Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.
Rumi
Last summer I was part of a group of people who engaged in a 6 day retreat, focused on healing and awakening. We were bringing together practices from the shamanic and the nondual traditions. A beautiful young woman named Heather was one of our facilitators. One of her most powerful offerings to all of us was something that she communicated with great energy and clarity: “When you need help, just call out to me, and I’ll be there.”
Because of her experience working in this field, she knew that it is not so easy to actually reach out in this way. To call out for what we need is not something that most human beings have learned to do. A good deal of our training, both explicit and implicit, has taught us just the opposite: to appear strong, independent, self-contained--and to carry on struggling by ourselves.
I felt this too, every time I heard Heather make this offer. I know the pressure of this conditioning from my own adult life, from my early life with my family, and from a lifetime of working with people. So I was wondering how we were actually going to do what Heather was inviting us to do. To actually embody this capacity to reach out and ask for help.
Then Heather came up with a brilliant idea, just before an evening in which we would be participating in some rigorous practices, all night long. “Just try it,” she said, “just call out and ask for help, even if you think you don’t need it. Practice doing this now, so that you’ll know how, when you really do need help.”
I remember something swinging open inside me, when I heard her say these words. She had somehow made it easy for me-I realized that I would be able to do it. I felt joy about this, and a deep sense of relief.
Later on that evening, I found myself in a difficult place. I noticed the tendency to withdraw into myself, to pull back, to isolate. To sit there and wait until I was desperate. And so I just called out, across the room, “Heather, are you there? I need your help.”
What I noticed, in the moment of calling out, was something extraordinary. That I was totally empowered, even before Heather came. And I also noticed that I was blessing the whole field of our consciousness, by making that clear and lucid request. This was confirmed to me later on, when many people in the room spoke about what happened to them when they heard me call out to Heather.
Of course, once we call out for help, we have to know how to receive the help that comes. Because it’s usually not what we are expecting or hoping for. Real help does not collude with the helpless child within us. Real help does not feel sorry for us. Real help awakens our inner capacities- our clarity, our patience, our humility, our wisdom.
But we can only learn how to receive help after we have learned how to ask for it. The mind thinks that reaching out like this is a terrible risk. That it leaves us helpless, and vulnerable. Kind of like hanging off the edge of a cliff, blowing in the wind.
What I experienced that night was just the opposite. So much of life is like this. We are living our lives upside down. When I called out to Heather I felt supported, before the help even appeared. How could this be? How can we make sense of this?
What the truth of this actually does is puncture many of the ideas and beliefs we have about the nature of life. I went through a period in my coaching work where I was astonished to see the help and support that showed up for people, when they really asked for it, when they were ready to receive. The support flowed into their lives in ways that were unpredictable, challenging, unnerving, and full of blessings and goodness. I witnessed this again and again.
Before that point, there is often a lot of suffering. This suffering can take the form of denial, what I often call false independence: ”I don’t really need help. I’m going to do this on my own.” Or it can take the form of despair, anger and bitterness, the belief that I am a victim and there is no help for me. When I fall into false dependence, I believe that I cannot really learn to stand on my own two feet.
These two extremes, and all the variations of each one, are all we’ve known for a long time. We’ve done the best we could with them. And there is another way. The other way is about discovering how to live from the ground of interdependence, InterBeing, as Thich Nath Hanh calls it. In this field, I don’t even exist as the solid, separate self i imagine myself to be.
In this field, asking for help can be like a prayer. Or it can be like an inquiry, a question that lives in my heart, a question that carries me into a real, living investigation. When I bring my whole being into this kind of investigation, the support that shows up, in both the visible and invisible worlds, is beyond anything I could have imagined.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
Rumi
A Happy New Year to all of you.
2012 at last!
love
Shayla
