There is this famous Raymond Carver poem which I keep in my “mindfulness poems” folder. I look at it every so often, wondering whether to use it for a retreat or a workshop, and always decide against it.
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. (Expedition Press)
I wouldn’t want someone who is not in a love relationship to feel sad or lonely—that’s one obvious reason for my reluctance, even if the kind of love in question isn’t spelled out in the poem. There’s also that emphasis on “wanting”—yes, we may all long to feel loved, it is clearly a universal human need. But I am not sure that trying to “get” what we “want” is the best approach when it comes to belovedness. Being held in a web of love, beyond the polarities of giving and receiving, self and other—this feels closer. If love was truly a felt reality for the poet (and he does seem to talk about himself and his second wife here, who nursed him through cancer toward the end of his life), would the question even arise? There is a hint of needing to convince himself that, “even so”—and this may relate to the fact that he struggled with alcoholism—there is love in his life.
I seem to come up with lots of reasons to discard the poem. And yet, there is something about it that makes me pick it up again and again, like a koan that asks to be resolved. An element of the poem that touches my heart is the sound of the word “beloved;” a little archaic or ceremonial, with this very lovely, lilting, three-syllable cadencing. More colloquial endearments, such as “sweetheart” or “darling,” don’t quite carry the same weight of timeless, even mystical significance. In her book Radical Acceptance (Bantam 2004), Tara Brach tells of a time when she was in her 20s, of being treated appallingly by the teacher of the spiritual community she was part of for eight years. She had just suffered a miscarriage and he publicly shamed her, implying it was her own fault for “being so professionally ambitious and ego-centered.” (p. 4) “My heart was breaking with fear and grief,” she writes. (p. 5)
I felt severed from my path and estranged from my own being. . . . In anguish and desperation I reached out as I had many times before to the presence, I call the Beloved. This unconditionally loving and wakeful presence had always been a refuge for me. As I whispered “Beloved” and felt my yearning to belong to this loving awareness, something began to happen. It was subtle at first, just a feeling that I wasn’t so lost and alone. Instead of being entirely immersed in a cauldron of suffering, I was beginning to sense an openness and tenderness within and around me. My world was becoming more spacious. (p. 34)
Even without the stimulation of a traumatic event like this, many of us can easily spend prolonged time in what Tara calls the “trance of unworthiness,” an insidious sense that there is something wrong with us and that we are not deserving of love. In our culture of hyper-individualism, it is extremely easy to feel like a failure—it is the unacknowledged shadow of our progress-driven capitalist ideology. We have developed our strategies to cope with this horrible feeling, keeping ourselves busy in work and social life to prove our worthiness, or distracting ourselves by addictive, mind-numbing activities in order to not feel the pain and shame of being found wanting. A subtler manifestation of this protective functioning of the psyche is “improving ourselves:” ceaselessly adding one physical or spiritual workout to the next, subtly pushing away that underlying threat of being cast out from belovedness.
Sensing that we need access to a larger power than our anguished small self, we may be praying for divine salvation and sometimes it is like Tara describes: we are able to open to the blessings of the “Beloved,” and our inner world opens out again. But sometimes, when we are honest with ourselves, access to this state of existential wholeness and belonging seems to be barred, however hard we may try.
People of faith across traditions know this struggle intimately as a “dark night of the soul.” Mother Teresa’s private letters reveal decades of feeling God’s absence, feeling “just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.” Even those who understand the divine as intrinsic lose touch with it at times. “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being” the Sufi master Hafez said. And Lama Gendun Rinpoche offers this advice from the Buddhist Dzogchen perspective: “All is yours already. Don’t search any further. Don’t go into the inextricable jungle looking for the elephant who is already quietly at home.”
Why is it so hard to heed this clear message? To stop trying so hard and simply relax into blissful oneness with the ever-present ground of being? Pointing ourselves toward that loving presence would require the very qualities of clarity, calm, creativity, and compassion and trust that trauma has disrupted. We’re submerged in protective patterns, flooded by pain and shame, and our nervous systems are sorely dysregulated. So how do we find the ground upon which to stand? You can’t really pull yourself out of a swamp by your own boot straps—will power and individual effort alone won’t work.
On a recent retreat at a friend’s house I found, in one of their books, this image of a Tibetan mother and her child. I had it leaning against my shrine for a couple of days and it helped me shift some stuck energy of my own. What strikes me about this image is how it holds several threads together: intergenerational healing, imagination, embodied presence, and what Tara calls radical acceptance. “Radical acceptance,” Tara Brach’s seminal term, is perhaps the most essential element: letting go of the subtle pushing away of what we actually experience. All the following methods and ideas need to be held in this light to avoid instrumentalizing them as means to avoid our reality.
Maybe some of us are fortunate and have been nursed by mothers who come from generations of well-loved children. But for many of us in the materially developed world, our primary relationships are more fraught and tenuous, marked by intergenerational trauma that is passed down through bodies and nervous systems underpinned by cultural structures, beliefs, and behaviors. Contemporary trauma work increasingly recognizes the somatic dimension of these processes. When a baby cries and no one comes, the nervous system learns a pattern: “I reach out and there is no response. I am not worthy of care.” This becomes encoded in the body, in patterns of tension and in the capacity (or incapacity) to relax and receive. If part of our meditation practice consists in the cultivation of love, we will inevitably have to face our sadness about what has been missing. And if we use visualization practices of deities and there doesn’t seem to be much resonance, we can easily re-stimulate that early childhood trauma. “See, here is proof again—I am not love-worthy.” Recognizing this as a perfectly understandable way our nervous system functions goes some way to lessen the trauma burden, taking it less as a personal failing.
Using the imagination sensitively is nevertheless a good way to proceed—tapping into brain circuits that give us respite from ruminative thinking. We can find imagery that hits the sweet spot for us, without too much back firing. Looking at this Tibetan mother/child I am picking up a quality of unhurried, loving presence. The two don’t even need to look at each other, there is an unquestionable bond of love, body to body, mind to mind. The baby looks utterly secure and the woman confident in her mothering. My nervous system picks up these qualities and I am inspired to engage in a spell of “re-parenting”—connecting to the wounded, unloved parts of myself from compassionate Self energy, and making sure the little one really gets that it is held in love, that it is fully understood in its feelings and needs. This must to be felt as a neurobiological experience of calling and being responded to, repeatedly marinading in experiences of safeness and warmth and in that way, early relational templates are gradually being rewired.
A resonant image can be like a magic wand, dispelling the fog of our suffering, even if only temporarily, but for long enough to lay some different brain pathways. Likewise, remembering words of wisdom from teachers, recalling their presence, or actually seeking out the presence of some guides, therapists, or supportive groups all give access to “co-regulation” of our nervous systems. We are not separate selves who must manufacture belovedness from within; we are relational beings who come to know ourselves as beloved through being held in webs of connection. And whatever positive realignment with our inherent goodness we experience will affect those we come into contact with.
The understanding of radical acceptance needs to be refreshed periodically, re-radicalized, you might say, as there is a tendency of the managing parts of the psyche to subsume anything into a limited understanding of control and safety. This includes bowing to the fact that we are wired to do this, and that we are likely to lose faith in our intrinsic belovedness from time to time. My uneasiness with Carver’s poem lies in the fact that he doesn’t acknowledge this—so it will probably stay tucked away in my folder. But poetry is strange this way . . . maybe it will speak to me differently in a while? My experience over time has given me faith that periods of disconnection from belovedness are not wasted, they are being transformed into something sweet and nourishing. There is a poem by Antonio Machado that captures this beautifully:
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvellous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures. (All Poetry)
References
Brian Kolodiejchuk, ed. 2007. Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta.” New York: Doubleday Religion.
See more
Graveside poetry & pie: Late Fragment by Raymond Carver (Expedition Press)
Last Night As I Was Sleeping (All Poetry)
Related features from BDG
Dharma in Transition: A Buddhist Call for Trans Liberation
What You Think, You Become …
You’re Not Not: Delighting in the Joy of Being by Opening to Existential Gratitude
A Small and Precious Miracle
Practicing Perfection in Art, Buddhism, and Life
The Most Awkward Question to Ask a Bereaved Person
