Lifeletter #167: Unflinching Kindness

I have taken a long and winding journey in this life, digging down into the truth of what love really is, what kindness is, and how we can learn to care for each other in a whole new way. I had to work my way through many hardened layers of  teachings and beliefs and ancient inherited ideas that have trained us to believe in a love that is a fantasy and a prison. I have often felt overwhelmed with the density of this conditioning, stretching back through generation after generation. Even to question these ideas of what it is to be kind, to be loving, has felt as if it was demanding a flow of outrageous courage and power from me.

And of course, it isn’t all up to me. We can’t do these essential tasks on our own. I feel truly graced by life, whenever I meet a person who embodies something other than the conventional norms we share about what love is. It’s like meeting an ally, coming into contact with a human being who feels real, deeply alive, and in alignment with a much bigger love than what my mind could ever know. I feel the resonance all through my body, with this deeper love, this caring that springs from a fierce and natural intelligence.

I encountered such a person when I watched “To Live Until You Die,” about the work of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler Ross. The presence of this woman transmits an unflinching clarity, a radical capacity to speak the truth gently and fearlessly, from a place deep inside herself.

“We spend 6 billion dollars in the US alone to erase those gorgeous wrinkles. We have not only taken the dignity out of dying, we have taken the dignity out of living.

I was astonished to watch her speaking with her dying patients. There is no sugar coating, no pity, no politeness. She treats each one as though they are perfectly capable of hearing the truth.

“You put make-up on a corpse, to make them look like they are only asleep. It’s all phony. “

She is extraordinarily direct with these dying people, helping them to face things they may have spent their whole lives avoiding. And in her directness I felt an unflinching kindness, a deep love that has nothing to do with the need for acceptance, approval or belonging.

She talks with a woman who has been brought home to her family to die. The woman is having great difficulty speaking, and communicates through one of her daughters, who somehow understands what she is saying. Through her daughter, she says that she knows she is going to die, but the process is taking a long time. What is she supposed to be learning from such a long, drawn out process?

Elisabeth replies, “If you can regard this as a challenge, and not as a threat or a punishment or something negative, but as a real challenge, you can learn to communicate with your husband and your children and with me. As long as we don’t fake it that we understand you when we really don’t, that’s a good thing for us. Then your family has to learn to read your needs and your wants. It’s their gift to find out what it is that you want.”

 The woman asks though her daughter, “The one thing that really bothers me is this: since I am unable to use my body, what purpose do I have? I feel that for anyone to live, they must have some purpose, and I can’t see what mine is now. “

Elisabeth bends close to her and asks, “Do you think it’s more important to run around the house, using the broom and cleaning windows, or is there an ultimate purpose in learning how to receive and letting your children mother you a little bit? Every day you can give your children to take care of you, and to see your courage and your love, is a gift to them. And you cheat them out of all these experiences, if you are afraid to receive.”

How often do we encounter someone who has this kind of courage and love? Someone who loves us enough, not to go along with what we have been taught about life, and about death. Such a one is more than a friend. They are an ally, a co-conspirator in our evolution and awakening.

A true ally isn’t perfect. A friend told me today that Elisabeth Kubler Ross had a very hard time herself, in the last part of her life, after her strokes. An ally is someone who has a vision, an instinctive feeling for what is possible, that lives in the core of their being. And it doesn’t let go of them.

 

I want to speak because I want a voice
for that thing that isn’t frightened by our deepest cry
that thing that doesn’t tire with our endless longings
that thing that is more beautiful
than even the best we’ve ever had

 I want to say
that beyond our notions of perfection
there is wisdom
And that wisdom has weaved itself into something
magnificent
 
in you

‘That Quiet Thing,’ Shonna Wells

 

with love,

Shayla