Broken: Do Not Open
Broken. Do not open. That's what the sign on the window says. It's a tall, old, metal-framed window with eight panes. It has hinges that open it sideways out into the world.
But for now, the window is not to be opened. It has a large crack with sign that has been taped over it for a long time. The sun has almost washed the words off the piece of paper. I hardly noticed the words on the paper until I was right in front of it. They look more like a relic than a warning.
Meanwhile, the crack in the window is clearly there. Its big and reaches from one side of the window clear to the other. It seems obvious that if we open the window, at some point it will break and glass will rain down onto some unsuspecting person two stories below. So, leave it be. Don't use the window. The first time I saw this sign on the window I was dancing. And this is no ordinary dance. This is a moving meditation dance. There are no steps. It's not about looking good or even feeling good, it's about being present to what is happening now and staying with the now as it unfolds in each moment. The main thing to know about this practice is that it involves mindfulness and letting go of thoughts, like all other meditative practices. The main difference is we don't sit still on a cushion. We do sometimes pause, but mostly we move on a dance floor and let our movement assist us in stilling our minds. It is like the whirling dervishes who say that it is through moving that we find our center. And so it is for me.
I was dancing this practice the day I saw the sign on the window. I was warmed up and moving freely. I was mindful of my breathing and my feet on the ground. I was focusing my awareness on what the moment felt like, sounded like, looked like. The rhythmic swaying of my body as I danced had calmed my mind.
In Buddhism the mind is sometimes likened to a lake and thinking is likened to the wind that ripples the lake. When the wind blows, the surface ripples. When the wind ceases, the surface of the lake becomes like glass and it is able to reflect the world without distortion. When our thinking calms, the mind is able to see more clearly the world as it is.
My mind was like a lake where the winds had died down and a stillness had smoothed its surface. My mind was present. I was unfolding with the moment. It was within this meditative state that I saw the words on the sign. They waved to me at a guttural level. The chattering ego was in the back seat and I didn't shelter myself from the truth of the sign- BROKEN DO NOT OPEN. A place in my heart came alive and burned. I could feel the hard tissue and stifled energy around my heart start to thaw. I felt the tightness of fear that was holding captive my heart and the weight of sadness on my face and in my shoulders pulling me down. I noticed the urge to recoil and hide my feelings and vulnerability from the other people in the room. I wanted to hide. The words on the sign reflected me to myself like I was standing in front of a mirror.
That day on the dance floor a great wave of disappointment rose in my being. For some time I had been ignoring my heart in order to keep up with my school work. I was incredibly busy with graduate school commitments at the end of the quarter and taking care of my deepest needs at this time seemed impossible. Something had to go and that something was me. I just wanted to keep up and finish the quarter. Trying to be emotionally present with myself or other people at this time felt like trying to build a bridge over an ever widening gap while treading water, water I might add that is quick moving and relentless. I needed to stay afloat in the river of theological school. To do this I sacrificed connection with myself and others. I was feeling more and more disconnected from my partner. I didn't take the time I needed to nurture that connection. And when something happened that didn't quite feel right to me I chose to let it go and get back to work rather than take the time to talk it through. I acted like a friendly stranger sharing her apartment, but herself and not her heart. I felt more and more lonely.
As you might guess, this was a recipe for disaster. I had tried to get around taking care of my needs, but now the wave of subsequent pain was here and crashing in on me whether I liked it or not. Sadness demanded my attention and I decided not to run.
I had instituted the policy and put up the sign: broken do not open over my own heart without realizing it. When I saw the sign on the window, I recognized myself and saw the fear that had shut down my heart. I saw my fear that we were drifting apart and that our love would not be able to hold us together. At some level, I was afraid I'd burst at the seams if I honestly opened my heart. Yet I was falling apart from lack of care.
It is far too easy to shut down when things get hard. I know this to be true of myself and I suspect this is true for all of us at some level. Before we even know it our hearts have closed and we've stopped living in accordance with our values and highest aspirations. There is no announcement or bell that goes off to warn us. It takes running into a wall within ourselves before we see that we've closed down, that we are in our own way.
This can be an all too familiar way of being. Closing the door is a barricade we place around our hurts, a fence that says, "Stay out. Keep away." Telling someone to leave us alone is easier than telling them we feel hurt. So, it's easy to say, "do not open." Telling someone where we're broken is when it gets hard.
When it comes to our hurts, "Broken, Do not open" is a strategy that works for a while. It might meet our needs for safety and independence, but eventually it will get in the way of our needs for connection and joy. When we hold people at bay, or withhold who we are, we are closed off and can't feel the world. Closing the window doesn't fix it, it doesn't address the crack, it just stifles it. Closing down our hearts doesn't attend to the original hurt, it just encases it. We might think that keeping people out will protect our heart from further damage, but it also traps it and keeps it stuck in one position, the position of brokenness. Meanwhile we are so busy keeping people out that we do not tend to the original hurt and instead of healing, it festers.
The heart doesn't ask for the "Broken. Do not open" sign. Fear compels us to do that. There is a wound hiding behind that sign. Many of us don't like to relate to our hurts, so we try to push them away or dump them onto someone else's side of the street so we can keep a safe distance from our pain. Only in doing this we shackle ourselves to it. We can find all kinds of ways to escape our feelings, but we can't stay there forever. The work gets done, the gym closes, our kids grow up, the bottle runs out and we're left with ourselves again. We can run but we can't hide!
Like the story of the person walking in the woods who is shot by an archer, we have choices how to respond to our hurts. If we yell at others, attack them or run away from them, our wound is likely to get worse. This does nothing to stop our bleeding. Instead we stand to make things worse. We've not only forgotten to tend to our own hurt, but we've also probably harmed the other person with our vengeance. We've made more mess to be cleaned up and we've created more obstacles to building the kind of peaceful world we're committed to.
When we run from our emotions, we aren't fooling anybody, but we probably are hurting them. Feeling won't kill us, but our fear of actually feeling our feelings can and does motivate us to take all kinds of actions that harm ourselves, our relationships and our world. Like a woodstove that's heated up and shut up- with both the chimney flute and the door closed, smoke will find a way out only sideways, rather than through the optimal pathways. We are like this. When we don't notice we're heating up or closed off, we tend to say things and act in ways where we will alleviate our pressure at any cost, even if that means hurting those we care for.
Hurting people is not listed anywhere in any Unitarian Universalist covenant or church mission. So if we want to live our values and we want to start at home, with ourselves as a foundation for peacebuilding in the world like the first reading claims, then we must continually work at opening our hearts even when it hurts. As Unitarian Universalists it is our clear religious call to build heaven on earth, here and now. This religious vision requires us to open our hearts and keep the window open.
There are no guarantees in this work that we won't get hurt in the process. Pain will happen and if we are committed to our life vision then we must learn how to respond with love even when it hurts.
When something we really care about is at stake, we react more intensely. If we extend what we know about our personal hurts into our social and national landscapes, we see that this is also the case. And the stakes are high in working for peace. Conflict is inevitable. When we work with ourselves and others to find ways to share and distribute resources more equitably, fear emerges. Bringing a closed heart to the table of this work will not help. Attitudes are contagious. It matters what we bring to the table of our lives, whether its to our families, or schools, our workplaces or church groups, to the government or to peace talks between nations. What we bring to the table matters.
We must continually practice opening our hearts or when the stakes rise, and our feelings intensify, and fears cloud our vision we will too easily fall into closing down, pulling back and thereby causing greater pain. We must open. We can't simultaneously hide our hearts and effectively relate to others with the love and compassion needed to transform our world.
When we close the windows of our heart and put up signs that say, Broken: Do Not Open, we live in our hurts. We see the world through our pain. We also won't see the world entirely as it is, we see it through our window, with its cracks and brokenness. We see the world through our protections and it changes how we perceive what is actually there. Unitarian Universalism calls us to seek the truth in love, not in fear. This isn't something we do just once, we must keep opening and opening. Rumi wrote, "Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed." We open and we close. We are fluid and dynamic or we are stuck. We practice to remain fluid.
Spiritual practice and meditation are a couple of ways to do this. They provide a way to plow the earth of our beings, as Rumi says, so that the ground doesn't become so hard that nothing will grow. There are many spiritual practices and many ways to learn to open: listening to another share deeply in a soul matters group or listening as a parent to things you don't want to hear from your teenager, or really listening as a teenager to things your parents are saying that you would rather not hear. We all learn to let go, open and keep opening to life in many ways.
Meditation is one structured path that is meaningful to me.
That day on the dance floor I felt pain when I recognized myself in the words on the sign. I felt the tightness of fear and the weight of sadness. I noticed the urge to recoil and hide my feelings and vulnerability from the other people in the room. I also felt a yearning to let go and release the feelings. I observed all of this. I dropped the story line and began relating to the energy and sensation of my feelings in my body. I returned my awareness to my breath and I didn't do anything. I didn't push it away, draw it closer or react. In doing so I made room for all of me to exist- the pain, the fear, the sadness. I kept breathing and I gave myself room to happen. The energy of my sadness and my loneliness moved inside of me, a new dance began in my chest that circled and radiated outwards.
The rhythmic nature of dance, the ebb and flow of the lungs aids in focusing and in returning to the breath. When the mind wanders, the instruction is to let the thought go and return to the breath. When the mind wanders again, return to the sensation of feet on the ground. And when pain comes up or something unpleasant that you'd like to push away, return again to the breath, to the feet; let go of the story line, climb down from the tower of thought into the body and stay with the breath. And as you move, the energy of whatever emotion or thought comes up, also moves and passes.
I have been dancing for 7 years for a reason. This practice of opening and letting go has changed my daily living. Not always, but more often I can breathe into and sit with uncomfortable feelings without pushing people away or hiding from myself. More often when I'm hit with an arrow I can pause and then thoughtfully respond rather than strike back at the archer. And when I don't, it doesn't take long into my dance for whatever I have pushed aside to come forward and be known. When I show up, the learning arrives. When I practice opening my heart I get better at it. When I practice opening myself to the moment, the muscles of compassion for myself and others stay limber and I live my values more of the time.
We can learn, we can practice and we can open the windows ourselves that we have warned others not to open. We can make room for the breaks in our hearts to be and we can trust their ability to heal themselves if we get our fear out of the way.
Our world and our visions of peace, respect and justice require that we move beyond, Broken Do Not Open. We must not put up signs rather than do the work that it takes to bring about restoration of broken places.
In this church of souls gathered together in covenant to create peace on earth, we can and must continue to take down the signs we have placed over our personal and collective brokenness if we truly want be instruments of peace. We must open like a guest house to the world.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
August 31, 2008