Women and Children First Read Free Page A

throw themselves on the Lama’s wisdom and ask for any advice that might help. Now Ceci considered doing that. But the Lama kept staring at her, his gaze so direct that Ceci could only return it in small doses.
    After a while Ceci said, “My husband broke up with me at a sushi bar. We were sitting side by side. The sushi chef wasn’t watching exactly, but he was there. My husband told me that he was moving to Arizona; then he ordered another cucumber salmon-skin roll. It was early for dinner. Only one table was full. Four young people, a girl and three guys—Wall Street types. I’d seen them on our way in. It had surprised me to see them so early, at such an unchic Japanese place uptown. After my husband said what he had to say, I didn’t feel like talking, so we eavesdropped on their conversation about how hard it was to meet someone in the city. And I was so filled with hate for them, such bubbling-up, boundless hate. There was nothing wrong with them, they weren’t obnoxious. I just hated them for being young. And I thought: Oh, I’ve changed. I am exactly the kind of person you tell you don’t love anymore, sitting shoulder to shoulder with at a sushi bar.”
    The Lama’s expression shifted slightly, crossed some nearly imperceptible line between boredom and relief. He looked at Ceci a few seconds longer. “There is a simple meditation called the meditation of loving kindness,” he said, with hardly any accent. “Its aim is to increase your compassion. You just breathe in and out. You breathe in the suffering of those you want to help, and the suffering goes straight to your heart and destroys whatever is most self-loving and self-cherishing. And you breathe it out as white light, which goes to whoever needs it and gives them what they want.”
    Well, it sounded as if it couldn’t hurt, but finally, what was the point? What did it have to do with Ceci or anything she had told him? How could breathing white light in and out help her, or anyone? How could her disappointment be translated into compassion, and what good was compassion without action? Don’t send white light, she thought. Send money. She wanted her fifty dollars back.
    The Lama said, “Just give it a ten-minute try. Ten minutes for something that’s worked for three thousand years. What have you got to lose?” And Ceci thought: Why not? Really, ten minutes was nothing, nothing to lose. And what if it helped? She remembered how, in high school, she read Franny and Zooey and so loved the idea of a prayer becoming part of your heartbeat. Working its biochemical magic.
    The others had started without her. Only for the briefest moment did Ceci let herself feel slighted. She tiptoed into the temple and settled onto a pillow near the door. She crossed her legs and thought of what the Lama had said and started breathing. First she concentrated on that—inhaling, exhaling—then moved gingerly, testing the water, toward suffering, toward how much you saw if you opened your eyes on an average day in the city, how much you never saw. She conjured up stories, that restaurant for the dying, photos, terrible images of violence and death and disease until she couldn’t hold her breath and breathed out, sending out health, long life, love, work—a miracle, if need be. She sent it streaming out into the world and even—this was the hardest part—to the others in the room, wishing for them whatever healing they sought in the Medicine Buddha.
    She inhaled again and the images began to blur, growing brighter, coming up behind her eyelids, brilliant and warming. She felt slightly dizzy, surrounded by so much light, and yet she could still check back on herself, probing, tongue in sore tooth, for what hurt. And after some minutes it began to seem to her that her problems were, when one took the larger view, really very manageable, and rather small.
    But though she kept breathing steadily, taking in and sending out, the light began to fade, gradually, as at