Hi! Welcome to my blog!
This will be a place where I write about dharma, music, and healing ourselves and the world.
The blog is called Simple Truth after a song that I wrote about self love. I wrote the song a few years ago for James Baraz’s class Awakening Joy (www.awakeningjoy.info). I am a singer for his class (it’s a class that meets ten times, and at each meeting there is a musician and a guest teacher. Each week has a topic related to awakening joy in one’s life).
That particular year, I was assigned to sing during the week James was teaching about self love as a doorway to bringing more happiness into one’s life. Not only did I not have a song about self love in the repertoire of songs that I had written, but I could not find or think of a single song about self love at all (since then someone pointed out to me that the song ‘The Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston is about self love). So I set about to write one.
My song about self love (Simple Truth) came surprisingly easily. I had been on two eight day metta retreats (‘metta’ is a word in the Pali language that means ‘lovingkindness’) in recent years. Metta practice is an ancient Buddhist practice which leads to greater levels of both warm heartedness and abilities of concentration. In the traditional practice, there are a series of phrases and a series of people that you send the phrases to. There are many ways to say the phrases (and you can adapt them to languaging that most suits you) – the ones I often use, and a simple way to do them, goes ‘may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you be at ease’.
The series of people you send the metta phrases to traditionally go in this order: self, benefactor, dear friend, neutral person, difficult person, and all beings. I was taught that the list was set up this way in order to access the most easy people to love first, and then with practice to access a loving heart for even the most difficult people in our lives.
But my experience had been that the first person on the list, my own self, was not an instantaneously easy person for me to love. There was a lot of self judgment and self doubt, and even self hate, in the way.
On my first eight day metta retreat I dutifully went through all the categories. When I went on my second metta retreat, I told my teacher in our first interview that I had found sending metta to myself more challenging than sending metta to others. So she suggested that I spend the entire eight days sending metta to myself!
When I say eight days, I mean 12 – 16 hours a day sending these phrases to myself. At Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where I did the retreats, we are in silence all day long sending these phrases in our minds. They feed us delicious vegetarian meals, which we eat in silence. Other than that, we are sitting in a beautiful meditation hall, and walking on the beautiful land or in a beautiful room built just for quiet walking back and forth – saying the phrases.
I did it. I did eight days of sending metta to myself. I was not imbued with self love the whole time, but I did have moments. What I saw was, with genuine self love, two things happened. 1) Complete acceptance of my imperfect self, and 2) Instantaneous love for all others.
The Buddha taught, “One cannot harm another who truly loves themselves”. I see why. True self love is not narcissism, selfishness, or self obsession. True self love is seeing ourselves as we actually are and holding ourselves in great compassion and patience. When we can do that for ourselves, we automatically do it for others. When we can see that we are both miraculous and flawed, and that we are trying our best, and that we are very dear – we know it about every one and everything else, too. And we would never want to harm anyone because we see how tender and sweet and confused, and deserving of love, we all are.
So, having had that experience, writing a song about self love came relatively easy to me. After I sang it at the joy class, James and his wife Jane both told me how much they loved the song. And though I have written many songs that people have appreciated, this song Simple Truth has resonated more deeply with people than anything else I have sung.
I have come to understand that much of spiritual practice and healing modalities serve a purpose of walking us away from self hatred (inculcated by societal childhood conditioning, and experienced through the critical mind) and toward unconditional love. Once we are able to love and accept ourselves on the same level that we love and accept, say, a fawn in the forest or a little yellow bird singing in a tree, we have accessed the heart that can tolerate and love a great deal within our universe. Maybe not everything yet, but a lot.
So, welcome to my blog. I will be sharing the things I consider ‘simple truths’, along with practices I use to help myself and others head toward the north star of a heart that can experience and offer unconditional love.
Love,
Eve