“Can the mind heal the body? How are the brain, immune system, and emotions interconnected? What emotions are associated with enhanced well-being? How does mindfulness function in a medical context? Is there a biological foundation for ethics? How can death help us understand the nature of the mind?”

In the summer of 1991, ten well-known scientists, psychologists, meditation teachers and other scholars came together with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala India “to grapple with these questions.” This book is a record of conversations that took place during this event—the Third Mind and Life Conference.

There are some, of course, who may say that the effort to understand reality through a dialogue between religion and science is misguided at best. But even if this were the case, Buddhism is not a religion in the ordinary sense of the term. One need not “believe in” the Buddha to practice Buddhism. For our beliefs, like our other attachments, are often what keep us from opening to reality, the miraculous emptiness that underlies the fundamental interdependence of all life.

What is unusual about Healing Emotions is the way in which it explores this “interdependence” through a continual questioning that expands our view of the world and explores relationships between things that we thought were unrelated. This should come as no surprise, however, since in the introduction we are told that “Buddhism has as principal aims the goal of transforming perception and experience and synchronizing mind and body.”

Healing Emotions explores the relationships between such subjects as cellular biology, stress, emotions, moods, headaches, immunology, visceral learning, self-esteem, virtue and morality, greed, mindfulness, death, self-acceptance, responsibility, consciousness, compassion, and much else. This thought-provoking book is a testament not only to the Dalai Lama’s far-reaching search for ways to better understand the many challenges facing us today, but also to his underlying “affection” for other human beings and their ideas and experiences.

“I believe that human affection is the basis … of human nature,” says the Dalai Lama. “Without that, you can’t get satisfaction or happiness as an individual; and without that foundation, the whole human community can’t get satisfaction either. In my day-to-day thinking, I always take into account the total environment, the whole community.”

Whether or not one believes that “affection” is the basis of human nature, it is becoming increasingly clear that the growing lack of genuine affection in modern life, of loving kindness toward oneself and others, is closely related to our lack of awareness of the “total environment.” And without this sense of the total environment—and the urgent sense of conscience that comes with it—any real transformation is next to impossible.

Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health

A crown and sceptre, the symbol of the power of a king, from Wikipedia

Human Skull, from Wikipedia

“How can I help you, great King?” the master asked as he bowed low to the floor.

“I am going to ask you the most important question I have ever asked, and I expect an honest answer,” the King replied.

“My answers are always honest, even at the cost of my life,” the Master replied. “What is your question?”

“I know that I am going to die soon. I want to know what will happen to me after death,” the King said in a trembling voice. “Will I continue on in some way?”

“I don’t know,” the Master replied simply.

“You don’t know?” The King was astonished, almost angry. “How can that be? You are a Master of Wisdom, are you not?”

“Yes, great King. But not a dead one,” the Master replied.

My retelling of one of my favorite wisdom stories.

News of the Universe, by Robert Bly

Sometimes I go about pitying myself,
and all the time
I am being carried on great winds across the sky.–Ojbiway

Containing 150 poems from many eras, News of the Universe, first published in 1980 and one of my most illuminating companions for more than 25 years, represents what could perhaps be called the poetry of the soul, of real feeling. The anthology brings us new, more honest feeling-perceptions of ourselves and the universe. We commune with some of the world’s great poets, including Pope, Yeats, Frost, Baudelaire, Lawrence, Stevens, Rumi, Kabir, Jeffers, Rexroth, Snyder, and many others.

Each of us will find in this volume poems that can not only help expose the rigid structure of ideas and attitudes about ourselves and the world that shape and even imprison our consciousness of the inner and outer world, a consciousness that is constantly constricted by the needs and demands of our self-image, but can also help open us to new ways of seeing, feeling, and sensing the world as it is.

Are we at all interested in seeing things as they actually are, or must we see everything in relation to our own lives? The poet reminds us:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment
on my life.–David Ignatow

Robert Bly: photo from Wikipedia

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings that no one touches, and the
source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:
Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.–Kabir

We are all “hungry,” says Bly, for consciousness. And so he has given us a gift of poetry that we can return to again and again for new insights into what it means to be a conscious human being, a book that can help us return to the actual feeling and sensation of the “good and beautiful,” which were so important for Socrates and Plato, and for which we are all searching, whether consciously or unconsciously.

One of the many crucial themes one finds in this volume is the realization of our ultimate death and the death of everyone we know, a realization that few of us allow into our awareness in our daily lives, but which can be tasted in moments of meditation, stillness, and silence.

There is a stillness
On the tops of the hills.
In the tree tops
You feel
Hardly a breath of air.
The small birds fall silent in the trees.
Simply wait: soon
You too will be silent.–Goethe

Bly writes: “this poem contains an experience many people have had: each time a human being’s desire-energy leaves his body, and goes out into the hills or forest, the desire-energy whispers to the ears as it leaves ‘You know, one day you will die.’ I think both men and women need this whisper; it helps the human to come down, to be on the ground. When that whisper comes, it means that the tree-consciousness, the one in the wooded hill, and the one in man, have spoken to each other. …”

The poet reminds us, however, that to come down to the ground is simultaneously to be lifted upward toward the heavens:

Earth hard to my heels bear me up like a child standing on its mother’s belly. I am a surprised guest to the air.–Ignatow

In being a “surprised guest to the air” we begin to reclaim our humanity, a growing sense of the wonder and mystery of being, and begin to live with a real question: “Who am I?”.

All the poems in this magical volume are enlivened by that fundamental question, but none for me so beautifully as this one:

I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I will never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years.
And I still don’t know if I am a falcon,
Or a storm, or a great song.–Rainer Maria Rilke

News of the Universe is a book that I recommend to anyone who wishes not just to think in a new way about the mystery of being but also to sense and feel it directly.

Copyright 2009 by Dennis Lewis. This review, slightly edited, was first published in the January 2009 issue of The Journal of Harmonious Awakening.

Photo of Robert Bly from Wikipedia: June 2004 at the Great Mother – New Father Conference in Maine. Photo by Fred L Stephens of Oak Ridge, TN

Free Your Breath, Free Your Life--Esalen 2009

Ella's Last Day

Out-breath, letting go into the silent spaciousness that is what we really are; in-breath, being filled with the energies and forms of life. I am still here and the mystery is still alive as changes take place in and around me.

Ella in 2008

In spite of her fast-deteriorating condition, she still plays with us when she has the energy, goes on walks with us (albeit it at a very slow pace), wags her tail profusely when friends come over, helps Dasha welcome and heal her acupuncture clients, and reminds us always of the power and mystery of unconditional love.

Ella simply waiting in openness

Guided by observation, intuition, and the advice of her doctor (with whom she is very comfortable), we will take her to the clinic on Friday, April 24th at 4 PM to finally relieve her suffering. Benoit, who loves her very much, will fly in from Boston to be with her during her final moments on this earth.

As I write this, I am in tears—not only from the stark fact of her impending death (of course, we and everyone we know are going to die) but also from the happiness and joy that she has brought us and all those she has met for almost 14 years. Her wagging tail always felt (and feels) to me like a great smile from being itself, a reminder of the awakening power of unconditional love.

Ella, thank you for the tremendous gift of your being! Though you will never read this, I know that you feel what is in my heart.