‘Inside this new love, die.’

This line from a Rumi poem stayed with me all week.  Not only the winter’s nakedness, but also a relational transformation has got me on the subject of losing and dying on a psychological, emotional level. Could it be that we face life’s setbacks to train us for our final, physical goodbye? I’m not taking any risks and take notes while a big part of my life is lost, or preferably, transformed.

‘Only by losing our life we can return to them more fully’, Philip Simmons writes in his book ‘Learning to Fall’. I guess this is also true for love.

If you think about it, it’s an amazing opportunity to die, and to die together while alive, which is what happens when a relationship ends. Instead of losing each other for ever, we get a second chance if we do well, a butterfly-like incarnation within one life. We get a chance to transform the relationship when love infuses our minds and hearts. It’s the dying part that’s hardest, yet essential.

They don’t teach you in school how to die. It’s something very personal and at the same time like all essential stuff, it is extremely shared. Yogi’s get this, when they practice Shavasana, corpse pose, at the end of each yoga session. They practice dying and because of that, probably return to their lives more fully. May we be strenghtened to keep practicing.

Namaste,
Geertje

It’s Christmas day and I get up in time to have wonderful, yoga, meditation, and contemplation packed morning. By the time I get to my yoga mat, my dog is having a ADHD attack, insisting that my back is the only place where his yesterday’s half chewed-off bone must be consumed. At the same time, my downstairs neighbor decides that it’s time to pump up the Christmas carols full volume, a regrettable privilege during Christmas. The washing machine is spinning full speed, the telephone starts ringing, a dog in my apartment block starts hysterically barking and my dog joins in. I can see my meditative morning fading transforming into mayhem.

Let’s be honest; it’s hard to get things ‘just right’. Some people, especially Buddhists, would say that it’s downright impossible, at least on the external level. But how we long for it! It’s the feeling that you’ve almost got it the way you want it only to see it slip away. Sometimes it’s almost as if the world conspires against you to make you miss that last step. Of course this isn’t the case, as ‘the world’, as Mark Twain reminded us, ‘was here before us’.

So we might as well invest in another way that doesn’t depend on things being just right. The best alternative I have found is investing in finding things just right and seeing the beauty in imperfection. The first approach comes from expectation, the second one from contentment. As one of my favorite teachers, Sakyong Mipham, so beautifully puts it:

“The most outrageous thing to do is to be content.”

We can actually use our expectations, our feeling of not getting things just right as a stepping stone towards feeling content as it reminds us of the fact that our happiness does not come from getting things the way we want them to line up, but from something more profound; by participating in our lives and living them fully.

Wishing you all a merry and content Christmas,

Geertje