Laila Ibrahim's Blog, page 3

Noticing Joy

Joy. I’d like to offer you a simple recipe for it.  Tell you just the right meal to serve, or gift to purchase, or words to say.  But I have never found a consistent recipe for the particular experience that is joy.  I find that joy, like its twin, grace, is an unasked-for gift that simply lands in my heart.

I do know that joy most often fills me at those unexpected moments when I take the time to notice how blessed I am.  

Joy:  It can’t be purchased.  It can’t be scheduled.  It can’t be given to you.

But it is there every day for the noticing.  For me there is joy in perfectly buttered popcorn, in a wide-smiled greeting, in a phone call asking for advice about how to vote, in a perfect breeze, in the bright lights that cut through the darkness this time of year, in beams of sunlight landing on my face.  The opportunity for joy surrounds me every day, but only if I take a moment to notice, to pay attention, to feel the blessing of this very mundane and yet miraculous day.

May you find joy in the everyday miracles that surround you.

Awash in Gratitude

Grocery shopping Thanksgiving week at the Berkeley Bowl, my local grocery store, is a spiritual npractice all its own. This year I went on Monday because I needed a lighter experience in my hectic week. Some years I’ve gone on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and I literally had to return my focus to my breath over and over again to get through the experience without snapping.

While shopping I had to proceed cautiously, doing my best to be aware of the people around me and make way for them.  On my way to the produce section I was stopped by a conversion of carts and people that made a traffic jam that could only be cured be someone backing off. Of course other people were the cause of the problem, not me.  I was just trying to get to the yams.  Okay, so were they.  We all wanted the same thing:  to buy the best ingredients to make the delicious food for our celebrations with family and friends. A bubble of frustration built in my chest. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  Calmed I looked out again; the jam had loosened up. My yams were in sight. Suddenly I was struck by the beautiful mounds of colorful produce ahead of me. Gratitude welled up in my chest. There was so much abundance it literally took my breath away. It didn’t matter in the slightest that I had to wait 20 seconds to get there.  All I needed, actually more than I needed, was right in front of me. I floated through my day full of gratitude and joy.

Shopping at the Berkeley Bowl Thanksgiving week is one of my favorite spiritual practices, though I only experience it once a year.  Maybe next year I’ll go on Tuesday and Wednesday.  ​

Breathe in sadness; Breathe out love

I started meditating during a particularly challenging time in my life.  Just when I needed it most, my neighbor started teaching a class on Tibetan Buddhism.  He talked first about Buddhist principles and then gave us practical instruction on different forms of meditation, starting with Tong Len.

I took to Tong Len like a fish to water.  It’s the first form of meditation that really worked for me. In Tong Len meditation you send loving kindness out into the world starting with yourself and then move out in concentric circles.

Sitting on my pillow, I close my eyes, take a centering breath and form a picture of myself in my mind.  I breathe in my  sadness and breathe out love for myself.  Then I imagine someone I love who is struggling and breathe in their sadness and breathe out love for that person.  I move to a stranger--such as a homeless person I’ve passed recently, newsworthy victims of an international tragedy, or the President. I breathe in their sadness and breathe out love for them.  And finally the hardest--but most satisfying over time--person: someone I’m struggling with.  I breathe in their sadness and breathe out love for them.

I started doing it for five minutes in the morning, but that wasn’t enough time. I went up a minute each day until it seemed too long and then I backed off.  Nine minutes most mornings I cultivate a practice of compassion for myself and for so many others.  Pema Chodron explains it better than I ever could:  http://old-shambhala.shambhala.org/te...

I was telling a friend about my practice.  Her hackles went up at the word ‘love’.  There was no way she could send ‘love’ to someone she was struggling with or a complete stranger.  But ‘compassion’? That she could send out into the world.  Whatever works for you, I say.

As good for my soul as for my back

Spiritual practices connect me with the great stream of creation, connection, and compassion that I call god. The first spiritual practice to which I committed was doing four Salutations to the Sun from the Hindu Yoga tradition.  When I started doing it in my early twenties I didn’t really think of them as either Hindu or a spiritual practice; rather I thought it was a stretching exercise that would be good for my back.  I was right, but it’s as good for my soul as it is for my back.

For years I did the salutations without directing my thoughts in any special way, but eventually I added an intention to each one of them.  For the first one, I reflect on some of the blessings in my life to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude.  Round two has an outward focus: I send blessings out to people I’m concerned about--a prayer for others, of a sort.  During the third salutation I ask for clarity about the meaning and purpose of my life, and then I listen carefully.  Sometimes I feel like I’m on track and other times I realize I need to make a course correction.  For my final salutation I focus on letting go...of whatever I need to leave behind:  Too often resentments.  Sometimes identities.  Other times expectations. And I remind myself that my time on earth is short and that I will die someday, but I don’t know when.

Taken together these four intentions and reflections keep me more grounded in what’s important in life and help me more of the person I want to be. All in less than two minutes a day!  What a bargain.

Creation, connection, compassion

I grew up without any religion. My mother had been Catholic;  my father Muslim. They often said that their lack of faith brought them together. I was raised with no spiritual practices beyond shopping for Christmas presents. However, for as long as I can remember I envied people who crossed themselves with holy water, bowed down in prayer, or lit candles for the sabbath or prayer.

As I teenager I dove into a faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism, that is more known for intellectualism and justice work than for deep spiritual practices.  But I never stopped envying people who had meaningful spiritual practices in their lives.  So in my twenties I set out to create something that would work for me.  I started with yoga. Years later I added grace-, then tonglen meditation, and most recently gratitude.

I didn't have words for what I was seeking when I started my spiritual practices, but now I do. These daily spiritual reminders help me to see myself as a part of the stream of life with more creativity, connection and compassion. I'm not rigid about doing them--I'd guess I do each of them 85-100% of the time in any given week, but they make a huge difference in my life every day. As we head into joy and stress of holiday madness, I know my spiritual practices will remind me of what’s really important in this time that has been so paradoxically commercialized. As a matter of fact, I think spiritual practice will be on the top of my gratitude list tonight.

We’re rich enough

When they were young, both of my children asked me,  “Are we rich?”  I told them,  "Yes, we are."

We live in a 1500 square foot flat in a triplex with our own bathroom that has cold and hot running water 24 hours a day.  We have so much food in our kitchen that we could eat for two weeks without grocery shopping.  We have our own car and when we needed two, we had more than one.

All of society tells us that’s not rich; that’s just regular.  But if I compare our lives to the quality of life of most humans throughout history, rather than to Paris Hilton, then I know I’m indeed rich.

The media message is unrelenting: “You don’t have enough.”  “You’re not doing enough.”  
“You aren’t enough.”

We may not have a master bath but:

I’m quite certain my children eat better than Queen Victoria did.
We carry powerful computers in our pockets.
We have drawers stuffed full of clothes.
​
We have enough;  more than enough.

I recently read a reputable study found that 30% of the food bought in grocery stores is ultimately  thrown away.   I don’t know the best means to get all my extra food to a hungry belly rather than my compost bin, but I’m certain it would be the right thing to do.

The spiritual truth for the vast majority of us:  We have enough.  We do enough.  We are enough.

Best day of my life, washed away

I'm in a time of enormous gratitude for the blessing of my life.  It feels like a golden time for me and I’m enjoying it enormously.   My life is so good that it borders on embarrassing.  My family, my work, my community, the weather, yummy  food, my house, my dogs, my health...the list of things I’m grateful for goes on and on.  

I was in my house, listening to my favorite Pandora station, Shake it Off, when The Best Day of My Life came on.  I felt the sentiment of those words deep down in my heart.  I started dancing around to the rhythm, and singing along to the life-affirming words.

As I’m singing and dancing, feeling the joy of being alive, I’m blindsided by a picture on my laptop;  The  heartbreaking  image of a preschooler’s body, washed up on the shore of a beach, is at the top of my Facebook feed.   I know immediately  this is a Syrian refugee who never made it to safe shores. Instantly, tears stream down my face. Imagining his parents’ pain causes me to sob out loud.

How can my life be so absolutely awesome when there is so much pain and suffering in the world, so much of it human made?  How is my life connected to that little boy?  How can I keep my sanity and feel empathy at the same time?

I had a good cry about that little boy and the refugees and victims of war. Then I kept on going with my day (minus the dancing). I can't continuously hold all the pain of 7 billion people or I would actually go crazy. But occasionally something breaks into my soul and I recommit to investing in something bigger than myself. Something that will bring just a little more love and a little more justice into our hurting world.

Yes, this does matter

When my children were very young we had a nightly ritual of holding hands in silence before eating.  Then we went around the table taking turns sharing about the bad parts and the good parts of our days.  At some point, during the elementary years, the kids started balking when it came time to hold hands until I started to feel self-conscious about this spiritual moment.  Eventually we let go of the habit and no longer had a moment of gratitude and humility before dinner.

Letting go of grace is one my regrets as a parent.  I wanted my children to have that experience and yet  I didn't hold it up as a value.  Throughout my children’s lives I've asked them to do many things. Sometimes they do them happily and other times they resist.  I know when they resist part of what they are asking me is, “Does this really matter?”  When it came to manners and homework and getting dressed and brushing their teeth and doing their laundry the answer from me alway came back, “Yes, this does matter.  So you are going to do your school work and be polite and wear clean clothes and keep your teeth healthy.”

But when they resisted grace, when they questioned the importance of a spiritual ritual around food, I tacitly answered, “No, this is not important,” when we stopped doing it.

When they were in high school I  reasserted the value of a nightly grace.  When I brought it up, my kids were not just willing, but eager.  So we transformed our dinners  by saying something along these lines:  “God, thank you for the abundance we are about to receive and for all that went into bringing it to our table”.  It’s not fancy, it doesn’t take long, and half the time we only remember to say it when we are part way through the meal.  But it does the trick.  It reminds us all that we are connected to so much else, the interconnected web of all existence and to be grateful for the blessings in our lives.

Loving all genotypes

One tool of racism is to teach us to be scared of young men of color, especially black young men. It's hard for me to admit this, but I know that it's been true for me. I became aware of this indoctrination after watching the Michael Moore movie Roger and Me.  That film shows how the media perpetuates the myth that black men are a danger to society rather than the opposite, which is that our society is actually very harmful to young black, and brown, men.

I then understood that I had been taught that certain neighborhoods were dangerous for me, when in reality I can walk in just about any neighborhood without harm ever coming to me. Yet I was taught to live in fear of crossing boundaries.

After that realization, I decided to work on loving people of all genotypes. I'm aware it’s a kind of a strange aspiration, but for whatever reason it became mine. It helps that I live in a multiracial community--and that my kids attended multiracial schools. Adoring kids is easy for me. And once they've grown up my love for them doesn't go away.

This week I'm visiting New York City, an amazing cross-section of humanity, which has given me a chance to see how I've done on my goal. I'm proud to say I've succeeded. Most of the human faces I pass by remind me of someone I know. In each stranger's face I see someone I feel warmly towards, which makes them less of a stranger in my heart.  And that makes the world feel like a safer place. I'm no longer living in fear of a lie. Instead I'm living a life of appreciation--for all of the (not so) strangers around me.

Stealing or Tasting?

   As I sat with a group of friends on a warm Fall day in Napa County, someone casually mentioned that they always taste grapes before they buy them.  Of course, I thought to myself, Who doesn’t?It turns out my friend D___ doesn’t. To my surprise, he challenged, “You eat grapes without buying them?!”

    “No, I just taste one,” our friend explained.

    D___ questioned, “Before you paid for it? And with no way to account for how much to pay for it?”

    “I guess so,” she said.

    “I do too,” I said.

    “Really?  Who else?” D___ asked.

    Most of us around that circle taste a single grape before buying a whole bunch.  The consensus of the group reassured me that I wasn’t breaking a social taboo by my sampling.

    “What else?” D__ asked, “Do you ‘taste’ before buying?"

    Nothing. I think to myself, just as our friend S___ says, “Strawberries.”

    I exclaim, “You eat a whole strawberry before buying a basket of them?!”

    She nods, “Same principle as the grape.”

    In my head I think, Oh no, that is stealing.


  In that moment I realize how arbitrary many social norms are and how we aren’t even aware of when and how we learned them.  I’m sure my mom tasted grapes in the store, but didn’t taste strawberries.  That’s why one's okay with me and the other isn't.

    One thing I love about being with people that aren’t just like me is that I get an opportunity to see my own internal biases and assumptions.  Sometimes I don’t know what I really believe until I’m faced with its opposite. This reminds me of a bumper sticker that’s popular around here:  Don’t believe everything you think.

    I still taste a grape before committing to buy a whole bunch, but now I’m aware of  the moral complexity of that act as I do it, turning an ordinary trip to the grocery store into a spiritual practice.