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Yesterday morning, I was on my way to spend time with a close friend who was offering companionship during a time of need, and I heard the song “Lean On Me” on the radio.  A thousand questions entered my mind.  When can I lean on someone?  For how long?  What if my troubles are too heavy?  How much weight can they carry?

The words of another song came to mind: “He ain’t heavy.  He’s my brother.”

When harsh circumstances deepen our need for support, there’s a chance we won’t find it.  Trust erodes, and love is overshadowed by fear when we need someone, and they aren’t emotionally present.  This happens to everyone, because our capacity to be present with those who need us is limited, and as social beings, our needs are deep and real.  The challenge: Our needs often exceed our social capital.  Without becoming Vulcans, we can’t stop having needs, and although we may increase our social capital, the bonds we form may or may not bring fulfillment, especially if personal fulfillment is the focus.  How you meet this challenge, the strategies you choose, influences your well being and shapes who you are deep down.

The prospect of placing one ounce over the alloted weight limit and tipping the scales from love to repulsion terrifies me.  I think people get nervous when they’re needed, because they believe the weight will only increase, and eventually they will be required to push the person away or let them down.

Breaking the Silence

In a research study I encountered while working at a health organization in Washington, DC, doctors were limiting the amount of time a patient could ramble on about their symptoms.  They were asked to estimate how long the patient would talk if given the opportunity, and most doctors predicted patients were fill a good hour.  A group of doctors were asked to simply let the patients talk for as long as they needed and see what happens.  While a few patients did indeed ramble on, the vast majority of patients did not speak for more than a few minutes.  A few minutes!  For the most part, the doctor’s fears were unwarranted, and after the study, many changed how they interact with patients.

Were I in the study, I would probably speak for about 3 seconds, and the doctor would need to coax more information out of me.  I am exquisitely perceptive of the expressions and body language of someone who believes that the demand on their attention has exceeded their preference.

Yet I find inspiration in a touching scene in the movie The Secret Life of Words.  A nurse, Hanna, survived torture in Bosnia.  She takes a job on an oil rig caring for a burn victim named Josef.  Initially quite silent, gradually Josef coaxes Hanna into speaking about her past.

She eventually leaves the rig, but after Josef recovers, he finds her and offers his love:

Josef: I thought um, you and I, maybe we could go away somewhere. Together. One of these days. Today. Right now. Come with me.
Hanna: No, I don’t think that’s going to be possible.
Josef: Why not?
Hanna: Um, because I think that if we go away to someplace together, I’m afraid that, ah, one day, maybe not today, maybe, maybe not tomorrow either, but one day suddenly, I may begin to cry and cry so very much that nothing or nobody can stop me and the tears will fill the room and I won’t be able to breath and I will pull you down with me and we’ll both drown.
Josef: I’ll learn how to swim, Hanna. I swear, I’ll learn how to swim.

Unconditional Trust

When I turn to someone for support, my needs enter into statistical formulas and probability distributions.  I calculate the ratio of positive to negative interactions over time and consult the imaginary table of numbers that will indicate whether the ratio has reached the cut off point.

Finally I realize I am being totally Vulcan about it, and my needs are still there, unphased.

When I abandon the calculations and trust in the universe, I become lighter.  Many needs arise directly from distrust and fear, and when you cultivate trust and faith, your needs naturally lighten.  As your needs lighten, it becomes easier to receive the love that is there, to see that you do matter, and to feel cared for, and what little trust you cultivated grows stronger.  It also becomes easier to shift your focus to the needs of others, which often become obscured by our worries.

Rather than putting trust in particular circumstances, you can trust the intrinsic loving nature of others.  Or more importantly, you can trust yourself to remain open to the support of others.  It becomes less important how well a person can be physically present at a given time, and what matters is what’s in their heart, which is the eternal.  I stumbled across a greeting card with a picture of flowers that said, “No matter how carefully you pick your friends, eventually they will all die.”  The attempt at morbid humor fell flat with me.  Instead, I found it insightful.  Every relationship, if what you call a relationship is some particular social arrangement for a certain ongoing interaction, is ultimately temporary, but love survives.

Opening to Needing

Last night, a friend suggested we watch the movie What Dreams May Come.  The movie is about two people, Chris and Annie, who fall in love and marry, but tragedy strikes, and Annie plunges into severe depression.  All the while, Chris encourages her to be strong and overcome her pain with courage.  “Don’t give up,” he recites.  He keeps his distance from her pain.  He considers leaving her.  However, their connection is strong, and love triumphs.  Eventually, Chris joins Annie in her experience of the pain.  The moment he gives up and enters the pain with her, Annie awakens from the darkness.

We put a lot of time and energy into building social capital, but when the amount we give is designed to maximize profit and minimize the cost, our social economy is unsustainable.  We aren’t as separate as we assume.  The math breaks down.  The more we surrender, the more we open our hearts and make ourselves vulnerable, the more we give up, the more we win.  “Sometimes when you lose, you win,” Annie says.

The funny thing about all this is that the one thing that I’m most afraid of, what prods my heart to close and shut down, is not being needed.  When I was very young, a boyfriend constantly encouraged me to avoid needing him.  Ironic, because he did a lot to help me out over the course of several years.  Ultimately, what drove me crazy is that at no point did he ever express a need for me.  I remember talking to him on the phone once, crying, and asking, “Do you need me?”  He couldn’t reply, because the answer was “no.”  I only cried harder.  Yet, what a reflection of me he was.  He had merely succeeded at what I was trying to engender in myself.

The truth is that our needs for one another are not always in our control, and perhaps that is just how it should be.  I give up.  I wave my white flag.  I will let myself need.

To those who would call upon me, I would say have trust in me and let go of fears that arise when I don’t come through.  You ain’t heavy.  You’re my brother.

(For a beautiful Zen Buddhist perspective on need, see this entry in Luminous Emptiness: Meeting Needs.)

Recently, I was leaving a parking lot and pulled out onto the sidewalk that crossed over the exit.  I thought I would catch an opening in traffic, but it quickly closed, and another car had pulled up right behind me.  I was blocking the sidewalk.  In the midst of the heat wave, a young man was pushing a very elderly man in a wheelchair down the sidewalk.  Their different ethnicities suggested they were not related, and I guessed the young man was doing volunteer work.  He glared at me, stopped, and sat down, waiting for me to get out of the way.  I tried to say that I was sorry for being in the way, but he was too far away to hear me.  I wished there was some hand gesture for expressing an apology.

When I finally pulled out and drove away, I was surprised at how awful I felt.  I just blocked the sidewalk for an elderly man in the middle of a heat wave.  He hadn’t waited long, but I was still down on myself.

The desire to be a loving person can make it hard when you hurt someone, even inadvertantly.  As a teaching assistant, I recently graded homework assignments, and several students were crestfallen and upset when they discovered they had lost many points for not showing their work on a math problem.  I lost sleep wondering if I’d subtracted too many points.  Again, I was surprised at how awful I felt.

Then I received a card in the mail from the bank.  It was a thank you note from a bank teller.  At the last farmer’s market, I found someone’s wallet lying in the grass, and I couldn’t find any contact information among the cards and photos, but I did find a bank card.  The local branch was right there on the capital square, so I walked over and gave the wallet to a teller, who called the owner of the wallet.  According to the thank you note, he was still walking around the farmer’s market that morning, and he was very happy to see his wallet again.  It was a small thing, but I felt wonderful.

All of this demonstrates how deeply we each need not just to be loved but to feel that our love is received.

During meditation, sometimes I ask my intuition how I can best love someone.  I imagine being in their presence, and I ask them, “How can I love you right now?  What do you need from me?”

Today, I began a new meditation.  Instead of imagining love going from my heart to other people, I imagined being open to receive it.  Instead of asking, “How can I love you,” I asked, “How can I receive your love?”

The fear is that we’re not loved, and we’ll be left out or left behind.  A bible verse says “Perfect love casts out fear.”  One way of loving is to face that fear, face the fear out of love, and then oddly it disappears, because if you’re seeing things that way, it becomes obvious that people just want to be appreciated.

Receive by knowing how much joy people get when they’re able to give and love.  I have a habit of saying “It’s not all about me,” but now I’m learning that it can be a very loving thing to say, “It is all about me,” because it gives people joy.  Knowing that you matter is something that matters to the people who care about you, and surely there are many who do.

“Facing My Fears With Love”
pastel drawing

Yesterday I went for a walk through the botanical gardens with a lovely friend of mine.  A true romantic, she approaches the world with an eye for fantasy.  Of a garden with roses and waterfalls, she imagined a unicorn prancing by.  Of a courtyard surrounded with flowers and vines, she imagined a prince and princess dancing.  She shares her visions with an air of reverie and faith in magic, and I always walk away inspired and refreshed.

We went to Dobra Tea, an exquisite tea house with unusual teas from all over the world stored in a wall of drawers reminiscent of an apothecary.  The walls are lined with oriental rugs and photos of far off places.  Low tables encircled by ornate cushions comprise the seating.  It was a lovely way to end our evening.

The conversation turned to the energy of the self.  There is an aspect of our true selves that is much larger than our self image.  I could see this in her.  Compassionate, empathic, and intuitive, her true self extends out into the space around her like a glowing light, with wisps and tendrils moving freely out into the world.  Yet, she holds on to a certain humility that makes her appear smaller, almost as if to say, “Don’t worry, I’m not a threat.”  I’ve seen people do this before.

There are times when we can sense how big we really are, and we are so big and expanded, we might feel a bit overbearing, or perhaps we’re simply uncomfortable with such seeming grandiosity.  Normally, feeling big and expanded means that we are taking up someone else’s space, and we will bulldoze them if we’re not careful.  So, instinctively, we shrink ourselves and lower ourselves, the way we might approach a dog in order to pet it.

Yet, although there is an unspoken rule that we must be small in order to live in social harmony, often making oneself small merely limits our capacity to offer what we have to offer.

On my way home, I pulled up beside an enormous, bloated van with a license tag that said “LIL O MEE.”  Ha!  That summed it up nicely.  Today, realize that you are a great vehicle, able to carry many passengers to beautiful places.  Taking the metaphor too far, but you get the idea.  Be big!  It’s okay.

Driving down University Avenue, I look around at people in the other cars, and everyone is in their own world.  You can just imagine how different our worlds are.  One person might be contemplating what they’ll be doing at work or how long until work is over.  Another person might be thinking of someone they love.  Someone in an old Ford might be worrying intensely about money, and their whole world looks like a big hole, and someone in a van might be excited about taking their kids to the zoo, and their whole world looks like a playground.  Then perhaps someone is on their way to see a dying relative, and the whole world looks as though it’s ebbing, slowly slipping away from everyone’s fingers.

From my perspective, we are all in the same world.  We are all driving down University Avenue.  Perception comprises so much of what we call reality.  In reality, we are driving down the street, but we dream, and our “own little world” operates in many ways like a dream.

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
~ John Lennon

If you were dreaming, how would you prevent yourself from slipping into a bad dream?  In the “real” world, a common tactic for staying positive is to focus on the good things.  The glass is half full.  But you wouldn’t maintain a good dream by focusing selectively on individual elements in the scene or specific facts about your dream world (e.g., “well at least I have money to pay the rent”).  Those individual elements are your own fabrication to begin with.

My dreams shift mood, color, and flavor when my perception shifts, as if I’m trying on a different pair of tinted glasses.  It feels like the process of remembering another world, like the world I was in when I suffered a loss or the world I was in when I moved into my new home.  The thing about dream logic is that, if you know you’re dreaming, you know that the facts about your world proceed from your perception and mood rather than the other way around.  In waking life, the same is often true, but we forget.

“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.”
~ Anias Nin

Ordinarily, reality is something one takes in passively, as if its tone and flavor is dictated by the external world.  And the perceptual shifts from good dreams to bad dreams to good dreams happen without any concious choice, but I’m finding that it is possible to make the shifts voluntarily, to make a habit of dreaming good dreams, or at least useful dreams that I can learn from, and avoid slipping into dreams that are just dark and have no real value.

Money woes weigh heavy on me this summer, as they do for many people.  However, hope and faith are still conceivable.  Soon, the house I lived in during my marriage will be up for sale, and I anticipate a low return, and my income this summer is too low to cover my expenses.  Yet, I’ve survived worse, and I’m continuously amazed at the steel strands of magic woven among the fraying threads that we think constitute the whole of reality.

Last Friday, I read a news article about the economy, Green Shoots or Yellow Weeds.  Roubini writes, “Hopes that ‘green shoots’ of recovery may be springing up have been dashed by plenty of yellow weeds… the consensus view that the global economy will soon bottom out has proven–once again–to be overly optimistic.”  The article painted a bleak picture of the future.

That night, I dreamed that my house had dramatically shrunk in size, and my children had no room to play, and I was running out of money.  I went to talk to someone, and I was trying to tell them that the situation was impossible, but they wouldn’t listen.  I was really broken hearted about it.  They dismissed me, and I got upset.  Returning to my house, I was so distraught that I grabbed my purse and walked out the back door, and I didn’t know where I was going, but I thought I would just walk forever until I could walk no more.

Soon, a friend appeared and stopped me.  I fell to the grass.  As I fell, I saw a clover patch beneath me and spotted a four leaf clover.  After staring into the clovers for a moment, I pulled up the grass.  Under the thick layer of grass, in the soil and roots, I found carrots and other vegetables, enough to make a wonderful soup.  People came from all over, because in the hurting economy, food had become hard to find.

The next day, I sat in the grass encircling the state capital in Madison and immediately found a four leaf clover.  Within minutes, after glancing around in the grass within arm’s reach, I found two more, and then I found a five leaf clover.

By one estimate, the odds of finding a four leaf clover are 1 in 10,000 or 0.01%.  Five leaf clovers are even more rare.

Ironically, I was sitting in the grass with my statistics textbook, my source of income this summer (I am a teaching assistant for an undergraduate statistics class).  I inserted the clovers between the pages of my textbook in order to preserve them.  Later, I realized that I’d sandwiched the first four leafed clover between pages discussing the calculation of probability.  Specifically, the pages discussed how to calculate the probability that an extreme or unusual observation was due to random chance or some special influence.

The special influence?  I have a bit of an obsession.  For more than twenty years, every time I encounter a clover patch, I search until I find one.  It rarely takes more than a few minutes.  I think I have a neural cluster specifically devoted to identifying four leaf clovers in a sea of three leaf ones.

It began when I was about ten years old.  I searched for months for a four leaf clover but could not find one.  I became so desperate that I strategically taped a fourth leaf to a three leaf clover and pretended that I’d found one.  But I continued searching, and soon I found a genuine four leaf clover.  After that, I found them everywhere, every time I looked.  I absolutely always expected to find one, and I always did, and it never took long.  I found six and seven leaf clovers as well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”  Such tenacity sprouts in an atmosphere of hope but withers when we think there is none.  That is ironic, because the odds that I will find a four leaf clover have been completely skewed by my tenacity.

A fellow meditator recently asked me about feeling compassion and how to conjure it up on demand.  In many Buddhist practices, the goal is to develop and sustain a state of compassion towards all beings (and eventually without a target).  Numerous techniques exist to arouse compassion, such as contemplating a loved one who is suffering.  Without an immediate situation calling it forth naturally, it’s not always easy to generate a genuine episode of compassion.  You might pull up an intellectual component while failing to experience the emotional elements.

Imagery is useful, but it’s only a means to an end.  Here is another approach that has worked well for me in the past.  When you’re struggling to call forth compassion, and the attempt is not succeeding as you’d hoped, ask yourself why you want to call forth compassion so badly.  But don’t formulate your answer in words.  Instead, look inward at what is motivating you to make the attempt.  Explore that motivation.

Often, the force underlying your attempt to arouse compassion is true compassion.  You already have it.  If you are striving and straining to have a good heart, it’s because you have a good heart.  The only thing left to do is let it guide your actions.

“Angel of Compassion,” unknown artist

When I was nineteen, I woke up one morning, and my eyes were so red and dry, I could not blink without excruciating pain.  My eyelids felt like sandpaper, and my eyes felt severely dessicated and raw.  I looked in the mirror, and the image horrified me.  I had never seen anything like it.  “I’m going to go blind!” I lamented.  I wanted to rush to the doctor, but I had no medical insurance and no money to pay out of pocket.  Feeling helpless, apprehensive, and sorry for myself, I sat on my bed and started to cry.  When I finished crying… my eyes were all better.  I felt sheepish.  The simple solution, in that case, would have been a saline one.

Problems, even the seemingly insurmountable ones, often turn out to have simple solutions, and we make them complicated only because we don’t understand the situation or because we’re accustomed to unsolvable dilemmas.  So, we ask the universe for help, but we believe the solution must be extravagant and involved.  We “choose the form of the destructor,” to use a phrase from the movie Ghostbusters, and the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man appears.  Not knowing how to untangle ourselves from a web of difficulties, we conjure up an elaborate plan for redemption.  The universe, all to eager to offer healing, may just oblige.

Once upon a time, a man fell asleep under a beautiful but strange tree in the fields near a lake.  As he slept, he rolled over onto the gnarly roots until his head was propped up against them.  When he awoke, a terrible pain filled his head.  The agony!

As he was sleeping, he surmised, his skin had absorbed a poisonous chemical from the tree.  He went to the library and researched the chemical composition of the tree, but he found no clues to a cure.

The pain grew more intense until he cried out to the cosmos, “Oh universe, what must I do to escape this suffering?”  Through his weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, he received an intuition.  He packed a bag and hiked to the furthest mountain.  The tradition said that the spirits visited those on the peak and blessed all who traveled there.

When he reached the foot of the great peak, after many days of travel, the air grew thin and cold.  He searched for a trail, and finding none, made his way through the thick scratchy trees until he reached the pokey rocks.  He shivered and became hungry as a heavy snow fell.  His shoes fell apart, but he kept going.  “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” he said with each step, but he kept going.  He abandoned his bag when he reached a sheer rock wall.  He climbed along the side, finding a place to hang on whenever he grew desperate.  All the while, the pain in his head grew more debilitating.

Finally, he reached the peak.  He knelt on the rocks looking out across the vast landscape and gazed skyward and begged for the help of the great spirits.  Suddenly, a small cloud formed above him and began to glow with an otherworldly light.  A being of golden light descended slowly from the cloud.  She wore garlands of lotus flowers and a necklace of skulls.  She held a serpent in one hand and a blade in the other, and a string of strange, emerald symbols encircled her.  She stood before the man and, with a third magical hand, pulled a white jar from her shimmering garment.

The man was ecstatic.  He took the jar carefully.  “What shall I do, oh honored one?  Whatever you command!”

“Take two of those and call me in the morning,” she said, “and get yourself a nice pillow.  Oh, and take the stairs down, dear.  They’re on your right.”  She smiled and returned to her cloud.  The next morning, the man’s headache was gone.

I’ve been writing a lot about love, fearlessness and surrender.  I think it all makes sense, but I’ve also had this nagging feeling that life is supposed to have some fear in it, and it’s the mixture of love and fear, surrender and anger, harmony and awkwardness, joy and imperfection, that makes it beautiful.

Fear presents a challenge, but opening to it, feeling it, and yet still choosing love, or even just being in the fear while some part of you just wishes you could choose love, there is something inexpressible about that which makes it all love.  When I embrace and allow the negative, it links me to that part of me that is never touched by it and always loves no matter what happens.

Some parts of an experience or relationship might contain fear or anger, but like pungent spices in a sweet dish too intense on their own, they contribute to an overall flavor that is all love.  Yum!