Dearest bodhi sangha,

In China, summer is over. Although the traditional season point 立秋 Lìqiū was on August 8, going back to school was the official end of summer for me as a child. Today is that day for all the children of China. As the buzz of the summer cicadas continues to undulate through the humid air, the days grow shorter, and in a few short weeks, night will be longer than day.

Traditional Chinese Medicine prescribes that in autumn, our energy should begin to transition from outward action towards inward contemplation. But in today’s environment of constant stimulation, pervasive distraction and perpetually accessible entertainment, we have developed a relationship of discomfort with our interior world. But when we remove our exterior preoccupations, we may begin to discover that growing darkness is not only a seasonal phenomenon.

After more than a decade of meditation practice, there are still many days where it feels difficult to sit. Though we often have this idyllic image of a peaceful meditator, in practice, I think most of us immediately experience the wild discomfort of simply sitting in silence. Reducing the stimulation from the outside, we are suddenly aware of all the noise under the surface, all the yearning, loneliness and anxiety. Beneath the mask of this seemingly functional person are a graveyard of broken dreams, a dark forest of uncertain plans and a thicket of unmet needs. Every part of us wants to turn away from what we see in the darkness behind our eyelids. But it is exactly here, in the darkness, that illumination occurs.

What happens when, instead of reaching for our devices, we allow ourselves to sit with the darkness within ourselves? At first, we simply become aware that we are suffering. If we haven’t practiced with meditation before, this awareness can feel overwhelming. We might wish to hide from it or run away. This is where we must be courageous and face the pain of our heart, so that we may begin to heal it.

Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa calls this the way of spiritual warriorship. But instead of putting on a suit of armor, we take it off. Instead of hardening our hearts with all kinds of coping mechanisms, we allow ourselves to simply soften and accept that we are in pain.

Our natural inclination is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This seems logical enough until we realize that pain in life is unavoidable. Our minds paint a picture of the nature of reality, but by ignoring pain, the image is never whole and we are prone to disappointment in a myriad of ways. Our dream job actually comes with a whole new set of problems. The romance that looked so promising actually reveals our deepest wounds. And the family and friends that we we believed would be with us forever are, in time, taken from us.

The truth is that life is in a constant state of change and uncertainty. Instead of trying to numb out the fear and grief that that comes with our disillusionment, we can learn to relax in it. We can breathe through it and become familiar with discomfort. In modern times, where everything is optimized for our convenience and pleasure, this is a very difficult task. But if we have the courage to sit in our own darkness, the pupil of our inner eye will begin to dilate and we begin to awaken to what was hidden to us before.

The famous Persian poet Rumi wrote:

The moon appears for the night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.

Indeed, it is in the depths of darkness that we find the light. Finally recognizing our suffering, we can hold it tenderly and care for it. We can begin to have a lot of compassion for, not only ourselves, but for everyone in the world who suffers from the same afflictions. Our shared pain is what makes us human, and without it, we wouldn’t have the ability to feel love and empathy toward one another.

In that way, our pain becomes a gift. Instead of constantly guarding our hearts, we finally open ourselves to truly and deeply experience life and all that it has to offer to us. To know pain is also to know love. To know how to suffer well is to truly live. As Joseph Campbell so eloquently said, “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say ‘yes' to life: ‘yea’ to it all.”

It was never an easy task to walk this particular path of warriorship. I believe that it is all the more difficult today, given the infinite ways in contemporary life that we’re provided to numb our pain. My teacher, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote “The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption. But unless and until we’re able to face our suffering, we can’t be present and available to life, and happiness will continue to elude us.”

In spite of this intellectual knowledge, there are still so many times throughout my day that I find myself unintentionally preoccupied with my phone or computer. Minutes, sometimes hours, of this precious, impermanent life pass before I realize that I am no longer in my body. Even in the tiny pause between cups of tea, I find myself habitually reaching for my phone, as naturally as I might scratch an itch. That itch is the symptom of an ailment much deeper, an unacknowledged pain that whimpers quietly in the shadows. It is the journey of our life to enter this darkness, and to illuminate the seed of compassion hidden in the depths of all that we fear.

What gives me courage to embark on this dark path is that we don't have to walk it alone. In this community are thousands of others who wish to create more space in their lives through contemplative practice with tea. If together, we can learn how to cultivate stillness, to relax in the face of fearful unknowing, and to allow our hearts to be truly open; then right here, in the mud of the world’s suffering, will the lotus of love bloom.

If you found resonance in some of these words, I invite you to share them with a friend or write back to me. Let us all courageously face the darkness together.

Sincerely,     

Nathan Carreon Lim    
founder, bodhi tea co.    
n@bodhitea.co