It is a big wordless kind of tired that follows my Monday afternoon volunteer shift with the Zen Hospice Project at Laguna Honda Hospital.  An emptiness that feels full.  It has been a month and  half since my first shift.  The residents, their families, and the other volunteers are seeping into my general awareness, staying with me throughout the week like characters in a novel that I can’t put down.

We were invited with one of the five precepts that were integral to our hospice training to bring our whole self to the bedside.  This means putting aside roles and ideas about who or how we think we should be, and allowing ourselves to show up in that alchemical way that is more than the sum of our parts.  The experience of serving residents and their families during the dying process becomes a dense matrix of manifold dimensions with each passing week.  The softening, sensitizing, letting go, grief, pain, surrender, willingness, trust, sadness – the complexity of who we are in any given moment is remarkable.  And, it is constantly shifting.  It is so easy to get attached to ideas about how we think things are supposed to be, who we are supposed to be, and who others are supposed to be.

Last week on a gorgeous sunny morning, I sat outside of a cafe on Lake Shore while the day ratcheted towards productivity.  Commuters, construction, and deliveries, lots of noise and slow-going traffic.  There was a man with a mechanized hand-truck and a palette of fifty sacks of flour, at fifty pounds each, destined for the cafe I was seated at.  Due to the construction, his usual way of zipping in and out of the cafe to make his delivery was obstructed.  He had to come up with a Plan B.  He was visibly unhappy about this change in plans.  The solution was to place an empty palette on the level of the cafe, maneuver the hand-truck as close to the curb as possible at the street level (through the construction, morning commuters, dogs, bicyclists, etc.), unload the carefully constructed piles of flour sacks from the street-level palette and manually reload them to the empty palette.  This took more time than he had planned, and it was not how the day was supposed to go.

Regardless of the steps to get from A to B, the job(s) ahead of him for the day involved delivering baking supplies to various establishments.  That much he knew when he showed up for work that day.  He had a body to do the work, a mechanized hand-truck to minimize the manual labor, a brain to problem solve, and a blue sky day.  I watched as he let this situation completely cloud the forecast for the rest of the day and thought about how often I do this same exact thing to myself, from the micro to the macro level.

The weekly immersion into gratitude afforded by volunteering with ZHP stirs all kinds of feelings, thoughts, and emotions.  The words from a yoga class last fall scroll through my head regularly, as follows, ‘this body, this breath, this moment, this life – may we never take them for granted.’  It is an embodied awareness to realize that grief is the other side of gratitude.

The precept of bringing my whole self to the bedside, like many other of the teachings stemming from this experience, is spilling over into the rest of my life.  Writing down the precepts before giving a presentation at a conference a few weeks ago, along with doing some breathing exercises, helped me to get back into my body instead of staying in the disconnected, freaked-out spasm of worry and performance anxiety in my brain.  It was a revelation to bring these skill sets into a completely other setting, and rewarding to boot.  It was the most fun I have had yet giving a presentation!

**

It is the season of graduation.  Before departing for the aforementioned conference a few weeks ago, I attended one of my favorite yoga classes on a Saturday morning with David Moreno in Oakland.  He read excerpts from a commencement speech Anne Lamott had given at U.C. Berkeley in 2003.  I highly recommend reading the speech.  It is full of humor, insight, and invitations, such as,

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”

At the end of the class, feeling integrated, embodied and ready for a shower, savoring the last seconds of shavasana, David declared that we were graduated and he read the final paragraphs of Anne Lamott’s speech, as follows:

“You’ve graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it’s a fool’s game. If you agree to play, you’ve already lost. It’s Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And — oh my God — I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you’ll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you’ve just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without your pants getting in on the act, too.

“So bless you. You’ve done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you are capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It’s what you are made of. And it’s what you’re for. So take care of yourselves; take care of each other. ”

**

Last Tuesday, a beaten-up padded envelope from the Gift of Life was on my welcome mat when I arrived home from my first all-volunteer meeting with the community that serves the Zen Hospice Project.  Our discussion was based around the question of what do we do with what we know about those we serve.  It was a layered conversation that functioned more like a koan than a pursuit of the right answer.  It is amazing how conditioned we are to think there is a right answer.

The envelope contained a commemorative Gift of Life Donor lapel pin and a thank you card from the director of donor services.  On the morning of May 14, the call came informing me that the recipient of my bone marrow had survived, was disease free and did not require a re-transplant.  Carrying this information with me into my second shift as a hospice volunteer was magical.  This news was so life-affirming and miraculous it had the affect of sweeping away anything that felt remotely like doubt.  Of course these states of mind don’t stay.  I am starting to believe, however, that with some assistance and discipline, gentleness and compassion, these more positive states of mind linger for longer periods of time, nudging the critic, the cynic, and the jury aside.

**

During our hospice training, the volunteer coordinators and facilitators  encouraged us to take a 6th hour after our shift to acclimate, to be gentle with ourselves before re-entering the fray.  Prone to date-stacking, it is unlike me to keep blocks of time open on my social calendar.   This experience is so entire in how it takes me that I don’t have a choice.

There is no right answer.  Bring your whole self to the edge of your experience.  Take care of yourself, and each other.

Namaste