Friday, June 26th
It is our first morning at the Garrison Institute, the first morning of our meditation retreat.
I am looking out the window onto a small strip of the Hudson river framed by massive oaks and maples. Green everywhere. Morning fog still hangs in the branches. It's going to be a hot day today. We are on the third floor of the building, it's an old Capuchin monastery, a grand old stone structure built in the 1930s, with tall ceilings, bone white walls, and dark wood everywhere except for the blond parquet floors. The vegetarian food last night was delicious.
Last night we also had our first opening teaching with Mingyur Rinpoche. More than before it struck me how funny he is. What a sense of humor!
This morning we had a choice between an hour of meditation practice and an hour of unsupervised yoga... from 7:00am to 8:00am
I took a short bath in the lovely hot tub and then went to yoga.
When I did my postures, I couldn't fail to notice how much stiffer I am. No regular practice since last winter, clearly, and I noticed how I wanted to stretch to reach my old marks, and then I thought: No, I want to listen to my body, I want to find the point that feels absolutely delicious, the point where my body says: this is where you are right now, right at this moment in your life, and this is perfect. And then I thought: I should do this practice as if I have never done yoga before, as if there is no past. Oh, of course: no past!! Isn't that how we would live, when we have left all of the old baggage behind? Without a past?
Reaching for a standard instead of listening to my body. To reach for an outside standard by comparing myself to another person or following an instruction is one thing, and I have been letting go of that for a long while now, but today I noticed that the standard and measurement I put up for myself from within my own body, from my own memory... is yet another matter, and just as destructive.
So I think I want to do this yoga practice now as if I had just been born and I am exploring and experiencing this body for the very first time.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Leaving an old Duality behind
Monday, June 22nd
One of my big experiences during this weekend was a vow process that we exchanged very much at the beginning, on Saturday. The plan was to remove any beliefs or limiting vows that keep us all from being successful in our business. I had not really thought much about that... we had just done some guided meditative pieces and some elicitation, but not a lot had come up for me... and as fate had planned it, I was paired up with an older woman, small, with short white hair and tight lips and a slight air of resignation hovering about her, and I remember thinking, oh well, this will probably not bring me a whole lot.
Normally, when you do a vow process you go back to a time earlier in your life when something happened that caused you to make a vow, take on a new belief or when the perception your reality changed ... in a way that was necessary at the time, because it offered a solution to the situation you were in... but now it has become unwholesome, unhealthy, or unnecessary for your life.
Now, to my surprise, Ann, my partner had also just done a shamanic workshop the weekend before... and when her time machine had landed, she said;" oh, I am back at the akashic records. I am in that very same library I went to last weekend, and there is my book, my record... We ended up shifting an irrational feeling of fear, a fear of exposing herself. A story unfolded that gave us glimpses of experiences when she had be prosecuted and hated by a lot of people. When her life had been in danger or even lost. Possibly all of this goes back to a lifetime when she had been executed for being a witch. When we were done and had cleared out the past, the image in her book had changed from one of a black witch to one of a lovely fairy. This was very unusual! I am mentioning her part mostly, because her process may have set the tone for something more unusual to happen for me too.
So when I started going down the stairs the first thing that was really different were the stairs. In a vow process you only have five steps, and as I got ready to step down the steps, they started expanding, started widening at the bottom and for a moment became something like a grand staircase, and then they kept on expanding until they had created a full circle, so that I was now standing on nothing but a little itty-bitty round spot at the top and steps were leading down all around me, so that there was no coming from or going toward, other than a going deeper and wider in all directions. Very unusual, something I had never seen before.
I had two mentors a male and a female... and our time shuttle was a human size version of these little cylinders that transport messages through little air tubes... where you put a little capsule in it and then: puff!! it gets shot into another part of the building. So, my time machine was a large cylinder, big enough for us to step into, and ready to shoot us to wherever we needed to go. And when we pressed the button to take us to a vow or a belief that was in the way for me building my business, I felt this capsule shoot us up into the sky and circling the earth and within moments we had zoomed around three times, with incredible speed obviously... faster than a rocket... and after three round trips it came straight down, voomm!! and landed in Egypt.
In Egypt, I arrived at an elevated, rectangular garden that was connected to the palace. It was built, balcony like, raised up from the ground, supported by high walls on three sides... and somewhere beyond the garden to the left was the temple, and the palace itself was over to the right.
Curiously this garden looked almost identical to a place I had seen during a journey with one of my clients in Germany, when she uncovered a time in Egypt where she had been a priestess at the temple. This was the same kind of garden... I though this was peculiar, almost as if I had landed in someone else's story. Didn't quite know what to do with that. My mentors had no information for me... they were just standing by my side on the gravel path, next to the lush flowers... I could bring the image of my client as a priestess and her soul mate into the picture... they could be there... or they could not be there... and it didn't really make a difference. Strange!
Then there was this slight pull into the palace and I wondered whether this journey had to do with the lifetime when I had been a member of the royal family and I had committed all these atrocious cruelties against the Jewish people. But none of that really showed up, it only hung there as a question, but didn't materialize as an image or an emotion. So, I kept wandering through the palace for a while and kept asking: ...what is this about? ... what is going on here? The first thing I finally heard was that it was about a duality of power... and I thought maybe it was about the duality of the religious or spiritual power on one side, and the power of the palace on the other, maybe there was a separation, or a conflict, or a competition of power... but no response on that... so we kept moving... and before long we wandered into the cellars of the castle, following a certain pull to go deeper. The castle was carried by many columns that were all black... The foundation of power? Again I wasn't sure what that meant... and before I could get an answer, we started sinking into the ground, and I let it happen. We sank deeper and deeper and finally arrived... in another time zone... an archaic or stone age time of human existence.
Here I felt myself to be male and I felt myself holding a big club and sensed that this was a moment of discovery, a discovery of a new, physical power through the use of the club. I could feel the surge and the excitement of that new power rushing through my body.... the exhilaration and the expansion of my life force and my territory. Here was the root of the duality: this club, this physical power, was being used against someone or something: against animals to be eaten, or against enemies to be killed or injured or threatened... and I could feel the imprint that this power came with. This power was made up of two parts: while something was gained for me, something was always lost for someone else.
I understood that it was time to remove this duality from my being. I sensed that it might have been this very duality that has kept me from using my power, because in this lifetime I don't want to use it against anything any longer, but up until now I hadn't been able to separate the power for something from the against something. I sensed I must have been brought here to remove the paradigm of this duality from my consciousness, or from my vibration, or my identity... hard to put into words. The image that represented the old energy was one of a large root growing inside my whole body. A root with two strands that separated at the end and reached down into my legs, one side white, one side black. Somehow I knew this old duality would be removed by pulling this root out of my body... and indeed, my two mentors took care of that, and as they did, I felt an an unexpected wash of emotion, of sadness, of pain, of old stories, of suffering, and suffering, and more suffering... so much suffering had been held in that duality of power being linked to gain and loss. Took a long time until this root was all out, almost as if it was extending as it was being pulled... stretching the ends of the root longer and longer, a stickyness, a sucking that pulled out all these old emotions with it... quite an experience... When it was done, and it was time to replace the old with something new. But what? There was no answer from my mentors, no words, no image... but after a while I became aware of the presence of a sound. A sound both audible and then also visible... that washed through everything... almost dissolving the boundary between me and everything on the outside. Melting away the separation, and what remained here and there was as thin as a membrane. This was the sound of oneness. Oneness in a sound... quite indescribable.
And that was the conclusion to the vow process.
The future integration was interesting, I could feel a spaciousness the next day.
A week into the future I knew I would be sitting in the middle of a Buddhist meditation retreat Jimmy and I had registered for, and I could feel experiencing the oneness in that environment, it felt almost as if I could slip into the experience of the teacher there, and the expansiveness of that state was quite exhilarating. The retreat appeared like a playground to experience this oneness in, in interactions with other people, in the experience of meditating, of doing yoga, or of eating.
Interestingly Anne skipped over the one month time line and went straight to asking me to step into the future six months from now... and that felt sooo far away... it was so different, it was almost as if my brain couldn't compute what it would be like, and instead just slipped back into what it had always been. Initially that was a bit confusing and then I understood it as a range of possibilities. Again, I kept asking: What IS going on in six months? ...close to Christmas, what IS life going to feel like? And it seemed the answer was: there is a very big range of possibility at that time, depending on my choice, depending on how I choose to use this oneness in my life. It could not have a big impact, it could not create a big difference, if I didn't chose to use it all that much... and life could slip back into something very similar as it has been in the past. But I could also use it a lot, and the endpoint of that was almost not visible... if that makes sense.
When Ann asked me in the second, one week integration : Did you integrate it? In that moment, that was a odd question, because it didn't feel like a ME was integrating anything, it felt like a ME was not there so much. A ME was falling away. It was not something that was added to a ME but something that I was blending into. At six months I couldn't even make that out any more.
Very curious to experience this unfolding. Much mystery ahead.
One of my big experiences during this weekend was a vow process that we exchanged very much at the beginning, on Saturday. The plan was to remove any beliefs or limiting vows that keep us all from being successful in our business. I had not really thought much about that... we had just done some guided meditative pieces and some elicitation, but not a lot had come up for me... and as fate had planned it, I was paired up with an older woman, small, with short white hair and tight lips and a slight air of resignation hovering about her, and I remember thinking, oh well, this will probably not bring me a whole lot.
Normally, when you do a vow process you go back to a time earlier in your life when something happened that caused you to make a vow, take on a new belief or when the perception your reality changed ... in a way that was necessary at the time, because it offered a solution to the situation you were in... but now it has become unwholesome, unhealthy, or unnecessary for your life.
Now, to my surprise, Ann, my partner had also just done a shamanic workshop the weekend before... and when her time machine had landed, she said;" oh, I am back at the akashic records. I am in that very same library I went to last weekend, and there is my book, my record... We ended up shifting an irrational feeling of fear, a fear of exposing herself. A story unfolded that gave us glimpses of experiences when she had be prosecuted and hated by a lot of people. When her life had been in danger or even lost. Possibly all of this goes back to a lifetime when she had been executed for being a witch. When we were done and had cleared out the past, the image in her book had changed from one of a black witch to one of a lovely fairy. This was very unusual! I am mentioning her part mostly, because her process may have set the tone for something more unusual to happen for me too.
So when I started going down the stairs the first thing that was really different were the stairs. In a vow process you only have five steps, and as I got ready to step down the steps, they started expanding, started widening at the bottom and for a moment became something like a grand staircase, and then they kept on expanding until they had created a full circle, so that I was now standing on nothing but a little itty-bitty round spot at the top and steps were leading down all around me, so that there was no coming from or going toward, other than a going deeper and wider in all directions. Very unusual, something I had never seen before.
I had two mentors a male and a female... and our time shuttle was a human size version of these little cylinders that transport messages through little air tubes... where you put a little capsule in it and then: puff!! it gets shot into another part of the building. So, my time machine was a large cylinder, big enough for us to step into, and ready to shoot us to wherever we needed to go. And when we pressed the button to take us to a vow or a belief that was in the way for me building my business, I felt this capsule shoot us up into the sky and circling the earth and within moments we had zoomed around three times, with incredible speed obviously... faster than a rocket... and after three round trips it came straight down, voomm!! and landed in Egypt.
In Egypt, I arrived at an elevated, rectangular garden that was connected to the palace. It was built, balcony like, raised up from the ground, supported by high walls on three sides... and somewhere beyond the garden to the left was the temple, and the palace itself was over to the right.
Curiously this garden looked almost identical to a place I had seen during a journey with one of my clients in Germany, when she uncovered a time in Egypt where she had been a priestess at the temple. This was the same kind of garden... I though this was peculiar, almost as if I had landed in someone else's story. Didn't quite know what to do with that. My mentors had no information for me... they were just standing by my side on the gravel path, next to the lush flowers... I could bring the image of my client as a priestess and her soul mate into the picture... they could be there... or they could not be there... and it didn't really make a difference. Strange!
Then there was this slight pull into the palace and I wondered whether this journey had to do with the lifetime when I had been a member of the royal family and I had committed all these atrocious cruelties against the Jewish people. But none of that really showed up, it only hung there as a question, but didn't materialize as an image or an emotion. So, I kept wandering through the palace for a while and kept asking: ...what is this about? ... what is going on here? The first thing I finally heard was that it was about a duality of power... and I thought maybe it was about the duality of the religious or spiritual power on one side, and the power of the palace on the other, maybe there was a separation, or a conflict, or a competition of power... but no response on that... so we kept moving... and before long we wandered into the cellars of the castle, following a certain pull to go deeper. The castle was carried by many columns that were all black... The foundation of power? Again I wasn't sure what that meant... and before I could get an answer, we started sinking into the ground, and I let it happen. We sank deeper and deeper and finally arrived... in another time zone... an archaic or stone age time of human existence.
Here I felt myself to be male and I felt myself holding a big club and sensed that this was a moment of discovery, a discovery of a new, physical power through the use of the club. I could feel the surge and the excitement of that new power rushing through my body.... the exhilaration and the expansion of my life force and my territory. Here was the root of the duality: this club, this physical power, was being used against someone or something: against animals to be eaten, or against enemies to be killed or injured or threatened... and I could feel the imprint that this power came with. This power was made up of two parts: while something was gained for me, something was always lost for someone else.
I understood that it was time to remove this duality from my being. I sensed that it might have been this very duality that has kept me from using my power, because in this lifetime I don't want to use it against anything any longer, but up until now I hadn't been able to separate the power for something from the against something. I sensed I must have been brought here to remove the paradigm of this duality from my consciousness, or from my vibration, or my identity... hard to put into words. The image that represented the old energy was one of a large root growing inside my whole body. A root with two strands that separated at the end and reached down into my legs, one side white, one side black. Somehow I knew this old duality would be removed by pulling this root out of my body... and indeed, my two mentors took care of that, and as they did, I felt an an unexpected wash of emotion, of sadness, of pain, of old stories, of suffering, and suffering, and more suffering... so much suffering had been held in that duality of power being linked to gain and loss. Took a long time until this root was all out, almost as if it was extending as it was being pulled... stretching the ends of the root longer and longer, a stickyness, a sucking that pulled out all these old emotions with it... quite an experience... When it was done, and it was time to replace the old with something new. But what? There was no answer from my mentors, no words, no image... but after a while I became aware of the presence of a sound. A sound both audible and then also visible... that washed through everything... almost dissolving the boundary between me and everything on the outside. Melting away the separation, and what remained here and there was as thin as a membrane. This was the sound of oneness. Oneness in a sound... quite indescribable.
And that was the conclusion to the vow process.
The future integration was interesting, I could feel a spaciousness the next day.
A week into the future I knew I would be sitting in the middle of a Buddhist meditation retreat Jimmy and I had registered for, and I could feel experiencing the oneness in that environment, it felt almost as if I could slip into the experience of the teacher there, and the expansiveness of that state was quite exhilarating. The retreat appeared like a playground to experience this oneness in, in interactions with other people, in the experience of meditating, of doing yoga, or of eating.
Interestingly Anne skipped over the one month time line and went straight to asking me to step into the future six months from now... and that felt sooo far away... it was so different, it was almost as if my brain couldn't compute what it would be like, and instead just slipped back into what it had always been. Initially that was a bit confusing and then I understood it as a range of possibilities. Again, I kept asking: What IS going on in six months? ...close to Christmas, what IS life going to feel like? And it seemed the answer was: there is a very big range of possibility at that time, depending on my choice, depending on how I choose to use this oneness in my life. It could not have a big impact, it could not create a big difference, if I didn't chose to use it all that much... and life could slip back into something very similar as it has been in the past. But I could also use it a lot, and the endpoint of that was almost not visible... if that makes sense.
When Ann asked me in the second, one week integration : Did you integrate it? In that moment, that was a odd question, because it didn't feel like a ME was integrating anything, it felt like a ME was not there so much. A ME was falling away. It was not something that was added to a ME but something that I was blending into. At six months I couldn't even make that out any more.
Very curious to experience this unfolding. Much mystery ahead.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Driving Home from Ottawa
Monday, June 22nd
A rich and full weekend is behind me.
What a privilege to stay with too highly successful Journey practitioners, Don and Marie-Sylvie, both psychotherapists who have both adopted the Journeywork into their practice.
Marie Sylvie didn't take part in our NAJPA weekend, because she was participating in a shaman training, a healing practice she was speaking about with highest praise. She had also just returned from a Journey event for a native American Indian tribe further north in Canada. A community that has an extraordinarily high suicide rate, where sexual abuse among children and teenagers is at a rampant 90%, and alcoholism has dissolved much of the foundation of the social fabric. They had a translator there who had to translate the work into "inu", their native language. It was a four day workshop, held for the entire tribe. The chief who had asked for the Journeywork to be introduced to his people had also just before banned all alcohol from coming into the community, so the upheaval was enormous and the anger was palpable, but in the end the transformation, the way she described it, was stunning.
It was an inspiration and a gift to experience this weekend from the vantage point of their lives... and to see such a different approach to working with clients, as they have pretty much maintained their schedule of one hour sessions and don't often go beyond that. The most they will schedule is a two hour session with a client. So there is not that long intensity of a process that tries to clean up everything that presents itself at once, but there is a more gradual, a more continuous and a more ongoing rhythm to the work... and that seems to serve their clients more than these big "all packed up in one" processes that take a long time to digest and have less of a continuity. Bob Levy, who presented at the weekend has the same approach. He sees clients for short amounts of time and his practice is overflowing. He is also a very gifted speaker and he gives a lot of intro talks. That's how he attracted all the people into his practice. He only completed the accreditation two years ago and he has already become a new presenter for the Journey Intensive Weekends. I understand why they picked him. His example is so very inspiring - very different, but very inspiring. I will have to restructure the way I do my work from the ground up, redefine my whole approach, including my follow up system, and my intake with people. Hmm, a lot to think about, a lot to digest, a lot of inspiration.
A rich and full weekend is behind me.
What a privilege to stay with too highly successful Journey practitioners, Don and Marie-Sylvie, both psychotherapists who have both adopted the Journeywork into their practice.
Marie Sylvie didn't take part in our NAJPA weekend, because she was participating in a shaman training, a healing practice she was speaking about with highest praise. She had also just returned from a Journey event for a native American Indian tribe further north in Canada. A community that has an extraordinarily high suicide rate, where sexual abuse among children and teenagers is at a rampant 90%, and alcoholism has dissolved much of the foundation of the social fabric. They had a translator there who had to translate the work into "inu", their native language. It was a four day workshop, held for the entire tribe. The chief who had asked for the Journeywork to be introduced to his people had also just before banned all alcohol from coming into the community, so the upheaval was enormous and the anger was palpable, but in the end the transformation, the way she described it, was stunning.
It was an inspiration and a gift to experience this weekend from the vantage point of their lives... and to see such a different approach to working with clients, as they have pretty much maintained their schedule of one hour sessions and don't often go beyond that. The most they will schedule is a two hour session with a client. So there is not that long intensity of a process that tries to clean up everything that presents itself at once, but there is a more gradual, a more continuous and a more ongoing rhythm to the work... and that seems to serve their clients more than these big "all packed up in one" processes that take a long time to digest and have less of a continuity. Bob Levy, who presented at the weekend has the same approach. He sees clients for short amounts of time and his practice is overflowing. He is also a very gifted speaker and he gives a lot of intro talks. That's how he attracted all the people into his practice. He only completed the accreditation two years ago and he has already become a new presenter for the Journey Intensive Weekends. I understand why they picked him. His example is so very inspiring - very different, but very inspiring. I will have to restructure the way I do my work from the ground up, redefine my whole approach, including my follow up system, and my intake with people. Hmm, a lot to think about, a lot to digest, a lot of inspiration.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Meadows
Friday, June 19th
I am getting closer to Canada now. There are these meadows, these soft green yielding surfaces, luminescent even on this overcast day. I can't take my eyes off of them. I cling to the little spots of color sprinkled in. All the flowers known and unknown... daisies for sure, yellow little fluffy things, bright yellow clover, these yellow flowers that look like mini sunflowers with their straight up stems and that same type in a reddish burnt orange. Other white fluff stuff.
Meadows, all these meadows here! Vast openness! This land looks very different. I am so draw to meadows, I m not sure why. Most of these meadows are just that, nothing else, not sure if they are being used for hay, or if they are just growing wild like that. A meadow is a land welcoming you to walk through it, to see through it. Meadows have always felt to me like the open arms of a landscape. I love these meadows here, I can't stop drinking them in. Sometimes there is a little brook running through, just now... sometimes there are trees, single ones or little clumps, sometimes the meadows have given way to shrubbery.. low and still open and you can see for miles. Stone looks different here too. On the first leg of the trip, where passages had been cut into the rock, it was a dark blackish shale. Here the stone is light gray and warm, and softer looking. Good land.
I wonder about Montana. I have seen pictures of Montana, seen these wide openings, those grassy slopes crowned by soft hills. I would like to go there sometime. Other people are drawn to the ocean. Not me. I am drawn to the hills and the meadows. It's always been like that.
I am getting closer to Canada now. There are these meadows, these soft green yielding surfaces, luminescent even on this overcast day. I can't take my eyes off of them. I cling to the little spots of color sprinkled in. All the flowers known and unknown... daisies for sure, yellow little fluffy things, bright yellow clover, these yellow flowers that look like mini sunflowers with their straight up stems and that same type in a reddish burnt orange. Other white fluff stuff.
Meadows, all these meadows here! Vast openness! This land looks very different. I am so draw to meadows, I m not sure why. Most of these meadows are just that, nothing else, not sure if they are being used for hay, or if they are just growing wild like that. A meadow is a land welcoming you to walk through it, to see through it. Meadows have always felt to me like the open arms of a landscape. I love these meadows here, I can't stop drinking them in. Sometimes there is a little brook running through, just now... sometimes there are trees, single ones or little clumps, sometimes the meadows have given way to shrubbery.. low and still open and you can see for miles. Stone looks different here too. On the first leg of the trip, where passages had been cut into the rock, it was a dark blackish shale. Here the stone is light gray and warm, and softer looking. Good land.
I wonder about Montana. I have seen pictures of Montana, seen these wide openings, those grassy slopes crowned by soft hills. I would like to go there sometime. Other people are drawn to the ocean. Not me. I am drawn to the hills and the meadows. It's always been like that.
Diamonds
Still in the car on my way to Ottawa. A while ago I passed by Herkimer and I remembered there is something called the Herkimer diamonds and I wondered if this is where they had been found. I could tell that something different had happened in this landscape.
There were those remnants of industrial exploit: iron skeletons of some died away rusty use, large lots of with heaps of gray rubble, pebbles and rocks... a particular quality... of something forlorn and discarded. And seeing this float by my window and melt back into the green waves of the pregnant summer landscape I thought: isn't it true that we humans live like this with the earth ... wherever there is something valuable, we run to use it up or take it away. And then: isn't it the same with those humans among us who have something valuable to offer: others come and want to take it. Isn't this a form of exploitation too? Examining this idea I realized there are nuances both on the earth and among us humans. Yes, there are places on the earth that hold something valuable that hasn't been discovered by that many people yet, places that have remained more secret, more hidden, less exploited, less run over, less visited... less SEEN. And it was also true that the amount of visibility or exploitation has nothing to do with the value that place holds. In fact there might be places of enormous value that are still completely hidden.
And my thoughts wandered into applying this to myself: did I want to become someone who was more hidden or someone more visible? If I had the choice right now would I want to become someone as visible as a Byron Katie, whose face is pasted on book covers and book covers and more book covers? Who travels around the world offering her message, giving something of herself that feels valuable to other people to those other people. That is her life. At least much of it.
I had always thought of that as a beautiful way to live, but all of a sudden, for the fist time, I could see the beauty in being a more hidden person. Just like a landscape that has remained unspoiled and lives in a more gentle harmony with the fewer people that walk through it or live in it. That becoming well known and run over wasn't the ultimate best thing that could happen to me; that the measure of who I was, was not determined by how visible I would manage to become; and that I could probably lead a exhilaratingly happy life in obscurity. This realization is new in it's quality... like with so many things these day this is not a thought I hadn't had before, or rather this is not a conclusion I wouldn't have been able to draw in my brain, but the feeling of ease and groundedness it comes with is new. A different resting yet again.
There were those remnants of industrial exploit: iron skeletons of some died away rusty use, large lots of with heaps of gray rubble, pebbles and rocks... a particular quality... of something forlorn and discarded. And seeing this float by my window and melt back into the green waves of the pregnant summer landscape I thought: isn't it true that we humans live like this with the earth ... wherever there is something valuable, we run to use it up or take it away. And then: isn't it the same with those humans among us who have something valuable to offer: others come and want to take it. Isn't this a form of exploitation too? Examining this idea I realized there are nuances both on the earth and among us humans. Yes, there are places on the earth that hold something valuable that hasn't been discovered by that many people yet, places that have remained more secret, more hidden, less exploited, less run over, less visited... less SEEN. And it was also true that the amount of visibility or exploitation has nothing to do with the value that place holds. In fact there might be places of enormous value that are still completely hidden.
And my thoughts wandered into applying this to myself: did I want to become someone who was more hidden or someone more visible? If I had the choice right now would I want to become someone as visible as a Byron Katie, whose face is pasted on book covers and book covers and more book covers? Who travels around the world offering her message, giving something of herself that feels valuable to other people to those other people. That is her life. At least much of it.
I had always thought of that as a beautiful way to live, but all of a sudden, for the fist time, I could see the beauty in being a more hidden person. Just like a landscape that has remained unspoiled and lives in a more gentle harmony with the fewer people that walk through it or live in it. That becoming well known and run over wasn't the ultimate best thing that could happen to me; that the measure of who I was, was not determined by how visible I would manage to become; and that I could probably lead a exhilaratingly happy life in obscurity. This realization is new in it's quality... like with so many things these day this is not a thought I hadn't had before, or rather this is not a conclusion I wouldn't have been able to draw in my brain, but the feeling of ease and groundedness it comes with is new. A different resting yet again.
Faith and Masters
Friday, June 19th
A few days ago I read my mothers memoir.
She had not intended to cover her entire life, she had been interested in writing down the steps and the stages that had brought her to the place of faith she is in today. She wanted to record the unusual, mysterious and sometimes unsettling experiences she has had, to put it all together in one place... I believe mostly to give to my siblings, because I imagine she thought in writing these things down they can be taken in and digested at a time when my sister and my brother would be ready to do so.
I think you could call my mother a Christian mystic of sorts. She hasn't always been that, but has been led very clearly and very steadily into this direction for decades.
None of the experiences she describes were new to me. She had always been eager to share with me what was going on and valued the welcome, the understanding and the feedback she got in return, I was in fact one of the few people she could talk to. So while the stories were not new, it was new to read them all at once, in one fell swoop, to get an overview of their entire map... and when I was finished I felt something almost like envy... that this path had been so clear for her. That there had never been a question which religion to follow. It was always the Christian faith and increasingly the Christian mystical path that she was here to walk.
I have never experienced that kind of clarity in my life.
I look at other people, other friends like that Lilia and her love for her teacher Tai Situ Rinpoche and her faith in Buddhism, Uwe my yoga teacher and his faith in the Yogic tradition and his master Guru Mai, and Martha, who was probably the first person I encountered who had a master, who already then did meditation daily... Stefanie and Adnan Sarhan. Eileen and Valerie and my friend Joan, who are all connected to the same master form India: Maharishi. Even more recently Annabel found Traleg Rinpoche. I had always been curious about a master, been curious about meeting someone in whose presence I would feel something like a calling, a place of home maybe, a trust, a knowing, a sense that this is "my teacher", this is "my guide"...and... it has eluded me.
I am recalling now the many places I have looked for this experience.
I remember as a teenager - still living in Hamburg - I went to an Indian master, or healer once, I don't even remember how I heard about him, don't even remember what I went to him for, but somebody told me, somehow I knew he was there, and somehow I ended up going. It was in the eastern part of town, Klein Flottbek maybe? An undistincive place, not a church... someones home, or maybe a center of some sort... in a low, modern, one story building. I remember waiting in line and I remember entering the room where this master was sitting and I guess I must have told him my request, and then I remember being taken aback by something ... by a lack of response, a lack of connection, a lack of understanding, a lack of significance really... I think I was struck by the brevity and simplicity by what this person was doing... and thinking "this might all be a fraud" "this person might not have any healing powers after all, might not be what he had been advertised as"... that must have been my first encounter of that sort.
In America, after I had moved there in my twenties, I got caught in a group around another master... I met these people at some convention I think, a woman in particular, I now don't remember her name, she was in a booth with some other people at this fair... and I remember making a connection with her, she seemed to reflect something back to me about who I was. I recall words like:"you are such a bright spirit, such a bright light, such a this, or such a that " Fairly flattering. I think I felt recognized, I felt called maybe, and curious too, and so I got instructions on how to work with this master. There was a certain ritual you had to do. There was a photograph, there was a candle and you had to sit and and look at the eyes in the photograph... and meditate with open eyes... and recite something... I don't actually remember the details.
I even went to a gathering where this master showed up and people were all excited about her arrival. They were talking about the wave of energy that would flow through the room when the master would enter . A lot of people: hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands - it was somewhere on the upper west side - and... I didn't feel anything. She walked into the room and down the aisle, not far, past the row I was sitting in, and... I didn't feel all that much, it left me disconnected. At some point I thought it odd to be looking at somebody's face and into their eyes, almost as if I was being hypnotized by a photograph. It began to feel a little cultish to me... at the time, and I stopped doing it.
Then for a while I had been to the Daoist center on 22nd St. During my last years in the city. Greg had been going there and they served a nice lunch. Sophia and Anina were still very small and I could bring them along. And again the people there praised me for the quick learning of the meditation style and my consistency in showing up and my progress. After a fairly short time they offered to do a ritual with me that would release me from the chain of reincarnation, that would set me on a path to... as I recall... complete my life in this lifetime. It seemed like an honor to do be asked to do that, it seemed like it would be adventageous to not have to return into a cycle of suffering, and... so I did that. I still have a certificate somewhere I believe. Did I feel different afterwards? I can't tell you. Maybe. Maybe not.
After I moved to the country, there were the years I went to weekly Sufi classes in Great Barrington with Stefanie and to some longer workshops with her master Adnan. I loved the classes, and the workshops even more. Those were my first experiences of deep meditation, maybe even transcendence, and connection to a larger energy. But no feeling of connection with him either. Lise, who was also going there for a while, described it very accurately: "When you hug him, it feels like you're hugging a rock."
Then there was Yoga with Uwe and his path and very clear communication about choosing a master. Not entering into a path of enlightenment without a guide. He would talk about that repeatedly in his classes. The huge difference it makes being connected to an enlightened master. And here too I was waiting for a sign to go to the Ashram, to see Guru Mai. And somehow that sign didn't come. Somehow I didn't feel the call.
Now there's been the time with Lilia and studying Buddhism. Which initially I did out of curiosity, out of fascination. I also did it because Lilia was so blunt in her description that yes, she was here to reach enlightenment, in this lifetime, on this earth. I had never heard anybody say this so boldly. And I admired that. I admired her dedication and her clarity and her path and I loved to go to her house once a week to meditate and to study some Buddhist scripture.
There are some things within Buddhism that don't connect for me, that leave me sceptical, or distant, and so I had never felt the urge to take the first step and take refuge with one of the masters, or one of the teachers. It is only now that I am contemplating to do this on my retreat next week. Maybe I will.
A few days ago I read my mothers memoir.
She had not intended to cover her entire life, she had been interested in writing down the steps and the stages that had brought her to the place of faith she is in today. She wanted to record the unusual, mysterious and sometimes unsettling experiences she has had, to put it all together in one place... I believe mostly to give to my siblings, because I imagine she thought in writing these things down they can be taken in and digested at a time when my sister and my brother would be ready to do so.
I think you could call my mother a Christian mystic of sorts. She hasn't always been that, but has been led very clearly and very steadily into this direction for decades.
None of the experiences she describes were new to me. She had always been eager to share with me what was going on and valued the welcome, the understanding and the feedback she got in return, I was in fact one of the few people she could talk to. So while the stories were not new, it was new to read them all at once, in one fell swoop, to get an overview of their entire map... and when I was finished I felt something almost like envy... that this path had been so clear for her. That there had never been a question which religion to follow. It was always the Christian faith and increasingly the Christian mystical path that she was here to walk.
I have never experienced that kind of clarity in my life.
I look at other people, other friends like that Lilia and her love for her teacher Tai Situ Rinpoche and her faith in Buddhism, Uwe my yoga teacher and his faith in the Yogic tradition and his master Guru Mai, and Martha, who was probably the first person I encountered who had a master, who already then did meditation daily... Stefanie and Adnan Sarhan. Eileen and Valerie and my friend Joan, who are all connected to the same master form India: Maharishi. Even more recently Annabel found Traleg Rinpoche. I had always been curious about a master, been curious about meeting someone in whose presence I would feel something like a calling, a place of home maybe, a trust, a knowing, a sense that this is "my teacher", this is "my guide"...and... it has eluded me.
I am recalling now the many places I have looked for this experience.
I remember as a teenager - still living in Hamburg - I went to an Indian master, or healer once, I don't even remember how I heard about him, don't even remember what I went to him for, but somebody told me, somehow I knew he was there, and somehow I ended up going. It was in the eastern part of town, Klein Flottbek maybe? An undistincive place, not a church... someones home, or maybe a center of some sort... in a low, modern, one story building. I remember waiting in line and I remember entering the room where this master was sitting and I guess I must have told him my request, and then I remember being taken aback by something ... by a lack of response, a lack of connection, a lack of understanding, a lack of significance really... I think I was struck by the brevity and simplicity by what this person was doing... and thinking "this might all be a fraud" "this person might not have any healing powers after all, might not be what he had been advertised as"... that must have been my first encounter of that sort.
In America, after I had moved there in my twenties, I got caught in a group around another master... I met these people at some convention I think, a woman in particular, I now don't remember her name, she was in a booth with some other people at this fair... and I remember making a connection with her, she seemed to reflect something back to me about who I was. I recall words like:"you are such a bright spirit, such a bright light, such a this, or such a that " Fairly flattering. I think I felt recognized, I felt called maybe, and curious too, and so I got instructions on how to work with this master. There was a certain ritual you had to do. There was a photograph, there was a candle and you had to sit and and look at the eyes in the photograph... and meditate with open eyes... and recite something... I don't actually remember the details.
I even went to a gathering where this master showed up and people were all excited about her arrival. They were talking about the wave of energy that would flow through the room when the master would enter . A lot of people: hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands - it was somewhere on the upper west side - and... I didn't feel anything. She walked into the room and down the aisle, not far, past the row I was sitting in, and... I didn't feel all that much, it left me disconnected. At some point I thought it odd to be looking at somebody's face and into their eyes, almost as if I was being hypnotized by a photograph. It began to feel a little cultish to me... at the time, and I stopped doing it.
Then for a while I had been to the Daoist center on 22nd St. During my last years in the city. Greg had been going there and they served a nice lunch. Sophia and Anina were still very small and I could bring them along. And again the people there praised me for the quick learning of the meditation style and my consistency in showing up and my progress. After a fairly short time they offered to do a ritual with me that would release me from the chain of reincarnation, that would set me on a path to... as I recall... complete my life in this lifetime. It seemed like an honor to do be asked to do that, it seemed like it would be adventageous to not have to return into a cycle of suffering, and... so I did that. I still have a certificate somewhere I believe. Did I feel different afterwards? I can't tell you. Maybe. Maybe not.
After I moved to the country, there were the years I went to weekly Sufi classes in Great Barrington with Stefanie and to some longer workshops with her master Adnan. I loved the classes, and the workshops even more. Those were my first experiences of deep meditation, maybe even transcendence, and connection to a larger energy. But no feeling of connection with him either. Lise, who was also going there for a while, described it very accurately: "When you hug him, it feels like you're hugging a rock."
Then there was Yoga with Uwe and his path and very clear communication about choosing a master. Not entering into a path of enlightenment without a guide. He would talk about that repeatedly in his classes. The huge difference it makes being connected to an enlightened master. And here too I was waiting for a sign to go to the Ashram, to see Guru Mai. And somehow that sign didn't come. Somehow I didn't feel the call.
Now there's been the time with Lilia and studying Buddhism. Which initially I did out of curiosity, out of fascination. I also did it because Lilia was so blunt in her description that yes, she was here to reach enlightenment, in this lifetime, on this earth. I had never heard anybody say this so boldly. And I admired that. I admired her dedication and her clarity and her path and I loved to go to her house once a week to meditate and to study some Buddhist scripture.
There are some things within Buddhism that don't connect for me, that leave me sceptical, or distant, and so I had never felt the urge to take the first step and take refuge with one of the masters, or one of the teachers. It is only now that I am contemplating to do this on my retreat next week. Maybe I will.
Back to Ooms
June 19th
Last Sunday Jimmy and I went back to Ooms for a walk.
Oh those wonderful summer meadows! Oh, the smells of summer in the air, of moist earth, lake water, and flowering plant life everywhere! The grasses were hip high now, strewn with daisies and clover and other blossoms I have no names for, the water had already bloomed with algae. There was a family standing at the bank, each of them holding fishing rods in their hands. Birds singing in the trees, meadow larks jubilating in the air, the wind wafting through the grasses. They are too tall for Jacky to run through, so she has to stay on the mown paths. The sky was clear, the clouds were luminous white and puffy, the temperature perfectly beautiful.
The last time I had been here with Jimmy, Constantin, Sophia and Anina, it had been so cold and windy it made my ears ache, and I hadn't been strong enough to walk around all of the lake. Now nothing of that was left. I walked past the pear tree the bird had perched on that had arrested me with it's singing and thought back to that timeless moment of slowness when I was gliding by under it's branches... now they were laden with leaves, sparkled by the sun.
It's good to feel strong again.
Yoga is a bit of a different matter. I haven't resumed a regular practice and a week ago I went back to Karen's Yoga class at Kripalu. This is a more vigorous class than the practice I do at home, but in the past that had been fine. This was the first time I had been back here in over six months, and, yes, my body feels different. My muscles just didn't want to work that hard. My brain kept saying "it's all right, you can take it slower", or "go ahead, you can sit this one out". But there is that odd pull of the group, the odd need to participate with what everybody else is doing, the strange power that holds you back from doing something different than everybody else. I made it through that class but my bones, and my flesh, and my muscles did not like it all that much. There may be a time in the future when that pace will be right for me again. For now it seems my body wants to move more slowly and less vigorously, and I will honor that. If I go back I will simply tell Karen that I am going sit a few exercises out in between, just so that I know I have an "ally" in the room and that ally will be the instructor herself in front of the room and that'll help.
Two days ago I worked in the garden most of the day. It started out being chilly, then it got warm, then it became colder again and I changed my clothes accordingly. I just puddled along all day with what I wanted to do. This does feel different! In a good way. There is a new luxury in the availability of the thought that I can let it go, that I don't have to meet the hypothetical goal I have set for myself. I can leave things half done, and time will embrace all of it lovingly. It doesn't matter if not all pots are planted; it doesn't matter if one flower bed never gets weeded this year. Time has become more of a friendly companion than an anxious competitor.
Last Sunday Jimmy and I went back to Ooms for a walk.
Oh those wonderful summer meadows! Oh, the smells of summer in the air, of moist earth, lake water, and flowering plant life everywhere! The grasses were hip high now, strewn with daisies and clover and other blossoms I have no names for, the water had already bloomed with algae. There was a family standing at the bank, each of them holding fishing rods in their hands. Birds singing in the trees, meadow larks jubilating in the air, the wind wafting through the grasses. They are too tall for Jacky to run through, so she has to stay on the mown paths. The sky was clear, the clouds were luminous white and puffy, the temperature perfectly beautiful.
The last time I had been here with Jimmy, Constantin, Sophia and Anina, it had been so cold and windy it made my ears ache, and I hadn't been strong enough to walk around all of the lake. Now nothing of that was left. I walked past the pear tree the bird had perched on that had arrested me with it's singing and thought back to that timeless moment of slowness when I was gliding by under it's branches... now they were laden with leaves, sparkled by the sun.
It's good to feel strong again.
Yoga is a bit of a different matter. I haven't resumed a regular practice and a week ago I went back to Karen's Yoga class at Kripalu. This is a more vigorous class than the practice I do at home, but in the past that had been fine. This was the first time I had been back here in over six months, and, yes, my body feels different. My muscles just didn't want to work that hard. My brain kept saying "it's all right, you can take it slower", or "go ahead, you can sit this one out". But there is that odd pull of the group, the odd need to participate with what everybody else is doing, the strange power that holds you back from doing something different than everybody else. I made it through that class but my bones, and my flesh, and my muscles did not like it all that much. There may be a time in the future when that pace will be right for me again. For now it seems my body wants to move more slowly and less vigorously, and I will honor that. If I go back I will simply tell Karen that I am going sit a few exercises out in between, just so that I know I have an "ally" in the room and that ally will be the instructor herself in front of the room and that'll help.
Two days ago I worked in the garden most of the day. It started out being chilly, then it got warm, then it became colder again and I changed my clothes accordingly. I just puddled along all day with what I wanted to do. This does feel different! In a good way. There is a new luxury in the availability of the thought that I can let it go, that I don't have to meet the hypothetical goal I have set for myself. I can leave things half done, and time will embrace all of it lovingly. It doesn't matter if not all pots are planted; it doesn't matter if one flower bed never gets weeded this year. Time has become more of a friendly companion than an anxious competitor.
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