FIRE GATE OF HEALING

Part One, the “Narrative,” begins with two very short items, one a Prologue, the other a poem that I wrote during the healing process (and which has since been published in the 2009 issue of the Santa Fe Literary Review). The Prologue provides a glimpse of happier family times; the poem, entitled “Moon Buddha: A Requiem,” combines narrative, memories and nursery rhymes as a way of expressing my initial grief.

Chapter One, “Impact,” describes the onslaught of grief – first the news, then the arrangements we had to make, then the emotional impact and numbness, and then the crisis-flood of uncontrollable grief. It summarizes events and emotions up through the departure of house guests after the formal memorial service.

Chapter Two, “Abyss,” begins with an overview of prior signs of trouble, of family events leading up to the suicide. It reveals that Chris’ fateful action didn’t just appear out of the blue, but was a result of preceding events, that in retrospect, at least, seem to provide a context for understanding what happened. The second section of the same chapter picks up the narrative where Chapter One leaves off and describes my subsequent, dangerous descent into grief. It documents the destructive effects that followed the initial blast of impact – the heat and radiation effects, as it were, that followed detonation. It was a disintegration that has been called the “second crisis” in grief’s unfolding after the initial busy-ness and numbness pass. Our friends and family had returned to their homes. With nothing to shield us anymore, the horror of Christopher’s death overwhelmed us. All I could do was observe the grief unfold, and be aware of how, as it did, it became ever more crippling and dangerous. I was swept into the tempest. It was both a hellish and dangerous time for me, requiring, eventually, a short clinic stay to ensure my safety.

Chapter Three, called “Roots of Sorrow,” interrupts the narrative to trace relevant generational and family history and events leading up to the tragedy. It makes clear how my background, history and conditioning – and therefore Christopher’s too -- powerfully shaped and magnified his suffering and my subsequent grief. The chapter also provides an opportunity to assess my own role in the tragedy, and illustrates how tragic acts like suicide emerge from a complex context of earlier events. Perhaps if that is better understood, future tragedies can be warded off.

The narrative in Chapter Four, entitled “Back From the Edge,” focuses on the grief work I did to face and eventually heal from the assault. The story picks up again at the clinic, which was a turning point marking a subtle shift from hopelessness to a desire to heal. After returning home, a maritime vacation then provided a brief respite. Immediately after returning, however, I slipped back into a deepening sadness that involved, over many months, my longest period of difficult grief work. Here I describe the retreats, guided meditations, readings, counseling and other therapeutic efforts that led very gradually to increasing signs of healing, and from there, later on, to recovery. In the process, I learned that my grief over Christopher’s death was being greatly amplified by unresolved sadness from childhood.

Having faced my grief, it was necessary now to deal with whatever barriers stood in the way of its resolution. In Chapter Five, “Overcoming Barriers to Healing,” the narrative explores two major obstacles – my declining health and collapse of the Zen Center where I was practicing. The health problems included complications from earlier surgery, compromised immune function, emotional exhaustion, and a misconception on my part of the nature of healing from a Buddhist perspective. The demise of my Zen center was the result of my teacher’s moral turpitude. There follows a brief discussion of the occasional problem of teacher misbehavior with students. The chapter then turns to the process of intense practice and growing independence that led to the most important breakthrough of my spiritual career –the discovery during several retreats of my “yearning creature,” and the enormous relief and freedom that discovery allowed.

The narrative in Chapter Six, “Letting Go and Seeing the Structure of Delusion,” describes the various techniques I employed to penetrate and let go of my grief. These included keeping a grief journal, writing various letters and poems, and engaging a series of powerful grief meditations from such teachers as Stephen Levine and Jack Kornfield. Also reviewed are the necessity of accessing unconscious aspects of one’s grief and the means I used to do so, including insight meditation, techniques of “noting” during meditation, Big Mind workshops and dream analysis. By such means did I learn to see the repetitive, tape-loop nature of my suffering, along with the very bad deal I had made with Mara (sanskrit for “murder,” or “destruction”) – the closest thing in Buddhism to the devil – during my earlier years. Finally, the chapter summarizes the continuing signs of healing and renewed happiness that emerged as my radical acceptance of self and sadness has deepened.

The narrative of Part 1 concludes in Chapter Seven, entitled “Cultivating Peace & Returning to Life.” This chapter begins by describing the place of healing I have reached, and my increasing explorations of mindfulness meditation, of the “four foundations of mindfulness,” of the “three marks of existence,” and of practices encompassed by the Brahma Viharas (Sanskrit for “Divine Abodes”), including structured loving-kindness meditations. Because writing poetry has been so central a part of my recovery, this chapter also includes five short poems reflecting different points in my own grieving process. Further, having discovered that I cannot really separate “healing” from “spiritual insight,” included here also is an overview of my “opening” experiences, both before and after Christopher’s death. As a way of both summarizing and concluding the narrative, I describe how my spiritual practice now involves an ongoing “dance” of relative and absolute, of delusion and enlightenment, of ordinary and spiritual.

My grief has not totally disappeared, and I am forever changed. But now there are many times of joy and celebration. My practice increasingly has taken the form of looking outward, as well as inward, and of serving others whose obvious suffering I no longer have the power to ignore, since it is my own. I have learned to happily dance with the demon.

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Part 2 of the book explores the Buddhist teachings and numerous specific healing practices for recovering from grief. Its first segment is

Chapter 8, entitled “The Truth of Suffering.” It begins with three “pillars” of strong practice that can be life-savers for those caught in the throes of grief. They are great “faith,” perhaps best understood as great trust; great determination, or commitment; and great “doubt” – referring to great questioning, not to disbelief. The teachings then turn to the importance of one’s sincere intention to practice and to heal, and to willingness to make the kinds of choices that are necessary for healing. The chapter concludes with a review of basic precautions and healing practices for those shattered by loss. These include coping with immediate dangers, finding social support, and knowing you’re not alone.

Whereas the previous chapter laid out, in effect, what is called the First Noble Truth of Buddhism – that suffering is unavoidable in an impermanent world, Chapter 9, “Origins of Suffering,” explains why this is so, according to the Second Noble Truth. This teaching expounds that suffering results for our attachments, or graspings, which, sooner or later, because of the fundamental impermanence of things, are frustrated, causing experiences of loss. These attachments arise quite naturally from human desires, which are built into our structure of self (ego). This “structure” leads, for virtually everyone, to the notion that this “I-system” is real and enduring. When the self (“me”) loses what it dearly loves (a child, for instance), its suffering can be extreme. In Buddhism, however, due to the impermanence and total interdependency of all things, “self” is an illusion, and deeply realizing this reality, through meditation, is the way to transcend suffering. Unfortunately, doing so is difficult, especially when one is “stuck” in dysfunctional patterns of conditioning. The healing practices noted in Chapter 9 pertain to surviving and coping with the initial trauma (and sometime danger) of loss.

Chapter 10, entitled “Insights into the Self-origins of Suffering,” delves into the predicaments identified in the preceding chapter. For instance, the reasons why identification with “self” can be such a problem, and even a trap, are discussed. The problem of maladaptive life conditioning is centrally relevant here and therefore requires some review of the Buddhist doctrine of karma (“action” in Sanskrit), or cause-and-effect. Indeed, so powerful are the effects of conditioning on how we react to trauma that some styles of meditation, like classical Zen, can be very aggressive in their approach to transcending it. Gentler, more assimilative approaches of mindfulness meditation are also available, however, and they have the added advantage of having developed more structured types of meditation than Zen for working with pain. Regarding relevant healing practices, at this point it is necessary to introduce elementary techniques of meditation and the most common hindrances that beginners usually encounter when starting on the meditative path. Particular emphasis is placed on cultivating intense physical awareness.

What may have seemed mysterious about the book’s title – “Fire Gate of Healing” – is resolved in Chapter 11, “Entering the Fire Gate of Healing.” My phrase “fire gate” refers to the central teaching in Buddhism that suffering can be transcended only by facing and fully experiencing it. This teaching seems so counter-intuitive to many that the chapter is devoted to explaining and documenting it. Because the efforts to fully know one’s own suffering are challenging, some space is devoted to again clarifying the role of intention and commitment in one’s efforts. Even more central is discussion of the reasons why and how mindfulness meditation works, why it has such great healing power, and why one’s ability to do it is so vitally important to the task at hand. Numerous examples and quotations from the Buddhist teachings are included here, as well as many specific meditative and other practices to foster healing. The healing exercises place particular emphasis on working directly with grief and accessing the afflictive emotions through physical awareness.

As explained in Chapter 12, “Healing, Emotional Alchemy, and the Structure

Of Suffering,” recovery from grief and the other dark emotions of loss not only requires facing our pain, but also is greatly aided by clearly seeing the structure of conditioning from which it arises. The ten “schemas” delineated by schema therapist and meditation practitioner Tara Bennett-Goleman provide an economical way of exploring one’s own pattern of dysfunctional conditioning. The limits of the kind of healing one can expect through such meditative self-exploration, however, require a review of just what is involved. For this purpose, drawing on the work of Stephen Levine, the discussion contrasts the more common understanding of healing as a “cure,” with a more realistic and relativistic understanding of healing as a deeper kind of spiritual adjustment and physical adaptation. The kind of healing explored by Bennett-Goleman and Levine involves deepening awareness that leads to a transformative “emotional alchemy.” The mindfulness meditation promoted in the last chapter can now be applied, using various relevant healing practices, to the job of interrupting the automatic schema reactions to stress that have led to such intense grief and suffering in the past. The chapter concludes with a review of guided meditations that cultivate such positive emotions as forgiveness, loving-kindness and gratitude.

The last two chapters of Part 2 explore more advanced dimensions of spiritual growth and healing. In Chapter 13, “Letting Go into Transformation,” the challenge of “letting go” of one’s grief, and other dark emotions, is reviewed. Part of the problem is simply the difficulty of releasing the highly conditioned behavior and emotions underlying the self’s suffering, including grief. Accomplishing this transition enables one to appreciate the teaching that, although life will never be free of pain, whether or not we suffer from it is optional. But an equally challenging issue is the question of just what or where it is one lets go into. This is the challenge of one’s willingness to expand awareness to include “Big Mind,” a process which can lead to the scary prospect of “forgetting the self.” As the transition unfolds, there begins a kind of “dance” involving, as partners, both the “relative” perspectives of little mind and the “absolute” insights of big mind. The relevant healing practices introduced at this point emphasize the importance of long-term practice and identify techniques for retaking one’s bearings, as well as for focusing one’s newly expanded powers of mindfulness on everyday activities.

Chapter 14, “Discovering Groundlessness & Forgetting the Self,” concludes the book’s exploration of teachings with a discussion of fairly advanced aspects of meditation that lead one right back to a renewed embrace of ordinary life. Having now learned to engage the more subtle dimensions of meditation, such as “choice-less awareness,” one’s still deepening awareness continues the process of letting go, including the experience of groundlessness and timelessness, and of experiencing compassion for all those in the world who suffer. But instead of having now been led to some esoteric spiritual plane beyond the reach of ordinary people, we find ourselves right back in the midst of everyday life, albeit with a vastly greater sense of vibrancy, beauty and freedom from suffering than was true when our journey through grief began. Although perhaps not in quite the way we first imagined, we have healed.

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Part 3,” Summary of Healing Practices, Bibliography and Short Biography,” ties up loose ends. There have been so many references to various healing practices that a summary and overview of them in Chapter 15 seemed warranted. After noting the various general types of healing practice, the chapter lists each one by chapter, starting with Chapter 8. The nature of each practice is highlighted by being printed in upper-case. Quite a few guided meditations and routines were noted in Part 1 (Chapters 1 – 7) because they were an important part of the narrative, and all of them are included in Chapter 15. I am in the process of offering on my website recordings of many of the guided meditations discussed in each chapter’s “healing practices” sections. Some of the meditations are my own, while others have been adapted from various sources

A bibliography is the second segment in Part 3. Embedded in the bibliography are recommended readings, selected especially for beginners. These suggested readings are marked by an asterisk.

The book concludes with a very short author’s biography.

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