Kriya (Cleanse)

 

We all experience times of darkness when nothing seems to sooth the emptiness and longing inside. St. John of the Cross the 16^th century Spanish mystic named these times when we are inconsolable as the Dark Night of the Soul.  While the Dark Night is a painful and dark passage, it is different than depression.  While in depression there is an inability to feel, in the Dark Night there is an overabundance of feeling.  We become exquisitely tender and open to feeling without resistance or veils.  Unarmored, we experience the preciousness and fragility of life but also stand in awe of existence itself in all its complexity and mystery.  While the tenderness can feel painful like bruise and we may feel very alone and vulnerable, there is a strong urge to go deeper into the woundedness and darkness rather than clinging to something that might at least superficially pacify the hurt. “Touching the hurting place with love,” James Finley write, “Brings us into wholeness.”

 

I experienced the Dark Night for a few days recently after visiting my mother for Mother’s Day.  My mother who lives on her own and can function in the day-to-day activities has less and less mental capacity to make new memories, to connect emotionally, to engage in meaningful conversation.  She is no longer able to mother me in ways I long for.  She cannot take in what I tell her about my life and my daughter’s life.  She is unable to express care or concern. She cannot remember when we last saw or talked to each other.  I left feeling so sad and empty at all that I miss from and about her, at her growing frailty and confusion, and in anticipation of the time in the not too distant future when we will speak our last words to each other. 

 

It was an unusually cold day for spring and very windy.  A great loneliness opened inside of me, with the raw grey landscape of grief that mirrored the outer cold. Nothing could ease this tender loneliness and grief and I did not seek to try.  Loving my mother now requires me to carry this burden of losing her. 

 

I didn’t want to go right home and it came to me to visit the grounds of St. Joseph’s Abby near where I had met my mother for lunch.  St. Joseph’s is a Trappist monastery where monks cloister themselves for work, prayer, and silence.  I parked in bottom lot and made my way up the long hill to the abbey.  Green pastures rose on one side of the hill and fell away on the other giving me a feeling like I was in rural England or Ireland walking along the ancient pastures.  I didn’t see any monks but it was comforting to know that they were there behind the stone walls chanting the psalms, praying, working in silence, living days and days and years of their lives in silent prayer. I too opened my heart up to God which to me is the presence I feel inside the deep loneliness, a presencing forth of that which has given me life and which helps to bear some of the burden of my despair. This presence does not take away the pain of losing my mother but it makes the pull into darkness worthy, holy, healing. 

 

In yoga, the Dark Night might be called a kriya or a cleansing.  The darkness seems to purify my grasping for things in the outer world to console leaving me suspended in longing itself rather than trying to resolve it.  The darkness restores me to gratitude, deep inner connection, awe, an attunement to the light.