Two years ago, after the breaking open of my heart, I retreated to a friend's home in The Berkshires of Massachusetts in order to make time and space to mend what was so desperately in need of healing. This weekend, I returned to her home for the first time since my pain-filled retreat and discovered that pain has been replaced with an incredible amount of joy. Nothing in the outer circumstances had changed but everything in the world of my interiority was new, bright and different. How could this have happened?

In this journey of a thousand miles, I learned how much of my suffering has been self-imposed and chose to stop imposing it. "Pain," says the tradition of Buddhism, "is just something that happens in life. It comes, it goes, and it is essentially impersonal." Suffering, on the other hand, is what we chose to do with pain: linger over it, poke it with the stick-thoughts of our burdened minds (sometimes over and over until we quicken the wound many times and interrupt its natural process of healing), indulge the pain-filled thoughts until we bring ourselves to the very edge of despair. It has taken me years to learn this simple truth: I am the one who pursues a situation from a place of pain-passing-through to the place where it actually generates suffering.

Now I know some things I didn't know when I first sat in the Berkshire gardens and encountered the awe-filled beauty of the blue dragonfly on the lip-petal of a yellow lily. I know how to examine my own thoughts to find and challenge those that are poised to cause me suffering. I know how to expand my thinking beyond that single-minded place where suffering seems inevitable. I know how to turn a thought from an enemy into a friend. This has been no small achievement, and my gratitude for those who taught me how to do this is boundless.

There I was, back in the same gardens with the almost-same people for the almost-same reasons, except this time it wasn't my suffering that drew me there but my friend's. Together we sat in the warm afternoon sun and talked out her worries about her son's future. She wanted assurance about his well-being that, at least for now, life was not providing her. She shared her concerns, and I listened as her heart unburdened. When the time was right, I told her stories about where my son had been perilously perched at that same point in his life, and how he eventually found his way into a sense of purpose and meaning without my guidance or interference. Something in him, some kind of inner compass, led him to his own contentment.

Healing, we decided, can't be forced or hurried. It has a timetable of its own that must be allowed to run its course. Could I ever have foreseen two years ago that I'd be in the same gardens twenty-four months later with a happy heart and a pervasive sense of peace? Absolutely not. Yet my inner compass knew just what it had in mind for me, and that involved placing me in the presence of a few good teachers for a while who were exemplars of mindfulness in a way that allowed me to find my own capacity to tend the inner garden of my mind, to decide what I nourished until it bloomed, and what to move out of the garden because its effect on the other plants was ultimately harmful.

No blue dragonflies in sight this day. The yellow lilies were budded out but not yet in bloom, although the honeysuckle---both pink and yellow---was flourishing. Just as we finished our tender-hearted conversation, a ruby-throated hummingbird buzzed over our heads to dive into the fat pink funnel of a hibiscus blossom, and a stunning pair of Baltimore Orioles sang out to us from the low bush on the hillside.

Some experiences are difficult to bear, and others are miracles waiting to be noticed. Among these mountains, here in these gardens, I have known both...and learned how to turn one into the other.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Meredith Jordan,