My dear friend August sent me a link to this article by Pema Khandro Rinpoche. Rinpoche is a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. It has to do with the concept of "bardo", or "having the rug pulled out from under us", as she so succinctly puts it. An excerpt:
“But to be precise, 'bardo' refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us. Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, to be entombed between death and rebirth. We often label that a state of shock. In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be like. … Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on artificial ground. ....There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point—there is, in a sense, no rest. This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because in that radical state of unreality we need profound reasoning—not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non-conceptual way.”
I replied to August by affirming that "bardo" has indeed been the state of my life for the past year, as I'm sure it is for you, dear reader, as you continue to live through and process your grief and loss. It also reminds me of my previous post on how we can continue to think more expansively and creatively about how we can use language to describe what we are experiencing.
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