See with an Equal Eye

“The true yogis, uniting their consciousness with God, see with equal eye, all living beings in God and God in all living beings.” ~ Bhagavad Gita 6.29

“A true yogi observes Me in all beings, and also sees every being in Me. Indeed, the self-realized man sees Me everywhere.”~ Bhagavad Gita 6.29

“Close both eyes see with the other one. Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments our ceaseless withholding our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new expansive location in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.” ~ Gregory Boyle, SJ

“The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be some lives out there that matter less than others.” ~ Gregory Boyle, SJ

These past couple of months have been a continued lesson in healing and integration, and I find myself looking to all possible avenues of relief and solace. Many people have asked me how I keep working through this grief, and I always respond in the same way: “What else would I do?” I have found that my work - teaching and sharing and considering and contemplating - has been my greatest source of inspiration and of regaining some sort of equilibrium.

For the past couple of months, I have been teaching about the Bhagavad Gita, looking to various of its most famous quotes and relating them to my own every day life and hopefully to the lives of my students.  I always try to offer parallel images or situations that allow us to see how this ancient wisdom - often repackaged and restated in later faith traditions - is actually totally relevant to our way of viewing our current circumstances.


Here is a powerful recent example.

In April, I returned to Seattle for my Spring contemplative retreat at the Grunewald Guild. I had very mixed feelings about going - how could I return to that place that had taken my sister, my nephew? How could I go there when they were no longer there? How would that feel?

Luckily I had many friends that encouraged me, reminding me that I had a whole life there that was outside of Erin and Shanikai. That I had community, a support network, students, and a city itself that was familiar and formative.

After landing in Seattle and settling in, I reached out to Shanikai’s ex-girlfriend - I’ll call her Dara - whom I had met the year before when I had a great trip up to Seattle, and then again in January when I went for the devastating reality of Shanikai’s memorial.

She responded right away and said she would like to meet, but I began to get cold feet. What would we talk about? What did we have in common, other than this tragedy? And, what did I even understand about the life they lived on Capitol Hill, one so different than the one I had lived at just a few years older when I first moved there? These kids were different. They were tough, they were scrappy, and as I would find out - they were all deeply traumatized by life circumstances in their relatively short time on the planet.

As we walked around Capitol Hill, people would often stop Dara to tell her how beautiful she was. “People always did that to Shanikai too,” she told me. She was soft spoken, childlike, loving and very connected to Shanikai. She wanted to show me all the stores they shopped in, and told me stories that I would likely otherwise never hear about Shanikai’s life. We ran into several people along the way who knew Shanikai, and Dara would introduce me. They would tell me how much they loved Shanikai, and several broke my heart open by telling me that they had wanted to meet me, that Shanikai talked about me often.

At one point, we ran into a young couple - the “older” guy (at 27) and his much younger girlfriend (who I would find out later was just 17.) They were just arriving at the light rail, having left rehab just a few hours earlier. They both gushed over me, took out their phones, showed me videos of Shanikai, text threads from him, and talked about how much they loved him. The guy said Shanikai was a wake-up call for him to get clean and to start a new life. “I’m going to start working at the church!” he proudly exclaimed.

We hugged and cried, and then they needed to get going - someone had stolen a PlayStation from one of their friends and they were going to retrieve it.

A half hour later, that young man would be dead - shot in front of his girlfriend in an altercation around the PlayStation. 

I knew this because the young woman - who I had met just that one time - reached out to me, “Aunt Molly, can you talk?”

A couple of days later, I went to see Dara again. I asked her who supported them in all of this grief. For the 17 year old whose boyfriend had been shot, this was her second boyfriend to die. Shanikai was also Dara’s second, at just 19. What they see, what they live with, what they have no way to process, is unimaginable to many of us. I know it was to me.  Dara said, “No one. We just move on.” I asked her if she thought the kids would be open to a support group and her first response was, “I’m not sure. We kids down’t usually talk to adults. If we do, we are medicalized, institutionalized or otherwise seen as behavioral issues.” She paused, “but we could ask.”

Later that week, one of Shanikai’s friends posted about the group on instagram to gauge interest. I remember going to sleep that night feeling defeated and almost ridiculous. These kids are not going to want to talk to me. Why do I always think I have to - or even can - do something? This is just me clinging to some version of Shanikai, the one thing I can’t have. I remember falling asleep filled with anxiety.

The next morning I opened my email to find that more than 30 kids had signed up for the group. I was thrilled, saddened and a little worried all at once. What would we talk about? How would this go? Would I have anything to offer?

And then another moment of doubt arrived. One of the kids who signed up was a kid whose name had been floating all around Shanikai’s death. I’ll call him Andreas.

Andreas was the bad apple. Andreas was the one who had gotten Shanikai into drugs. Andreas was the one Shanikai was with the night he died. At Shanikai’s memorial, I remember saying, “If I ever meet Andreas, I will kill him with my bare hands.” In my mind, in the desperation of grief and looking for someone to blame, Andreas proved the obvious target.

I wrote to one of the young people who had helped to publicize the group. “I don’t know what to do about Andreas, I don’t want to talk to him,” to which I received the response (from a 15 year old), “While I resent Andreas for introducing Shanikai to drugs, in all of my other interactions with him, he seems like a good person who has made bad choices. Just like Shanikai.”

Uuuff. True. And if a 15 year old could find that kind of equanimity and forgiveness, maybe so could I.

On that first call, Andreas was the first one on, and the only one to share his video. So it was just me and Andreas, looking at each other. At one point, he talked about his feelings of guilt and began to cry, he talked about calling his mom on the night Shanikai didn’t come home, and hearing him being a kid, calling his mom, just broke something inside of me. I knew I could not hate or blame this kid. In fact, a couple weeks later, on a call on Mother’s Day, he shared that he had always wanted the approval of his mom and the one way he could get that was by doing drugs with her. How could I not want to just hold this kid? Tell him he mattered, tell him I believed in him, and that he was not to blame? And really, how could I not hold all of them? Every one of the kids talked about a mother who was absent, incarcerated or abusive, and father’s who were mostly not in the picture at all.

And yet, up in Seattle, it seems all we see now are homeless people, drug addicted kids, vandalism, petty crime, and as an “insider/outsider,” what I mostly hear is people like me complaining about them, being sick of them, tired of kids “tagging” their buildings, and I get it. But what we miss is who are these people, and how did they come to this? It’s so easy to judge, it’s so easy to feel morally superior, and yet, these questions of morality are precisely what can ultimately prove deadly for some of these kids, either killed seeking some kind of justice, or perhaps ending their own lives over things they feel they cannot be forgiven for.

And still, God is present in each of them, and they are each a part of the totality and infinite expansiveness of God. They are God’s children too, and our only job should be to protect them, to love them, to give them the resources they need - especially in terms of love, acceptance, unconditional support, pride in their accomplishments, to let them know that they matter, exactly as they are.

The support group has had several kids on it talking about, and then deciding against, suicide. Just yesterday, a new kid reached out to ask if I could talk to him one on one, he had been having thoughts of suicide and self-harm and he just needed to talk to someone, to learn how to make those thoughts stop, or at least not be so loud.

We texted back and forth for about an hour. I asked questions, “what was his idea of freedom?” “What did he want for his life?” “Who was his support network?” and I offered resources like Howard Thurman talking about freedom, “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls,” and specific practices like grounding, orienting to space, coming back to the present moment.

He wrote to me after our call saying, “I really wish more people had someone saying healthy things like this to someone that’s hurting, I really don’t like the fact that therapy is so looked down upon and hated on for being expensive. I think the government should pay therapists and that everyone just deserves, as a human right, to be freed from these thoughts.” I could not agree more.

These are the moments, ones I try to identify as often as I can, when I believe that these practices, these faith traditions, these spiritual or religious orientations, are truly for us to become more connected, to widen our circle of care and compassion, to see God in all beings, and all beings in God. These ideas are not theoretical, they are not “out there.” The Bhagavad Gita, or even the Bible, are not for us to simply read, quote and use for shutting down conversations with an easy theology, a thought terminating cliche. They are for real life, for real circumstances, and real opportunities for us to flex to become a “true yogi,” to become one who “closes both eyes to see with the other one.”

“Just as the sun, while remaining in one place, spreads its light everywhere, similarly the Supreme Lord, by his various energies pervades and sustains everything that exists.” The perfected yogis, in the light of realized knowledge, see everything in its connection with God.”

I have to believe then, that even these losses, my sister, my brother, my Shanikai, are also part of the mystery of God presence, that somehow, this too is part of it. This is not spoken from a place of spiritual bypass, but rather from a place of spiritual survival. If there is only loss, only grief and devastation, then going on makes no sense. But if I - we - can get to someplace where these losses can be integrated, where something new and unexpected comes alive through our adaptation after loss, then we have something to hold on to, something to move forward from and something to move forward to.

For now, these kids are a lifeline to me. They are my greatest teachers, and give me a sense of purpose and meaning. The same kid who texted me yesterday closed our conversation saying, “He would be so proud of you for dealing with things the way you have and the impact you are aiming to make. We have to all be here for each other.”

I agree. 

I hope I see you soon, on a class in Seattle, online (Bhagavad Gita!) or here in Mexico. We are all in this together.