Windows

 

This is the time of year I start to close and open windows.  After leaving them open all summer, I now close them in the evenings, so it won’t be too chilly in the morning.  By late morning, after the sun starts to warm the day, I open them again for the fresh warm air. The temperature never feels just right but always in flux. This is what my heart is like, opening and closing throughout the day.  I might start to feel anxious and overwhelmed at how much needs to get done at work (closed) and then later during a walk I am delighted by the musty fall fragrance of wet leaves and earth, the exploding purple flowers on the long green stems, the slash of starlings across the sky (open).  I open to what warms me and close to what makes me cold.  I wish the outer situation would keep me warm so I might stay open all the time. A permanent vacation, for example, from overwork, unaccommodating funders, one more revision of a paper long overdue.  I could be open all the time, I imagine,  if I lived in a little cottage in the alps where I might hike all day, swim in the lake, lie in the sun, and read by the fire at night.  A life of ease.

 

But it is not only work that makes me closed.  There is the care of my aging mother whose memory and understanding of everyday things is deteriorating, fear of aging, the poor.  Jesus said the poor will always be with us.  What I imagine he meant by this was that there will always be people in our families, neighborhoods, countries, the world suffering from hunger, illness, hurricanes, despots.  Even when you are on the most perfect vacation, you cannot get away from this suffering without closing big parts of your own heart down.  And when that happens joy is also squeezed out. There really is no where we can go, nothing we can do that will stop the opening and the closing.  This rhythm of opening and closing is as natural and life giving as our beating hearts.  To try to create the outer conditions of open, our lives would become smaller and smaller, self-made prisons, because more and more experiences and people would be irritating.  We would lose our capacity to do anything that wasn’t completely predictable and controlled.  Where is the life in that?  Instead, the yogic path from dharana, dhyana, to samadhi is to open up little by little to what makes us close down. 

 

In yogic terms dharana is the seeing state where we step behind the opening and closing, just an inch.  We stop trying to control it and begin instead to notice how and when we move from open to closed. Rather than being tossed-up by it or numb to it, we watch and allow the opening and closing, how it is different in the morning than in the afternoon, how sometimes we are overcome by it and other times passified.  Experiencing this rhythm, we learn how being closed helps us to learn how to open wider and how opening wider will teach us where we are still closed.

 

Beyond the observation of the sway, is dhyana which is when we begin to notice the pause between the grasping and repelling.  We find ourselves in a moment of stillness that is neither pleasant nor painful but tender.  It is both open and closed which is what makes it groundless and tender.

 

Beyond dhyana is samadhi where both what is seeing and what is seen dissolves into pure sensation.  This is something rare.  It would hardly be possible to live like this even if you were a saint.  Still, to touch samadhi, even momentarily, offers a taste of what it is like to be awake in the moment without judgement, psychological projection, woundedness.

 

An experience of Samadhi is how I felt like when I held my daughter for the first time.  She was outside of me, in my arms, but we were still not separated.  Life flowed through us as if we were skinless, a communion so sweet and tender and magnificent.  It was open and closed at the same time because she would soon be in her own skin and separate from me. 

 

We can have this experience of communion with everything in life.  That is the spiritual path of yoga and all the wisdom traditions.  That is how much love we are capable of, no skin between ourselves and others and our world.  We can become so soft and tender that love flows through us to everything else and then back in.  It is the source of great healing even if touched only briefly and rarely.