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What's included in today's Digestation:
An update on my process with digestations (now a year old!)
A digestation on awakening/insight/falling and pain/pleasure
Words Beyond Words - a digestation check in
I’ve been beyond words for digestations, which are now a year old. I’ve had plenty to say, frankly, that’s not the issue. I’ve even had plenty of writing I could have made into digests, but I’ve somehow felt too frozen to share it with you all. I think it’s a freeze from the hugeness of this moment on so many levels – a bit of “What can I possibly contribute to all this?” I am trying to thaw myself out of that, a training of my white womanhood.
Also, after this, I am committing to shorter, regular, less perfect, or fully crafted digestations.
I aim to share a digestation on kids’ books and other pleasures next week, not to bypass but to remind us that the whole human experience is rich, and there’s always this AND more than this.
(Image of broken glass with words "Pleasure and Pain in Awakening" and logo for Herspiral Contemplative Arts)
How Does Awakening Feel? Pleasurable and/or Painful?
I’ve had a bit of a mantra this autumn – a reminder to look for tiny peak moments, not huge peak experiences, or THE peak experience. In places with a lot of autumn color, we refer to “leaves being at their peak” - when all the leaves are changed, brightly colored, like some photo in a magazine of Vermont mid-October. The thing is, that rarely happens in southern Wisconsin (and from what I hear, it rarely happens in New England). So instead, I’ve been enjoying the one moment the sun pierces through a single fully golden maple or cresting a hill and seeing one red Oak popping out of surrounding green.
In North America, we tend to say fall more than autumn, but this autumn has been full of falls. Just yesterday I fell – tumbled on my front walk in excitement to receive some red monarda plants from a community member. Luckily, I walked away, only rattled and with scrapes and bruises, no breaks or twists. But there are other continuous falls in this time – genocide in Palestine, Tigray, Sudan, and more, the election discourse, and what to me are relatively meager options, none of which really lead to liberation, climate chaos palpable through North Carolina and Hurricane Helene, as well as the 80-degree late October weather in southern Wisconsin. It hasn’t been like this here since the 1930s, and I keep thinking of the Dust Bowl, which led to the most famous of US waves of climate refugees. How many more of those years do we have ahead?
Out of this I’ve needed some of the medicine of what I call “the good news of impermanence.”
Falling/flying can be liberating – no parachute, but no ground, to paraphrase Chogyam Trungpa – but it is also terrifying most of the time, and even injurious. This has brought me back to a digestation I drafted a few of months ago when I had my contemplative writing groups explore what insight/intuition/breakthroughs feel like in their bodies. Some insights from this writing were initially mentioned on IG in a May 5 post called “Realization and Trauma Often Co-Arise.”
We were using this quote from Pema Chodron*:
“…the Buddha…taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding that we all share, something that can be turned around, corrected, and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone showed us where the light switch was. It isn’t a sin that we are in a dark room. It’s just an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is.”
- From Pema Chodron, Awakening Loving-Kindness
I love this quote because it shows how simple it *can* be to understand the root causes of our suffering and find the right action to take in a complex situation. However, I also hate this quote because I find it is rarely this simple, or singular. We need beings – including non-animate beings – to show us where the light switch is again and again and again. We forget, deny, or don’t have access; so many reasons why this kind of moment needs to happen repeatedly.
The resulting sharing and conversation in one group really blew us away, and I wanted to share some of the collective anonymous wisdom and experiences folks shared.
We immediately all registered there are SO many ways this can happen, not just one.
Images for really big breakthroughs included quantum leaps with absolutely no going back; massive paradigm shifts that require viewing everything in a new way; the physical world – and mind - stopping or suddenly popping; refreshing like a freezing cold shower or utterly shocking like a car accident; a trauma or a treat; a physical feeling of falling and landing in a new dimension; a skull being forced open and understanding dropped in. Regardless, especially with these big moments, there was always the need to regroup.
What was most powerful however, were all the OTHER ways insight and intuition show up. That first set of descriptions is how media/culture often depicts enlightenment – a one-time, world-shaking event. From ages 28-68, though, this group, individually and collectively, moved quickly to how subtle, and even boring, ongoing insight and awakening can be. What’s key, and came up repeatedly, was to “not fight not knowing,” which is so much easier said than done!
Last spring and early summer, in Dylan’s and my decision to buy our next house, I went through a tortuous couple of weeks because I kept worrying that my intuition was telling me the house we were choosing was the wrong one. Finally, due to some inner child work I’ve been doing, I realized that “off” feeling I was having wasn’t about the house – it was that adult now me was abdicating such a vast and difficult decision, and by doing that, my inner younger child selves felt obliged to try and decide for me, and they were ill-equipped. Once I parented myself again and could see that the discomfort was coming from putting the weight not on my intuition but on my under-resourced inner children, I felt we were making *a* right choice. I never thought there was a “the one” house, or *the* right choice, but part of me still hoped I’d feel that way. I wasn’t excited, no bells went off, it didn’t feel like a dream come true. This time, insight felt like a relief, like our choice was good enough, a sound, adult human choice.
As people in this group wrote about more complex situations of “finding the light switch”, these are the kinds of images that came up: resting in a soft patch of light under an oak tree; crawling through tall grass, the grass slowly thinning on occasion; grinding and repetitious cognition peppered with occasional bursts of light; quiet, though huge, intermittent insights hidden in the middle of row after wrote of academic library shelves; cells shaken as reading and finding passages that express what someone didn’t even know they knew. These images of seeking, the desperation to see more clearly and understand without doubt, were familiar to many of us. A few of us said that the key is surrendering to wisdom when it arises in these cases, so mixed in with confusion it can be. It can be so hard to stop trying/searching and receive the answer(s) there for us at that moment.
Finally, some folks described not understanding that we’ve come to understanding until a while AFTER it happened. This is the subtlest, sneakiest form of insight – when weeks, months, or even years after our understanding has changed, we recognize our thinking or actions shifted a while back, and we didn’t even (consciously) notice.
I read a quote a few days later where Dzogchen Punlop Rinpoche says realization rarely happens without a crisis. I posted about this on Instagram and said that while I often find that true, the inverse is not a given – realization does not happen in all crises. In addition, sometimes trauma and realization co-arise, and it’s hard to tell one from the other. Most often, trauma seeds some key understanding for us when we are young, but it takes decades of active healing to begin to even slightly access the lessons. In my case, this looks like a lot of early death and loss trauma, which it has taken decades of many therapeutic modalities to turn into glimmers of comprehending the truth of impermanence.
I find that Buddhist-ish language can talk about “enlightenment” as a one-stop, total deal. In her amazing book Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, Mariana Caplan reminds us that most beings we consider “fully enlightened” are very awake in some ways and NOT AT ALL in others. For instance, just because a guru understands interdependence doesn’t mean they can have healthy personal relationships. In addition, in my experience of and being around others who have had what Stan Groff called “spiritual emergencies,” glimpses of complete awakenment can come simultaneous with – and sometimes indiscernible from – massive confusion, suffering, and other overloads to the system that are the literal definition of trauma: too much, too soon.
We cannot force any insight – from understanding how to have a hard conversation to complete enlightenment. Putting pressure on ourselves to somehow be more “awake” than we are usually backfires. If you can have realization amid a deep crisis, that’s a miracle. And conversely, if you experience deep realization without any complications – from confusion to flat-out trauma – you might need to check that you aren’t “spiritually bypassing” the pain.
We often think trauma will feel terrible, and realization will feel great, but like most binaries, that’s false. It’s important to de-romanticize both healing and enlightenment—both are often tricky and dense and take time and support. I am suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. Yes, there are moments of grace, quantum leaps, or a light suddenly going on in a dark room. And they are often preceded and followed by hard work, lots of rest, and collective support.
I believe that anyone can wake up and that anyone can heal. However, I’ve also seen that not everyone has the capacity for either or both at any time. Please be gentle with yourself and all the other suffering beings as best you can. And do yourself a tremendous favor – become familiar with the flavors of waking up in your experience – especially the fleeting ones. In the five paths of awakenment of the Yogacara teachings, the middle one (path of seeing) consists mainly of stabilizing glimpses of the true nature of being so we can understand they are showing us the whole backdrop of reality.
*Speaking of complexity and insight – there have recently been some intense articles out there about Shambhala/Pema Chodron/Chogyam Trungpa. I am not going to link them here – you can google “cult and Pema Chodron” or “Shambhala and cult” – just that suggestion gives you a sense of the content. I have read them and am still integrating them. However, at this moment, my heart and mind still find great wisdom in these two teachers despite their cruelty (in the case of Trungpa) and complicity (in the case of Pema Chodron).
Closing
There are no simple answers here, which I know can be frustrating less than a week from a major US election. I share these thoughts not to bypass the terror and rage many of us feel, but to give space to open to the complexity. I could tell you who I voted for, I could try and talk you into voting for the same people. I could shame you for voting for anyone else. I could argue the virtues of the options for hours. But for me, there are plenty of people doing that, and that’s not my style. Also, the medicine I need now, and I think a lot of others need, is complex space. Room for both/and, and even more than that. Holding contradictions. Playing with paradox. Remembering that this single moment is both terribly crucial and also just a single moment.
As always, I send you love and a deep wish for the liberation of all beings.
Love,
Miriam
Where else to find me online?
My Mighty Network, the best spot to follow me, interact with my community and me (including a spot to discuss these digests!)
Goodreads – I post about every book I read (more than I mention here) with reviews and ratings
Instagram – Mostly politics in the stories and Miksang Photography in the posts
Facebook – Political and personal posts and images
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