Form and Emptiness

Hi, strangers! (friends)

How have you been? What's new? Hanging in there? Having some summer fun?

DID YOU SEE THOSE AWESOME NEW PHOTOS OF SPACE THAT WERE SHARED?!?

I frickin love space.

When I was a kid, my dream (one of my dreams) was to be an astronaut. Then I started needed glasses at a young age and was like, they'll never take me. So my dream was to have some skill set that would be needed when eventually people were sent into space to find and develop a new planet. Which . . . still hasn't happened. Of course, at the same age, I thought for sure pennies would cease to exist (oh wait!) and everyone would have flying cars (well, does self-driving count?).

So. Anyway. SPACE IS AWESOME.

When I think about connecting to something bigger than myself, or I get stuck in the tiny weeds of my problems, or I think about how we're all part of something vast and infinite and unknowable . . . I always look up.

I think that vastness also exists inside our hearts.

Because the actual form hardly matters.

There's a very famous zen buddhist teaching called the Heart Sutra, and lines that are taught and analyzed and meditated over are:

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form;

Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.

cool. cool cool cool. and what does it mean??

I recently revisited this sutra with a dharma talk by one of my most influential teachers, Michael Stone. Something her shares:

"So the Chinese word for emptiness, which is..."ku" which means the sky. So I think it's helpful when you're reading this to yourself, instead of reading the word 'emptiness,' say the word 'sky.' Everything is really sky. All dharmas, all practices are really sky. My problems today, they're just sky. It's not writing them off. They exist, and they're also made up of sky. They're sky. This is just vast, vast. It's not saying, 'My problems are vast. They're like the sky.' But they're sitting in the spaciousness of the sky, the space around the stars."

Okay. okay. I'm feeling it.

It's the infinite.

It's that we are part of it but we are not it and our problems are real but also they exist within the vastness of everything that exists and maybe we can take a breath into allllll of that space.

??

Maybe

??

It's the work of not contracting but expanding.

It's the work of giving our worries space.

It's the work of releasing an obsession with form.

Which is to say, releasing what you think things "should" be.

Another gem from Michael:

"Just like this glass, right? So this glass, when there's water in it, is full of water. And we say the glass is full of water and then open the top, drink the water. And then we say the glass is empty. But actually the glass was never full of water or empty of water. The glass is always empty. Water comes in and takes the shape of the glass. Just like when water falls from the sky, we call it rain. When water is in a river, we call it river. When water is in a cup, we call it a drink. So those are all the waves of emptiness. So form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness is no other than form."

Here's why I think this is important. In early days of practice, we're working on seeing more clearly. As we continue through our practices, in different moments, we may start to be SO SURE that now we've figured it all out. NOW we see reality, we see form. Which takes us to the next step - OOPS NOPE JAYKAYJAYKAY FORM IS EMPTINESS EMPTINESS IS FORM.

And what I see as the point of all of it is:

Anything we're doing, we can get really interested. That's exciting and what we should do, let's be SO interested. Let's learn, let's have fun, let's gather all the rules and the yoga poses and the names and the ideas and let's be so eager to figure out where to put our feet and our hands, and how to breathe.

AH WE LOVE THIS. I LOVE THIS.

Whatever thing you're doing (though naturally right now I'm thinking of yoga), that can be enough! You can stay excited and you can think about the forms and shapes and rules and you can explore it the way you've been guided to explore.

That's cool! That's fine! Live laugh love, pal!

Buuuut. My guess is, if you've read this far, if you've made a habit of practicing yoga with me or reading words I write, you're a person who is interested in–well, I won't claim to know exactly what you're interested in, but I'm guessing it's something deeper or something less known.

So.

We can get really interested, we can learn all the things, and then we can let all of that interest lead us into the vastness inside and outside.

We can realize how we understand so much and also so little.

We can be the water.

We can be the sky.

We can be the space between the stars.

And if we can know ourselves as water, as the sky, as the space between the stars, maybe that can help us loosen the knots that tie us up in daily life.

The water, the sky, the space between the stars.

Breathe.

Your breath and the water and the sky and the space.

Take a deep breath.

Let it expand you.

Let it have form which is not form and let it take up space which is also emptiness.

Vast.