Mon-Fri: 10am-7pm
Saturday: 10am-5pm
Sunday: 12pm-5pm
The Many Faces of Buddha These days I am doing an extended personal retreat at a local Buddhist facility. While I don’t consider myself a full fledge practicing Buddhist, I feel very much at home there. The writings of Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron, both Buddhists, as well as some of the members of the local Buddhist community have been instrumental on my path. The bare bedroom, the absence of telephones, TV and radio, and the silence of the place tends to strip away the distractions in one’s life that we sometimes readily embrace to keep us from looking at the core issues of our lives. The facility has a small shrine room where I frequently sit and meditate. There is a beautiful statue of Buddha as well as photos of the Dalai Lama and the Rinpoches, the monks who founded this local center. Frequently when I sit to meditate I will get settled and simply ask Spirit, “What would you have me know?” The answers I have gotten over the years have helped shaped my experiences of life. Lately though the question hasn’t even come to mind. What comes these days is an instruction to surrender, to surrender into the moment of what emotion is before me, whether it be joy, fear, sorrow, confusion. To breathe deeply into it, as the breath can actually lift it up and allow it to gently pass through me as I remain a witness. It reminds me that I HAVE the emotion, I am not THE emotion. I am finding that the statue of Buddha has been changing as well. I sit there and I experience a family member has now become the Buddha. It is now my wife, or my daughter or son sitting in full lotus upon the alter asking me to surrender into my experiences of them, the emotions that spring up when I think of them. They have become my personal Buddhas, offering me the opportunity and silently challenging me to see what lies within. Other people have come in as Buddha as well, people that have been dear to me, people that I have had struggles with, all teachers offering mirrors for me to examine what bubbles up in my consciousness. This whole process reminds me of a friend that when she cries, she will wipe her tears off with her finger and put them in her mouth to drink and ingest them. The tear of the hurt acts like an anti-body or vaccine towards the pain, thereby allowing for even more of a complete release from her system. By ingesting them she is completely honoring and accepting her tears and that loving space adds transformative power to her healing. I believe all these ‘faces of Buddha’ that have been coming to me are asking the same of me. To let all the emotions come out, to surrender to the experience of them in the quietness of meditation, accept them as if they were like swallowed healing tears, and watch them drift by like clouds. Enjoy life's sacred journey.