The gift of loss

Driving to work this morning, I saw birds in the sky, their V and M silhouetted shapes against billowy clouds of grey and white. They were commonplace birds - seagulls, ravens, pigeons - but today I was struck by them, like a visitor in a new land.  

Reflecting on the past year I have, as with many others, been filled by a deep sense of loss. The passing of leaders and creators that have helped shape me. The seemingly endless and senseless police brutality and violence against our Black brothers and sisters. The threats and violence at Standing Rock against Native Americans and mother Earth. Our local community devastated by the loss of bright young men and women in the Oakland fire. And a president elect who seems completely disconnected from his constituents. As such, it has also been a year of profound healing, enabling me to reconnect with life in deeper and simpler ways. The idea that loss leads to deeper connection feels like a paradox and like all paradoxes, its understanding cannot be grasped by the mind. It must be realized by the heart.

The term “at a loss” comes from hunting and is used in reference to hounds losing the scent. This past year I have been struck by that very feeling, a sense of bewilderment and confusion. To lose a scent is akin to losing a dream, the destination is no longer apparent and cannot be reached. I’ve had this feeling before when the rug is pulled from under me or I am unexpectedly thrown off track and have to quickly change plans and reconfigure. There is panic, anxiety and sometimes depression and paralysis but then I regroup and redirect.

This year I still can’t seem to find my footing, the feeling of loss is strong. And I actually feel this as positive and awakening. Being at a loss is like a short circuit to business as usual. Like a Zen Master slapping you upside the head, it hurts, it’s humiliating, it’s uncomfortable but it is exactly those things that wakes me up to challenge my own mind games. For many of us including me, our usual mind games are not mindful at all. We are running around like chickens without our heads (and hearts), obsessed with the busyness and trivialities of living but not feeling connected or alive. Much of life goes unnoticed when we are mindless like this. Put your head back on and your heart in its rightful place. Loss re-minds us of the uncomfortable fact that there is nothing permanent. As such, there is everything precious. For that may be the gift of loss.

A New Year has begun and life is short. I wish simple and beautiful things to take root in your life this year. There is much love and healing to cultivate in the world and in ourselves. May we locate all the loss and inspiration of the past year in our own hearts and in doing so may we ourselves give off the scent of love and healing so that none of us will be at a loss for very long.

Happy New Year BCA Community! All my love and blessings in the coming year.

Thuy

Some words to share

““Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you. Your feelings need you. Your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things.” ”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I ’ve been having a hard time finding the words this month. Words give shape and meaning to my experience and create a bridge from my internal world to my external world. The recent turmoil has left me searching for the words I want to say.

On the morning after the results from the election came out, I arrived to work feeling fragile and raw. One patient was in shock and disbelief and asked for some words, “a sentence or two”, to help navigate the difficult news. I searched my mind, but what welled up inside had no words, just waves of grief and emotion. Throughout the day, there were a lot of tears shed between my patients and I.

In the days following, I put all my energy towards showing up. It was very difficult, but it is my medicine to show up as I am. I’ve traveled from grief to rage to cynicism to despair to exhaustion. In these states, I focused on putting one foot in front of the other without denying or acting out my feelings. I sat with my patients and listened. I saw my emotions reflected back at me through the tears, the disillusionment, the anger, the fear, the hopelessness.

Many people were compelled to leap into action, organize, protest, strategize. Others found it hard to get out of bed and felt guilty for feeling defeated. We live in a culture that is fixated on action and doing. The desire to fix something and do something is so reflexive in us, that we barely feel the edges of discomfort before we are off to find solutions. It is not so easy to sit with confusion or fear or pain or despair and not impulsively shut it down, run away from it, hide it or do something about it.

We think that through action we can put out into the world peace, justice and wholeness despite feelings of anger, fear and disconnection. We fail to see the impossibility of the situation, that we cannot give what we do not have.

We can’t wallow and let hatred take over the world. What is to be done?!” When I’ve been asked these questions, I can feel the fear and the anger behind the insistence on action. And I think it’s best to pause. And that pause, that willingness to acknowledge and sit with the discomfort of our own fears is the best “action.” Because in that pause, we’ve refrained from putting more fear and anger into the world and then perhaps there is a space for true healing to take place. Healing takes into account the whole picture, the shadow and the light and integrates and connects into our personal and collective beingness. It takes intentional presence and patience to acknowledge all the disconnected parts and to allow the healing process its due course.

The healing process may not look like what we pictured.  It may look like tears and confusion and anger. It may feel like pain and despair. It may be without energy or words. But in our willingness to be compassionate with it, to acknowledge and affirm our own suffering, we are affirming ourselves. We are giving ourselves the love, the patience, the confidence, the wholeness that we want to see in the world. When we can give that to ourselves, then it becomes a true and natural extension to others.

My gratitude is extended to you, my community, for showing up for me, for doing the work of healing with me, for sharing in the collective grieving that acknowledges our wholeness and our resilience. May we continue together on this path of healing and may we meet any form of anger and fear with compassion for ourselves and for one another. And if in our grief, we find no compassion, may we walk away, seek help and care for ourselves until once again our strength returns and we can give and receive love and healing.

Heal Yourself, Heal Your Community.

Thuy

On Healing Ourselves and Our Community: The Importance of Taking Care

“Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you. Your feelings need you. Your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. ”

— Thich Nhat Hanh   

There is medicine, and then there’s Medicine. There is healing, and then there’s Healing. There is community, and then there’s Community. What I thought I understood about these things, even after many years of studying and practicing traditional medicine and my lifelong search for community was quite limited. This past month, I was blessed with the opportunity to be a patient at a traditional Navajo healing ceremony. What I’ve taken back from that experience is a deeper sense of commitment to healing service and a renewed determination to integrate community and justice into healing.

My journey took me to New Mexico, the land of of painted deserts and painted skies. I was immediately taken by the beauty of the landscape, pulling over on the freeway at sunset just to stare in wonder. Taking in the beauty of nature is an inherent part of the medicine. On the night of the ceremony, seventeen of us settled on the floor in a circle against the walls of a hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling. My eyes were trying to adjust to the light of the lanterns and the coal. I looked around me, taking in all the new faces that came that night to be in ceremony with me, to help me heal. I didn’t quite understand why thirteen Navajo people who didn’t know me would gather to support my healing in an all night vigil. My brain was trying to remember all the instructions that were given me, keeping them in the correct order so that I didn’t offend my hosts. Before us, in the center of the hogan, was a sacred crescent of red earth and a mound of burning coal that I focused my attention on when I felt lost or overwhelmed.

When the ceremony began, I was asked to announce my reason for being there. I reached for some rehearsed words, knowing that this moment would come. The words came, a bit stiffly at first, but as I spoke I eased into a deeper and more natural voice. I told them I was there because I want to be a better healer and in the work that I do, I know that I must start with myself. I spoke about some sense of disquietude that I felt inside me. I spoke a bit about my my childhood and the search for healing and community through my work. I could feel that I was heard as I spoke by the audible sounds that were uttered in return to punctuate and validate the words I was pulling up from deep inside me. From that place I asked for help and when I was done the medicine man, in plain speak, summed up my speech to say that I suffer from loneliness.

It was a bit jarring to hear his diagnosis: loneliness. I don’t think of myself as lonely, being surrounded by community, friends and family most of my day. In fact, in the day to day  busy-ness I sometimes crave to be alone. But the simplicity and accuracy of the medicine man’s diagnosis was indisputable.  As I considered his meaning, I understood clearly he was addressing a loneliness much deeper, not simply meaning to be alone, but a thread of loneliness that seemed to reach back eternal when I believed that I had to go it alone. After he spoke and the others concurred, I could feel the deep shard of disconnection inside the depths of my being make itself known.

Sitting up into the night, on a desert hill, in a little hogan before coal and ember, beneath the wide expanse of infinite stars scattered into forever with friends and community supporting my healing through song, medicine and prayer, the concept of loneliness disappeared and left a flow of tears that could’ve filled the canyons running through the dry earth.

“We have come to consider medicine to be a pill or procedure. Something that is done to us either by chemistry or instrument. Something or someone designated to take the pain and discomfort away.”

We have come to consider medicine to be a pill or procedure. Something that is done to us either by chemistry or instrument. Something or someone designated to take the pain and discomfort away. While I had known that healing is much deeper than that, my experience in New Mexico showed me the truly profound depth and breadth of medicine. Medicine isn’t about taking anything away. We are already ill from too many things being taken away from us. If we keep taking things away, there will be nothing left of us. Medicine is about reconnecting with all the things that were taken from us: reconnecting to one another and to community, reconnecting to the land and to the skies, reconnecting to all things that give us life, reconnecting to music and spirit and to our own voices and words, reconnecting to our grief and our loss, reconnecting to fire and water, reconnecting to our human hearts. Our pain, put in the proper perspective of the universe becomes a tiny glint of light in the entire night sky. And that light is there to light the way for others. We do not and cannot heal alone.

My eternal gratitude to the Medicine, to the Healers, to my Companions, to Community, to Mother Earth and to the Great Mystery. May we all light the way for one another.

In Health & Community,

-Thuy

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