The Labor of Love

A few weeks ago, I was on my way to my weekly yoga class after dropping my 3 year old son off at school. It had been a particularly challenging morning: whining, demanding, testing. And I thought to myself: “Thank God I have yoga to retreat to and replenish myself with – without it, what would I do?”

Then a thought emerged as if on cue: Attachment is the root of all suffering. As I drove I contemplated the Buddhist teaching on suffering. I guess I am attached to yoga, to all kinds of things...my life, my husband, my son, all the people I love, my health, my job, my home, pretty much everything I own – and even the things I don’t like our beautiful cherry tree, and the perennials I’ve planted. And I'm certainly attached to my yoga, and especially my teacher Janice. She is the best, really the only one who does it right. Yes, I admitted, I see the attachment.

I arrived at class, ready to exhale my morning onto my mat and place my life and body trustingly in my teacher's hands to learn that she was announcing her retirement, and closing up shop, no one would be taking her classes. I laid my mat in the back corner and went to the bathroom heaving up a heavy sob.

I felt my attachment with full force, the ache in my heart, the love for my teacher, the trees I viewed from the windows, even the dull paint of the room where we practiced would be missed. How would I cope with parenting and life and stress without this weekly dose of quietude?

I felt raw for a week…or more, honestly - so deep was my attachment. It was useful for me to drag it out, feel self-pity, complain to friends, indulgent as it was. For, I could see that my spiritual maturity has much to do, still with outside circumstances. I can see how well I do with life when my attachments are intact and life flows as I predict.

This week my dear friend Rhei C. went through terribly long and agonizing labor. Hopeful for a home birth she was equipped with: birthing tub, meditation tapes, candles, coconut water, midwives, husband and me, all focused on this single goal. At the 48 hour mark, my astonishingly courageous and powerful friend made the call, time to let go of our expectations and attachments, I need the hospital, now. With the help of an epidural, she gave birth naturally to a perfect expression of love a few hours later, Chayton Theodore Bura.

When I think of how long she bared the pain, how hard it was to let go - truly let go, not the “look at me I’m letting go”-letting go, but the authentic release of your grip on life – I am filled with awe. The admission that the life span of this dream (relationship, car, job, tree, you fill in the blank) is complete. It is done. That most painful place of simultaneous arrival and departure is a rare space where God and life and love are born in us anew.

Thoreau wisely said it, “The soul grows by subtraction.”
And the subtraction is painful, especially when it means letting go of someone/something we really love. And I suppose, that is the spiritual labor of love - when its life span is complete and we must let go.

I give thanks to the spirit of all life, the formed and formless, that is constantly evoking the labor pains of growth, maturity, awareness. Through the endless series of attachments we are able to release, we get to experience the freedom that lies beyond them and a love that is unlike what we have ever known.
Rev. Katherine Silvan