I Was Born of Immense Strength and Fearlessness

A few months back, I was returning from a dharma retreat in Mexico City—three days in the city to walk in silence and be in community. One of the retreatants I had the good fortune and blessing to spend those days with was a beautiful and powerful birth doula named Erica Pinilla. As it turned out, it happened to be Mother’s Day when we were to head home, and so Erica and I took an Uber back to the airport together. While we were sitting in traffic, she began to ask me all these questions related to my own birth. Was I breastfed? Were there any traumas or complications before or after I was birthed? Most of these questions, I didn’t know the answers to. Most of these questions, I had never even thought to ask my mother about. Fortunately, Erica didn’t seem surprised by my lack of birth knowledge. She said most of us treat our birth as the opening line of our story, when really it’s the middle of a much longer sentence.

Most of us treat our birth as the opening line of our story, when really it’s the middle of a much longer sentence.

Up until that moment, I knew the day I was born (I’m a Leo), I knew the time (7:00 a.m.), I knew the place (New York City), I even knew the hospital (because my father was born in the same one). I mainly knew all these things because I live in L.A. and have had enough people ask me if I know what my sun and moon signs are, but it had never really occurred to me that there was a before me, a version of my mother who existed before I crowned her with the title of Mom, before her whole story became a supporting role in mine. How selfish, I thought. To spend a lifetime narrating my own arrival without once wondering what it cost the person who made it possible.

In my own study of Buddhism, the emphasis has been far less on birth and more so on death. Death, and my particular fear of death, might be one of the reasons I fell into this practice so deeply to begin with. My early life had been marked by death, as I lost my best friend, my brother, when I was just 13 years old, and, perhaps because of this, the idea of death kept me up at night. After discovering meditation, I quickly found the Bardo Thodol, known commonly in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and its many translations. It became a launchpad of inspiration for my art practice, and I began to write plays where we (the audience) consciously die together in the span of sixty minutes. All that being said, I spend a lot of time thinking about death but probably not enough, I think, on arrival. We often speak about impermanence (Pali: anicca), about dissolution, about the great vanishing of things. But birth is also a crossing. A mystery. A coming into. A doorway no less strange or important than death itself. 

So I called my mom with a list of questions from the doula.

“Mom, will you tell me about my birth?”

My mom said, “Oh . . . OK . . . sure . . . well, your birth was very original.”

I was born one month early, and the obstetrician who was supposed to deliver me was on vacation. “His name was Dr. Irving Ward Robinson,” she said. “I loved that man.”

My sister had been born prematurely at seven months, and because of complications during delivery, my mother had needed a C-section. So when she became pregnant with me, her plan was to try for a vaginal delivery. But because I, too, arrived early, her medical records never made it to Saint Luke’s Woman’s Hospital. The doctors there didn’t know how the original incisions from the C-section had been done, and they warned her against a vaginal birth. They told her it was too dangerous. That her spine was too unstable. That she could rupture, bleed out, and die.

She refused. They made her sign paperwork showing that she had been warned of the complications and potential health risks associated with this type of delivery. 

“I said, I know I can do this,” she told me. “I knew we would be OK. And we were.”

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. I knew we would be OK.

Not hoped. Knew.

There is a quality of faith in Buddhism that is often misunderstood. Not blind belief but a real amount of knowing. The kind of knowing that can arise only from bringing something into the laboratory of your own life. It’s called ehipassiko—it asks us to “come and see” for ourselves rather than accept some thing or many things on blind faith alone. We have to try it. Not optimism. Not denial. Something steadier. Complete presence with reality as it is because I gave it a shot. A mountain does not hope to remain standing in the wind. It simply stands.

My mother’s certainty felt like that to me. Not ego. Not defiance. Just an unshakable intimacy with life itself. What will be, will be; what is, is. 

Shortly after my birth, around seven months later, my mom developed severe nerve compression in her spine (I guess the doctors were kind of right). She lost the ability to walk and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was placed in traction for weeks—her body held in place by a system of weights and pulleys designed to slowly stretch the spine and relieve pressure on the nerves—and, as such, she was unable to see me.

My mom said, “I’ll never forget Mother’s Day. The nurses let your father sneak you in to see me. When I held you, you cried because you didn’t know who I was.”

Then she paused . . . “I had to rebuild that bond with you.”

Love is not always instant recognition. Sometimes love is rebuilding. Sometimes love is returning to each other after separation, beginning again. Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “Every moment is a chance for us to begin again.” Sometimes the bond breaks and asks to be made again.

Buddhism teaches that attachment is the root of suffering, but I have never understood that teaching to mean we should not love deeply. Only that we must understand the fragile nature of all things. Every bond changes shape. Every relationship asks to be renewed again and again. Every role can and might end, and might be returned to. Entropy comes for all things. Nothing stays fixed, not even mother and child.

The Buddha lost his mother, Mahamaya, just seven days after she gave birth to him. The very figure we imagine as awakened entered life through rupture and loss. Even enlightenment begins in separation. There is a belief for some that Maya heard the Buddha’s teachings in heaven. Which wouldn’t be the first experience of recognizing how the veil between life and death is quite porous. It reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s experience after he lost his mother: “The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, ‘A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.’ I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam . . . I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. . . . When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. . . . I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.”

I asked my mother if she had ever had any miscarriages or losses before me. She told me she had miscarried once before I was born.

“What does that mean to you?” the doula would later ask me.

I told her I didn’t know.

But my mother said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since: “If we had that child before you, we probably would have stopped there.”

Stopped there.

I sat with those two words for a long time. My existence could have stopped there? A loss I never knew about made room for a life I’ve spent decades assuming was inevitable. The doula didn’t let me rush past it, either. She kept returning me to the question, What does it mean to you? Her work, she told me, had taught her that a birth is never just one event happening to one body; it is multiple generations arriving in the same room at once. She was pointing me, in her own way, toward the koan I’ve often tried to understand but never really could, What was your original face before your parents were born? 

Erica told me that in her work, she’s learned that every birth carries its lineage of grief, that mothers labor not just with the child in front of them but with every child who came before, born or unborn. We arrive, she said, into stories already in progress. She has learned so much about women and children from doing her best to see the full picture. 

What is my original face? A face I imagine lives there, before the rebirth. I wonder, would that first birth still have been me? Or would I have never arrived at all? Or somewhere else? Where would all this energy have gone? This strange, aching, searching awareness I call myself? Would it have dissolved back into some larger field waiting for another opening? Another body? Another story? What was your original face before your parents were born? 

What Erica and my mother remind me is that the story of me does not begin with me. Riding in that Uber, and later, sitting with my mother’s words, the koan stops being theoretical. Before my parents were “my parents,” they were two people carrying a sorrow, a hope, a dream, a goal, a struggle I knew nothing about. Before I was me, I was a possibility hovering on the far side of someone else’s heartbreak. Asking my mother about her miscarriage was me looking for my original face and finding hers. My original face, it turns out, was shaped by faces I never thought to look at.

Asking my mother about her miscarriage was me looking for my original face and finding hers. My original face, it turns out, was shaped by faces I never thought to look at.

Buddhism asks us to meditate deeply on the illusion of the fixed self, but moments like this make me feel the mystery of continuity. If there is no permanent self, then what is it that travels forward? What is reborn? We have been on this earth, had as many lives as it takes for a hawk to wipe away the tip of a mountain with a scarf. A flame passed from one candle to another is not the same flame, and yet something continues. Karma ripples forward. Causes and conditions unfold endlessly into new forms.

As a Buddhist, I often think about the stories of monks choosing their rebirths with astonishing precision. Choosing the time, the place, the mother, the conditions through which they will return. I once knew a woman from Boston who told me a story about being in a salon owned by a Nepali family when a group of monks walked in. They went directly to a little boy sitting beside his mother and told her, “Your son is a Rinpoche. He must come study with us.” Eventually, she let him go with them back to Nepal.

Is there some peaceful waiting room before life? Some great quiet emptiness before we enter this dream of form and grief and memory? And, if so, what is that place? What existed before the first word was spoken? Before the first child pointed at the dark and called someone mother?

Whether these stories are literally true has become less important to me over time. I think this practice (my practice) is less interested in certainty than intimacy. Koans (or, as I like to call them, big juicy questions) are not riddles meant to be cracked or even answered. They are invitations to sit inside something until it rearranges you. The koan wants you to feel for the ground beneath your idea of yourself, and to discover there is no ground there, only relationship, only flow. The question is not, Can you prove rebirth? The question is: How should you live if everything is deeply interconnected? If nothing truly disappears? If your actions echo far beyond the visible edge of your own life? 

This is what the teachings ask us to embrace about emptiness (Skt.: sunyata). Emptiness is not a void in the Western sense. Emptiness is not just what remains when everything is taken away. Emptiness is the potential to become anything. It’s the start of the most exciting things, the boundlessness that allows anything to become anything else. Empty of fixed form precisely because it is pregnant with potential for everything. The flower is empty because it is made of sun and soil and rain. I am empty because I am made of my mother, her grief, her fearlessness, a child who came before me and never arrived. The vast, unknowable field from which everything emerges and to which everything eventually returns. It is boundlessness. Interdependence. The understanding that no thing exists independently from any other thing. The origin of all created things. The vast, unknowable field from which everything emerges and to which everything eventually returns. A cloud becomes rain. Rain becomes trees. Trees become paper. Paper becomes this essay. My mother becomes me. I become whatever comes next.

And maybe that fearlessness my mother carried into the delivery room did not begin with her alone. Maybe I arrived already carrying some ancient momentum toward life. Maybe somewhere, before any of this, I heard her say, We will be OK.

And I believed her.