Heart Full

“We all breathe”, she said, “on the inhale …. I am you…. on the exhale …..you are me.” It’s a yogic concept I suppose, that when you inhale, it’s more than oxygen you’re breathing in, but energy, the environment, the breath of someone else.

It’s easy to forget that we’re so deeply interconnected. It’s easier for us to categorize each other, Democrats or Republicans, apathetics, liberals, New Yorkers, Southerners etc,.. But on other nights, we’re just people who like to eat out on a clear, Fall, New York night. Sharing a table, making recommendations on menu items, and laughing at how far off the center we are.

They say that New Yorkers don’t care, that we keep our heads down and mind our own business, sometimes we may even bump into each other, and not bother to apologize. Tonight, at Republic – an Asian fusion restaurant located off of Union Square, I had dinner with my friend Heather. At Republic they seat you in bench like tables that somehow channel Zen rather than lunchroom cafeterias, though in both cases, you have two swing a leg to get sit and stand from the tables.
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It was someone’s birthday, our instructor seemed excited that the birthdayee was spending it in her class. She smiled, “it’s wonderful … it fits perfectly with my dharma talk”. I assumed this meant she was going to talk about the wonder and the miracle of life, always an inspiring topic, but nothing new. I closed my eyes, ready to meditate on the beauty of life. Instead, she spoke about Halloween, or ‘All Hallows Eve’, as it was formerly called. All Hallows Eve and All Saint’s Day, is a time, when we as a culture turn our attention to the other side, the spirits. The spirits during these holidays, wander perhaps a little longer and a little more freely than they do on other nights of the year. Interesting … but still not quite getting it.

Some of these spirits are what various eastern cultures call “hungry ghosts”. I’d heard of hungry ghosts growing up, I had always just assumed these ghosts were noisy, not too friendly, and ‘hungry’ in a sense for our soul. Not so, she explained that these spirits had a head as small as the top of a needle, and mouths even smaller than that, but with stomachs unimaginably large, gigantic. These were hungry ghosts, ghosts who could not satisfy their hunger, because their mouths were too small to nourish them. These people had been greedy in life, and this was the form to work out that karma.
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