Monthly Notes from Nethra

Life’s Longings

On my desk sits a black-and-white photograph of my mother carrying me as a child. I was less than a year old, wearing a baby shirt she had sewn for me. She was standing in front of my grandmother’s gardenia tree, covered in heavy white blossoms. It’s the first fragrance I remember. For me, the scent of gardenias and this photograph are intertwined—one brings the other to mind. The image recalls a felt sense buried deep in the repositories of memory: what it felt like to be held in my mother's arms and nestled within the wider web of attunement of my grandparents’ home. When I see it, it brings to mind a visceral sense of safety and oneness that I once knew and perhaps have been looking for ever since. This oneness had the quality of the melting of separation without a loss of self.

This image captured the relationship between us that was to come. In it, I am reaching for something—perhaps the flowers in front of me. Holding me with one arm, smiling at the camera, she is gently redirecting my hand. Captured in this moment, with our hands suspended in the air, is a lesson that she infused into my childhood: my mother taught me the difference between holding and grasping.

I continue to explore this distinction on a daily basis. How do you hold something that is precious to you without grasping it?

Many years ago, my mother read me a poem by Kahlil Gibran that she had just discovered. I was a teenager at the time and was beginning to contemplate going to college in the US. I had a hard time fitting into school and felt intensely lonely around my peers. The school curriculum felt dry and uninspiring. I walked around the world feeling that there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t belong. In the hollowness that accompanied me as I walked through the school gates, I was experiencing the first flashes of alienation in an institutional setting.

As I came home to my mother, riddled with teenage anxieties, she handed me the books she was reading—poetry, books on trauma and healing, texts on the workings of our minds and the underpinnings of anxiety. She introduced me to ideas, frameworks, and practices that my education in school couldn’t provide. I didn’t realize it then, but I was discovering a second curriculum at home—one that felt much more enlivening and attuned to my experience of the world.

I learned from my mother how to look inside and listen. She sought ways to guide me into finding my own answers to the questions I had. She let me into her own inner world, sharing her emotional patterns and seeking ways to help me release the intergenerational cycles we had inherited. She was helping me build a compass for myself, even as it was becoming clear that this compass was likely to take me away from her, across the world.

My mind was full of dreams of what college in the US would be like—idealized images from the teenage novels I was consuming. Unlike my mother, I hadn’t grappled with the reality that this would mean leaving the close-knit cocoon of my life with her. She, on the other hand, was preparing herself for a transition that would bring separation and loss. As she was grappling with the reality that I was being drawn to a life in the US, she found this poem in Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet. As we talked about it, she told me she had found in its words guidelines for navigating that parting of ways that was to come.

On Children

Kahlil Gibran

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Reading it decades later, I now know that my mother lived her way into the truth of its words. She nurtured me and let me go. She continues to do so. This was no small feat, as she had rearranged her life to raise me. She stopped working when I was born. She woke up at 5 a.m. every day to prepare meals for me to take to school. She sewed most of my clothes. She spent hours waiting in traffic as she drove me to school, to my after-school activities, and from one hospital to another to tend to various illnesses that plagued me as a child.

In my teenage years, we became very close. We read the same books, intuited each other’s thoughts, and even had the same dreams at night. I hadn’t known a life outside of this closeness. As I felt the tug of the gravitational pull of college in the US, I hadn’t fully grasped the reality of what it would be like to have a life away from her. Yet, she didn’t stop me from leaving or ask me to go to university in Sri Lanka or somewhere closer to her. She turned her attention to her own emotions and worked on letting go of the idea of having me close by. She focused on her Buddhist practices of reflecting on the changing nature of life, the impermanence of all things. She read this poem many times.

As I left for college, she stood at the gate and watched the taxi pull away, taking me to the airport. I saw in her eyes a kind of composure where the pain of parting was modulated by a fierce integrity—the willingness to surrender her desire to keep me close. Unlike her, I felt no composure, and I wept as the recognition that I was leaving finally registered.

Holding Without Grasping

Holding without grasping sometimes requires this kind of fierce integrity to relinquish control in service of love. It is grounded in an ethics of relating that includes an openness to separation and loss.

A key distinction between the two is the way the recipient of our love is held. A hand that grips encloses and constrains that which is held, sometimes to the point of crushing it. An open palm, on the other hand, provides a space to land and rest, alongside the freedom to leave.

It is this freedom that kept me coming back, turning towards my mother over the years despite the geographic distance. Our daily conversations continue over tea. In Sri Lanka, we sit together, exploring our shared experiences and inner worlds over tea several times a day. In Sausalito, I curl up on my couch and call her for an hour each morning, sipping my tea. I continue to bring her my conundrums. She continues to share with me the things she has read. In the absence of demands for closeness, our relationship has continued to renew itself over the decades and through the many seasonal migrations that comprise my bi-local life.

A Steady Bow

As an adult, Kahlil Gibran’s words resonate for me in a new way when I think about my own longings and the longings of my clients as I accompany them in finding their way toward what they want to create.

Reading the poem again, I ask myself: What would it be like to relate to our longings by seeing them as “children who are not our children,” but as the progeny of life’s longing for itself? How would our relationship to our work change if we let go of the idea that we own what we build? What would it mean for each of us to be a steady bow for what we want to create in our lives, our communities, and wider collectives?

For me, reframing our work, our creative projects, and our relationships this way creates a crucial shift in perception. It starts with the recognition that the arrow leaves the bow. It loosens the ego’s grip on our creative work, allowing us to become facilitators of our creative expressions.

Many artists I coach find it challenging to share their work, often held back by the fear of criticism and rejection. Writers become blocked, rewriting and editing the same sentences over and over again, unable to move forward due to the belief that imperfect sentences cannot be shared. Other artists also tend to hold back from fully expressing themselves because any judgment of their work feels like an indictment of who they are.

When I ask my clients about what they long for in their work, so many say they yearn for the freedom to enter a flow state, to create without being held back by concerns about the criticism of others. I then gently ask them to tell me what freedom feels like. Often, they respond that it feels like following the love of the work—the process, the craft, the discovery, and some kind of larger purpose that the work represents.

Many times, I pose the question: “What do you want your work to be in service of?” As we explore it, I see how it shifts their focus from the fear of judging eyes to something that is more important to them than the need for validation. I have seen this shift in focus facilitate a powerful experience of unblocking. It provides courage, which in turn brings freedom.

What emerges is an idiosyncratic, bold, and authentic expression of the person’s work. Knowing that the arrow does not belong to the bow but moves toward some larger purpose often brings forth the most powerful offering a person can create.

Intention and Surrender

Shifting the focus to what we want our work, our relationships, and our lives to serve brings us to reexamine how we hold our intentions. For me, turning towards our intentions is similar to drawing a bowstring. There is a period—a key part of the process—of pulling back, drawing into our own depths, inquiring into what we want, and waiting. While I have no experience in archery, I have seen from coaching that the process of clarifying an intention and holding it with patience, focus, and presence is the most crucial part of the journey.

Sometimes this involves a long period of being suspended in the unknown, of encountering failure after failure. This process has its own temporality and trajectory that we cannot control. Yet it is this period of tending to our unactualized dreams where we discover what matters most to us. It is often in the gap between the time that we set our intentions and the time we see them actualize that we learn. We gain skills. We cultivate discernment. We reexamine our intentions and our assumptions about the outcome. Often, this learning process results in us changing our own initial ideas about where we want to direct the bow.

Finally, for the arrow to fly, we also have to let go. With everyone I have worked with, I have seen that the deepest breakthroughs happen in the aftermath of some kind of surrender. It could be a surrender of a core belief, a set of assumptions about success, an intergenerational pattern that is repeating itself, a need for external validation, or a set of fears and stories of inadequacy. Unless whatever is holding us back is released, change cannot happen. It requires a fundamental shift in the inner landscape, in our relationship to ourselves and our longings.

This often means that our bow is required to go through some kind of reconstruction during this process. We are called to mend it and tend to it, to learn and discover the form it needs to take for the arrow to freely fly. In its optimal shape, it does not strain itself. A steady bow does not contort itself for the arrow. It finds its shape and holds it. In holding its shape—with just the right amount of stretching without overextending—it gathers its power.

This power is what arises from within when we redirect our attention from how we might be perceived to how we want to serve. We find more courage to harness it when we see what we build as arrows that flow from us out into the world, as expressions of life’s longing. A steady bow that knows this truth releases the arrow with the fullness of its power, surrenders it to life, and rests back into itself.

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