Friday Reflection meets this week (January 23), the usual time of 9:30-11:00.

We’re going to try something new tomorrow – an all-Virtual Reflection, using Google Meet – *NO* in-person meeting at First Parish!  I have a cold, my son likely has the flu.  While I personally don’t feel “that bad” (I feel well enough to facilitate a virtual gathering), I don’t wish to put anyone at risk or to limit anyone’s participation.  This is a good opportunity to try something new and to learn from it.  Please reach out to Jonathan (jonathan@mindfulness-plus.com) if you’d like to join in — I will send you the link.

We move on to Chapter Four (How We Live is How We Die) in Pema Chodron’s How We Live is How We Die.  As someone steeped in the language of “the five stages of grief,” I chuckled at Pema’s description of a friend’s experience.  “...she went through the classic early stages of coming to terms with her death:  denial, anger, and so on.”  And so on!  I don’t think Pema means to be glibly dismissive of language most everyone uses and takes for granted .  I think she *is* saying that there’s something more beyond.  That there’s a different kind of experience and possibility, in grief,  if one engages in the practice of groundlessness.  If we learn to go with the flow of the  changes (most little, some big) that happen every day.

None of us can know “how it will go for us” at the moment of our death, however much we might prepare ourselves and imagine it.  But we have all known loss in the deaths of our dear ones.  It does sound glib to say there’s a “lesson in everything.”  Indeed, this comes dangerously close to one of the most unhelpful, and often hurtfully well-meaning things people say by way of consolation (“everything happens for a reason….” ).  But can we look back at the loss of our loved ones, back at our experiences of grief, and ask what else there is to see – and can this “what else” be helpful to us?  Can we do this look-back without glibness and without denying whatever pain might have been part of our experience.  Can we look at our grief and not see one thing or another?  Tomorrow morning we’ll try exactly this.

Come sit gently with yourself and others.  Hold these questions with openhearted curiosity.  You do not have to be reading along to join in, though reading along might enhance your experience.