Hope is a rich gift. Trust is life-sustaining. Hope and trust together are bread and water for our hardest journeys. Hope gets us going. Trust keeps us moving. Together they give us what we need in order to risk entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death where we meet Presence, our companion even on passages through hell.
Below is another of Jack Kornfield's blessed stories. Hope and trust have big roles.
But since this is a story about terrible trauma, it's also essential to balance hope and trust with patience and caution--and I think JK writes with this kind of sensibility. God-awful trauma is never something to breeze through or to see with the slightest bit of rose-tint in our glasses.
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For Katie, a young woman who had been abducted and raped,
mindfulness of the body was a delicate and painful journey. She came to a month-long
meditation retreat to heal her trauma and find some inner peace. At first, the
intensity of her painful memories kept her completely out of her body. Then,
with a tenderhearted attention, Katie found that she could feel her feet when
she walked. But sitting was too stressful for her. She had been tied up and the
immobility was too similar to her abduction. So, instead of sitting practice, she
walked and walked, learning to fully feel her feet on the earth, her legs, and
her movement.
Next she used her breath as she walked to breathe compassion
into the rigidity and terror, into the tension in her shoulders, arms, and
torso. Periodically waves of fear, rage, and grief washed over her and she had
to rest. Sometimes she would reestablish a sense of well-being by holding on to
a tree or feeling her feet touching the earth.
When Katie felt stronger she began to sit—“immobilized,” as
she called it—and little by little allow the memories of ropes and panic to
arise. To support this practice, we sat together often, establishing a trusting
field of compassion that could allow for her healing. Guiding her attention
with kindness, she began to feel all the sensations she had avoided for so
long. Her body wept and shook. Then she slowly opened to the feelings and
images. By taking it a little at a time, she was gradually able to tolerate and
release more and more of the memory.
After several weeks of practice she relaxed her grip on the
story. Her experience became just sensation, just feelings, just a memory. She
realized with relief that her abduction was not present anymore. All that was
present was sensations, thoughts, feeling, and spacious release. Katie began to
feel free.
