Within the Brokenness

Trigger warning my friends: this article talks about some difficult traumas I have witnessed. Please be caring towards your mind-stream. If this is not something you can read right now, that is no failure. Refraining would simply mean you are engaging in an act of loving awareness.

There was the gentleman with ALS (lou gehrig’s disease) whose body was becoming paralyzed, one limb at a time. He was frightened and despairing, and during our fourth visit together, suddenly wasn’t able to control his swallowing or coughing muscles. He started to panic and couldn’t breathe. Immediately, there were fifteen doctors in the room, rushing towards him, looking terrified. Then there was the young man — actually, he was just a boy at the age of 16 — who shot himself in the head and who I saw die once he was brought in by paramedics. It was gory and hard on so many levels, but I don’t need to go into details. There was also the woman who spoke no English, and who, despite being at death’s door managed to travel hundreds of miles to our emergency room (having heard from someone that, if she did so, our doctors were legally obligated to provide her with a life saving organ.) Once she realized that this information was inaccurate, I sat with her as she tried to make sense of how to get back home to die in peace. And then, there were the two parents who I held as they bellowed, watching their son, no older than 30, be taken off a ventilator. As I blessed his body in his final moments (something his parents requested), I recall the sensation of his skin growing colder against my own. All this, and then some, in less than 24 hours.

I don’t know how to introduce this topic any other way than to provide an energetic sample of my chaplain days (and nights) of late. Yes, there are days that aren’t this intense. But, in all honesty, I can’t say that this kind of day is a-typical. Some days are worse. I join the ranks of many service providers who are exposed to trauma daily. Therapists, paramedics, doctors, nurses, social workers, firefighters, police officers, disaster workers, victim advocates, emergency department custodial staff, funeral directors, public defenders, legal aid attorneys… the list goes on. I know I’m not alone in this. But I can’t help but wonder… how are we managing it all? When things are at such an extreme, what does “healing the inner divide” and residing in the place beyond extremes actually mean?

It’s true that not all crisis situations and deaths are traumatic. Moreover, even if these events are traumatic for those enduring them, they are not necessarily traumatizing for those who are witnessing them. The inverse is also true. And yet, by mid-January 2022, five months into my first, official, full-time chaplain gig, I began to feel a palpable sense of brokenness. Suffering was everywhere and the hospital walls seemed to be bursting at the seams with trauma, grief, and the gully, gory mess of the human experience. Here I was in the middle of it. Like being in a city on fire, I wondered if it was actually possible to be there and not get burned.

And then my rumination took it from there. If I did “get burned,” i.e. — internalize the brokenness of the context where I served — what did that mean about me and my spiritual practice? Surely, I thought, if I were a good chaplain, I would be able to accept difficulty and come out clean and unscathed. Surely, a true bodhisattva (an awakened heart warrior on the spiritual path) would be able to serve amidst the flames, and even allow heat to self-liberate on the spot. Pure awareness never gets harmed, right? Why then, was I feeling it all?

I turned to my teacher, a Buddhist lama, for help. Over Zoom, I wept as I described my feelings of inadequacy. I explained that, though my formal sitting practice felt strong, my “everyday life” practice while at the hospital felt tumultuous and even frightening. I described the strong energy shifts in the hospital; the wails; the adrenaline; the vividness; the heavy, tender moments. I confessed my doubts that I was a “good” dharma practitioner, and recounted my theory that surely a true bodhisattva would be able to serve in the hell realms unscathed. Maybe I just wasn’t good enough.

My teacher’s response was simple. It was one part correction, one part practice instruction. He listened with empathy and then, in the gentlest way, said: “Malika, the bodhisattva gets burned. The question is, what would it look like to let the enormity of that brokenness simply be?”

Painting of Kshitigarbha Bodhisattva by Janet Piésold. Please see: http://www.buddhist-pics.com/index.php

In retrospect, my questions were pretty naive, and my teacher’s responses fairly obvious. And yet, I often forget that freedom on the spiritual path does not mean freedom from the phenomenal world, it means freedom within it. From this place of forgetfulness, I start thinking that success (in life, on the job, on the spiritual path) would mean the vanquishment of pain — as if unpleasantness would no longer be a flavor of the human experience. My confusion is rooted in an (embarrassingly routine) misunderstanding of the Buddhist teachings that I practice. Let me explain.

Buddhism teaches that the ultimate nature of reality is freedom, or total openness. This means that the ultimate nature of any phenomenon is not a “thing.” Rather, it is the freedom from any “thingness” (because, double zing: there is no such “thing” as a concrete, permanent, individual “thing” from a Buddhist point of view; instead, all is interrelated, moving, and dynamic because it is essence-less.) This is pretty radical when taken to its natural conclusion. It would mean that, whether we’re talking about a war zone or a baby shower, the nature of the situation is ultimately the same (total openness), even if it feels or presents differently on a relative level (that is, when compared to other situations). If you were to try to find the essence of each situation, you wouldn’t be able to. All you’d find is energy, awareness, and space, none of which could be pinpointed. A gunshot and a baby’s laugh ripple through reality with fluid, open freedom. The simple fact that either of these situations are able to arise in the first place is proof of the inherent openness of reality. Reality is just that way: open to any possibility.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. My conditioning sometimes looks at these teachings and says, “See, if you were really spiritually advanced, difficulty would simply vanish because you’d see its inherent openness.” But, what I (re)realized in talking to my teacher was that, such snarky internal dialogue conflates liberation (freedom from fixation) with exhaustion (the disappearance of phenomena). For me, these words — liberation and exhaustion — each have special significance in Buddhism, particularly within the Vajrayana (Tantric) and Dzogchen traditions. As I’m someone who learns as I write, I’d love to unpack them each in turn.

Liberation refers to the freedom and energetic flow that reveals itself when we let go of the fiction of separateness (that is, when we let go things being “this” or “that,” or being some particular way.) If you were looking at the ocean, you might think to yourself, “Ah! There’s the ocean,” as if it were a concrete “thing.” And yet, if you were to allow your eyes to rest on the oscillating movement of the water’s surface, with its changing colors and wave formations; if you were to allow the smell of the sea-air to spontaneously change from fishy to fresh, and back again; and if you were to let the splash and seagull sounds arise and dissipate, like echoes of no substance — suddenly, your fixation on the “the ocean” as some stagnant “thing” would dissolve. What reveals itself instead is a vivid, dynamic experience that is free from any fixed reference point and that cannot be described in words. Liberation, therefore, is not necessarily the disappearance of experience, but rather the dissolution of our tightness around experience. It is the abandonment of the conceptual cages we construct around experience that block us from being experience. In more positive terms, liberation is the process of experiencing (and eventually, realizing we already are) the free-flowing, unpinnable vastness of reality. Liberation is not something “we do;” it is instead the natural state of things that is revealed when we allow reality to be what it is.

Exhaustion, however, refers to the “seeming-disappearing-act” that happens in our day-to-day lives. It speaks to the karmic lifespan of any given “thing” on a relative level, when we allow ourselves to compare “this” and “that.” For example, when growing conditions are no longer sufficient, a flower will shrivel and decompose in the ground. When weather conditions are no longer cloudy and cold, a puddle will evaporate in the clear, sunny sky. When organs no longer function sufficiently, a body will die. Although on an ultimate level, energy is never lost or destroyed (because there was never any “thingness” to be lost or destroyed to begin with); on a relative level, seeming “things” do look like they exhaust and disappear when we compare them to other seeming “things.” Exhaustion is the natural “end” of appearing phenomena, from the vantage point of the comparing mind.

My realization as it relates to my job was this: though my mental fixations about reality can liberate when I let be, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the energy of any given situation exhausts (i.e., disappears all together), and certainly not on my timeframe. Sometimes liberation and exhaustion happen at once, but not always. The terrifying energy on a battlefield may take quite a while to exhaust, even after guns stop firing. Its explosive quality may haunt the minds of those who survive for quite sometime, even rippling through multiple generations in various ways. On the other hand, the bright, bubbly energy of a baby shower may dissipate within a few short moments once the last guest has gone home. The point is this: we can let go of our fixation regarding how energy presents itself, but we can’t necessarily destroy or annihilate that energy all together. The energetic flavor of the moment is in town as long as it is. Un-capturable yet experienceable, it endures until it shifts and seemingly disappears. Like a mirage. Or a rainbow.

Or a nightmare…

I am in the emergency department, in “trauma room 5,” holding a woman in my arms as we watch her husband’s chest getting pounded and electrically charged by a team of twelve doctors moving at lightning speed to save his life. Indeed, the situation is nightmarish. There is no gentleness on the body when it is being resuscitated. Movements are fleshy and forceful. The room feels full, dense, and claustrophobic. The lights are bright and the words shared between doctors are like scalpels: sharp, efficient, precise, and cutting. As I hold this patient’s wife in my arms through it all, and whisper words of solidarity to her, I can tell our hearts are both pounding. Sweat rushes down my back from the heavy, shower-curtain-like protective gown I and others must wear in this particular hospital room. I’m getting burned, not because I’m failing, but because the bodhisattva doesn’t escape feeling.

It is here that my teacher’s question has resonance: “can you just let this brokenness be?” The moment this question surfaces, the mind begins to loosen and relax. This relaxation doesn’t make anything disappear, but rather allows all to express itself in the fullest sense, revealing the situation’s pervasive un-graspable-ness. Suddenly, the situation is not what I think it is (“bad,” “horrible,” “proof of my incompetence,”) it is simply what it is (strong, vast, free-flowing energy that is without location.) Though the energy is unpleasant to the senses, and at times so vivid that the body noticeably contracts, aversion too is permitted to “be,” and now I am “in” and “of” the moving, but-not-necessarily-disappearing, power of it all. Like a nightmare that manifests in the mind during sleep, but that has no real substance; liberation is seeing that experience undeniably manifests, yet is completely unpinnable. It is the brokenness that is knowable and yet nowhere.

There is no dreamer who decides when a nightmare is over. A nightmare exhausts on its own timeframe when the sleeping body begins to stir, when sunlight begins to dawn, and when the psycho-biological conditions for dreaming are no longer present. Forty-five minutes into the ordeal in the emergency room, the doctors give-in to death’s final word. The room becomes still, the gowns come off, and the doctors stand in reverent silence. The patient’s wife seems to be holding her breath before an exhale of wailing begins. When her sound finally explodes into the room, I hold and rock her, and she gives her weight to me. Slowly, we make our way to a separate, sterile room, populated only by a couch, office chair, and generic looking painting. We are now in grey liminal space, that is nevertheless dense with the weighted energy we’ve dragged in from the trauma room. We sit in alternating periods of conversation and silence, slowly processing what has just happened. We discuss shock, grief, and the surreal way reality blends at a “time like this.” Pockets of freshness puncture the density, like flashes of blue in an otherwise matte, grey sky.

Eventually, as this patient’s wife gears up to leave the hospital and make her way home, I pivot to discussing what I must: tissue donation, funeral homes, crematoriums, burial, whether driving home feels feasible, and who will be there when she arrives. I endeavor to render all of this on the lowest, gentlest frequency available between us. After a final visit of the body, I walk the patient’s wife to her car. The air outside is cold and sharp, quickly consuming whatever lingering heat was in my body from all the evening’s activity. We hug, and as we do, I enter a noticeably more tender landscape. Like opening my eyes to a green valley that is still dripping with moisture after a passing downpour, I can feel the “thunderclouds” still rumbling, yet now at a distance. The last thing I say to her as we pull away from one another is, “My heart breaks with you.” We hug again and I turn to leave. As I walk back into the emergency room, the comfort of solitude comes, and the internal winds shift again. Now, my chest feels like I have just watched the movie Life is Beautiful four times in a row, and the brokenness is with me, as is some vague sense of deep satisfaction. This is just the way it is. Shifting and moving; fine, not fine, and fine again. “Am I okay?” “Was that really fucked up?” I nod to each of my thoughts as they ebb and flow in my mind-stream. Then I allow my steps to follow their natural rhythm, and head back inside.

I can’t always realize my teacher’s instructions, but I endeavor to do so all the same. Can you just let the brokenness be? Was there ever a more impossible, beautiful, and hopeful instruction? What a relief to stop trying to be the cavalier heroine who vanquishes sorrow! What a relief to not have to work so hard to feel confident all the time! What a relief to let my sense of spiritual and professional competency wax and wane! What a relief to simply be in it. No pretending. No silver-lining. Just this.

My teacher’s instruction invites us to consider that all situations are buddha, that is, that all situations are inherently, open, awake, and free — regardless of whether they are pleasant or not. Lately, when I’ve had trouble remembering this in the hospital setting, I think of Palden Lhamo. Palden Lhamo is a manifestation of enlightenment. She is a buddha and the fierce goddess who has sworn to protect the lineage of Dalai Lamas. My teacher once told me that the first line of her sadhana (or ritual invocation) is something akin to this: You will know her because she is unpleasant and awful.

Palden Lhamo.

Palden Lhamo is the knot in our throat and the panic in our belly. She is the emergency room that is flooded with harsh smells and scary sights. She is the grief that settles all around us, as we come home from a life-changing loss. She is the shadowside of solitude, within whose fangs, fears cannot help but ooze. She is the ghastly, gory, and ghoul-like. She is the forceful screech of sirens or car breaks; she is the hold-your-breath quality right before an impending crisis; and she is also the energy of the crisis itself. You will know her because she is unpleasant and awful. And yet, Palden Lhamo is a buddha. She is the un-capturable, irreducible, open and free energy of these situations. If you have the guts to turn towards her, and if you can decipher her words amidst all the vomit and spit she spews your way, you may hear her say this: let me be and I will show you the meaning of freedom.

It’s often strange to me how much I love my job. And yet, I credit this to Palden Lhamo taking me under her tutelage. I don’t know how long I’ll be her student in the chaplaincy context, but I’m curious to linger. It would seem that Brokenness (Palden Lhamo’s epithet) has gotten a bad rap. And I just want to spend a little more time within her, discovering what’s really true.