Parenthood as a Teacher of Nonduality

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

Doesn't make any sense.

-Rumi

In the world of spiritual nonduality, we often hear about the ultimate and the relative. The ultimate being the final answer, the world where all is well beyond the illusion of human limitation. The relative is this human experience, where there is duality - right and wrong, good and bad. Where there is so much to be lost. Another way to say it is, the ultimate is the true nature of things and the relative is how things appear. 

I cannot think of a time in one’s life where these two dualities stand out more than being a parent. When my first child was born, I felt the urgency to understand the true nature of things. Time was precious. I couldn’t think of a better gift to bestow upon my child than for me, myself, to understand the truth of things. In return, maybe he could as well. I reached a point shortly after the birth of my second child while working with a gifted therapist and spiritual teacher where I experienced “no mind” as described by the Buddhist experience of emptiness. Other traditions may describe this as the Ground of Being or the Godhead. What a freedom this was. Freedom from the torture of a mind riddled with fear, constant thought, and worries of this human life. 

However, being a parent grounds you to the earth in a way that nothing else can. The relative of this world matters so deeply. We care that our children are mentally and physically well no matter how much we trust in a divine process where nothing can be lost. To be a human parent is to give our last breath to protect our children, and there is no spiritual practice that I want to take part in that would exempt me from this beautiful aspect of humanity. 

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself farther and farther from this place of “no mind”. The pandemic and social unrest of 2020, homeschooling, you name it. My body, my children, and my life have asked something different of me. They’ve asked me to heal my nervous system, to learn healthy relating, to understand my emotions, and to make the world a more just place. Through deeply engaging in this world I’ve developed the common worries that so many of us parents have now: screens, gun violence, processed foods, bombs dropping. And the stress is showing up in my body.

I reached a point recently where I recognized that my level of internal distress was actually more intense than it has to be and I remembered that there is another way. A way I have touched many times before. I was reminded of the gift of surrender. A place where I don’t have to know answers and where not knowing is sacred and valued. Wendell Berry’s poem, “Our Real Work”, comes to mind: 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think we have to choose between this place of ultimate peace and relative existence. I think the art of the spiritual journey is to merge these two - the relative and the ultimate. The knowing and the not knowing. Being firmly grounded in this world while simultaneously watching the divine spark woven through every ounce of existence. Trusting that in the seeming chaos is an order that our minds cannot see. 

Through being a mother, I get to see how deeply precious this life is. How much there truly is to lose. How as parents we cannot and would not go live in a cave in the Himalayas, though a yearlong retreat sounds pretty restorative. That despite seeing the suffering in this world of relative experience and knowing that through meditation we can go to places where there is no suffering that we would never choose to stay there. 

I think the work of this human journey is showing up and living this life in all its pain and glory, knowing that the deepest of love would not be possible if we did not engage in this humanness. That we would be cutting ourselves off from an essential part of why we are here on Earth. These gifts from the realm of the relative - the emotional and physical pains and pleasures of life - they are the seers. The wise ones. They are the ones who bring us to the place of surrender - to the Timeless Now. Paradoxically, life itself is the very vehicle for dwelling in the Ground of Being. 

Our children can be these vehicles for us, if we let them. They are our teachers of nonduality. They bring us to the brink of insanity while allowing us to touch into a love and a mystery that can only be described as transcendent. Allowing this paradox is the work. It is the art of the spiritual practitioner. I would choose worry and exhaustion and injured nipples. Stretch marks and stress blisters and chaos all for a chance to see the Timeless Now show up in my four year old with the very biggest of emotions who daily brings me to a place of not knowing. To surrender. To emptiness. To the Godhead. 

Impermanence

When my first child was 6 months old I remember walking in our neighborhood with him on my chest on a late August afternoon. The low sun spilled a golden glow onto everything it touched. In Durham, North Carolina we were experiencing a respite from the unbearable heat. With the shift in temperature, I sensed a changing - of the seasons and of my baby. With that recognition, came a gripping anxiety and desperate attempt to hold onto summer and to the fleeting moments of my child’s infancy. My baby was growing up and there was nothing I could do to stop it. No amount of the efforting or perfecting or mental scrapbooking that I would try over the next couple of years would allow me to escape the unavoidable loss bestowed onto us all. 

On the surface, I was experiencing the bittersweet growing up of my child, but on a deeper level I knew that the turning of 12 weeks to six months and soon to be a year represented something much more profound. The turning of winter, to spring, to summer, to fall had never paralleled my own experience so closely. I felt within my nervous system the knowledge that everything changes and that the people and circumstances I hold dear will change, too. 

For 30 year old me, I was unknowingly facing the dread that many of us do at one point in our lives or another: that there will come a day when there is seemingly no more. On the surface I was a mother with a healthy growing baby. But under that was the truth of our mortality. That with our death, comes our end. That was my story. Teachers like Byron Katie implore us to ask, “But is it true?” It became important for me to ask: “Is impermanence a matter of a final ending or rather of a continual changing?”

After much suffering and developing skills in mindfulness, I eventually developed the skill of savoring and holding experiences lightly. Experiencing the joy of the moments in my body and soul and allowing them to leave when they would. Experiencing painful experiences and knowing they wouldn’t last either. I knew that each moment would leave and make room for a new one. Weirdly enough, there can be a kind of predictability and comfort in knowing that life isn’t certain or stationary.  We can eventually learn to rest in the nature of change. 

What gave me the trust to do this though, the letting go? Well, for starters, l learned that gripping onto experiences or people simply doesn’t work.  It only amplified the pain of them leaving and created a living hell for me. Mindfulness taught me that everything changes and that I can observe these changes from the seat of a witness. I also developed the skill of self compassion, saying things like, “Of course you want this to stay, this is important to to you.”. And while I’ve grown so much, this fear does still sneak up on me from time to time. 

Nature provides us with a clear picture of this changing but not ending. A seed grows into a flower. The flower dries and stops producing. It drops its seeds. The flower decays and enriches the surrounding soil to create nutrients for the seed to grow. The seed grows into a new flower. Did the flower cease to be or did it change form? Looking at clouds: A cloud turns to rain. The rain flows into rivers and the ocean. Animals drink the water and eliminate it. The earth takes it back and then the sky, evaporating back and becoming a cloud. A kind of naturalist’s resurrection. 

In his last sermon that is titled, All Good Things Do Not Come to an End, my grandfather, Bob McClernon, wrote the following:

“Once upon a time, when I was young, I knew a secret holy place in the deepest woods, the heart of the forest still unprofaned. It was a sanctuary for a reality in which fairies danced when the moon was full, birds and rabbits spoke, and a great stillness created a palpable oneness and covered it all with a mantle of peace. There were towering oaks and friendly sassafras and fern and mayapple and other plants of various kinds. For ages of autumns, the trees had dropped their leaves and flowers and other plants ceased their growing and died. Even though I was young, I felt a touch of melancholy of the mortality of living things - but more than melancholy, infinitely more. For I saw, as I believe little children do, that the good fruit of a spring rain and summer sun did not, and would not, utterly cease to be. That good lives on in a soil enriched continually by the dying, but not the total death, of everything that had been.”

Everything changing became a fact of life for me and provided me with a framework of how to relate to my experiences. I knew that holding onto experiences caused suffering as did resisting them. This knowledge wasn’t enough though. I had a felt sense of a timelessness that was impervious to the passing experiences of the temporal world. Jack Kornfield says that “along with our physical birth is the mysterious quality of consciousness not yet understood by modern science but is most directly defined as the knowing capacity. Consciousness is the clear, pure, transparent, lucid quality that knows touch, thoughts, and feelings. But it's more like a mirror that reflects all things, knowing experience but not limited by them.” To get to know this spaciousness, you may notice what has stayed unchanged in you throughout your life. Your age has changed, your appearance has changed, your health status changed, other circumstances have changed and yet, throughout your life, there has been a thread through each experience and through each year that has stayed the same. This is why you might hear someone in their 80s say they feel like a child inside. 

We can count on change and we can find stability in the truth of instability. And when necessary, we can deeply grieve the utter heartbreak that comes along with this changing human life. Pema Chödrön says that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” My minister, Dorisanne Cooper, once described this process of one truth giving way to an even larger one as an opening door. Yes, there is change, and on the other side of that opening door is a second truth. A quiet and mysterious one.  

Getting to know this place of the unchanged, the witness, the hub of a wheel of changing experiences, is a freedom that is not conditioned by any state. 

I look at my child now. He is almost 7. He is tall and wise and loves baseball. He has changed. I can only recall certain details of what he was like as a baby unless I look at photos. And yet - he is the same. We are the same. The passing of bonding with my baby has made room for bonding with my big boy - for biking, swimming, and dancing. 

Today, the September sun is golden and casting a low glow over this first day of Autumn. Its setting is making way for a new day, for a new season. The leaves are turning color. They will soon fall and the trees will appear barren. The deciduous trees will look as if their end has come. But under the leaf litter is an opening door. A mysterious and paradoxical world of roots and microorganisms that hold it all together through the changing seasons.