When I was eight or nine years old, I remember standing in my bedroom. The walls were painted sky blue, and the curtains were white as clouds. I could hear the creek from my open window. It was at that moment I realized all those I loved would one day die.
I stood in bright panic, weeping. I called for my mother. She came, she hugged me, and she told me something so soothing, so simple, that I didn’t fear death again until I was 18 and it had taken my brother.
Over the last few days, I felt petrified. I am in love. And one day, my love will die.
Insight Dialogue is a practice of companioned meditation. People sit in silence together, and then sit in pairs or groups and offer each other the only gift we can: presence.
I spent this week at an Insight Dialogue retreat—I had no idea what I was getting into. I’d only heard in passing that the teacher was good. I even thought it was a day shorter than it was, that’s how quickly I skimmed the description.
At first, I found the depth of connection in the practice to be too much.
“It’s funny to me,” I wrote in my journal after the first day, “how hard this is, considering how publically I’ll eviscerate myself in writing, or monologue any gripping trauma of mine to a stranger.”
Insight Dialogue is different. The attuned presence of another person makes it wholly safe. Which, to me, makes it feel incredibly unsafe. When I’m fully present with myself, listening deeply, and speaking the truth, I’m in a prime zone for discovery. I don’t typically let readers or listeners go to new places with me; I forge ahead first, then circle back to bring folks along.
Every retreat I take allows things to arise that I never anticipate. Where this week I expected some inner guidance about my career path, instead I got rather harrowing contemplations on death, self-righteousness, and forgiveness.
I’ve been reading a book, “The Five Invitations,” by Frank Ostaseski. He’s the co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project, and has brought Buddhism and meditation into the world of dying and palliative care. In the introduction alone, this truth was bared:
“I am reminded that death, like love, is intimate, and that intimacy is the condition of the deepest learning.”
In nondualism, it’s easy to see that of course there is loss wherever there is love. They are two inextricable sides of the same coin, two halves of the same globe. And of course, now, in partnership with one of the most incredible people I have ever met, comes new fear of loss.
On the first night of the retreat, I lay awake in fear. Some deadly circumstance could snatch him in an instant. Worry ran into the room of my brain at random, arms flailing and mouth agape in a noiseless scream.
“I’m afraid of his death more than I am my own,” I wrote that night. “And to imagine a child born of that love? I’d be more afraid of their death than of the end of the world.”
To lose a partner, to lose a child. I could never feign to understand what that pain is. I pray that I’m spared, that my losses so far have been enough. But death keeps coming.
“Losing a child is most people’s worst nightmare,” Ostaseski writes. “I couldn’t endure it. I couldn’t bear it, you may think. But the hard truth is, terrible things happen in life that we can’t control, and somehow we do bear them. We bear witness to them. When we do so with the fullness of our bodies, minds, and hearts, often a loving action emerges.”
In a meditation duo the next morning, I explored my fear. I explored how I present as accepting or even wise when writing about death—at least, I have my head around things enough to put words to it. But how, really, I was experiencing terror. No acceptance at all to death.
The guidelines of Insight Dialogue are Pause, Relax, Open, Attune to Emergence, Listen Deeply, Speak the Truth.
One of the instructors translated the guideline of “Relax” as “Befriend.” It helped me conceptualize, allowing the fear present in my body to just be. I described to my meditation companion the feeling of fear as a deep gouge across my chest. This person sitting across from me didn’t know my story, he couldn’t speak or ask for it. He didn’t know about my losses, didn’t know about my love. I was left only with his steady gaze and the task of “Befriending” my own searing wound.
I imagined a dear friend before me. I imagined her telling me that she hurt this way and why. If it were her, I’d embrace her. I’d hold her and just say, “Oh, honey, of course you’re afraid!” I’d love her and hold her and cry with her.
Of course, after such shattering losses, you’re afraid that this new, deepest love will shatter you again.
I imagined holding my friend, allowing her pain. I imagined my mother holding me, allowing my own. Really, it was all me, allowing my pain to be.
The gouge didn’t disappear but, like an infection abating, the stiff, hot area around it cooled and relaxed. I still felt pain, but the suffering had abated somewhat.
“Attachment masquerades as love,” Ostaseski writes. “It looks and smells like love, but it’s a cheap imitation. You can feel how attachment grasps and is driven by need and fear.”
Over the course of the week, I fumbled through, feeling out what was my love and what was attachment. In another meditation session, tears rolled silently down my cheeks as I shared with someone about the love and fear I feel for my partner. My listener kindly repeated back to me what he heard me say, the look on my face and the tone of my voice as I said it.
It took days of meditating, reading, feeling, writing, and sharing. But I touched on the truth again. When I dwell on my love, there is no fear of my partner’s death. There is no fear for my own. A deeper self knows that the goodness within us lives on and on, that there is no taking my love, only transmuting it.
The love I felt for my brother, for my mother, the love that we shared—its’ not gone anywhere. It lives on, it proliferates. Love expands, it is never diluted or discarded. Death does feel like it disrupts love, it has been the deepest hurt of my life so far, but no transformation is painless.
“Love is selfless; attachment is self-centered,” Ostaseski continues. “Love is freeing; attachment is possessive. When we love, we relax, we don’t hold on so tightly, and we naturally let go more easily.”
If I think of all my expectations of my partner—my hope for a life together, companionship, maybe even children—then his death would seem like the greatest betrayal. A halting disruption to my best-laid plans of lifelong happiness. But that is not my love. My love is limitless.
In having me as her child, in bringing life into the world, my mother knew that I would not get out unscathed. Even though she feared for her children’s lives more than the end of the world, she knew we would taste suffering. She knew, looking at my infant face, that my life would be marked with pain. It’s unavoidable.
In a place of love, I thank her. Not only for the beginning of my physical life but for the beginning of my authentic life. “Awareness is the great gift of death,” Ostaseski says in his introduction. “For many people, authentic life starts at the time of death—not our own death, but someone else’s.”
My life as a woman began with her death. I don’t know if I’d be capable of wielding the depth of love that I do without the losses I have felt. And I will never let a fear of loss keep me from loving as fully and authentically as I can.
I don’t remember what my mother said to me, on that sunny day in childhood, to assuage my preemptive grief of the world. But I’d like to imagine it held truth in it: That, although death is inevitable, love is eternal.
Thank you for reading Internal Alchemy. If you’re interested in Insight Dialogue, explore the community of practice here! There are online and in-person options around the world. And if you happen to live in the NC Triangle area, one of my teachers Phyllis Hicks guides ID regularly and the Triangle Insight Meditation sangha seems one to behold.
As always, thank you for your presence and your readership. I’m honored to share with you.