Drawing Our Impermanence
Student/teacher collaboration (2022)
Originally published by Tricycle Magazine on September 2, 2024
A mournful violin echoes hauntingly as “Anna” stills her wrinkled hands to draw. The 70-something concentrates with her eyes closed after resisting the instruction, a smile of surprise spreading across her lips as she allows her creativity to unravel. Her defiance softens as she learns to trust her instincts, it seems, her girlish features weathered by decades despite the youthful verve she arrives with for our weekly workshop. As she works in silence.
Seven other women perform the prompt with individual flair, their faces worn like maps of time and experience, with the setbacks and breakthroughs that have brought them to the Lehman Village Senior Center in East Harlem. The facility is operated by the Carter Burden Network, a nonprofit offering programs that alleviate social isolation, food insecurity, and health and wellness needs that improve quality of life for older adults.
Each dot they draw symbolizes a moment in time, a mindfulness exercise for expressing the fleetingness of life in the abstract. Their faces mirror the moods each memory unleashes; the aching loss of husbands, the innocent joy of grandchildren, the trials of rural childhoods spent in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic—the illnesses that have robbed them of friends and family. They reveal these snapshots while presenting their pieces at the close of each session, during the storytelling exchanges that connect them in vital ways.
A joy to witness.
I came to this work after completing Tibet House’s 100-Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training with David Nichtern in 2020, the chance of a lifetime. Once certified, I met with undocumented students, queer youth of color, recovery groups, frontline residents, and the chronically ill during and after the pandemic that devastated the immigrant, communities-of-color where they lived—where I lived—in the Bronx and elsewhere.
Rather than shielding myself from the suffering, I met it with generosity, compassion, and creativity—the tools of my teaching craft—as I lost the mentor who became a father, my consulting contracts, and my apartment during the 2020 lockdown. I too despaired in the wave of change that swept over us at such a difficult time, in the great upheaval that doubled as an opportunity to transform that pain into something greater: purpose.
The Clemente, a Puerto Rican/Latinx arts institution on the Lower East Side, proposed a partnership to serve elderly residents as dementia and mortality rates skyrocketed due to the isolation imposed by COVID-19. Rallying in response, we launched CUENTOS in 2022, a meditation and storytelling initiative for Black, Latinx, and Asian seniors. Participants reported reductions in physical pain, anxiety, and insomnia as well as improved mood, focus, and concentration, which they credited to meditation combined with the intercultural exchanges that made them feel seen and heard—alive.
Data supports their feedback.
While planning CUENTOS, I learned that mindfulness practice can lead to changes in brain structure and function, which can impact mental and physical well-being by increasing our resilience to stress as reported in How Does Mindfulness Training Affect Health? A Mindfulness Stress Buffering Account by J. David Creswell and Emily K. Lindsay in 2014. I also found that regular mindfulness practice can improve executive control and emotion regulation in older adults, which could support cognitive health and coping with the difficulties of aging compounded by pandemic-related trauma.
In a paper by psychologist Susan H. McFadden, PhD, I discovered that “positive social interactions can nurture resilience and creative engagement among older persons, including those living with dementia”. The motivational, attentional, and social aspects of arts activities can offer meaningful opportunities for the elderly to express and strengthen this resilience. While aging contributes to mental and physical decline, it doesn’t appear to diminish our creativity. This convinced me to combine meditative and creative exercises to stabilize my well-being as an experiment first—an approach known as “creative mindfulness”.
The pairing of these ancient disciplines has allowed my students to lead with their strengths, whether contemplating the movements of breath, observing the coming and going of thoughts, relaxing into sound meditation, expanding their creativity, or telling the stories that inform their artworks. In the process, I developed a method for transmitting the practices that have helped me to others by drawing on my experience as a musician, writer, artist, and teacher—a reinvention of purpose by merging my spiritual and creative paths.
As when “Carla” draws ovals to the sound of resonating meditation bowls, a 70-something who spends much of her precious time with her children and grandchildren when she isn’t visiting relatives in Puerto Rico. She’s learned to pull away from the negative ruminations that cause suffering, to cease the revisiting of regrets and losses, the worrying over what might happen—most of which is beyond her control. By focusing on the present, she connects to something greater, to God as a Catholic—to inner calm and simplicity.
Each ellipse she draws represents a beginning, growth, and end, a cycle of impermanent existence—a birth life, and death. The overlapping rings create a hypnotic effect as the composition emerges from the depths of consciousness where her wisdom and instincts reside, an artwork that captures the lived and subconscious stories that surface as she meditates on impermanence. As she looks back while accepting what awaits us all.
Of the hundreds of students I’ve served, only a few have identified as Buddhist, a testament to the dharma’s capacity for meeting us wherever we are, its transcendence. Nearly all have recognized the impermanence they embody as they focus on the movements of the breath, an intimacy with self and spirit that compelled “Laura”, a wheelchaired elder of Jamaican heritage, to proclaim that, “Meditation makes me feel closer to God.”
I’m grateful for their time, for creating a forum where they can reflect on the fleetingness of this existence, but also the joy, awe, and self-discovery that make this journey such a mystical unraveling for many of us. I’m privileged to witness the courage and vulnerability they uphold, the creativity they channel as the subtlest levels of consciousness speak through their minds, hearts, and hands in languages they translate for the rest of us.
Working with our elders has awakened me to the wisdom of finding happiness in a child’s laughter, in scurrying squirrels—the spark of kindness in the gaze of a passing stranger. In simple things—how time rises in value in proportion to its scarcity. How we’re lucky to share this precious human birth despite the anger, attachment, and ignorance that make things difficult.
Why expressing our kindness, our selflessness—is the wisest investment we can make in a world gripped by so much anguish but also magic—rebirth.
“See you next week,” I say as I leave each week.
“God willing,” Laura says since nothing’s guaranteed.