The first time I met the Dalai Lama at 23, I had anticipated looking into his eyes and seeing how beautiful he was. But when I looked in his eyes for the first time, and each subsequent time, I was utterly overwhelmed by how beautiful I AM. It literally knocked all the human babbling straight out of my mind and cracked my heart wide open. He offered a clear mirror with my own beauty reflected. I have met with many clear seeing eyes who do this. Children often do it. Nature does this. And occasionally we have loved ones who do it as well. I just spent an amazing week with my beautiful sister, beauty reflecting back and forth, exploding with joy, wonder and heart cracking splendor.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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