lettuce, no mayonnaise, hold the chicken). The room temperature is too cold or too hot. The teacher doesn’t pay enough attention to my kid or singles her out for special (not good) treatment.

I wasn’t feeling great the other day. Stuffed up, headache, scratchy throat, didn’t sleep well. Here I am in southern India. Home of Ayurvedic medicine. Decided to get an Ayurvedic massage. For the uninitiated, this involves total nudity and more oil than a Mediterranean diet calls for in a lifetime.

The very sweet young woman spoke no English – zero – and my Malayalam is pretty rusty. There was absolutely no possibility of any request whatsoever. None of the usual massage direction – harder, softer, higher, lower. Nada.

As I lay there swimming in oil I thought THIS is the opportunity of a lifetime to fulfill that Israeli saying – Whatever happens, I’m satisfied.

I found thoughts popping up about how I might prefer this, that, or the other thing she was doing but they disappeared as quickly as they arose. They were irrelevant given our mutual lack of communication skills.

Ultimately, after she wiped off a lot of oil and I pulled my shift over my head – this not being my first rodeo I knew that less is more is the rule when committing to a Ayurvedic massage – I showered and crawled back into my stuffed up, scratchy throated, headachy nest and realized my headache was gone, my throat a bit less scratchy, and that prickly low grade fever feeling had disappeared.

I woke up this morning with more energy than the past couple of days. Had a peaceful, flexible hour on my yoga mat, and sat down to ponder the potential of “Whatever happens, I’m satisfied.” She knew what she was doing and any direction from me would have just gotten in the way.

It’s a continual conundrum in my mind. This contentment with what is versus the striving for improvement.

What do you think?

PS The above photo was taken from this very balcony three years ago. The most peaceful place on earth, Thumboly Beach


Differing Realities

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I’ve been teaching meditation in one form or another for the past 20 years. During that time I’ve listened to hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of dharma talks given by insightful teachers. I’ve been a member of meditation groups – presently a wonderful group of people from the west coast of the USA on Zoom every other week – pretty much consistently for decades. I’ve read dozens of books about mindfulness, awareness, no self, here and now, letting go, equanimity, and lots and lots of other catchwords and phrases. You know the ones.

All this is to say that from many different sources, I’ve received the magnificent gifts of self-knowledge and the possibility of inner serenity during tough and not-tough times. I’m hugely grateful to all my many teachers, those who call themselves teachers and those who don’t, who give of themselves so generously and to God for giving me the time and resources to take advantage of it all. As my husband and I often say when thinking of our bountiful lives – We couldn’ve been born under a bridge in Mumbai.

But it’s only recently that the light went on over my head concerning not only the reality of being born under a bridge in Mumbai – having few material resources and few possibilities of their attainment – but living in a reality that doesn’t allow for integrating those catchwords into one’s life.

It came about one evening after teaching a Raja yoga class (which includes a segment of meditation). I stood talking to one of my students, a particularly beautiful young woman who looks startingly like a well-known gorgeous movie star. She’d obviously lost some weight from her already-very-thin frame and had black circles under her eyes. Her entire affect was one of misery. As it turns out she was caught up in the turmoil of what she saw as a terrible injustice on the part of the employer at the job she’d just left. She felt that, while she’d left the company, others were still suffering the injustice and she was struggling with the idea of suing the company. It took me a few questions to realize that, in fact, it had nothing to do with her directly anymore. I kept thinking surely I must be missing something.

She said that she hadn’t been sleeping and had lost her appetite; that she couldn’t stop thinking about the bad behavior of her former employer. I suggested that she might focus on her supportive husband, healthy scrumptious kids, and her new (more appropriate) employment. We spoke about the possibility of letting the drama and injustice go. She said she’d think about it, but I could tell she wasn’t happy with the direction our conversation had taken.

Since she only comes to my classes sporadically, I noticed that I hadn’t seen her in a while but didn’t think much of it. I wished her well in my heart and hoped that she was able to make peace with not championing those who had remained with her former employer.

About a month later she got in touch with me. She’d been on a 10-day silent retreat. Her first.

She said that when we’d had the conversation about her former employer she’d been very angry with me. She thought my idea of letting the injustice in her former workplace go was surrendering to unethical behavior and part of the larger problems in the world. (in the world!! no less). It was only very far along into the retreat that she felt what she called a clarification which was like the lifting of a heavy fog. She realized that the entire issue of the injustice wasn’t her issue at all; that her inability to see what was clear to me lay in her having always been responsible for her siblings and even her parents in her dysfunctional home. She needed to take care of everyone around her to feel okay about herself. Once she recognized that she was able to let it go. She felt a huge physical relief as if a suit of armor had been lifted from her body.

Of course, I was happy for her and hopeful that she would continue to safely investigate her feelings. I know there’s a lot of inner disquiet and deep fragility there. But I was also chagrined at my cavalier projecting onto others with catchwords and phrases I never stopped to consider might be out of the realm of possibility for some of them.

I know better than that on so many levels, and, apparently, know less than that on others.

I began to look more carefully at other concepts I act as though are healthy, positive, and accessible to all, with a more discerning eye. Is this one really accessible to all? And that one?

It’s all fine and well to talk about relinquishing our narratives and not letting them be in control of our present lives, for instance, but is that accessible to everyone in the present moment of their lives?

Easy to talk about being grateful and satisfied with what is, but how does that resonate with someone who never experienced the unconditional parental love that encourages an ability to feel that one has enough, that one is enough?

And what about letting go, being joyful at the happiness of others, and oh so many others?

I’m embarrassed to say that I seemed to operate on the belief that saying it’s possible, telling stories and legends about people who have integrated such things into their lives, could shine a light bright enough to make it come true for my students. But while I like to think that it could and did for many of them, I will be making amends/changes to accommodate those for whom it’s not part of their reality…yet.

My reality is an ever-changing thing. Nothing in this life is permanent. So why in the world should my ever-changing reality be anyone else’s reality. For the most part, even in our uniqueness, we share quite a bit of similarity to those in our general milieu, but not enough to assume….well, anything.

You know what they say about people who assume…