In his new book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (Bantam), Jack Kornfield examines what happens after a spiritual awakening, when we have to return to our mundane, everyday lives. In his experience, enlightenment and day-to-day existence aren’t opposites, but two sides of the same coin.
Kornfield was trained as a Buddhist monk and is the founder of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center in northern California. In this excerpt, he talks about family life and how it can both challenge and strengthen the life of the spirit.
— Ed.
A prophet is never heeded in his own country, and in his own house.
Matthew 13:57
No matter how many communes and communities they make, the family will always come back.
Margaret Mead
It is one thing to offer a multitude of prayers for the sick and the poor, or to undertake loving kindness and compassion meditations for thousands of sentient beings everywhere. It is another to bring these same practices to bear in our own family and our closest community.
Even the Buddha and Jesus encountered difficulties when they went back home after starting to preach. Jesus’ ministry was dismissed without respect by his family. Then, when his mother and brothers came to the house where he was preaching, Jesus refused to let them in, pointing to his disciples and saying, “These are my true mother and brothers, those who do the will of God.”
Similarly, when the Buddha returned home after his enlightenment, he was rebuked by his father for being an unseemly beggar. His father and stepmother demanded that he stop being a monk, change his clothes, and return to his princely duties. When the Buddha tried to teach his family, they dismissed his understanding as worthless. He had to perform a miracle — floating in the air while spouting both fire and water — to convince them that he had learned anything of value.
Like Jesus, Zen Master Basho warns: “You can’t teach the truth in your native town. They know you only by your childhood names.” As it happens, this may be the best reason to go home. Where better to fulfill a genuine practice of the heart than with one’s family and neighbors? Because they see us unclouded by spiritual ideals, image, or reputation, they are the true testing ground of our practice. My daughter Caroline has remarked to me more than once when I have been angry or careless or upset, “Dad, I thought you teach mindfulness!” or, “Dad, look what you’re doing. What kind of meditation teacher are you?” Sometimes when I’m having a hard time, she simply says, “Dad, I think it’s time for you to go meditate.”
As one Zen master puts it,
The role of a spiritual teacher can imprison us in the very task of enlightened helper: Bringing wisdom and compassion to others, we can lose our common human relations. Most of the people we know are in the role of students. We run the risk of isolation, of becoming a kind of sacred monster, without the counterweight of ordinary human connection — friends, family, and real relationships. Family provides this best of all.
One devotee laughingly said of her husband, a well-known Hindu teacher, “My husband came home from his last visit in India in an amazing state. He was enlightened for six months — until he spent time with his mother.” Another respected teacher of raja yoga used to emphasize what her guru taught her: “You are not the body, you are not the mind.” She taught these truths and wrote about them for many years. As she aged, she was determined not to be dependent on anyone. After having a series of strokes, she called her children together, reminded them, “I am not the body,” and with their help took a large dose of morphine to end her life. Days later, she awoke from a coma in the hospital, and when she returned home, her family was understandably in great disarray. Not only had participating in the attempted suicide been a terrible trial, but it had brought up other long-held resentments. Her teaching of “You are not the body and the mind” had made her a poor mother in many ways over the years. She spent her last year making amends and learning to tend to her family, and allowing them to tend to her.
Family pain is common throughout our culture, and spiritual communities often draw those with painful family histories. Spiritual seekers may come looking for release, healing, or a way to transcend the troubles they carry within. This is not true of the students alone. Most Western spiritual leaders, meditation teachers, monks, nuns, and clergy also carry deep family wounds. They, too, may have initially hoped that spiritual detachment and peace would release them from dealing with family pain.
But one Chinese Chan master cautions:
Don’t confuse nonattachment and freedom with running away. Your idea of leaving your family and children to renounce the world is like running from your shadow. This is false emptiness. There is nowhere you can go that is any more or less empty than your own house. Enlightenment has been here from the start.
We cannot escape the fact of our family background and the wounds it inflicts. Nor can we impose our spiritual ideals on our family. One young woman who had become very involved in Buddhist practice returned to her parents’ home. She struggled with their Christian Fundamentalism for a time, until she sorted things out. Then she sent a letter back to the monastery saying, “My parents hate me when I’m a Buddhist, but they love me when I’m a Buddha.” This is our task: to awaken the Buddha as we face our family karma.
When my father was dying of congestive heart failure, I went to be with him in the ICU of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Because he was a biophysicist and had taught in medical schools, he was keenly aware of all the equipment monitoring his heart. He was terrified of dying, and especially of dying in his sleep without the nurses knowing it, so he dared not let himself sleep. He would fall asleep for three minutes, then startle awake and anxiously turn to the monitor to see if his heart was still working. This went on night after night.
Though brilliant, my father had also been violent-tempered and physically abusive. For everyone around him, he was a paranoid and difficult man. Now, having gone without sleep for days, he was even more out of control. Still, over the years I had made my peace with him, and I loved him.
I sat with him, and we talked. As he was very anxious and distracted, I tried to teach him meditation. We practiced breath awareness for calmness and tried a loving-kindness meditation, with his grandchildren as the focus. It was useless. Fifteen minutes of practicing meditation could not undo seventy-five years of practicing paranoia. When I asked what he thought happens when you die, he answered, “Nothing.” As a scientist he didn’t believe in anything beyond the physical: Death was the end. I pointed out that the majority of people in the world believe in life after death, which is also validated by near-death research. I told him about my own out-of-body and past-life experiences and even explained the stages of dying and what he might possibly experience. He was doubtful. “Just wait. You’ll be surprised,” I said. “And if it happens,” I added, “remember I told you so.” He laughed.
Later in the evening, after most visitors had gone, I told my father I needed to sleep. “Don’t go!” he pleaded. I sat with him for another hour as he repeatedly drifted off to sleep and startled fearfully awake. “I can’t sleep. Please, please don’t go.” I was happy to comply; I’ve learned to sit. Eleven, twelve, one A.M., two. I sat with him over a number of nights. There wasn’t much to say. I held his hand. He was frightened. He didn’t want to hear about meditation. He didn’t even want to talk. What mattered was that I sat there, not being afraid, not rejecting his fear and his pain, but simply holding his hand. After several more days, he died. I was grateful to have been able to sit with him during this extraordinary time.
Perhaps this is the best we can do: to help when we can; to witness each other with kindness; to offer our presence; to show the trust we have in life. Spiritual life is not about knowing much, but about loving much.
Most of us in spiritual life have to go through a large measure of family healing. To finally be able to sit at ease with my father was the result of many years of conscious work. My family pain had been covered over in my early monastic meditation while I focused on being empty, peaceful, and wise. But it was there underneath, waiting, unconsciously influencing my whole way of being, and when I returned to my family and to intimate relationships, the struggles all came back. It may well be that even if I had stayed in ascetic practice, they would have eventually returned.
To find myself still struggling with my emotions was hard. I needed the assistance of both meditation and therapy before I could acknowledge the deepest levels of fear, anger, judgment, and grief I carried. The therapist was essential as a compassionate witness, another being to help me face the images and fears I carried in my body, everything that I had been unable to face alone. I saw how much the old patterns had reinforced my small sense of self. In the face of pain in our family, my brothers and I had each become regularly depressed, angry, fearful, cynical, needy, or cautious. These deep wounds remain a part of each of us to this day, but by opening to them, we began to lessen their power.
One Catholic nun told me:
There was plenty of pain and abuse in my family’s past. Most of the biggest changes in my spiritual life came around shame. I grew up in an alcoholic family, from at least my grandfather on down, and the sense we had of ourselves was shame-based. When it arises strongly enough, none of my practices and prayers work; I just don’t feel good about anything. I’ll be praying, and a voice will come: “You are a disgrace compared to what you should be. You are not using your gifts; you are not enough.” Never enough! I used to be caught and feel so terrible. But with good therapy and a great deal of inner work, I’ve come to understand it. Now I see it as family cycles of shame that just arise. I know it for what it is. “Oh, it’s another cycle of shame.” I can even laugh at it now. This insight has done more to heal my heart than years of struggling to be holy.
Traditional teachings focus so often on love and its transformative spirit that we can overlook a more basic and fundamental power: the tolerant heart.
After the ecstasy of spiritual awakening, there is the day-to-day fulfillment in the laundry room of our sustained practice. One natural outcome of an awakening experience is an increase in our spirit of tolerance, in our acceptance of what is. In this renewed and capacious tolerance, the heart’s harmony can be found. Human differences are enormous: our rhythms, what our bodies like, our aesthetic sensibilities, our emotions, our fears, the way we move and speak and love and rest. There are differences of race, culture, class, and values. Without tolerance, there is no ground for relationship, no possibility of intimacy. Without tolerance, family life can be unbearable. Without tolerance, we would have a society of perpetual conflict, a world of sectarianism and tribalism, of warfare and genocide.
We don’t have to like, let alone love those we tolerate. The truth is that even spiritual teachers do not always like one another; nor do they necessarily get along. Many respected Zen masters and swamis, ajahns and sheiks, lamas and rabbis have powerful disagreements. Some have a distaste for one another’s teachings or styles. Yet the wise among them embody a genuine tolerance, knowing that another person’s reasons may be invisible to us, that another person’s way is as worthy of respect as our own.
Tolerance does not mean acceptance of what is harmful. Just as detachment can be spiritually misused to hide from our feelings, so tolerance can be misused if we avoid seeing the truth or fail to take a necessary stand. Tolerance does not mean turning a blind eye to abuse. To prevent further suffering, we may need to respond with great strength. But when our heart is behind our actions, even this strength can be combined with compassion and understanding.
I saw this in the way Ajahn Chah handled the abbot of a branch monastery, a man named Ajahn Som, who had been a street tough and petty thug before he was ordained. Even as an abbot, Ajahn Som had a reputation for being harsh and difficult, and monks who returned from his temple often complained about him. One day, I demanded of Ajahn Chah why someone like Ajahn Som was allowed to remain an abbot. Ajahn Chan paused thoughtfully and then said that, although he was a difficult fellow, Ajahn Som had founded this cave monastery through years of labor with his own hands in a remote, pristine forest. His spiritual dedication was slowly growing. It’s true he might never be a picture-book monk, but if Ajahn Chah were to take away his monastery, he would probably be back out on the street. Is that what I was recommending?
We so easily become judgmental of one another. Sometimes the closer we are to a person, the stronger our judgment and frustration can become. That is why family is one of the final frontiers of spiritual development.
One former Hindu swami told me:
After my years of practicing yoga in India, I came back to teach and marry, and later I became head of a temple. My samadhi experiences had showed me the bliss of all things. But over time, I got busy, and I started to lose it. I tried to meditate more to get it back. There was conflict in the temple. And in my marriage we fought, sometimes quite terribly. Some days I wondered if I should ever have tried to practice in this worldly life. Even meditation was not giving me much help.
One day, I was visiting my family and taking care of my young nephew. It was a hard day for the swami and the three-year-old. We messed up the house. He threw a tantrum. Finally I took him in my arms and just held him. I sang Sanskrit melodies. And I realized that’s all the world wants: to be held in spite of it all. The bliss and samadhi came back as soon as I opened my heart.
The birth of tolerance and acceptance most often occurs close to home. In my own home, my wife and I are temperamental opposites, and we come from difficult family backgrounds. Liana is quiet, an artist and a writer with a deep need for solitude, stillness, and interior life. I, though a meditator, am more extroverted, with a huge network of friends, colleagues, and community members.
In our first years, I dreamed about getting a large house in the country with lots of rooms for visitors. She, of course, had something smaller in mind. When I protested, she asked, “Didn’t you just spend ten years living in a meditation center in the country, with a big library and kitchen? If that’s what you want, why don’t you just go back to your retreat center?”
With a lot of care and some good therapy, we made it through our stormy beginnings, got married, and had a beautiful child. Still, some of our differences continued. One day, we were walking through a Zen center garden with our baby daughter. Liana had recently given me Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Every Woman so that we could talk about the different aspects of feminine energy and the parenting of a girl. I told her I enjoyed it, especially the chapters that described the strength of Artemis women and the grace and beauty of Aphrodite. Then I added that there was one goddess I didn’t particularly connect with: Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home, ever-present but invisible.
When I said that, Liana looked stunned, threw the book on the ground, and burst into tears. “That’s me. That goddess describes my life! I knew you never really loved me. I knew it.” And she turned and strode away.
It took me a few moments to feel the force of her words, to collect myself and turn back to her. Shocked by the truth of what she said, I could only apologize and tell her she was right. I did love her, but without knowing it, somehow I was still hoping that she would be different. For so long, I had kept an unconscious hope that she would change. And, of course, she felt it. It was only after being forced to see her reality, instead of my own desires, that I grew to love her for who she is. Together we created a home for Hestia. Now I go out to work with big groups and return home to a quiet and simple family life. I have come to be nourished and protected by my family and to love it as it is, and I praise my wife’s wisdom every day.
Such honorable appreciation between adults is the basis for wise child-rearing. Another word for this tolerance is respect. This is illustrated by the story of a seven-year-old boy who went out to dinner with his parents and their friends. The waitress took his order last. “What would you like?” she asked. “I’d like a hot dog and french fries,” he answered. His mother quickly interjected, “He’ll have the meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and carrots, with milk to drink.” As the waitress walked away, she asked, “Do you want ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?” The boy turned to the table smiling and announced, “Do you know what? She thinks I’m real!”
Our children love respect. Even little ones want respect for their needs and respect for their fears. Our lovers, our parents, our co-workers, even the animals and trees around us blossom with our respect. Offering respect is the foundation of parenting as a spiritual practice. Without awareness and respect, we simply repeat what was done to us, acting in ways conditioned by our own upbringing. Without respect, we will continue whatever cycles of wounding, shame, unworthiness, stress, or abandonment existed in our own past.
Without a spiritual perspective, our heart’s natural caring, as displayed in parenting, can be overpowered by the fast pace and materialism of modern life, by the pervasive values of the media, by the accepted norms of stress and violence. Without respectful attention, we allow the media and modern pressures to hurry our children to grow, forgetting to protect their dependency and vulnerability. We forget to trust that children naturally become independent in their own sweet time. Without attention to our hearts, we become like the generation of parents who followed popular experts’ advice and refused to feed or pick up crying infants, even though every wise instinct and cellular impulse in their body called for them to hold and comfort their children. With respect, we can offer our children protection and wholehearted nurturance, while at the same time setting appropriate limits on behavior. Our spiritual teaching will be conveyed not just in our words but in the integrity of our daily life, how we demonstrate the deepest values of our heart.
It is never too late to offer this respect. When we become adults, we can carry this respect back to our family. A woman who had trained as a Buddhist nun in the monasteries of Thailand and Burma spoke to me of her difficulties upon returning to visit her home. Her family lived in Detroit, in a working-class neighborhood. She had let go of much of the pain in her past, but even now her family did not understand or accept her as a shaven-headed nun. And however hard she tried to teach them about the dharma, it only led to conflict and more frustration. The family’s evenings were usually given to drinking beer and watching TV. After each disagreeable weeklong visit home, she fled. I had a few suggestions for her. “Why don’t you try going to your parents without your robes and without teaching? Just be there as a family member and love them as they are, maybe sit with them and sip a beer and watch the game on TV. Oh yes, and don’t stay too long — three days at the most.” So she tried it. Next time I saw her she was smiling. It had worked.
One Sufi master says:
Being with family and close friends is different from all my other relationships. It’s certainly not the same as the teacher role. With my family, I just have to be, to let love and openness have its effect. I’m not ahead or in charge. I’m trying to accept them, to be who I am and to be tolerant of their nature. There is in all this an undeniable passion and Eros, a built-in charge between children, parents, and siblings, whether positive or negative. Even the conflicts become larger because of the depth at which we touch one another. What I try to do is tap into that place of the heart’s connection, the essence beneath the story.
Thomas Merton described this kind of tolerance for others as learning to see “the secret beauty of their hearts” beneath all our expectations in regard to them. When we see the secret beauty of others’ hearts, we connect from our true nature; we see the sacred spark that illuminates our life as well.
The Commandments of the great Middle Eastern religions — Jewish, Christian, and Islamic — teach that “you must honor your mother and father.” In Indian and Chinese traditions, these teachings can be even stronger. “If you were to carry your parents on your back,” says one text, “you could hardly repay them for giving you life.” Whatever your tradition, this obligation remains, and its fulfillment is not necessarily simple.
Aging parents, unhappy teens, conflicts with siblings, money problems, family illness, addictions — all are part of accepting family life as an ongoing practice. These difficulties become even more burdensome in a society like ours, one without much community, where aged people are shunted to old-age homes and where teens, isolated from their elders, often seek initiation in destructive ways. Underneath all these problems is the essential human need to be connected. Someone once said, “It is better to be wanted by the police than not wanted at all.” For better or worse, family is the original source of this connection, offering both love and responsibility.
Family responsibilities never end. Many of us will find ourselves caring for parents through the slow decline of Alzheimer’s, cancer, or stroke. Many others will be involved with difficult teens or family depression, or tending to marital conflicts or the divorces of our siblings, our children, ourselves. The sacrifices of a family are as demanding as those of any monastery and offer exactly the same training in renunciation, patience, steadiness, and generosity.
Thus, when one middle-aged monk told me that monks had to practice self-discipline and sacrifice while a layman’s life was by nature one of indulgence, I laughed. He went on, “You can eat when you want, dress as you choose, party, enjoy a succession of lovers, live a carefree life.” I wondered whose life he was describing. Further conversation revealed that he had been ordained at age twenty-one, so his vision of lay life was left over from his own teenage years. He didn’t understand that marriage, work, parenting, and citizenship are their own forms of discipline.
Zen teacher, poet, and father Gary Snyder writes:
All of us are apprenticed with the same teacher — reality. . . . It is as hard to get the children herded into the car and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One is not better than the other; each can be quite boring; and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and its good results make the very activities of our life into the path.
The demands of family life call on our hearts and test our strength like almost nothing else. One teacher told me:
As a young Catholic, I was inspired by the saints. I had always wanted to do something like work with Mother Teresa in India, but most of my life has not been so glamorous. After college, I became a teacher in an elementary school. And then my mother had a stroke, and I had to drop out of teaching and help her for two years: bathe her, care for her bedsores, cook, pay the bills, run the house. At times, I wanted to complete these responsibilities and get back to my spiritual life. Then one morning it dawned on me — I was doing the work of Mother Teresa, and I was doing it in my own home.
At home or in the temple, it is the same. In one ancient account, the Buddha found one of his monks sick and uncared for because the other monks were busy with their meditations. The Buddha himself washed and tended the monk and then called the entire community membership together to castigate and instruct them. “If you do not care for each other as family, who else will do so? Monks, those who would attend to the Buddha, let them attend to the sick.” Five hundred years later, Jesus said to his disciples, “In truth I tell you, insofar as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.” This is the love that knows we are one family, and all later loves in our lives will stem from this.
Facing the suffering in our family and community brings us to a great task: to stay true to our deepest values and still remain open and vulnerable. Whatever hardens and closes our heart leaves us rigid, frightened, unresponsive. Through our grudges and fears, we become increasingly territorial and defensive. How can we keep the heart open without losing our strength and our sense of justice?
To do this, we must allow the heart to become strong in a new way. We turn toward the suffering of the world willingly and let it stretch our compassion. In the inevitable pains, conflicts, and betrayal, we discover we can embrace the power of love. In the midst of difficulty, we can repeatedly stop and return to our heart, reconnect to our strength of compassion and our vulnerability.
One Sufi teacher says this of his prayer and meditation:
My main practice is stopping and listening to the heart. It’s like a moment of Quaker silence. Even if I can’t stand still, I stop inside, step out of the drama, recognize the pain, the busyness and being lost. I breathe and return. With my family or students, I try to come back to my own heart before speaking, to hold or acknowledge what needs attention in me. Then I include them in that space of the heart. This makes a strong presence, a connection.
When times are tough and we can’t do this alone, we may need another person to help us return to this truth. This is the basis for true spiritual friendship and fine therapy. One Zen master tells how he needed this in his first year of teaching. He had practiced for thirty years when he received formal transmission as a roshi. Months later, he found himself feeling painfully lost and insecure, as he had been years earlier in his practice:
I went desperately to a senior Zen master in my lineage. I was afraid he would condemn my insecurity. Instead he took me in and loved me and expressed total confidence in me. He helped me hold my suffering and confusion with steadiness and faith. My mind relaxed, and my teaching was transformed.
When we are confused or in pain, we often judge ourselves “not spiritual enough.” But the awakened heart does not judge anything — not our family or our love, our pain or our confusion, our passion or our anger. “Terrible harm has been done by this misunderstanding,” said one Catholic monk.
In mature spirituality, we are willing to have a dialogue with pain, with evil, to hold them in our prayers. In situations of great pain, someone has to consciously suffer the impact, to become the ground where the sorrows can be held and reworked. These things can be carried with grace. But it can’t be faked. If you go to someone with 99 percent goodwill but are still caught in 1 percent anger, all they feel is the anger, and it pushes them from reconciliation. The heart has to willingly hold the whole of suffering for it to be transformed.
In Zen, holding the suffering sometimes takes the form of “eating the blame.” This is illustrated by the story of a cook who made soup for the monks from a turtle offered by fishermen that morning. When the soup was ladled into the monks’ bowls, the roshi bellowed for the cook to come out. The turtle’s head, which should have been removed before serving, was floating in the master’s bowl. The cook bowed to the master, saw the problem, and, with a deft movement of chopsticks, plucked the turtle head out and ate it. Then he bowed to the master, the master bowed back, and the cook returned to the kitchen.
Eating the blame requires both strength and compassion. It is like the divorcing father I know who, in the midst of messy litigation, consciously gave away more than was legally required so as to spare his children the damage and suffering of a protracted court battle. “Even if it is unfair, I want this suffering to stop with me,” he said. He would sacrifice now so that his pain would not be passed on to his children.
The truth is that in spiritual life, our awareness of suffering actually increases over the years. We see and know more clearly the sorrows of the world. We can no longer hide from their existence. With this knowledge comes a deepening compassion.
No matter how extreme the circumstances, compassion is possible. Once, on the train from Washington to Philadelphia, I found myself seated next to an African-American man who’d worked for the State Department in India but had quit to run a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders in the District of Columbia. Most of the youths he worked with were gang members who had committed homicide.
One boy in his program had, at the age of fourteen, shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was read, she stood up slowly, stared directly at him, and said, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in a juvenile facility.
After the first six months, the mother of the slain child went to visit her son’s killer. The boy had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he’d had. They talked for a time, and before she left, she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts. Near the end of his three-year sentence, she asked him what he would be doing when he got out. He was confused and uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend’s company. Then she inquired about where he would live. Since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home.
For eight months, he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job. Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?” she asked.
“I sure do,” he replied. “I’ll never forget it.”
“Well, I did,” she went on. “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things. That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That’s why I set about changing you. And that old boy, he’s gone. So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here. I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you’ll let me.” And she became the mother of her son’s killer.
We must especially find a forgiving heart with family and those close to us. Only then can we bring it to the world. Whether we practice through Buddhist meditation, or, as Jesus taught, by “turning the other cheek,” or by finding “the mercy of Allah,” we must learn to forgive ourselves and others. Booker T. Washington said it simply: “Don’t ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them.” Forgiveness is the heart’s capacity to release its grasp on the pains of the past and free itself to go on.
There is so much to learn about letting go and loving. Family becomes the ground for this wisdom to flower. I have heard countless grateful stories of someone saying, “I finally called my mother and told her I loved her before she died,” or, “After all these years of pain, I finally reconciled with my brother.” Forgiveness offers the mercy that our hurt and fear have withheld for so long.
It is in tenderness and tolerance that our path is made whole. It is in reconciliation and love of those closest to us that the spirit of our human family grows and widens to fully embrace our true family: all that lives. We awaken as a part of one another’s family.
Ishi in Two Worlds is the remarkable account of the last remaining Yana Indian of California, who was befriended by anthropologists Theodora and Alfred Kroeber. Ishi told stories about the way of life of his people, never more to be seen on this earth. Yet one of the most moving stories was not told in the book. Among all the teaching songs and exquisite knowledge of nature Ishi revealed to the Kroebers, there was one sacred song that he had been sworn never to teach to anyone outside the tribe. It was the song sung to the dying, used to sing his people back to their families, to their ancestral lands after death. No one outside the tribe was allowed to know how to go there. Yet Ishi was alone at the end of his life, the last member of his tribe. It was then that he taught his secret song to the Kroebers, so they could sing him back to his people.
In the end, no matter how isolated or embattled our lives, we need one another as family. We need each other’s hearts and songs to help one another find the way.
This essay is excerpted from After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield. © 2000 by Jack Kornfield. It is reprinted here by arrangement with Bantam Books, an imprint of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
