Annie Mahon | Author, Health Coach, Mindfulness Teacher

Guest Blog by Alison Gray: Saying Good-bye and Saying Hello

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After my friend Leigh lost her mother, she said that sorrow hit her at strange moments. My own Mom died this year on the Sunday before Mother’s Day. I drove down to N.C. to see her on the preceding Thursday. I entered the medical unit of her retirement home and saw a nurse standing at her station with a very small, gaunt, gray-haired woman lying on a rolling bed next to her in the hallway. I was still several doorways from my Mom’s room but stopped because something about the woman was familiar despite her overall unfamiliarity. I looked at the woman and then back at the nurse, and asked, “Is that Mrs. Gray? B.J. Gray?” My Mom was much changed from the last time I had seen her only two months earlier. After the nurse said, “Yes,” I immediately bent down as if I were kneeling at the bedside of a small child. “Hi Mom,” I said. “It’s Alison, your daughter.” I smoothed back her soft, unruly hair and held her hand. I was trying to provide comfort to a mother who had never asked for any. It was purely instinctual to give solace and love to someone who for the first time in her life seemed defenseless.

She was out in the hallway because the nurse said she had tried to get up and had fallen earlier. She was keeping an eye on her. We wheeled the bed back to her room so that I could spend some private time with her. I held her hand and smoothed her hair again and thanked her for taking good care of her four children, and said that we all loved her. In sangha, we learn to speak from our heart and on that day and at that time, that’s what I could say to my Mom, who I was not sure knew who I was due to the progressive dementia she first began exhibiting a year earlier.
Meditation has taught me how to find calmness in the midst of emotional storms simply by being present. I was bringing all of that meditative muscle memory to bear in being with my Mom and saying goodbye. Sometimes being present means just being silent. It also can mean close listening. That’s tricky, however, with someone who has lost her words.

My Mom did not seem to want my caresses or expressions of thanks. Her overriding emotion was agitation and her desire was to get out of bed. Each time I went to hold her hand, she grasped it not in a desire for warmth or tenderness but as leverage for pulling herself up! Her strength given her diminished condition was remarkable. I did not understand, however, why she wanted to rise since the only understandable words she said during the hours I spent with her were “church” and “I want to get up.” My mother has always been fiercely independent so I misperceived it as a desire simply to get out of bed to prove that she could. Lolling around in bed all day was definitely not her style. Her agitation continued and, after a while, she gave me one of those looks that I knew meant she was frustrated with me. The look actually made me smile since it was some recognition that she did know me!

Only later, when an aide let slip that my Mom had not been changed that morning due to a misunderstanding with the hospice staff did it dawn on me that my Mom wanted to get up for a very practical reason. Finally, an aide arrived and I helped her sponge bathe my Mom and change her diaper which was soiled and had wet through her gown. Despite the circumstances of seeing my Mom so incapacitated, weak and terribly thin, it felt good to be of use to her and the aide, and to let her lean her weary head against my chest. Once changed and back in bed, she settled and fell asleep from the exertion. I stayed a bit longer before saying my final goodbye.

I teared up as I walked back to my car and cried three days later when my sister, Robin, called to say she had passed away. But, my truest sense of sorrow hit me about a week later as I was walking down an aisle of the Whole Foods in Friendship Heights! The prior week had been spent learning about a different side to my Mom from previously unseen love letters between her and my Dad and scrapbook pictures of her in her teens, and 20s in which she walked hand-in-hand with high school friends, laughed in the snow, and showed off her five foot two inches and 90-pound frame under a wide brim hat at Myrtle beach – all of which helped in the writing of an obituary designed to honor her and capture her full 91 years on Earth. All of that, however, was just busyness, a distraction from my sorrow.

Not until the frozen food aisle did I come face-to-face with the essence of my Mom’s love for her children – which was expressed daily, year in and year out, and during holidays in the preparation of meals for my Dad and us as we grew up and eventually away from her. I was in the midst of reflecting on what food I wanted to prepare for an upcoming celebration of my Mom’s life for a small gathering of family planned for June, when tears began rolling down my face as I thought how often that was my Mom’s role and how that was one abiding way she would live on in me. Her presence with me at that moment was tangible and comforting.

According to Buddhist wisdom, the view of immortality, or permanence, is a wrong view. Everything is impermanent; everything is changing. Nothing can be the same forever. So permanence is not the true nature of anything. But to say that when we die there is nothing left is a wrong view too. Immortality and annihilation are also paired opposites. Immortality is a wrong view, because we have not seen anything like that. Everything we observe is impermanent, always changing. But annihilation is also a wrong view. . . .If we have lost someone who is very close to us and we are grieving her death, we have to look again. That person still continues somehow. And we can do something to help her to continue more beautifully. She is still alive, inside us and around us. . . . That is the kind of vision, the kind of insight that is needed to overcome grief. We think that we have lost [her] forever, but that person had not died, has not disappeared. [She] continues in new forms. We have to look deeply to recognize [her] continuation and to support it. “Darling, I know you are there somehow, very real to me. I am breathing for you. I am looking around for you. I enjoy life for you. And I know that you are still there very close to me and you are in me.” We transform our suffering and our fear into awakened insight, and we feel much better. — Thich Nhat Hnah, Fear, Essential Wisdom for Getting through the Storm

Despite the tears, my epiphany in the ice cream section (which is sweet since my Mom loved a small dish of ice cream most nights after dinner) did make me feel better because I recognized her clear love, in a relationship that sometimes seemed devoid of it, and knew that, just as her mother had passed on an expression of love through the sharing of food with her, my Mom had passed along that same gift to her own family. Impermanence truly does simultaneously embrace sorrow and joy. We say goodbye but we also say hello to new forms and understanding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty Jean (“B.J.”) Gray
October 24, 1926 – May 6, 2018

by Alison Gray.

Another Dog’s Poop

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Dear Friends,

Last week, while scooping my terrier’s poop in the park, I saw another pile of poo, just next to his, and I thought, “Might as well grab this, too.”  I added the unknown dog’s poop to our little green baggie, but I noticed I felt a little squeamish.  As the mother of four, and the human friend to countless dogs and cats, I don’t normally feel uneasy about cleaning up waste. But as I carried the bag, now filled with co-mingled doggie doo, I was grossed out.

I began to wonder what it was about the contents of that bag that made me feel so icky. It had something to do with the fact that the dog who produced it wasn’t “my” dog. But unlike my children, Roger isn’t biologically related to me, and so my comfort with his waste couldn’t be attributed to a parenting gene. Over the four years since we rescued Roger and his brother, Woody, we have grown very attached to them. So much so that I am completely unfazed by scooping for them, but am made viscerally uneasy when I do the same for another dog. I’m sure this non-biological attachment comes as no surprise to any of the adoptive parents reading this, but the degree of my attachment made me pause.

Interbeing

Some years ago, I was at a retreat with the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, where he answered questions from the audience. One question in particular was very touching. It was from a woman whose young adult daughter had recently died of leukemia and she was trying to understand how she could live while never being able to be with her again. Thich Nhat Hanh’s response surprised me.  He said that if the mother was mindful and concentrated, she could find her daughter right here and now in a new form.

Just as the cloud can later be found in the rain, he said, her daughter can now be found in other people. In our universe, “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything transforms” (Antoine Lavoisier.) Knowing this, we see there is nowhere for us to go, our energy and our matter must continue on in new forms.  This is what the Buddha called interdependence, and Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing — the insight that we are always in process and sharing the same matter and energy back and forth between each other, like a cold virus in preschool.  In the light of this insight, discrimination between people, or dogs, seems silly. And yet we do it.  If my neighbor has a raucous party that lasts into the wee hours, I would be more annoyed at her than I would be at my son having the same party in my house.

Non-discrimination

Many spiritual and mystical teachers have suggested that we are capable of non-discrimination (though I’ve not yet seen a spiritual text referring to dog waste discrimination.) The Bible suggests we “Love thy neighbor as thyself” which would require a serious feat of non-discrimination, and the Buddha similarly suggested that, “Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, even so let one cultivate a boundless love toward all beings.” Impossible? Definitely. Worth practicing? I think so.

“To enter the Buddha Way is to stop discriminating between good and evil and to cast aside the mind that says this is good and that is bad.” — Dogen Zenji

Even the smallest bit of non-discrimination could quite possibly lower the levels of violence and suffering in our world. Mindfulness practices, like this one, are impossible to put into practice 100% of the time — at least for we non-monastic practitioners. It’s hard to be attentive to every breath in every moment. But that’s ok, because if it were possible, it would simply become one more thing on our bucket list. Enlightenment? Check. Non-discrimination? Check. Because non-discrimination is impossible, we can continue to learn and transform by practicing it from now until the day we die.

Maybe picking up another dog’s poop is one way to begin to practice. Or treating a stranger on the bus the way you would treat your own mother. When someone annoys you, you might give him more leeway if you imagine him as your best friend. If the man on the street wearing a shabby winter coat and asking for change were your own son, would you give him something?

To practice non-discrimination, we can notice and investigate habit energies that naturally create attachment to those we spend the most time with, especially those we consider to be in our “tribe” (whether human or otherwise.) Instead of diminishing the relationships we have with our special people, non-discrimination extends the love and nurturing we have to include those outside of our immediate circle.

Love

Since that day in the park, I’ve been practicing paying attention when I feel aversion to someone or something, like to a stranger or her dog’s poop. I see my mind creating discrimination and distance by telling me that my dog — or my family — is in some way better than, safer than, less smelly then this stranger. This story may serve me in certain circumstances, like when I need protect myself or someone else. So, I’m not rejecting the mind’s discrimination suggestions without considering whether they are true. However, most of the time discrimination is just a habitual way of thinking that I can notice it, check out, and usually abandon.

“You climb the mountain to be able to look over the whole situation, not bound by one side or the other. If your love has attachment, discrimination, prejudice, or clinging in it, it is not true love.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love

My brain has been training itself for four years to think that Roger and Woody’s poops are better than all others. There’s nothing innately wrong with my mind for discriminating this way — it’s an effective tool for making sure I take good care of my loved ones. Once we see that discrimination is a story that may or may not be true and may or may not serve our deepest intentions, we have the freedom to choose how we respond to our thoughts. We all benefit when we expand our circle of love. So next time I notice discrimination arising, whether it’s aversion to dog poop or another human being, I hope to have the freedom to set my discrimination aside and invite other dogs, and people, into my heart.

What Side Are You Not On?

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Dear Friends,

I remember one of the first times I heard Thich Nhat Hanh speak. He shared thoughts about his work and life during the Vietnam War. Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay (a title of respect, which means teacher,) often spoke about how difficult that time was for him, particularly because he refused to line up with one side or the other. Although he was against the horrors caused by the war, he didn’t side with either the communists or the anti-communists or make one side a friend and the other an enemy. He was eventually expelled from Vietnam because each side assumed he must be supporting the other side.

When I first heard about his experiences during the war, I thought it was nothing more than an interesting history lesson. I was a young child during the time of the Vietnam War, and while I remember the anti-war movement here, of which my family was a part — we had the yellow “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” poster on the wall directly across from our front door — but I was too young to know that there were other people out there who supported the war. Hearing Thay’s words, I thought, “Yeah, that makes sense not to take sides.” I didn’t consider this to be a mindfulness teaching because I didn’t think about why one might not take sides, though I generally supported not taking sides by preventing politics from creeping into our yoga and mindfulness community as much as possible.

November 2016

Fast forward to November 2016, when we experienced the most polarizing election in my lifetime. The day after the election, I received several texts from family and friends in various states of panic, asking me what I thought was going to happen to us. Conversations were filled with judgments about the “others” and fear about what the perceived enemy might do to “us.”

In addition to feeling righteous, I was suffering.  And when I suffer, I look to mindfulness practice to help me transform my suffering. As I searched my mental files for a relevant teaching, I remembered Thay’s suggestion about not taking sides. I began reading more about how he stayed neutral during the Vietnam War, even as bombs were killing his loved ones, and more than one of his students immolated themselves. But I also worried whether not taking sides was just an easy excuse for non-action.

As I dug deeper into this practice, I discovered the many ways in which Thay and his students worked for peace and justice, rebuilding cities after bombs destroyed them and speaking out, both in Vietnam and in the West, against the pain the war was causing civilians. It became clear that the practice of not taking sides doesn’t prevent anyone from voting, speaking and acting out, or working for justice. What it means is that I choose not to personally condemn anyone I disagree with or tell myself that one side is all good and the other all bad. As the Dalai Lama likes to remind us, “From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering.” We all want the same things in life — things like food, shelter, love, connection, freedom from fear, and safety for our loved ones —  but we don’t always agree on the strategies to get them.

Thich Nhat Hanh worked for peace, without making either side into an enemy. And his practice has been my inspiration, my North Star, since November 9. I know it is not possible to be completely free from judgment or enemy-making, but it’s an important practice for me right now because it supports my deepest intention of generating understanding and love in order to transform suffering. It’s not easy, though. Taking sides in a conflict gives us a team, and without a team it can be lonely. And there are many benefits to being on a team, including the feeling of belonging and strength in numbers. The more we create an enemy “out there”, the more our team solidifies “in here.” We all need a team, but the team I am looking to join now is the one on the side of understanding and compassion.

So what’s wrong with taking sides against an enemy?

There are three main difficulties that arise for me when I take sides against an enemy. First, I am limited in what I can do. For example, if I judge everyone who voted for the other candidate as bad or all wrong, I can’t contribute to our government working together or help people who voted for one candidate understand why some of us voted for the other. As Marshall Rosenburg, creator of Nonviolent Communication, has said, “It’s through connection that solutions materialize – empathy before education.”

Second, taking sides and creating enemies often leads to conflict and eventually to war. The more one side digs in, the more the other side digs in. We are more likely to continue seeing someone’s faults after we have judged them an enemy. We can look at the history of every conflict from the death of Jesus to the civil war in Syria, to see how division and side-taking leads to more division and side-taking. I believe that none of us really wants this outcome, but once we have created an “us” and a “them” it’s difficult to undo. Every adult I know still aligns strongly with their hometown sports teams, and it’s the same way with our political teams.

And thirdly, although we feel safer when we are part of a crew, having a common enemy increases our overall suffering. Once we have created enemies, we live in fear about when and where our enemies will strike us. There’s no rest for us when we are a divided people.

“This does not mean that we must be silent about injustice. It just means we should do it with awareness and not take sides. We should speak the truth and not just weigh the political consequences. If we take sides, we will lose our power to help mediate the conflict.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace.

Like Thich Nhat Hanh, not taking sides doesn’t mean we can’t say or do things to help change a difficult situation. We can still speak out against injustice, oppression, and hate. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his sermon at the Dexter Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957:

“Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. … And that [way] is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love…We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way. Jesus discovered that…So this morning, as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ And I’m foolish enough to believe that through the power of this love somewhere, men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed.”

Practicing Side-less-ness

This practice is not easy. Taking the side of understanding and compassion without explicitly taking a side as for- or against- Hillary Clinton or for- or against-Donald Trump doesn’t make us very popular. Like Thay, we may be exiled from our own communities.  But perhaps our overall impact on the situation is more important than our popularity. Now that I understand a little better what it means to practice not taking sides, I have so much respect for those, like Thay, who choose not to take sides during war and other violent conflicts. When we choose to take only the side of understanding and compassion, we have the chance to really transform divisive situations through wise action which no longer needs to make our side look good and their side look bad.

Give it a try, or let me know why you don’t think it will work. I’m want to learn how others are using yoga and/or mindfulness to help inspire and heal our country and the world these days. Please consider sharing something here or in another forum so we can create a community firmly rooted on one side — the side of understanding, compassion and love.

To Eat or Not To Eat, or Blacking Out and Waking Up

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food photoDear Friends,

Since my book about mindful cooking and eating came out in September, I have been speaking and teaching more about the practice of mindful eating, and how to work with habits that cause us to suffer. Especially at this holiday time of the year, it can be difficult to “manage” our eating when there are so many sweets, drinks, and relatives around.

One of the things I find trickiest about teaching people how to be mindful in challenging situations is that there is no recipe to follow. There is no recipe because when we are mindful we respond to situations directly from our inner wisdom. If we could always make choices from that immediate wisdom, we probably wouldn’t so often regret our actions.

Well, you are saying, that sounds so easy. If it’s that easy, why do I, and so many others, eat and drink to excess and then feel guilty? And what can we do about it? Here’s the hard part: that wisdom isn’t always available. A lot of the time it’s gets knocked unconscious by our anxiety, avoidance, and craving. All three of which are fueled by conditioned fears. And here’s the good part: it is possible to spend more time in our inner wisdom.

Though I hate to admit it, when I was in college, there were times when I drank so much that I didn’t remember much of what happened. Being overtaken by our anxiety, avoidance, or craving is a lot like being blackout drunk. Only it doesn’t require any alcohol, just our naturally fearful mind. In an instant that fear can put our cool, calm, Buddha-nature out cold, and before we know it we are eating our third piece of pie in bed with a pint of coconut ice cream.

Our first reaction is to condemn ourselves and those parts of us that ate too much. But that would be like blaming the alcohol for our black out. The nature of alcohol (when taken in large quantities) is to inebriate us. The nature of the mind is to make sure we are “safe” by worrying and craving. Getting angry at ourselves for our mind’s anxiety habit is about as effective as screaming at the vodka bottle, “Damn it, you got me drunk again!”

The only way I found to keep from getting blackout drunk was to recognize that if I kept drinking I was going to do things I would seriously regret in the morning. In the same way, remembering that our awareness and concentration will keep us clearheaded and practicing staying present in each moment, we know we will have less to regret later. Being present we are more likely to act from our deepest intentions for well-being. Though I can’t tell you what those actions are or should be, I have faith that when we aren’t blacked out on fear, our actions will tend to reduce suffering– our own and others’.

“What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.” –David Whyte

Those times when we do lose track of our wisdom and eat a pile of Christmas cookies, we can either stay lost by blaming ourselves, the cookies, or our families or we can return to our Buddha nature by simply accepting that this is how the human mind is designed to operate. Anxiety and acting out of anxiety is gonna happen. And the more we blame and judge ourselves and others, the more lost we will become.

When we simply return our mind to our body — by becoming aware of our feet on the floor, our breath coming in and going out, or the sounds of the world around us — we easily wake up. Unlike a real alcohol blackout, we have the power to wake up from our anxiety, fear and craving anytime we want. It only takes one breath. Whether we were blacked out for a minute, a month, or a lifetime doesn’t matter. Obsessing about the seemingly “bad” things we did while we were out only serves to keep us unconscious. Returning to our Buddha nature again and again is the best we can do.

“And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

This is why there is no recipe for mindfulness. Each moment is unique and full of opportunity, and we know exactly what to do or not do when we are fully present. To eat or not to eat, is not the question. When we arrive in the present moment and recognize our deep connection to the world, we will know just what a next right step will be.

with love,
annie.