If you touch birth and death deeply, you touch the world of no-birth and no-death.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I did not touch birth so much as it touched me. Before becoming pregnant, I lived in a gray land, like the Manhattan sidewalks I traveled to and from grammar school. I spelled out the words of a building I passed, Hotel Esplanade, in time to my steps on the gray squares of cement. Unknowingly, I spelled not a word but a wish, for esplanade comes from the Latin esplanare, which means “to explain.” My day-to-day life as a child in the 1940s and ’50s yielded no explanations as to why I felt vague and smudged, like a poorly done drawing. It was a sense of emptiness and nonself, but very different from the Buddhist awareness of the limitless ground of being. I call it “no-life,” but unlike the world of no-birth and no-death, it is not life’s deeper counterpart. No-life is disconnection: a wave without an ocean.

The roots of this misfortune lay in my early childhood. As a sociologist I can see now how the childrearing practices of the 1940s influenced my parents. And as a student of Buddhism I can see how my mother’s and father’s ignorance and their own state of no-life caused my suffering.

We used to think that newly borns had no sense of themselves separate from their mothers. Studies now show that babies have an emergent sense of self right from the very start. So long as it grows well, this young part of us is the source of mindful wonder and creativity throughout our lives. My emergent sense of self had been damaged, and so I—like many of us—closed it away in the cellar and tried to get on without it. Yet this young self doesn’t disappear, nor does it age like wine. Only after my son graduated from college did I peer back down at mine through psychotherapy.

But the deepest looking came through vipassana meditation. Three summers ago, I sat quietly in a chair, having forsaken sitting cross-legged on the floor due to rheumatoid arthritis. My mind, too, was quiet that day. Following my breath, I felt a spaciousness open inside me. Gradually, I noticed how I rested after the outbreath, and how the stillness allowed me to feel my heart beat. This simple awareness led, over many weeks, to a cascade of early somatic memories. As if compelled, I formed them into a story:

I am an infant alone in a room. A wood lamp in the shape of a brown-and-white-spotted dog crouches on its haunches. A clock with a round pink face, cheerful red cheeks and twinkling eyes sits beside the dog. The lamp and the clock keep watch, yet their wooden expressiveness is so terrifyingly inert. Cloths with brightly colored designs and a fresh, laundered smell give off some life. The smell brings an absent mother near, and the vivid hues warm my eyes and dance in my head with an almost dizzying stimulation. A breeze comes through a window. The air touches my skin as if the breath of someone near. Sometimes after I breathe out, I rest with only the thump of my heart to interfere, so that I can listen for someone coming. When I breathe in again it feels sad, like going on alone.

What does come is fire and ice: this is what I know of love. The person whom I will later call “Mommy” yanks my baby arms and legs impatiently. She looks at me with cold disapproval or with an absent expression. I am disgusting, the first look says, because my diaper is dirty. The second look is worse: I am not here, I have vanished. She leaves. After a time longer than long, the person I will later call “Daddy” appears and tickles my ribs and knees. My body flies apart from terrifying surges of laughter. He leaves, too. Because I am too worked up and don’t know how to soothe myself, bubbly pains come in my belly. My whole body stiffens, and I cry until I forget how to stop crying.

Someone attaches a glass bottle to a pink vinyl bottle propper and sticks the rubber nipple into my mouth. The nipple is too long, and the lukewarm milk comes too fast as I suck. I thrust my tongue against the nipple to keep from choking. Afterwards, though I’m still alone, a partial comfort arises from inside. My breath billows my lungs; cradlelike, my knocking heart rocks my body. My filled stomach feels pleasantly heavy and makes watery noises; at the bottom of my body, warm wetness comes as well as soft mushy solids. The cup of my inner ear sounds with blood whooshing. Saliva trickles down my throat and bubbles at my lips. Sounds vibrate up from my throat past my warm mobile tongue; I can make them come again and shape them into new sounds. Salty wet washes my eyes that open and shut on the world.

But the muscles of my arms and legs long to be folded against my body as they were inside my mother. The pores on my skin open like the mouths of a million baby birds, but nourishing touch does not come. Cut off, I feel weary. I curl on my side, draw my knees up to my chin. The arch of one foot locks into the arch of the other—as perfectly fitted as pieces of a puzzle—and I sleep.

These early memories deepened what I had learned from my son, Levin, when he belonged to the culture of the newly born. By “culture” I mean that babies form a hidden universal community that holds embodied wisdom. I discovered that there is never just a baby but a baby and someone. As a child, I did not feel connected to my mother. So I became attached to a blanket that I named “you-you”; it was the “you” that comforted my “I.” By contrast, Levin felt that he was connected to me. In fact, while still breast-feeding, he seemed to see himself as part of a whole. He would use the pronoun “my” instead of “I”—for example, he would say “My am going out to play”—until he weaned at three and a half, when for the first time he called himself “I.”

Quite naturally babies are like little waves that fearlessly crest from oceanic waters or subside into them. To flow both ways, they need two gifts: embodied connection to their ground of being, which is the maternal body, and respect shown to their emergent sense of self. Lack of proper connection and respect impedes babies’ life flow, and they risk becoming cut off. Recent research on infants shows that abused or neglected infants lack normal receptors in the brain that govern emotion, and this deficit impairs their inherent sociability. Early absence and early transgressive presence are the taproots of loneliness.

A mild example comes from shortly after Levin gave up breast-feeding. I lent him a gold bracelet I wore at his age. My formal name, Roberta, was engraved on it. Levin showed the bracelet to his babysitter and asked her what it said. When she read “Roberta” to him, he insisted, “Read it again.” When she did, his lower lip trembled and his eyes filled with tears. He looked down at the bracelet and asked, “Robbie?” The bracelet was my hand circling his wrist, permanence in the face of absence. Without it, he felt lost.

Buddhists use the word “right” to refer to correct ways of being—for example, right thinking and right action. From a baby’s point of view there is also such a thing as “unright.” Unright emptiness is the emptiness of disconnection, not that of ground of being. More severe instances than Levin’s of unright emptiness can then lead to cravings.

When I was a baby, food was my only comfort; it also served as a refuge from unpredictable and intrusive closeness. At fourteen an eating disorder seized me. At the times I ate, I could not leave the house since I associated food with isolation. I walked back and forth all day from the kitchen to the bedroom, dressed in a T-shirt and underpants. I called these my “eating days.” I felt trapped in the foyer of our apartment, where I hung out because it led to the front door; but somehow I couldn’t get through it.

I managed to escape to college and then marriage; I hoped that if I became one flesh with my husband, I could escape my own embodied suffering. Seven years later, I became pregnant on an autumn camping trip in the White Mountains. I wasn’t sure why I had left my diaphragm at home and let my husband press me up against a fiery orange and yellow maple tree. Yet, this ambivalent moment forever transformed my misery.

I hadn’t expected pregnancy to be a refuge, as a cocoon is to a butterfly, but it was. For one thing, I didn’t have to be thin, a social pressure that obsessed me. Now I also felt less alone. A short Buddhist saying, “Sitting quietly/doing nothing/spring comes/and the grass grows by itself,” describes perfectly the new joy I felt simply in being.

One day in April, my seventh month of pregnancy, my in-laws, my husband and I visited Sylvann’s Wood on Cape Cod, which every spring had an extensive showing of flowers. Spaced generously with no underbrush, the trees were easy to walk amongst in my billowy green top and wide purple drawstring pants. In the woods were many fruit trees and euonymus with their strange segmented branches; the ground was a rich dark brown. Poking up from the soft earth were early spring bulbs—English primrose, crocuses, daffodils and cyclamen. For the first time, nature no longer existed apart from me: as it bloomed, so did I.

If pregnancy was the chrysalis, birth was the moment that cracked stone. The labor contractions felt strong enough to lift my body off the bed: levitated, I felt borne on the breath of being. At the contractions’ strongest, a flush rushed hotly over my face as if the life force, so long damped down, had returned all at once. Restless, I listened to my husband’s mindful words, “It’s just a moment in time,” and yielded to the waves of heat. Though I heeded him and, later, the doctor, I felt utterly separate from them, and I enjoyed it. Never before so present in the moment-to-moment movement of life, I needed to be alone as one would be in meditation.

Slowly, I labored through a hot July day. It became time to push the baby out. Steamy and slippery with sweat, my hair clinging any which way to my face and neck, I moved languidly up from sleep to meet the contractions. Like a loose piece of seagrass, I felt free in elemental waters. My son unfolded, wetly, out of me just when I’d almost forgotten why I was laboring, so much had the present moment expanded. All my life I had needed to ruminate before I acted; suddenly, this old habit had no place. For here was a living being, moving his thin arms and legs with oversized hands and feet about in the air, and uttering his first sound of “laaah,” like a newborn lamb. Someone helped me put him to my breast. Looking down, I saw his hair wet just like mine, and felt his firm, perfectly round gums and soft tongue on my nipples. The being of pregnancy was now replaced by the being of motherhood.

After the dharma of pregnancy and the fierce meditation of birth came the embodied enlightenment of breast-feeding. I arrived home from the hospital the day the milk came in. It was high summer. I sat out on our porch admiring the nasturtiums, morning glories and marigolds, which had grown noticeably in my absence. Like my body, everything seemed to be in full bloom. I watched a seagull glide on an air current, a row of poplar trees lean away from a breeze in the yard next to ours, and at the same time became aware of the surge of milk in my breasts. These different currents—of milk, of air, of the sap in the trees and water in the flowers—seemed to me to flow into one another, so that I became part of them and they part of me. Like a rushing spring river, pregnancy, birth and nursing bore me to the ocean, from which I emerged as refreshed as if newly born.

What I felt in those years I never felt again. To have another life grow inside your familiar body; to feel your body open as wide as oceans; to be left all alone in your body, yet to feel the milk pulse in criss-crossing streams in answer to your baby’s suckling; years later, to find yourself no longer ripe as the freshest fruit, no longer able to bring forth life into what Buddhists call the privilege of human birth—these are radical moments of emptiness and nonself. And looking deeply now, in my late fifties, I can see that these experiences released me from no-life into the right understanding of these universal truths. One birth begot another. After many years, my smudged young self emerged from the cellar, and I became her mother, too. Last summer we walked together at dawn with my Labrador retriever alongside the booming ocean. Drawn out of ourselves, we became continuous with the gray-green, fresh white crests of the waves, blown back like horses’ manes, the numberless grains of sand, and the pink-blue morning sky that stretched every which way without end.

I could not have written this article without the encouragement and discerning editorial help of Nancy Bardacke and Myla Kabat-Zinn. I also want to thank Inquiring Mind editor Barbara Gates for her support.

∞

From the Fall 2000 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 17, No. 1)

Text © 2000-2019 Robbie Pfeufer Kahn

Art © 1996–2019 Judith A. Williams: White on White and Blue. 35″ x 23″. Mixed media on paper. Used by permission.