Ayaka came from Japan to our most-recent retreat outside of Milan, and she asked a question that touched everyone in the room. How can you stay with a person who is suffering? Her mother, she told us, is not a happy person and lives amidst many complaints and much sadness, and even in passing encounters, in a cafe or at a station, she feels the sadness of strangers as her own. Beneath these examples lay her real question: how can she take care of her own heart without closing it?
I suggested to Ayaka that she feels her mother’s unhappiness as her own because she shares her being with her mother. Her mother does not yet know that behind her suffering lies her being, completely free of sorrow, and so she complains about her experience, believing that if only it changed she would be happy. Ayaka knows better: if her mother wants to be happy, she has to go back to her being. But with someone who does not share this interest, one cannot be direct. Ayaka must accommodate her mother’s complaints as far as is necessary to keep the loving relationship, neither indulging her nor being so strict that she feels unloved, remembering that the real purpose of their time together is not to sort out the issues but to take her mother back to her being. And she knows her mother as I cannot: she will find the crack in her defences, and in a quiet moment say something small and see if it lands.
As for her own heart, the way to take care of it is to realise that it does not need taking care of. If you believe your heart is vulnerable, you must defend it. But if you know that your true heart cannot be hurt, that recognition is its care, and you can be completely open, undefended and available. Without a word being spoken, her mother will feel her peace, will love being near her, and will be given a taste of her own innate peace.
With a stranger at the station, everything is the same, only the means are smaller. A few dollars, a cup of tea, a word of encouragement: what you really give is the smile with which you give it. The money goes into their pocket; the smile goes into their heart, and it stays there, and it does its work in them. As W. B. Yeats wrote of a quiet moment in a crowded London shop, ‘I felt that I was blessed and could bless’. To be blessed is to be in touch with being, and to bless is to shine that being on someone, with a look, a word or a gesture.
We cannot always speak of this understanding to those we love, but we can always live it in their presence. A heart that knows it cannot be hurt is free to remain open, and that openness is itself the deepest communication.
This is what I explore in ** Living in Peace, Living as Peace**. It is an invitation to become intimate with the presence that lies beneath the changing circumstances of our lives, a presence that is already whole, already at peace, and that no sorrow, our own or another’s, has ever truly disturbed.
You’ll find the meditation here.
