join our e-mail list
DEALING WITH GRIEF
|
Life [has] made it easy for me to confront death and impermanence because several of my family and close friends died quite close together. Writing about this in my column [in The Age newspaper] led to my being invited to join the Committee of Management of what is now the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, the largest provider of bereavement services in the country (www.grief.org.au).
Coincidentally, I was asked to work on Melbourne's Makor Jewish Community Library's "Write Your Story" project, which has published over sixty memoirs, around seventy percent of which relate to the Holocaust (www.makorlibrary.com). So here I am, up to my neck in death, much of it violent. Which is why I hardly ever watch television or go to the movies and do not read detective stories. If I could initiate a social campaign, it would be against violence as entertainment. Whenever I am with a group of people who have experienced extraordinary suffering, the first thing I notice is a lightness in the air. They are very easy to be amongst, because they are not competitive; they do not flirt or fidget for attention. They are kind, generous, and very loving. People tell me that Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings have the same feel - of great kindness and trust. The shellac gloss of cleverness has been stripped away and they are more open to each other - happier. I had never been kissed so much in my life until I began spending time with Holocaust survivors, nor have I ever eaten as much cake! If material things made us happy, all the rich and physically beautiful people in the world would be happy. But they too collapse in grief. They too commit suicide. And often a jealous public responds without too much sympathy for them. As Buddhists, we are taught that the persona we so cherish and protect does not actually exist. What lies at our core is 'emptiness,' and while it is easy to intellectualize about that, the experience itself, so I have read, is non-conceptual and words do not apply. I have not realized emptiness. One approaches such a realization through study and meditation, in particular, through learning to actually look at our thoughts, and by developing single-pointed concentration. As Lama Yeshe said, "The results of successful contemplation are incredible, almost unimaginable. You experience much bliss - not only mental bliss but physical bliss as well. You will feel liberated instead of uncertain and full of doubts and conflicts. You'll always have a happy, joyful vibration." Two years ago I attended a month long course by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Lama Yeshe's principal student [and FPMT's spiritual director], on how to see 'emptiness.' The course did not consist of long sitting meditations, but of long prayers, thousands of prostrations, and endless discourses on kindness - delivered late at night in freezing cold, and followed by more long prayers and prostrations. Someone asked when we were going to get taught about this 'emptiness.' Rinpoche told us that in order to create the kind of mind that could realize emptiness, we needed to purify our present self-seeking and helplessly distracted nature. Somehow, it seems that experiencing great loss sometimes does that. I am not a clinician, but our counselors always tell me how impressed they are with the courage of the clients they see, many of whom suffer incredibly complex and traumatic bereavements. Some of these people go on to help others, while some are truly overwhelmed, and remain so for the rest of their lives. So if you spend your time with the suffering, you can't really lose. Either they will lift you up, or you will develop compassion for them. But if you preach to them words from textbooks, or fine ideas you have not actualized, they will call you out as a fraud very quickly - and then be concerned as to why you have to be like that. What fears are you hiding? People who really know themselves are very, very kind. Adele Hulse, whose column has appeared in The Age in Melbourne, Australia, since 1984, uses a pseudonym because "Lama Yeshe did not want me to become conceited or competitive, the twin hells that lie in wait for those in the public eye. Success is not happiness. Fame is not happiness." This is an excerpt from a paper she presented in April 2006 at the 1st International Conference on Happiness & Its Causes, an initiative of Vajrayana Institute, in Sydney, Australia.
|
