All-Day Mindfulness Retreat Talk: “That’s Where the Light Enters You”

I get asked a lot “Why New Zealand?  Why did your family decide to leave the States and come here?”  To this question I hardly ever have a clear or complete answer.  Sometimes I simply explain that “Aotearoa was calling us”.  I talk about my “itchy feet” and my longing for an “adventure.”  Other times I smile and tell people that I just wanted “a place to have my mid-life crisis in peace”.  Or, depending on my mood, I might describe my “Post-pandemic helping-professional burnout” or say we just “needed a ‘reset’.”  But the truth is … I think a hole in my heart needed to be filled and I didn’t know another way to do it. It was a hole created from SO much “trying and doing”.  In this state, I was no longer able to parent my kids in the attuned way I longed to, I had stopped remembering how to truly care for my clients, and I felt a soul rending disconnection. 

This fragmented state I was in – call it mid-life crisis, compassion fatigue, burnout - wasn’t unique to me.  In his book Heal Thyself, Saki Santorelli describes how "In the process called growing up, most of us have been taught to forget [our] innate presence.  The remembering of such an inner radiance is radical.  Establishing contact with such aliveness will do nothing less than turn our lives inside out… Meanwhile, the common conventions of the world maintain our well-oiled sense of separation, offering us thin gruel in place of real nourishment.  For the most part we remain in this fragmented trance, until we are uprooted by circumstances that tear apart the accustomed fabric of our lives, turning us back on ourselves.  Such rendering is part and parcel of life.  Sometimes it arrives at our doorway in the guise of illness, sometimes in the breakdown of long-standing relationships, in the loss of loved ones, in those middle-of-life eruptions that leave us little choice but to remain isolated and desperate or take the chance and slowly begin dissolving our hard, protective shells." Surely you have been in such a state to some degree or another – a moment when you suddenly realize that you have become disconnected from yourself and from others for some time. 

I certainly was there when I applied on a whim for a job in Ōtepoti Dunedin, a city I’d never visited in a country I’d never set foot in.  In September 2022, I brought my family for a visit to check out the employment opportunity.  It was then that I noticed there was SOMETHING in the delicious water here, in the fresh humid air, in the morning tui songs… something in the interactions with people, that I can only describe as a cleansing agent – slowly removing layers of my stress, pretense, and guardedness.  I knew it was here I would be able to switch from “trying and doing mode” to simply “being”.

And so we moved ourselves nearly halfway across the world with no plan of returning home.  As the layers of weight I’d been carrying around on my shoulders were discarded, I began to find myself.  But it didn’t take long to realize that no matter how far from home I went I couldn’t run away from all of my hang ups, flaws and demons.  They simply came with me – bare for me to see.  Still, I soon learned that this was part of the reconnecting process, too.  In the same way, Archbishop Desmond Tutu observes that “Discovering more joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken.” 

I began to look head on at my own humanness and locate a compassion for my own most fragile parts.  In so doing, I began to cultivate more gentleness and attunement in my relationships.

Santorelli writes, "If language and music are ample evidence of a deeper silence, our wounds and flaws are sure signs of our fundamental completeness.  If speech is a finger pointing toward the unspoken, our sense of incompleteness, our fragile, tender vulnerability is a sure sign of our strength.  This tender softness is a portal… the entry point for marvelous possibility." Some time after we moved to Aotearoa our family became close with some neighbors who grew up immersed in the works of the ancient Persian poet, Rumi, in their native Iran.  In his poem “Childhood Friends” Rumi reminds us of this entryway:

Trust your wound to a Teacher’s surgery.

Flies collect on a wound.  They cover it,

Those flies of your self-protecting feelings,

Your love for what you think is yours.

Let a Teacher wave away the flies

 and put a plaster on the wound.

Don’t turn your head.  Keep looking

At the bandaged place.  That’s where

the Light enters you.

And don’t believe for a moment

That you are healing yourself.

While it may not take everyone a move to the other side of the world to learn to soften toward themselves, perhaps it is a universal opportunity we each have to allow those parts of us that block us from ourselves to be stripped away.  And as they are, we might find our own most tender wounds serve as our Teachers.  May we each consider the invitation made by Rumi:

Don’t turn your head.  Keep looking

At the bandaged place.  That’s where

the Light enters you.