The Place of No Pity, Lifeletter 54

This Lifeletter continues from the previous one, where I wrote about the retreat in which we brought together practices from the nondual and the shamanic teachings. There’s no need to go back and read Lifeletter #53, unless you want to. This one is complete in itself.

I left off at the place where I called out to Heather for help. When she came over to see me, I told her about the intense physical distress I was in. After I went into some detail about my suffering, she simply looked at me with a look of great lucidity, a clear and tranquil gaze. “Yes,” she said, “sometimes it happens like this.”

This was not what I was expecting from Heather in that moment! I experienced her as being fully present, completely open, and utterly without pity. There was nothing coming from her, not even in her expression or the tone of her voice that said, “Oh that’s too bad Shayla. I know how hard that is. I wish it wasn’t like this. I’ll do something to change this for you.”

Nothing. Just a recognition that this is how it is sometimes.

It was only then that I realized I had been hoping for something else. It was only then that a window opened in my perception and I saw that I was actually feeling sorry for myself. I had no awareness of this until I received the shocking clarity of Heather’s response.

While I was taking all of this in, Heather sat down and began to sing for me. It was not a song for the mind – I couldn’t understand the words. It was a song for the heart, the body, and the deeper intelligence. Every note of that song was like a crystal clear bell, reflecting back to me the same luminous clarity: things are as they are, and whatever I think about them is extra. And most of the time the extra just creates a whole lot of suffering.

As the song continued, I realized that in my secret place of self pity I had collapsed. I had withdrawn from a genuine relationship with the physical discomfort, because of my story that it was too much, because I believed that it should be different. I had closed down and retreated into a passive place, a place where I was not ready to meet my experience at all.

The nature of Heathers’ gaze, her words, and her song, punched a big hole in everything I was believing. As I felt myself rise up from the place of collapse, the intense nausea and physical turbulence were still there, but my relationship with them was radically different. I felt as if I had grown up. It was clear to me that I could work with whatever was happening in the body. I was not holding myself as a victim anymore.

I began listening to the intelligence in the body, and responding to it with movement, with breath and with massage. I continued to receive clear responses from the body, as if we were having an actual conversation.
Instead of being stuck, frozen and collapsed, I was engaged in a dialogue, and an inquiry. Slowly, the energy began to move. Tension dissolved, space opened up, sensations flowed freely. In about half an hour I was fine.

How marvelous, that Heather did not rescue me. She responded with what I call ‘awake compassion.’ This was an induction into a direct experience of what it is to be radically responsible for my own experience. This place of no pity no longer seemed cold and heartless. I realized that Heather was expressing a deep trust in my capacity to meet this situation, to respond to what life was bringing me.

The way of awake compassion is profoundly empowering. And it flies in the face of everything we have been taught about love, kindness, support and caring for one another.

Over the last few years, the circumstances of my life have dragged me into a deep exploration of what awake compassion actually is. I say ‘dragged’ because it has not been easy to pull up all of my precious ideas about love and compassion by the roots. These ideas were part of my identity, my belief that I was a kind and loving person. And that I should try to be even more so.

What I found was that my ideas of love and kindness were simply not sustainable. They were not sustainable because they were fixed, based on an idea or an image. So they were really not relevant to the moment to moment experiences of my most challenging relationships. They did not bring me and the people I loved to a place of freedom or ease or real intimacy. The redemption I was looking for came through inquiry, and through the spontaneous blessings of times like this one with Heather.

Life will always bring us to our knees. Sooner or later. There is nothing to be afraid of in this place. It’s often the only time we can really listen to something beyond what we already know.

There’s courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion? What’s the
use of old and frozen thought?

(Rumi)

with love
Shayla