Legacy

As the earth gives us food and air and all the things we need

May I give my heart to caring for all others until all attain awakening

For the good of all sentient beings

May loving kindness be born in me.

I am so grateful for these words, words that I say at the beginning of every day at the end of my morning meditation. They are kind of a wake-up call. A call of compassion. A call of compassion for every single being. A call of compassion for my daughter. My daughter who, more often than not, does not acknowledge me on this day that our society dedicates to mothers. And sometimes I really need that wake-up call. I certainly needed it this year.

Mothers Day. A day I dread. Every. Single. Year. Every single year I get caught. This year was no exception. It started the day before actually. As evening approached I recognized the closed feeling starting to take over my chest. Shutting down. The tightening of my abdomen. The slight nausea. Yup. Mothers Day warning signs. My body doesn’t lie. It’s funny you know, even as I write these words my body is doing its Mothers Day thing. No escaping it.

With the arrival of Mothers Day, before I even got out of bed, I felt my gut clench. Nausea. Fear. I thought: I hate Mothers Day; I hate that I have to go through this every year. I tried to shut off my thoughts. Didn’t work. I should know better. If there is anything that I have learned through my many years of meditating, it is that you can’t stop your thoughts. They just arise as they will and go as they will. I know they are not real. I mean: Where do they come from? Where do they go to? Yup. Definitely not real. Did that help? Not as I lay in bed, dreading my day. And so it began.

As per usual on this day, depression threatened to take over. I crawled out of bed, did my morning ablutions, and made my way to the kitchen. With coffee in hand I headed to the meditation cushion situated in front of the big picture window overlooking our backyard. One thing that I always do, no matter how I feel, is to get my butt onto the cushion.

Grant your blessings so that my mind may be one with Dharma

Grant your blessings so that Dharma may progress along the path

Grant your blessings so that the path may clarify confusion

Grant your blessings so that confusion may dawn as wisdom.

I quietly repeated these words of the Tibetan Buddhist lineage I follow, words that have been repeated over the centuries by countless others before me, all of us carrying forward a tradition of peace and compassion.

And so I sat. Eyes open. Doing a kind of meditation where I bring my full awareness to the sense doors: ears, eyes, touch, smell, taste, thinking… Feeling the rise and fall of my chest with every breath. My thoughts taking over. Noticing my mind doing this. My emotions reeking havoc. Kind of a loop really. One feeding the other. Still I sat. I kept coming back into the present moment. As I sat there I felt hurt. I felt angry. I was caught. Oh, was I caught. Still I sat. Bringing my awareness back into the present moment, again and again and again.

I noticed a puddle. Raindrops splashed in the puddle, disturbing its mirror-like surface. I heard the piercing call of a red bellied woodpecker. I felt the silkiness of my coffee as it washed over my tongue with every sip. I watched a squirrel munch on something white it had found. I wondered what it was. What a scrawny tail it had. Shifting my awareness from the yard to the window ledge directly in front of me, I noticed the leaves of the Christmas cactus, their spines a foil against the shadows cast from the light coming through the window. A pink flower barely hanging on to its stem on the fuzzy leafed hanging violet.  As I listened to the raindrops patter against the window and noticed the sky darkening in the distance, I realized an hour had passed. My meditation session was coming to a close. What did I feel now? What did I think? I felt sadness. I thought of how my daughter, like me, was a victim of abuse. At the hands of my ex-husband. At the hands of her father.

As the earth gives us food and air and all the things we need

May I give my heart to caring for all others until all attain awakening

For the good of all sentient beings

May loving kindness be born in me.