The Big Squeeze

Audio recording here.

“This being human is a guest house.” writes Rumi
“Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!” he says.
”Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in…
each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

This poem came into my life while in seminary. It was around this same time of school-year endings - a few years ago - when I was trying to finish my masters thesis. It’s exactly as you might imagine it or have experienced yourself when in the throes of a massive project.

Piles of books and papers on a desk. Too much - way too much - caffeine, hours of cat videos on YouTube effectively procrastinating.

And the night before it was due - late into the evening - I realized that I was not going to finish it on time. I had in fact only fully written half of the required 50 pages.

And as a recovering perfectionist - this felt terrible.
Calling my advisers to ask for a very last minute extension filled me with that feeling of not enoughness - familiar to so many of us - with some sadness and disappointment and a little shame - all piled on top.

As the version of myself I had imagined - someone who calmly turns in her pristine thesis well in advance of the deadline - collided with the reality.

It was my roommate at the time who found me in quite a state at the breakfast table the morning this all unfolded. She eventually asked if I knew the poem “The Guest House” by Rumi. She shared about how it came into her life at a difficult moment and read it out loud to me.

And something about Rumi’s words in this poem in that moment offered me some space around these undesirable emotions that had showed up. The not-enoughness, the sadness, the disappointment, the shame. Some space so that I could see them better.

Was I laughing and inviting in all of these unexpected visitors - all of these undesirable emotions into my life - as Rumi suggests? No, I was definitely not laughing nor smiling at the door - of my home, of my being. But there was some space.

I was willing to consider that these emotions served a purpose, which was a reframing. That there was meaning to be made in response to their arrival.

And it is out of a similar sense of things that Pema Chödrön - the Tibetan Buddhist Nun, scholar, teacher - offers her teaching around what she calls - “The Big Squeeze,” which is the service title today.

You may have noticed an interesting misspelling on our sign out front this week - “The Big Sueeze”

I tried to think of a way to make a joke about this misspelling, but honestly kept coming back to the fact that it would be so great if Sueeze were an actual word when playing scrabble - all those vowels and a z? Scrabble Gold.

But, The Big Squeeze is the name she uses when those unexpected visitors show-up. And more specifically as Pema Chödrön talks about it - its the moments when “the upliftedness of our ideas meet the rawness of life.”

“There is a perplexing tension” she says “between our aspirations and the reality of feeling tired, hungry, stressed out, afraid, bored, angry, or whatever we experience in any given moment of our life.”

Speaking specifically as a Buddhist practitioner she adds -

“We can kid ourselves for a while that we understand meditation and the [Buddhist] teachings, but at some point we have to face it. None of what we’ve learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we’re insulted by our colleague.”

The big squeeze is -

- valuing a shared meal with your family - cooking, planning, coordinating for the one agreed meal of the week - and being met with someone who is grumpy, someone else complaining about the food and the dog peeing on the floor.

It’s feeling motivated and inspired to live out our UU principles by joining a justice project and then feeling irritated or disappointed by the way the meeting is run or by a particular personality in the group.

It’s leaving yoga class feeling calm and connected to that spacious birds-eye view offered by a spiritual practice and then having someone cut you off in the parking lot.

It’s when the upliftedness of our ideas meet the rawness of life.

It’s the meeting place of how we want things to be, how we think they can be or even ought to be - with the uncertainty, complexity, chaos, humanness of life.

That yoga example I just mentioned - that ones mine. And what I did in that moment when someone cut me off in the parking lot - probably minutes after bowing and saying Namaste - is that I yelled unkind things at the person who obviously couldn’t hear me - and so I really yelled unkind things at the windshield.

(Yes, it is funny. And maybe that’s why Rumi can see the possibility of laughter in these moments.)

But this place of the squeeze - it’s fertile ground for those unexpected visitors to show up. Those undesirable and often big emotions. They seem to just shoot right through the surface - finding an opening in the smallness of a parking lot encounter.

Pema Chödrön spends so much time describing and talking about these particular moments in our lives because - it is exactly in these moments, she says, where we can really learn something about ourselves.

“The place of the squeeze is the very point in our lives where we can really learn something” she writes.

Because when these big emotions show up in our ordinary and everyday moments, these unexpected visitors are sort of like teachers.

As a tradition, as many of you know, in addition to our 7 principles we have 6 sources we’ve named to guide us as we try to live out and into our principles - and one of these sources is the wisdom from the world’s religions.

And so the teaching being shared, the wisdom from both Pema Chödrön - a contemporary teacher - and Rumi - a 13th century teacher - is that our emotions, the presence of our emotions, serve a purpose.

And I just invite you to check-in with yourself for a moment to notice whether you agree with this or not.

Generally do you value the emotions that showup at the doorstep of your home - your very being - on any given day?

Do you think the emotions serve a purpose or are that somehow this part of the human experience has less value than the mind.

We all have emotions, every single one of us. And so how are we in relationship to them when they show-up? Especially those emotions that we don’t really like to feel.

If we imagine for a moment, that both Rumi and Pema Chödrön are in the car with us when we yell at the windshield - and I’m going out on a limb to say that you’ve maybe also been in this place. Maybe Pema Chödrön, in the passenger’s seat, would calmly be saying - let’s pause here and look at what just happened. What was that? Why did such a big emotion show-up in a seemingly small moment?

We might grumble in frustrated response feeling like we don’t have time for such questions - to only hear Rumi laughing - whose in the backseat already serving tea to the emotion that is already riding with us.

They both are saying - pause (in the moment if you can, later in your day if reflection is more possible). Pause, welcome in this moment, accept it because it has already arrived. And if you do this you will learn valuable things about yourself - you will grow in awareness and deepen into your truest self.

This is challenging work - this work of self-awareness. It’s very uncomfortable to feel squeezed, and if we take this route of pausing and staying in the moment - we are extending these feelings of discomfort. But just like all visitors, they come, they stay a little while, they share their story - and then they leave.

But this is also challenging work because setting out the welcome mat for these unexpected visitors asks that we practice loving ourselves. That we have compassion for our stories, for our journey of becoming.

Hospitality is a love practice. And as we practice setting out the welcome mat to whatever arises when we feel squeezed, we’re practicing returning to the seat of Love.

We might not always fully get there each time, but that’s why it’s a practice.

And, lucky for us, the human experience provides lots of opportunities to practice returning to Love, to practice returning to this Loving gaze toward our own process and journey again and again.

The squeeze is just a part of this life thing. But we can shift the way we respond when it happens. We can rearrange the furniture in our homes a little to be more welcoming and hospitable to these unexpected visitors.

Recognizing that - they have a story to share, something to teach us - and then they will be on their way.

All month we’ve been talking about creativity in light of the words of Vinita Hampton Wright: “When you take the stuff of life and rearrange it so that it matters, so that it does good things, you’re acting creatively.”

And so this too, is an invitation into a day-to-day creative practice in those moments when you feel squeezed.

And, when we rearrange things to be more welcoming to the unexpected visitors that show up in our own lives, we are more able to do it for others.

When we set out the welcome mat and practice returning to that seat of Love in our own lives it will impact how we show up in relationship, how we show up for others.

Because how can we be present for another’s true story - if we can’t be present to our own?

And we need each other when we feel squeezed. If it’s feeling hard to return to that seat of expansive Love and compassion for ourselves and welcome in what has arisen, we can remind each other that - you are loved and - you are worthy.

Sometimes we need someone in the car with us to say - what just happened there? To help us laugh at ourselves. To serve the tea. To share a poem. To help us soften and awaken our hearts.

It’s why deepening into our true selves - is part of JUC’s church mission - because we do this in community, in relationship.

We had a lot of squeeze moments this year. Of course we all did in our lives outside of JUC, but also here, as a community. Many of us felt the squeeze around the making room project. Through conversations and forums - we welcomed in the bigger emotions at work around what it might mean for many of you to leave this building that has been your church home.

You welcomed three interns this year, you welcomed all of the changes that have come with supporting Keith’s sabbatical.

And yet - and yet - we need each other to deepen in our welcoming. Because we are always in motion - are we not? Growing, deepening, becoming. We have not arrived.

With the privilege of my fresh eyes in this community -

In this moment, in these times, one of the places where most of us in this room feel the squeeze is whenever whiteness, white supremacy culture, or something connected to those words is brought up. These words and phrases that I’m sure evoke a variety of reactions in this room.

(Perhaps unexpected visitors have arrived already in this moment for you just in hearing these words from the pulpit.)

But these words and phrases - and what they are unearthing - are not going away. And I think that’s a really good thing.

And perhaps it is specifically churches, specifically faith house where there is a real opportunity, a safe and supportive and healing way to ask each other - what’s going on there in your reaction that to that words or phrase? Can I help you rearrange the furniture of your internal room to make space for its arrival? To go deeper and really engage it?

Because if you’re willing to set out the welcome mat for all that arrives within you and within eachother in this squeeze as opposed to resisting it then there will be transformation, there will be deepening, connecting, engage.

And that is the beautiful mission of this church.

May it be so.

Amen.