August 2008

image credit: Perla

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

This quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson has been playing on my mind as I contemplate music this weekend since we are having our annual music festival here in Powell River.

My old dog Tricksy was a connoisseur of good music. I remember a time I was listening to some heavy metal rock music. Shortly after the music started, she got up from the floor beside me, with her ears perked up, a scowl on her face, she looked at me and then to the speakers on the wall. She gave me one more disgusted look and walked out of the room. When I listen to classical music, she lies with her head between her paws, and a dreamy look in her eyes.

Dr Emoto from Japan has been experimenting with what the effects of the environment have on the crystallization of water. One experiment was conducted to determine the effects of music. Photos taken of the frozen crystals formed from the effects of music by Beethoven, Tibetan sutras and Kawachi folk dance were harmonious and beautiful, whereas those of heavy metal music were broken and discordant. In research on the effect of music on plants, it has been found in one study at Oxford University in 2001 that classical music was better than fertilizer for stimulating plant growth. In another study by scientists Creath and Schwartz, it was found that seeds germinated faster with the music of Carlos Nakai and Paul Horn than with pink noise or with nothing.

What does this tell us about how we can be affected by the kind of music we listen to? A few weeks ago, I was in the front of our home doing some gardening while my husband was painting the porch. The neighbor was blaring hip-hop music while he worked on his car. Every other word in the songs was the F…word. My husband said, “How do you like that music?” I thought, if Tricksy were here, she would go and hide under our bed like she did during thunder and lightning.

On the spiritual healing journey, using music as therapy is wonderfully healing. It can uplift us to transcendental heights; it soothes the mind, and heals the heart. Some of my favorite uplifting music is from Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, and Sacred Music, Mozart: Serenade in G Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Piano Concerto #21 in C, and Nawang Khechog a Tibetan flutist: Music as Medicine.

Last night one of the speakers at the US Democratic Party convention quoted Einstein referring to Republican Senator John McCain’s campaign policies as being the same as the present administration’s, creating economic deadlock: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” As insane as that statement sounds, that’s what many of us do because we are afraid of change.

photo credit: Thowra_uk

Making life changes is the most difficult of tasks, we are being asked to die to an old part of ourselves. Change does not come without a lot of kicking and screaming. I remember how I would stall and stall, talking to people about what I want to do until my dear friends would say, “shit, or get off the pot.” When we begin to look at ourselves on the spiritual healing journey, we become aware of our pain and looking deeper, we often see how we are creating the situations that cause our suffering, yet we continue with the same course of action. We’re stuck and yet we refuse to try something different. Do we do this because we are insane, stupid or stubborn? One of my teachers points out that when we “dig our heels in,” it’s because we do not feel safe to make a different choice. We allow fear to cloud our thinking and even though we see that our life is not working and want change, we are not able to move in a different direction. When we come to this impasse it is time for the practice of “loving-kindness,” accepting that we are not feeling safe enough to step into the unknown. For many of us, continuing to be in pain with the familiarity of our situation is more comfortable than stepping off the cliff, which is what we need to do to create a different outcome in our lives.

In practicing loving kindness, we are not trying to cover-up our pain, we recognize our fear, and we are gentle with ourselves. We may need support to create change whether it is outside of ourselves or whether it’s our own permission to step beyond our comfort zone.

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I received this beautiful video in my e-mail of an extraordinary relationship. It is a powerful reminder that we are all being taken care of. Something or someone is always watching over us, “not a leaf falls without its knowing” is a phrase I came across somewhere to describe the power of Grace in our lives. We call that higher power: Christ, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Shiva, All That Is etc. Whatever our spiritual path whether you came upon it by birth or by choice, what is common to all, is the power of Grace. Grace doesn’t ask us to believe, it is there for us anyway. When we make Grace our ally, we experience its power more magically because we are more aware of it and attract more expressions of it in our lives.

No matter how much we feel separate and afraid, Grace comes to our protection in some form. I remember two instances in my life when Grace was there for me. Once when I was a young teenager, I was waiting for my older brother who was supposed to pick me up after my evening class. He had forgotten and it was getting late and I was at a school in the middle of nowhere and no one was around. I was beginning to panic and was so relieved to see my brother’s car drive up. When I went to the car, it wasn’t my brother; it was a young couple driving a car just like my brother’s. They saw me all alone in the dark and stopped. They offered to drive me all the way home, twenty miles away!

Another time was when I went to India for the first time. I took my three-year-old daughter with me. It was just the two of us traveling. After my husband left us at the departure gate in the airport, it dawned on me, “ What are you doing?” I was going to one of the strangest countries by western standards, alone with my baby. There was no turning back now. While we were on board the airplane, we went walking around and I met a friendly, older couple who was going to visit family in Mumbai. They helped me with my baby while I went through customs at each of the different ports. When we got to Mumbai, there was a general strike and there were no taxis to take me to the hotel I was going to. I hitched a ride from their relatives. We said our good-byes, and I knew that we were returning to Canada on different dates. It turned out that I had to postpone my date of departure from India and I was ever so surprised to see them on the same flight as mine on my return home. Again they took care of my baby and me on our journey home.

Even though I see the power of Grace in action in my life, I sometimes still doubt myself and feel afraid seeing how bad things happen to good people. This is the mystery of life, and we live with it with courage and wisdom.

Last night I watched the US Democratic Party convention for their presidential nominee on TV. I saw people deeply moved by some of the speeches that were made. The theme was “change.” I felt that people were relating to the need for change on a level that they were not even conscious of, that led them to tears. Hilary Clinton appealed to her supporters to go deeper into themselves to look at what they want when she said, “Were you voting for me or for the mother with cancer and two autistic children who have no medical insurance? She echoed presidential nominee, Barack Obama’s stand when she said, “Change must come from the ground up, not from top down.” This is a call for deep-rooted change that builds the foundation for a strong society that is based on a fundamental need for security, dignity and trust. The keynote speaker, Mark Warner, ex-governor of Virginia spoke of building a strong future based on hope not on fear. He rallied his audience to draw upon the American spirit to work together to reclaim the basic standard of living lost to many families, to create a new economy that will come from new technology for sustainable energy, and investment in education to bring out-sourced jobs back home from overseas.

photo credit: alicepopkorn

As I listened to these speakers, I was reminded of the phrase “take the one seat” from Jack Kornfield’s book, A Path With Heart. Mr. Kornfield says we need to find a spiritual practice and stay with it to yield the fruit of that practice. For many of us, no matter what spiritual path we choose, meditation is the foundation of our spiritual practice. Through meditation, we look at our struggle, our sorrow and awaken the force of life that is unstoppable. It is in awakening this force that we are able to create real change in our lives. In his book Mr. Kornfield says, “In taking the one seat, each of us awakens this force. It is through our strength of being, our integrity, the discovery of our own greatness of heart that we bring freedom to our lives and bring it to those around us as well.”

Last Friday evening we had our blackberry festival here in our little town. Three blocks of the main street, the business section were closed to traffic and hundreds of people were frolicking; there were blackberry goodies in abundance to eat and drink and music and dancing. For a toddler it could be overwhelming. I watched a little girl waiting, while her parents chatted with friends. I could just imagine her saying, “OK, that’s it. I have to take a break!” She flopped down, arms outstretched, belly down in dead man’s pose right there on the road.  Soon after she lay down, a big, big, beautiful dog came up and gave her a sniff. Up she popped, all energized again in no time.

Sometimes on the spiritual healing journey, I am like that toddler on the road; got to take a break! There is a line from a Bob Marley song, “you running and you running away, but you can’t run away from yourself.” On the spiritual healing journey, there is no resolution to painful situations; no one to blame, nothing to hold on to, no place to hide. You just have to stay with it; the only way out is through. Our programmed reaction is to distract ourselves: eat something, buy something, watch TV etc. Blaming the stars, the government, your parents, is another way out. It is convenient to distract ourselves and find something or someone to blame, then we don’t have to look at our part in creating the situation and how we need to make change. Sometimes the situation is one that is not within our control and there is nothing we can do to fix things, no one to blame. We can’t move in any direction to make things right again. We’re stuck. It feels crappy, but staying right here is what we need to do. Anything else is running away, even going into the wilderness or an ashram. Staying with our situation, opening into our pain is what opens the heart. We experience our true nature. To experience the opening of the heart, we have to embrace the good times and the bad times, or what we label as good and bad.

photo credit: alicepopkorn

The spiritual healing journey can be exhausting and it is those times that we need to give ourselves a break. With the awareness of what it is you are doing, making healthy, nurturing choices to give yourself a rest is OK. Going to a noisy bar and watching people with empty looks in their eyes isn’t nurturing for me. Going out in nature, gardening, listening to classical music, taking an aroma-therapy bath, having a cup of tea with a friend, are ways I give myself a break. And like that little toddler on the road, it doesn’t take much nurturing to get energized and be on the road again.

At my favorite Thai restaurant there is a scale of five chili peppers to let the waiter know how hot you can stand to eat your Pad Thai. One of my friends is a “five” on the chili scale; I’m a “one.” We all have our limits. Another of my good friends cannot have a speck of anything peppery on her plate; she goes into extreme pain if she does. She also must stuff pieces of paper napkins in her ears if we go to a noisy restaurant. She is a highly sensitive person with the rare gift of synesthesia; she sees sounds she hears as color. Another of my friends smokes pot in the morning after she drops her son off to school, just to “take the edge off” so she can function for the rest of the day. We are all wired differently at birth and have different pain thresholds. So if someone asks me, “do you think I should go on meds for my depression?” I honestly say, I don’t know. There are techniques for dealing with physical and emotional pain and I tell people to work with those techniques first, before going on medication. Alternative health practices such as acupuncture and acupressure are also helpful. Then there are cases where people are so badly damaged from being the victims or the witness of extreme violence, that they need to dissociate. I highly recommend to these people, if they wish to work with self-help techniques, that they work with the support of a qualified therapist. If they are on medication they need to be monitored by their doctor.

In her book: When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron addresses how to work with emotional pain, using Buddhist techniques. She tells us that to end suffering, we need to approach our pain head-on when we would rather escape from it. She talks about the practice of “loving-kindness” where we approach painful situations with friendliness and curiosity. She refers to the space we’re in when we choose to not run away, as a place of groundlessness, where we are on the edge, nothing to hold on to, letting go into the unknown. With the continual practice of relaxing into the groundlessness of painful situations, we discover that love and truth within ourselves, which will always be there, no matter how chaotic our life circumstances are.

Many of us approach spirituality with the hope that we would get to a point of security, where we would fix our pain, where if we meditate enough we would let go of all our impurities and we’ll live happily ever after. Sorry, that’s not exactly how it is. In Buddhism they speak of impermanence to describe the nature of reality where change is inevitable. We will keep experiencing loss as long as we live. Being on the spiritual healing journey helps us to live with loss and its ensuing pain, the human condition. We learn how to be with pain and be happy anyway. How to love anyway, no matter how much pain we are in. One of my teachers uses the word “soften”. This is a magical word when you feel your heart hardening to pain, your body hardening, shutting down. Saying, “soften” is a key to opening into the painful situation and allowing your love to flow anyway.

My good friend Dolores, is known for her hilarious one-liners. Last night we were talking about how her life is so much simpler since she got rid of her car. In her usual way not trying to be funny, she said, “My personality complicates my life.” Dolores is one of the movers and shakers of our town who thinks outside the box and with her gregarious nature, she is often asked to be part of committees. So her life is extremely busy with also hosting two weekly local community radio programs, her stained glass art work her garden and her spiritual pursuits. Dolores’s statement is a classic aphorism from all spiritual traditions worded in different ways.

The ego is the personality that we take on that defines who we are, which we mistakenly believe is our true nature. This personality that we take on, masks our true nature or the Self. The nature of the Self is described in the scriptures of Shaivism as Truth, Auspiciousness,.and Beauty. As we progress along the spiritual healing journey, we begin to peel away the layers of this personality or ego like we peel away the layers of an onion. All these layers are composed of beliefs we have about ourselves; based on our upbringing, how society tells us to be, and decisions we made about who we are, resulting from both our positive and negative life experiences. These beliefs about ourselves, which we take to be the truth, are at the root of all our suffering.

In eastern mysticism, it is said that the ego not only derives its persona from the experiences of this life but from all our past lives. The first step in peeling away the layers of the ego to uncover our true nature is recognition. This is what Dolores’s statement, “My personality complicates my life” is. Recognizing that something is masking what her life is truly about is a profound spiritual practice. When we take the teachings and apply them to our lives, that is the path of the spiritual healing journey. We begin to detach from the morass that complicates our lives and begin to make choices that take us to the experience of the Self. One of my teachers puts it this way; “Does this action take me towards Love or away from Love?” That is a good barometer by which to make healthy choices.

No, not your nifty little phone computer. In Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world where my aunt lives, garlic is celebrated in a world famous annual garlic festival. Here on the coast of British Columbia, we celebrate the blackberry which like garlic, is a love em and hate em delicacy. This is blackberry season and in our house, “let’s go for a walk” is a euphemism for: let’s go feast on blackberries along the power-line. The smell of ripening blackberries is to die for. If you saw me dressed to go blackberry bushwhacking in the winter you would think I was dressed for combat. I have had many a struggle with a blackberry bush and sometimes there are battle scars, and like a veteran soldier, I glory in the knowing that it was for a good cause. Come summer, we’ll be savoring luscious sweet berries with purple fingers and purple teeth. Yes, I am getting to what this has to do with the spiritual healing journey. There is a parable here, the mind and the blackberry.

photo credit markhillary

What is the difference between meditation and blackberry bushwhacking? The difference is not so subtle. In bushwhacking you go at the bushes with a vengeance and spare no unruly branches, using the sharpest cutting tool you have. In meditation, thoughts are like an unruly blackberry bush. As you get closer to them, they grab a hold of you. The more you struggle, the tighter you get enmeshed in its web. Unlike bushwhacking, you approach the mind with gentleness. You just let thoughts be, not engaging in them, not suppressing them, just coming back, focusing on your breath every time you catch yourself holding on to thoughts. Focusing on the breath keeps bringing you back to the present moment. Thoughts are memories of the past or fantasies of the future. The present moment just is. As you practice daily, getting to the still-point of the present moment or being in the presence of the Self is the goal of meditation. With a still mind you can be more effective in dealing with life. You are not so affected by the madness that surrounds you, you can stay more grounded, think more clearly and access intuition which is always advising you how to best proceed in all endeavors. Meditation is not easy, and yet you can’t struggle with it. You just have to keep doing it and over the years, it becomes easier.

Yesterday I started having second thoughts about continuing this blog. I was telling someone who is on the spiritual path, about what I was doing and she didn’t seem to have any interest. I began this negative self-talk. “Who would want to read what I have to say. I don’t like spending time on the computer myself. I don’t know enough. I don’t know anything about writing. People may misunderstand what I am trying to say. I may offend some people. Blah, blah, blah!” This morning when I woke up, I thought, “What would I write about today?” In my imagination, I looked at the headings of the topics I covered so far and saw that the next one was: For All We Know. I wondered what I could write about using that heading. Then it came to me that I could write about the negative feelings I was having about this blog.

One of the most important ways to “come home to yourself” is to listen to your intuition and follow through on ideas and prompts that pop up in your conscious mind. I started this blog after hearing Andrew Macevich on the Bill Moyers Journal. He said that the solution to the problems we face today lies in the need for us to look at ourselves. In eastern mysticism, it is said that there is only one Mind and we are all rays of that one Mind. For all we know, our intuitions are communications with other rays from within the one Mind. Who knows, maybe I was tuning in to someone also watching that program and was thinking, “How do you do that?” Well, I know how to do that. I have been studying this subject since I was a teenager. I have a long, long way to go at mastering it, but I know how to do it. If even what I have to say touches one person and can help them to start healing their life, then that is a great service to humanity, to touch one life.

So as I write this I feel great about continuing with this blog and I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to share what I have learned. I thank all my teachers, especially the ones who did not know that they were teaching me. I thank you readers for giving me a venue to share my knowledge. I thank myself for the courage to write!