March 2009

image credit: FreeBirD®

I once heard about a woman who had cancer, and was told by a Buddhist master that her healing process would accelerate by performing acts of compassion. She went back to Canada, to the fish market at a wharf in Vancouver, and bought a hundred lobsters that were still alive and set them free in the ocean. She continued, on a regular basis, saving the lives of shellfish. A short time went by, when she returned to her oncologist she found that her malignant tumor had disappeared and she was cancer free. After a while she forgot about saving lives, and went on with her life. Some years later, the cancer returned.  She did the same thing, she set free shell-fish she bought, and again the cancer went away.

Now, you may say that it was this woman’s faith and trust in the advice of the Buddhist master that cured her. Perhaps this is so, but the power of compassionate acts to heal have long been recorded in Taoist and Buddhist stories. For an amazing story on compassion from India, click on the photo above. In India, it is believed that the feet of the enlightened masters are holy and hold much spiritual energy. Here is another beautiful story from the Taoist tradition:

There was an old Taoist monk who was a master in physiognomy (reading the face and body). One day he looked at the face of one of his servants, a young boy who was eight years old. He saw in the boy’s face that he would die within a few months. Saddened by this, he told the boy to take a long vacation and visit his parents. The monk impressed upon him that he should spend a long time with his family. The monk thought that it was fitting for the boy to be with his family when he dies.

Three months later, to his astonishment, the monk saw the boy walking back up the mountain. When he came closer, the monk saw in the boy’s face that he would now live to be a ripe old age. The monk was curious and insisted that the young boy tell him in detail everything that happened while he was away.

The boy told of villages and towns he passed through, of rivers forded and mountains climbed. One day he came to a stream in flood. As he waded across the stream, he noticed that a colony of ants had become trapped on a small island formed by the flooding stream. Wanting to rescue the ants, he took a branch from a tree and laid it across the stream, with one end touching the island. The boy held the branch steady until all the ants made their way safely across to dry land. Then he went on his way.

The monk thought to himself, that it was this one act of compassion that had altered the boy’s fate. It is said that just as compassionate acts can alter your fate for the better, so too acts of cruelty can affect your fate.

There are endless ways that we can perform acts of compassion. It can be as little as offering a smile to brighten the day of someone who is lonely, or it can be as courageous as what my friend Maithri from The Soaring Impulse is about to undertake. Maithri is a young doctor, a singer, and poet from Australia, who is returning to his beloved Swaziland in Africa where he previously spent a few months working with the people with AIDS.

Swaziland is the country with the highest prevalence of HIV in the world (42%). 10% of its population are orphaned children and the average life expectancy is 32 years. It is a land where there are more coffin shops than grocery stores, where aid agencies would not go, seeing it as a lost cause. And as Maithri tells it:

“I’m under no illusions about my abilities as a doctor or as human being. I am deeply aware of the immensity and complexity of the problems which plague this beautiful mountainous country and the world.

I go simply with the intention of holding a little love in my heart.

Of reaching out my hands to those who are hurting with the breath of this love inside me.
We may never be able to turn a chaotic ocean into a symphony of peace.

But what if we can affect the cup of water that we offer our brother or sister who is suffering?

What If we can fill it with kindness, and understanding and gentle listening?

If we can make it ripple with whispered hope, infuse it with a single drop of grace?
John O’Donohue says “When one little flower opens, spring awakens everywhere.”

Perhaps this is why we go to Swaziland and all the places in the world wintering in despair.

To coax the buds.”
I encourage you to visit Maithri at The Soaring Impulse and make a donation to foster the work that he and other compassionate doctors and  workers are undertaking in a little hamlet in Swaziland, where hope is thin but loving-kindness is immense. If you are not able to donate, you can send your prayers and blessings to support Maithri and his team, that their love and their courage will see them through their time there.

May all beings know Peace

May all beings be happy

May all beings be free from suffering!

image credit: mckibillo

There are endless opportunities for spiritual practice in any given moment or circumstance in life. This morning I was graced with one  such opportunity. My credit card statement came in the mail and there was a charge that finally made it on my account even though I had talked to both the merchant and the credit card company about it over three months ago. Because the rate of exchange is much higher now on the dollar than it was three months ago, I ended up having to pay a lot more. My husband was angry about that but was resigned to let it go. But I am not one to let an injustice go without speaking up, so I decided to take it up with the credit card company.

It turned out that the supervisor I spoke to was not receptive to my request to have them take up the cost of the difference in the exchange rate. He made some remarks that were not what I would consider good customer relations. As the conversation went on, we both felt more frustrated and I ended up feeling unheard and more angry.

I noticed how easy it was to get all caught up in the emotion of anger. Anger like all the other emotions have an effect on the physical body as well as the mind. My stomach was knotted up, my chest was tight, my lower back was aching. I could feel the hot energy of anger coursing through me. I managed to remember to breathe and to calm myself. I was wronged and I still needed to have some resolution. I could not let it go at that moment.

I talked to the merchant and although it wasn’t any fault of theirs, they offered to give me a twenty percent discount on my next purchase. This exchange was pleasant and I felt heard and valued as a customer. It made me feel a lot better and I thought that it would be appropriate to call the supervisor back and tell him the  outcome. I related what I learned about how to deal with this kind of situation in the future and offered some feed-back about how I was affected by his remarks as a customer. He responded with awe, that I would call him back to give him feed-back in such a professional manner. I felt that I had some closure on the issue. I felt heard by everyone and the supervisor came away feeling better too.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, he said,“The practice of mindfulness, of recognizing and embracing anger is to open the door of your hell and transform it, rescuing yourself and the other person, returning together to the land of peace. This is possible and you are the one who is going to do it…” Getting to peace is not easy when the ego has so  much investment in being right, being victimized and laying blame. This experience reminds me of some tips I have learned about dealing with anger:

• To refrain from saying or doing anything that would incite more of an angry response.
• Practice mindfulness, breathe and come back to self.
• Make a conscious effort to wait until the emotion has receded to speak to the person about it later, when you can both be more open to hearing each other.
• Recognize that it is the unresolved anger that we carry from the past, that is being triggered in all situations.
• Recognize that we alone are responsible for the anger we feel, no matter how justified we feel in being angry. Someone who does not have anger in them will not respond with anger, but in a calm manner.
• Refrain from laying blame.
• Contemplate the possibility that our perception of the situation may be wrong.
• Remember that everybody is only doing the best they can in the moment, though they may have done better before and have the potential to do so later.
• Be willing to forgive yourself and the other person, no matter who is at fault.
• Sometimes everyone is right in any given situation.
• Resolve to act with more compassion for self and others. Anger is an expression of pain and suffering. Compassion brings the healing energy of loving-kindness and helps to alleviate the suffering of all concerned .
• Be willing to live with happiness than in being right.

Related posts:

Still There

Lightening Your Load

image credit: alicepopkorn

I remember the chant in the school-yard: Sticks and stones can break my bones but your words cannot hurt me. And no matter how loud you chant, its magic didn’t seem to work; you still felt the sting of someone’s words or worse the shame of a group of kids jeering. The defenses we learned to build to protect ourselves or to hurt others, happened so innocently, through childhood games or careless communication in a glib remark. Yet our attitudes in life still reflect the effects of mere words spoken so recklessly in passing.

Words have power. In the Gospel of John we read, “In the beginning was the Word.” In Hindu mythology, Brahma the creator, first showed himself as a golden embryo of sound. He was a vowel, vibrating outward, the sound echoed back upon itself and became water and wind. In Sanskrit, this power is called Matrika Shakti, the inherent creative energy behind the letters that make up words. It is said that each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet has a corresponding sound vibration both in the subtle energy channels of our bodies and in the cosmos. When these sound vibrations resonate with a corresponding vibration within us they create thoughts, then these thoughts gradually manifest the grosser forms of feelings and then speech.

The Matrika Shakti resides in our energy body and rises of its own volition into consciousness, manifesting as our thoughts. The quality of our thoughts depend on what seeds we have been harboring over many lifetimes. For example if we have carried impressions of low self-esteem from this life-time or previous ones, the Matrika Shakti or letters which vibrate with the energy of low self-esteem are attracted to come together to create thoughts that correspond to this energy.

Thoughts then are the precursor of words, and they both carry the power to influence ourselves and others by the energy inherent in them. For instance, the word peace or joy opens us up to the vibration of those qualities. A person who wants to create peace, joy and clarity for themselves would be very careful of the inner dialogue that they allow. The same is true for how we want to affect the people whom we think or talk about. Although a person may not be present, we send our thoughts to them telepathically and even though they may not know that it is us who are thinking or speaking negatively about them, they still  feel badly about themselves. So the thoughts we send out can work for or against ourselves and others.

In my previous posts, Know The Beginning and Of One Mind, I explored the nature of the mind and ego and looked at some ways of working with them. The mind puts forth a powerful field of energy which determines how we experience the world. To create the life that we want, it is first important to be aware of our inner dialogue. If our inner critic is allowed to dominate, we attract the same kind of experiences we anticipate, which then affirms for us that our inner dialogue was right. When we learn how to soothe the inner critic and foster thoughts of what we want rather than what we don’t want, then we are mastering our world. This process of mastering our world all begins with awareness of thoughts and feelings and using skillful means to loosen their grip on us.

And as for all those impressions we carry from school-yard taunts, our inner critic, and our outer critics, they are grist for the mill of our evolution. Words can hurt us but it is the practice of awareness of the power of Matrika Shakti that is going to free us. When we become vigilant of what thoughts we engage in, what words we speak, how we talk to ourselves and others, then the words we choose to broadcast, will uplift us, our world and those whom we encounter.

image credit: eddi07

In my last post, Know The Beginning, I mentioned how the ego keeps us from knowing our truth, and one of the ways we can deal with ego is to name the thoughts or emotions that show up. In this way we create some space, witness them, and not get caught up in the stories they tell. These stories are not the truth that we are, they are fabricated by Ego to keep us feeling separate; better than, or worse than the other players of our drama or pathos. The characters we engage with are the embodiment of anger, despair, anxiety, worry and a host of others. The task of disconnecting from Ego is not easy. It has a strong grip on us to match all the disparate parts of ourselves that are in revolt with each other.

I read somewhere of a creation story from the Native American people of the Northwest: Old Man, maker of all things first created a girl who he named Breaking Daylight. She watched him cut himself one day, then gather the blood up, breathe into it and create a boy. Breaking Daylight then watched as Old Man proceeded to give the boy a mind. Old Man made ten more human beings, wrapped them up and put them into the young man. This was the mind. Old Man told Breaking Daylight, that the mind was not going to allow the young  man to get anywhere unless all ten gave their consent for the young man to get to where he was headed. Then Old man cut himself again, collected the blood, breathed on it and created another human being. He told Breaking Daylight that this one was called Staying Alive. He then put Staying Alive inside the head of the young man.

For me, this is a beautiful metaphorical teaching story on the importance of having all aspects of our being in alignment. What we think, how we feel, what we say, and how we act must all be congruent. No matter how much we talk about what we want to create in our lives, if some parts of ourselves are doubtful, afraid, distrustful etc., we will not be able to manifest our heart’s desire. We really have to look deeper to see what hidden beliefs are preventing us from accomplishing what we want; who is there that is sabotaging our goals.

In the Native American creation story, Staying Alive was created by Old Man and placed  along side the ten aspects of Mind. Who is Staying Alive? I see him as the trickster, old Ego himself that keeps the disparity of self in tact so that Ego can stay alive and grow strong, creating the feeling of separation from Truth. When we live from the aspect of Truth, there is clarity, there is trust in our world, there is faith that all our needs will be met. There is the knowing that all things, all beings are connected and when we declare what we want to manifest in our world, when it is for the highest good, all of creation comes together to help us to bring it forth in a synchronistic dance. However when we are caught up in Ego’s web, some parts of us will sabotage our endeavors because of its own beliefs and programs that says that what we want to create can’t be done.

How do we become of one mind, where there is a harmony in our thoughts, our feelings, our speech and our actions? I believe that the answer lies in aligning with Truth. When we live from Ego, every aspect is living from a belief that is inconsistent with the rest. The way to align with Truth is to live from the heart, from loving-kindness. For as strong as Ego is and how difficult it is to be free of its sticky tentacles, love is greater.  Every time we come upon that same issue we have been wrestling with, when we soften our feelings, without judgment, without beating ourselves up, we are practicing loving-kindness and compassion. Soon we notice that Ego does not have its hypnotic grip on us and we are freer, more aligned with Truth. We are living from that space which is of peace, joy and clarity. It takes constant practice, but when we recognize that this is our main purpose in life, that everything that happens is for the polishing of this gem of understanding, then life no longer feels like a drag, but a play of consciousness, and we are the players until the last curtain call!

image credit: Paco CT

In the Gospel of Thomas, the disciples asked Jesus, “Tell us about our end. What will it be?” Jesus replied, “Have you found the Beginning so that you now seek the end?” The disciples’ question about the end is not unlike ours when we seek for answers outside of ourselves. We yearn to know about realities other than this one, which we hope will give us some respite; some nirvana, “the zone,” or “the light.”  I think that Jesus was pointing his disciples to know themselves in the present and not to hope for some future refuge.

I have come to a place in my spiritual journey where I think, that which I have been striving for, these many years, is a lot simpler than I thought. I say simple, not easy. There are so many different paths, different teachers, and gurus who teach the ancient truth, each with their own twists of understanding and particulars of practice, according to their inclinations. After years of deciphering many different teachings I have come to realize that there is only one basic message. This message is put very succinctly by Jesus when he said, “Blessed is anyone who will stand up in the Beginning and thereby know the end and never die.” How does one, “stand up in the Beginning?”

In my understanding, The Beginning refers to our original nature, before ego has set itself up in our consciousness as our truth. It is what Shunryu Suzuki called the Beginner’s Mind. He said in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: …The purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of the big existence, or reality itself. When we realize this fact, there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. The purpose of our practice is to be aware of this fact.

So becoming aware of “The Beginning”or “Beginner’s Mind” or our “Original Nature” is to become aware of Truth.  We have so many options available to us today to become aware of this “Beginning.” And just like how we feel overwhelmed when we go shopping for cereal at the supermarket, with so many brands to choose from, we feel the same about the glut of spiritual information out there, present company included. My purpose for writing this post is to share with you how simple I think it could be, hopefully not to confuse you with yet another choice.

I have come to the conclusion that all practices are to help us to let go of ego or our false identification of the truth of who we are. So we practice meditation, chanting, hatha yoga, tai chi, prayer, and communing with nature as ways of calming the mind, to give us clarity, to witness our thoughts and to not identify with them. None of these practices are paths to the Truth. Truth already is in our consciousness, we just need to identify with it instead of identifying with everything else we have come to know as ourselves. These practices are merely aids to letting go of our ego identification, as they create a spaciousness where the mind stops and gives us a glimpse of the true reality that we are.

As I said, the spiritual journey is simple, not easy. If we can find some method that resonates with us that will help us to quiet the mind that is easily accessible, we can follow this practice as an opening to Truth. It is not easy because the ego is very difficult to let go of. We have to be constantly vigilant of the thoughts that bind us into thinking less of ourselves and others. We also have to be vigilant of those thoughts that make us feel superior to others or thoughts of perfectionism that keep sabotaging our equanimity.

I think that the crux of the spiritual journey is the ability to rest in equanimity, to keep coming back to this center, to this Truth which we are. It is the Beginning, it is how we arrived in the world, without a care or worry, pure beingness. The eastern mystics describe this pure beingness as awareness itself, it is blissful and it is of the nature of light and expansion.  Ego is heavy, dark, and contracting, it is when we feel worried, fearful, depressed, angry etc. When we are able to recognize that we are identifying with ego and come back to center, we are identifying with the Truth. We can do this by  simply naming it: worry, depression, anxiety etc. We say to ourselves: This is not the truth of who I am.

The Truth then, is as close as the next breath! When we come back to the breath, we stop identifying with ego until the next thought grabs us, and then we do it again and again.  Then one day we will realize that we can witness all the forms that ego takes and not get tripped up in it. The goal here is not to get rid of our ego, that is setting ourselves up for failure. As long as we are in this human body, there is ego or the feeling of separation from God. This process can take as long as we want, it is simple but not easy.

When we can rest in this equanimity, we will feel blessed, and we will have connected to the Truth of who we really are, which is eternal, it never dies, it is just our body that dies. The Truth that we are is the same in the beginning as it will be in the end. And as Jesus said, “The place of the Beginning will be the place of the end. Blessed is anyone who will stand up in the Beginning and thereby know the end and never die.”

I came across The Gospel of Thomas recently and I am really fascinated by how different its message is from the Gospels of the New Testament.  The Gospel of Thomas is a list of approximately 150 sayings of Jesus, presumably written down by the apostle, Thomas in Syria. In the early days of Christianity different apostles were said to have founded the churches in different areas. Mark founded the church in Egypt,  John, the church in Greece, Peter, the church in Rome and Thomas the church in Syria.

There is some overlap in the list of sayings, to the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, but what is strikingly different about the Gospel of Thomas is the absence of stories of miracles, no virgin birth narrative, no discussion of Jesus’ crucifixion, and no mention of the resurrection. It lacks any emphasis on judgment, the coming end of the world, or the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Gospel of Thomas lists sayings that emphasize valuing the present and tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is here now, within and around us. Hence the list of sayings lack predictions of destruction, images of trial and judgment, and warnings to beware the immanent arrival of the day of doom. Instead, the sayings promote self-knowledge, and contemplation of the nature of this world now.

Of course the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas was a threat to the conservative Christian scholars with its teachings of self-reflection and focusing on the present rather than seeking salvation in some future kingdom of Heaven. In late 1945, an Egyptian peasant rode his camel to the base of a cliff, hoping to find fertilizer to sell in the nearby village of Nag Hammadi. He found, instead, a large sealed pottery jar buried in the sand. He broke open the jar and found a collection of twelve old books. He sold the books at an antiques market for a small sum. The books gradually came into the hands of scholars in Cairo, Europe, and America. Today these books are known as the Nag Hammadi library. The twelve books contain fifty-two texts altogether including the Gospel of Thomas, forty of which were previously unknown to scholars. The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas was significant and of great interest because scholars knew of its existence, as it was mentioned in the works of Hippolytus, a third-century church father.

There are several translations of this Gospel but I am only familiar with this one by Stevan Davies. I am not too keen on some of his interpretations but the point of studying the sayings is to glean your own understanding and open to the inner “Kingdom Consciousness.” In the translation by Stevan Davies, Andrew Harvey writes in the Foreword, “…the Gospel of Thomas makes clear that Jesus discovered the alchemical secret of transformation that could have permanently altered world history, had it been implemented with the passion and on the scale that Jesus knew was possible. Its betrayal by the churches erected in Jesus’ name has been an unmitigated disaster, one major reason for our contemporary catastrophe…What Jesus woke up to and proceeded to enact with the fiercest and most gloriously imaginable intensity was this new life of “kingdom-consciousness,” not as a savior and not as a guru claiming unique status and truth—the Gospel of Thomas makes this very clear—but as a sign of what is possible for all human beings who dare to awaken to the potential splendor of their inner truth and the responsibilities for total transformation of the world that it then inspires within them.”

The Jesus depicted in the Gospel of Thomas is a far cry from that of the New Testament, rather he is a mystic with a radical message that the living kingdom of God burns in us and surrounds us at all times and that passionate love-consciousness can help birth it into reality. Jesus is usually described as the Prince of Peace, but in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said: People think, perhaps, that I have come to throw peace upon the world. They don’t know that I have come to throw disagreement upon the world, and fire, and sword, and struggle.

The sayings attributed to Jesus have hidden meanings but The Gospel of Thomas is optimistic that what is hidden will be revealed. The first saying: Whoever finds the correct interpretation of these sayings will never die. The translator notes: …The correct interpretation of the sayings is not the final goal but the means to the goal, the discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven. Thomas’s Gospel is an exercise book, a list of riddles for decoding. The secret lies not in the final answers but in the effort to find the answers.

I look forward to studying the list of sayings and sharing any gems I discover. I have already seen  comparisons to the mystic teachings of eastern philosophy in many of them, which is not surprising since Truth is one.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled….

From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What’s the meaning of all song?
‘Let all things pass away.’

Taken from Vacillation by W B Yeats

These words by Yeats echo what ails us until we learn to, “let all things pass away.” This is the key to true freedom; when we can truly let things go, to let go of the thoughts of regret about the past and mulling over what we could have said and done.

Who amongst us has no regret about the past?  If only we made wiser choices, acted differently, were more gentle in our speech etc, our life would be different today. The wisest compassionate remark one of my teachers made regarding this was, “if you could have, you would.” With  this outlook, we recognize that we did the best we could for who we were, which is the best we can ever possibly do, until we learn that we can make different choices.

Letting go of the past is the most important step towards personal freedom. Painful memories and unresolved issues of regret or failure are the invisible companions that follow us into every avenue of our personal life path in the present. They appear as nagging doubt, anxiety, timidity, fear, and lack of trust in ourselves and others. How do we shrug off these ghosts of the past and live in the present with clarity and resolve without self-sabotage?

One of the most helpful methods I have found is a self-healing technique called TAT®, which I have mentioned in a previous post, Coping With Difficult Times Part 3. There are a few steps to this technique which consists of focusing on a few statements while holding a posture. The posture is putting one hand at the base of the skull and the other on the point just above the nose-bridge between the eyes. You would have to look at the instructions on the TAT website. You can download the free instructions here by clicking here. From that page there are two ways to get the instructions. You can log in as a customer and order it through the store, or you can go to the tatlife home page and click on the free download link. Either way, it is free.

The  steps are:

1. This[substitute this with  whatever your regret, anxiety, failure etc.] happened.
   
2. This happened, it’s over, I am ok and I can now relax.
3. All the places in my mind, body and life where I hold this, is now being healed. Thank you.[you may thank whatever form of divinity or the universe etc.]
4. All the origins of this is being healed. Thank you.
   
5. I ask forgiveness of anyone I hurt because of this.
6. I forgive anyone including myself and God who I blame for this.
7. I now choose to create…[the opposite of 'this']
8. This healing is now integrating on all levels. Thank you.

The above steps can be shortened to three steps or you can even add more. Please check the TAT website if you are interested in learning more about this technique. You can download the instructions for free.

The beauty of this technique is that anyone can do it at any time, to heal mental, emotional or physical issues. The steps of forgiveness and choosing a new way of being are the most effective parts in healing any emotional issues from the past. It is the acknowledging of what is standing in the way of us moving forward in the life we want to create. It makes conscious all the nagging discomfort and stress that looms over us or appears as a background of anxiety and foreboding, without having to delve deeply into the issue.

When we can let all things pass away, we are open to the present moment and can live more fully and deeply. Our choices are not based on negativities that we still harbor from past hurts. We are free to make choices where we can reflect on our actions, determine their consequences both for ourselves and others. Our choices are then made on the basis of what brings us fulfillment rather than emptiness and disatisfaction. We become truly free with a deepening self-knowledge.