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Sliding into a New Year with Love

December 19, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

When I grew up Christmas Eve and the New Year were magical times because my German mother made it so. Real candles on the Christmas tree, shoes left at the doorstep (would St. Niklas fill it with candy or coal?), handmade wreaths, Linzer torte and pfeffernusse cookies, and of course, many rounds of Oh Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht. Perhaps my favorite joy was carefully opening up the tiny sparkled covered doors on the beautiful advent calendars sent to us by relatives, with cherubs, gnomes, forest animals, and baby Jesus in a manger in a snowy field. It didn’t have to make any sense. Make believe has its purpose. It was the anticipation that mattered. What little illustration would be uncovered? An acorn. A pretzel. A reindeer.

Inevitably, there was always a walk outside, a toboggan ride, or pond skating—no matter how cold. I look back now and see a wonderful blend of Nordic rituals, the winter solstice, and Christian traditions. It was a whole month of contemplation and celebration. Even when times were tough—which pretty much was every year—the festivities were laden with warmth, connection and hope for new beginnings.

The Germans like to say, “Einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!” And so I, too, wish you a good slide into the new year!

P.S. Kindness matters. Share how. Consider sharing my book with friends and family

Photo by Terry Matthews on Unsplash

Photo by Brigitta Schneiter on Unsplash

Courageous Conversations with Family

November 21, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

One of the things I appreciate about a mindfulness practice is simply the ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings. That it’s okay and that it is necessary.

I was faced with putting my mindfulness practice to the test the other evening. A local group called Courageous Conversations hosted a book talk at the high school with Debbie Irving, the author of Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race. I read the book earlier this year along with Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, as my own commitment to understanding racism in America.

The auditorium was mostly filled with white people and that was the point. Irving’s clear mission is to educate white people by sharing her own awakening. I’m grateful that local groups in my town are “ripping off the bandaid” so people can face a very dark and uncomfortable history around racial oppression and the systems that have been designed to instill the divides: government, education, banking, housing, urban planning and so on. There are many things we do not learn in our history books or social studies.

Who benefited from the GI bill?

Who was Rosa Parks really?

Do you know about Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma and what happened there?

The most poignant and perhaps ironic moment happened at the end of the talk when a woman, who is of Native American descent, stood up. With a quavering voice she said that she would appreciate if the author would also include her people in her discussions. How it’s very painful for her to continue to experience being invisible, even in well intentioned conversations about people of color. She implored,

Where is red?

The room fell silent.

The history of Native Americans in Massachusetts, where I live, is heartbreaking. The pilgrims stepped ashore here after all. This significant event in our history was followed by a genocide no one wants to admit. Several centuries later this woman stands up, forcing a brief reckoning for some of us. At that moment I had to call upon my compassion practice — for this brave woman and for everyone in that room who was bearing witness to the pain. But what’s next?

Tomorrow I will enjoy a wonderful day with family. I look forward to it. A thanksgiving meal is my all time favorite. Practices of gratitude warm my heart. There is so much to appreciate every single day. At this writing, some families don’t have homes to go back to as fires burn on the West coast.

As we gather there will be opportunities to acknowledge what’s happening right now in our own communities and in our nation, like racism. It’s about cultivating an expansive heart to hold the joys and sufferings. I was delighted when a mentor sent the following resources as if she knew I was writing this post. We need some instructions. This is not easy. But it’s essential. Let’s shine a light on our imperfect humanity and join hands for change.

Kindness is love in action.

Blessings to you,

Tara

Self-Kindness: Finding Refuge for Ourselves

October 10, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

When I grew up I learned a lot about being compassionate and giving to other people. My mother is German and came over after World War II at age 19 as a nanny. Eventually, she married an American guy (for worse rather than for better) and had two daughters. We really struggled when my parents split up. She began to sell Avon door-to-door to make ends meet. We were even on food stamps for a time. She either made our clothes or whipped up outfits from the local thrift shop. Few would ever have a clue about much we struggled. This led to a quiet kind of shame, an imposter syndrome. Still, we were always giving. If there was something that we didn’t need and somebody else could use it, we’d just gave it away. My mom’s cosmetic customers ended up with our hand-me-downs and toys for their children. It was quite the network of generosity.

Of course, kindness, self-sacrifice, and a reduce-reuse-recycle philosophy were very important values. But in our family it almost went to the extreme. When it came to giving for oneself, or even wanting or desiring anything, it was fraught with guilt and anxiety. Sometimes I became angry about it, too. It seemed somehow unfair and I threw fits of frustration.

I realized only later when I started learning about the science of compassion that I had found ways as a child to be caring towards myself. Often it was in the form of running away from home. This meant bee-lining through the backyard into the woods with my stuffed animal, named Rango, and my Raggedy Ann sleeping bag. I had many forts under pine trees and also up in the thick branches of a weeping beech situated on a rich neighbor’s estate. Mostly I’d find a favorite spot in a hidden thicket and lay down on the soft pine needles, looking up through the long arms of the trees, and just rest. I’d take in the sights and sounds and the smells; and it was really only when it got too dark that I would sneak back into the house and up into my room. (Of course, my mother knew I’d do that.)

Without knowing it, I was recruiting my own physiology for self-soothing. I engaged the “calm and connect” pathways in my body, also known as the parasympathetic nervous system. I also had some courage.

This past winter I “ran away” to my first meditation retreat. It was a 7-day silent retreat for women. There was snow everywhere and it was bleak. We were not supposed to write in journals or read books, and of course there was no speaking other than in the conduct of some shared chores. The rebel that I am, I cheated a little bit. At the last minute before I left home, I brought with me a very thin book of poetry by Mary Oliver, Swan, that someone had gifted my daughter for her 18th birthday. I thought, “I can sneak this in with me.”

One night just like a child, I took out a flashlight and began reading. One poem cut me to the core. It spoke to me as if from a long hibernation. I recalled that earlier time in my life when I found refuge in the woods and wept. The poem is called “Trees,”

Heaven knows how many
trees I climbed when my body
was still in the climbing way, how

many afternoons, especially
windy ones, I sat
perched on a limb that

rose and fell with every invisible
blow. Each tree was
a green ship in the wind-waves, every

branch a mast, every leafy height
a happiness that came without
even trying. I was that alive

and limber. Now I walk under them —
cool, beloved: the household
of such tall, kind sisters.
〜Mary Oliver

Such tall, kind sisters. We need to find our places of refuge. A safe place. A sense of feeling bolstered up. As a young girl I had to learn how to bring compassion to my own suffering. I did it without even knowing it and because of that I didn’t appreciate the essentiality of this kind of self-love. Instead, I felt guilty about being such an ornery, temperamental child, of which I was often reminded.

Self-compassion is a psychological resource that we need to repeat over and over again. It’s about being on your own side, like a true friend. Self-kindness is a source of inner strength. As the psychologist Rick Hanson teaches, we need to absorb these nurturing and beneficial experiences so they get turned into lasting changes in the neural structures of the brain. He refers to this resourcing as filling the “neural backpack” with the supplies needed for wellbeing and true happiness. Self-compassion is one of those survival skills to carry along the journey of life.

Speaking kind words

One way that we can cultivate self-compassion and add it to the neural backpack is to come up with kind words for yourself.

You can write down simple statements such as:

I am okay.
I’m taking a stand for myself.
I trust in myself.
I am enough.
Even though this feels hard, I will be kind to myself.

Or, refer to yourself in the third person or imagine a wise being, an angel or spiritual guide, speaking to you:

You rock.
You can do this.
Your true nature is love.

The only caveats are:

Be clear. Be authentic and true to your experience. Use a kind tone.

You can ask yourself what do I need to feel calm in my body? How can I bring kindfulness to this moment? The answers are typically universal human needs. For example:

Belonging
Connection
Encouragement
Love
Respect

You can also bring to mind times when your were really on your own side. Maybe it was through a hardship, failure, or loss; or you found yourself speaking up to someone who disappointed or hurt you. If this it too hard you can recall a time when you were encouraging or protective toward a loved one or friend. Direct that gentle attitude toward yourself.

Write down your phrases. Once you have one or two, try them on. Find a few minutes each day to quietly reflect on the statements. Repeat them aloud or in your mind and let them sink in. Call upon them when you find yourself in a challenging moment. You may use more traditional loving kindness phrases, too. These are phrases of wishing yourself well and including your being in the circle of humanity:

May I be safe and protected
May I be peaceful
May I live a ease and kindness
May I experience joy and purpose

Feel what it’s like to be committed to your own well-being, to being your own BFF. Let the feelings, thoughts and intentions of being a true friend to yourself sink in and becoming a part of you. And repeat.

Credits:

Photo by Savs on Unsplash

Photo by Raquel Smith on Unsplash

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

I shall not be moved

July 9, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

I shall not be moved.

On my wall hangs a signed copy of Dr. Maya Angelou’s poem Our Grandmothers. I bid on the 8×11” piece of paper at an auction at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art in 1993 when it was housed in an old fire station on Boylston Street. The ICA was raising funds for AIDS relief and research. I was a grad student living off loans and hardly in the position to bid on art. But the Angelou poem on linen resume paper got my attention. A voice inside me said, “Hold up your auction number already!” Meekly, raised my paddle. To my surprise I kept poking up my hand. Do I hear $10? Do I hear $15? In the end I paid $100 (and twice that for the frame).

She gathered her babies,

Their tears slick as oil on black faces,

Their young eyes canvassing mornings of madness.

Momma, is Master going to sell you

from us tomorrow?

The poem is placed above my framed doctorate degree. After 25 years both documents are faded and musty. Whatever they are worth today, emotional or otherwise, they remain symbolic. Maybe more so today as a daughter of an immigrant mother from post WWII West Germany. I am a first generation college graduate. My husband and I are now launching our girls into the world. Not without some reservation, I might add. They are young women living in rather strange times in the very land of opportunity to which my mother fled and my husband’s French Canadian ancestors settled to farm or work in textile mills. I find myself apologizing for the burdens their generation will bear in spite of amazing progress. It seems we are taking some steps back. But what’s a mother to do?

So I turn to wise elders. Every once in a while I stand before Our Grandmothers with my chin angled and eyes squinting. Angelou’s poem is strangely beautiful, fierce, heartbreaking yet hopeful. (You can read it in full.) The poem was inspired by an old spiritual turned into a protest song. I look up at Angelou’s words with a kind of reverence and also a basic incomprehension of the plight of slavery, of black women, and how history can’t help but repeat itself. Many images arise. The German holocaust. The Rwandan genocide. Syrian refugees. How dare I, however, relate to a poem about black women and generations of oppression. I will never pretend to know. Yet, a mother am I. Empathy, after all, enables us to imagine ourselves into the lives of others.

Yearning to Breath Free by Barry Blitt (c) The New Yorker July 2, 2018

As I watched the news about the children being separated from parents at the borderland, I am drawn to her poem again. In the haze of the summer heat, Angelou’s words mesmerize. Several stanzas scream out.

No angel stretched protecting wings

above the heads of her children,

fluttering and urging the winds of reason

into the confusions of their lives.

The sprouted like young weeds,

but she could not shield their growth

from the grinding blades of ignorance, nor

shape them into symbolic topiaries.

She sent them away,

underground, overland, in coaches and shoeless.

There was another line of text that moved me recently in a news story on the 4th of July: “Therese Patricia Okoumou, of Staten Island, was arrested after scaling the base of the statue and taking up temporary residence on Lady Liberty’s right foot.”

I clicked the news feed for more. Sure enough. Upon the grand topiary of New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, was a small human figure seated at the folds of her green copper cloak.

I shall not be moved.

Captivated, I watched the footage. Who was this person? Here was someone who embodied the spirit of many people today, like me, resisting the irrational policies of our nation but with much more nerve. That she would not be moved was a thrilling example of compassion in action.

Just days before, like many others, I had joined in yet another protest march, #FamiliesBelongTogether. Volunteers were handing out bottles of water. Local leaders gave speeches. Chants of “This is what democracy looks like!” could be heard in waves. I held my worn out sign from previous marches. I poked my arm up and down like an auction paddle. Be Kind, Be Brave. Dripping in sweat I lamented, Will this march make a damn difference? In the center of my poster board is image of a black girl under the title Women are Perfect. It was created by muralist Jessica Sabogal in partnership with Amplifier.org for the Women’s March in 2017. My husband had made easy-to-carry sign for me then. It seems to have multiple lives.

Will this march make a difference? The lament circled in my mind. Maybe it was the heat. It’s exhausting to bear witness to the creepy erosion of basic liberties, the seeds of fascism finding root. Moving along the crowds I found myself behind a young man waving his poster, History Teachers Against Repeating History. Another sign appeared in the far distance: And then the children.

and I shall not, I shall not be moved.

I hopped on a concrete wall looking at the crowds. Impressed yet not quite hopeful. Then a mother with her daughter asked to take a photo of my sign. “Do you know the child in your poster is Maya? That’s her name and she’s seven years old. She’s a friend of ours. Her name is Maya.” The mother was insistent. “Her name is Maya. Maya.” Thank you for telling me.

Women Are Perfect (c) 2017 Jessica Sabogal

Back home I looked up at Our Grandmothers and wondered if the child depicted in Sabogal’s protest poster was named after the poet. The mother at the march really wanted me to know the girl had a name. It matters. At a poetry reading given by late Dr. Angelou she implored us to love our ancestors for they named us and loved us before we were even born.

Children behind wired fences have names, too.

Like the woman at the foot of Lady Liberty. Therese Patricia Okoumou. She was asking us to care. She was showing us that when people go low, we can go high. Our grandmothers demand this of us.

The Divine upon my right

impels me to pull forever

at the latch of Freedom’s gate.

The Holy Spirit upon my left leads my

feet without ceasing into the camp of the

righteous and into the tents of the free.

I reconsidered my doubts. Every human has a name. Every step makes a difference. Every chant breaks the silence. Raising your hand up in protest matters. It’s what Dr. Maya Angelou called the nobleness of the human spirit. It’s what democracy looks like.

Lay aside your fears that I will be undone, for I shall not be moved.

Appreciation for Maya Angelou

Featured Image:
Luke Stackpoole

Love Thy Neighbor

June 24, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

I joke when I say I belong to the church of Mr. Fred Rogers. People close me know how much I admire the late great TV host and often send me quotes, vids or articles about him. So when my husband and I went to the local community theatre to see the new documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, it was as much about being a flock member of his media ministry as it was much needed relief from the recent weeks in our country. Images of children separated from their families and behind wired fences is nothing short of a battle cry for compassion, care and reason. Of course, children the world over are suffering in unconscionable ways. Somehow it hurts more when it’s closer to home and under our country’s watch.

We need you Mr. Rogers.

I was three years old when the first season of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood aired. I was five when I got a FAO Schwarz stuffed animal for Christmas, a spotted leopard named Rango. To me he was a kindred spirit to puppet Daniel Striped Tiger and he soaked up buckets of snot and tears. Decades later Rango was adopted by my youngest daughter, although not with the same passion I once held as a lifeline. Even one glance at the now floppy cub, who is relegated to a bookshelf, infuses me with a love so big that I grin with gratitude every time.

Fabulous reviews about this Rogers documentary abound and you will simply have to see it for yourself. It is a salve for our times. The subtitle is “A little kindness makes a world of difference.” We all know that’s true. It’s just harder to implement on a moment-to-moment basis as seems warranted now.

When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed. – Fred Rogers

Mr. Rogers didn’t creep me out like some say. I was the perfect age for his pace of teaching and doctrine of love. I needed calm and consistency in order to deal with big questions I could only feel rather than understand when my family was breaking apart. We might all benefit from slowing down enough to listen to our own hearts and hear our own breath.

Fred Rogers’ kindness was fierce and compelling, soft and hard, timeless and true. He respected children: their vulnerability, imagination, and curiosity. He believed that what mattered — an enduring empathy and respect for the human condition — in all its variations, was also “invisible to the eye.” This is the subtle caring that inhabits the spaces between and within each other. I imagine this belief was also a nod to the 1943 children’s book, The Little Prince, that also impressed me so:

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Mr. Rogers showed us that there is good in this world and we can be part of it: Love Thy Neighbor. Love Thy Self. His numerology was: 1-4-3.

I L-O-V-E Y-O-U.

This is heart work. We need his legacy and light to speak loud and clear. It’s up to us.

Your fellow lightworker,

Tara

More Matters in Kind

Child Refugee Crisis, UNICEF
How to Take Action, ELLE
Call my Congress, online tool
Tune into my recent interview on the benefits of kindness with Brenda Michaels and Rob Spears on ConsciousTalk Radio.

Finding the Awe in You

June 1, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

When I was 20 years old and in crisis, I climbed Mt. Kenya with a group of wayward young adults in an outdoor leadership program (that I saved up for by waiting tables and cleaning motel rooms one summer). Essentially, I had to get as far away from home and Africa seemed like a good enough distance.

The head guides, a young married couple, gave us some basic instructions and reprimanded those of us who snuck in toilet paper in backpacks. We hiked up slowly in order to acclimate yet quickly discerned the complainers in the bunch. Once at the top, we were randomly put into teams for the first venture of getting back down to basecamp and voted for who would lead each team. (Anyone with camping experience?)

It turned out I was on the losing team. We got very lost. We didn’t follow the map; we had boiling blisters from unbroken hiking boots; our bodies hurt; we froze at night and overheated during the day. Over two days we fought, cried and laughed. It was both painful and exhilarating. It seemed like I was in some kind of paradise conjured from my imagination, but it was real. Avatar had yet to be conceived and filmed. This was some secret spot on planet earth and I was a mere creature in it. I understood the true meaning of awe.

awe

Noun [aw]

an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful.

The other two teams, who quickly found their way down the straight dirt path in a half day, missed the beauty of the ravines, a surprise encounter with a baby elephant, the glorious flowers, bamboo thickets, the fragrance, and dappled light. It was one of the most formative and spiritual experiences in my life.

There are no straight lines if you want to grow your soul. It does help to have a guide and some basic tools, but more often than not the wise guide is inside of you. You are it.

There are no straight lines if you want to grow your soul.

Climbing that mountain may be a cliché for life or an overused metaphor. But that’s because it’s apt. I literally had to climb a 17K foot mountain to see the simple truth: I was ok after all. More than ok. I was stronger than I had believed.

We don’t have to go anywhere at all to discover this humbling truth. But sometimes we need to go great distances within ourselves to get perspective. And sometimes we have to begin all over again. And again.

That takes courage and patience.

It’s the same thing with self-compassion, a skill I practice and teach. Being kind to oneself can be unchartered territory at first. But with guidance, a spirit of adventure, and emerging faith and goodwill, self-compassion reveals the beauty that has been there all along, calluses and all.

Matters in Kind

Check out the Greater Good Science Center Awe Quiz. Awe is a relatively new area of study. Awe has been linked to kindness, humility, focus and better health.
Read Chapter 17, The Naturalness of Being, in my book The Kindness Cure.

Photo Credits:

Cagatay Orhan

Tim Foster

Kinder Workplaces? A Hard Sell (But Better for the Bottom Line)

May 22, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

Truth be told, kindness is a good prescription for a life well lived. Kind actions and a compassionate attitude bode well for both physical and mental health. And let’s face it: We might try to be kinder than we think we are — especially at work.

Why? For one, according the Global Happiness Policy Report 2018, the majority of people are miserable at their jobs even if they say they’re happy to have one. Two, we spend over 30% of our lives working. Might as well try to enjoy it, right? Third, when we behave in kind ways, the positivity that arises spreads to others. It’s just like that old 1970s bumper sticker: Kindness is contagious.

Yet, the topic of kindness can be a non-starter for most businesses and HR executives. Many organizations operate on the principles for survival, namely finding self-serving ways to get ahead and stay ahead. In spite of the billions spent in workplace wellness and leadership training, something isn’t sticking very well. It may be that we’ve been conditioned by entrenched beliefs that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. We don’t truly recognize that thriving, instead of surviving, is the key to success. Charles Darwin, after all, observed that we have a stronger instinct for caring and cooperation than for trampling over one another. It just didn’t make the headlines. Thriving means taking care of each other by focusing on wellbeing and cultivating resilience in our relationships — whether in family, at work, or in the greater community. After all that’s how the human species continues to survive.

We’ve just got things a bit mixed up in our heads.

For the skeptic out there, here’s a workplace study that was conducted at Coca Cola Iberia in Madrid, Spain. The researchers randomly assigned over 100 employees into three different groups and the employees weren’t aware of their assignment to the groups or the true purpose of the study. The employees were assigned to be Givers, Receivers, or be in a Control (people who don’t do anything).

The Givers practiced five acts of ordinary kindness a day from a specific list ideas of kind gestures (see below). This was not about flowers, balloons and cake. The Givers could choose when to do the kind acts, and for whom from a list of fellow employees assigned (unbeknownst to them) as Receivers. The Givers did this for four weeks. Examples of the kind activities included:

Bringing someone a beverage
Cheering up a coworker who seems to be having a bad day
Speaking up on the behalf of another
Emailing a thank you note

The people in the Receiver or Control groups were not asked to do anything at all during the course of the study. It was just work as usual for them. All three groups filled out surveys before and after and two months later.

Here’s what the researchers found: Givers and Receivers mutually benefited in well-being in both the short- and long-term. They showed improvements on weekly measures of feelings of competence and autonomy, for example, acting in alignment with core values. Receivers remained happier a full month after the study and Givers became less depressed and more satisfied with their lives and jobs. They also noticed the changes in workplace. Givers’ prosocial acts inspired others to act: Receivers paid their acts of kindness forward with 278% more prosocial behaviors than Controls. That’s right, just like that ‘ol bumper sticker said so. Surely, this is a prescription for happier workers and workplaces.

Why does this matter? The most common contributors to low job satisfaction and causes for absenteeism include but are not limited to: bullying and harassment, burnout, stress and low morale, stress of childcare and eldercare, depression, disengagement, illness, and not surprisingly, looking for another job. I will never forget when I was a psychology intern and was told to forge medical documentation that previous staff had failed to sign. An accreditation was at risk. I refused. My supervisor reprimanded me, “Don’t you know? Shit flows downhill.” I stood my ground and almost left the profession before I barely got started. Later I learned his wife had stage 4 cancer. He was desperate. But still.

Consider that kindness, a prosocial skill that needs to be practiced in order to grow, is about connecting with other people in genuine and transparent ways. Yes, most of us are caring and want the best for others. But life poses daily challenges and we can be easily distracted. So we have to put in the effort. All the co-opted leadership buzz words of today apply: compassion, grit, emotional intelligence, empathy, mindfulness and wisdom. Yet, practicing these skills at work is another matter entirely.

Moreover, there is a multiplier effect when you do try. Your kind and caring action and the corresponding upswell of positive emotions will spread, influencing at least three other people like a happy virus. It’s likely that each of those three people will positively influence others in their social circles. A little kind intention can go a long way. It’s not all that different from raising well adjusted kids, which of course, takes time. It requires courage, consistency, calm, and true connection — no matter the successes and failures along the way. That’s the caring advantage. It flows uphill. If we can’t model such genuine attention to the people we work with every day it will be hard to expect retention, innovation and longevity.

Survive or thrive. What would you rather do?

A version of this article originally appeared on the Whil blog: http://blog.whil.com/make-work-virtuous-viral.

My new book is “The Kindness Cure: How the Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World.” Drawing on research in psychology and neuroscience, this book will help teach you the benefits of practicing kindness from the inside out. Check it out today! https://www.taracousineau.com/book/

@taracousphd

Photo Credit:

Johnson Wang

Nathan Dumlao

Handprints in the Heart: A Reflection on Love and Loss

April 30, 2018 by Tara Cousineau Leave a Comment

It’s been a raw, rainy and cold spring in New England. An impatience for summer has taken hold as I feel vitamin D deprived. If anything, the slog of the last few months has been a time for quiet reflection.

I went on my first 7-day retreat of “noble silence” at the Insight Meditation Society in March. A week of nothing to do but meditate with 100 women, all strangers to me. No friends. No talking. No technology. No reading. No writing. No obligations.

My family and friends at home wondered: Was it amazing? That must have been so relaxing! How nice to get away for a whole week. As if I was napping and reading fashion magazines at a spa.

Not even close. It was a week of sitting in silence, walking in silence, sitting in silence, walking in silence, sitting in silence, walking in silence… in a snowbound building and in the most rural part of the state. It was so bleak that the warm glow of a sunset, like a cherry swirl popsicle, was a gift I didn’t know I desired until it appeared. A deep appreciation settled in.

But by the end of the week a sort of transformation took place—in part because of the contrast with what came after. The minute I left I was hit with a reality of life: the hustle and bustle, the noise, the demands for my attention, a work crisis. Perhaps most poignant were the looming changes ahead: My youngest was about to turn 18 and be off to a college far away. We had also decided to move out of our home after two decades. The proverbial emptying of the nest.

If anything, the week of silence helped me to be present with all the uncertainty, to be patient with discomfort, and to practice the deep work of befriending my own mind. This is not easy.

One evening at the retreat the master teacher, Christina Feldman, read one of my favorite poems, Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

Hearing the poem in the midst of such quietude was a comfort, like the tender hand of a grandmother resting on my shoulder. The young woman next to me began to weep and I wished I could have taken her hand in mine. We were alone, together. And yet the proximity, the felt sense of compassion, was enough for each of us to bear our own thoughts.

The opening lines of the poem linger with me as I clear out closets, discover remnants of child’s play, and make the donation rounds to Savers. Mostly achingly the words sear as I apply and reapply fresh coats of paint to the stair banisters, oily and stained by children’s hands. Covering up the proof of our lives.

The other day my college-bound child flounced on the couch in my home office. She looked up at the ceiling and noticed a dirty hand print. That’s yours, I told her. “No way.” Yes. You tried on a new white dress for a banquet and twirled on the coffee table feeling so pretty and proud. She didn’t believe that she could have reached that high as a kid. She hopped up and realized that indeed her 11-year old agile self might very well have done just that. One of her nicknames was Jumping Josie after all. We stared at the smudge for a long while.

…all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

We both knew. Same time next year all this would be but a memory. Childhood is like that. It has a shape, many shapes, and then it’s gone. Even the dirty hand print.