I had a knee-jerk response to what I perceived as strangeness with the robe and waterfall, and wasn’t sure I wanted to post, but this teaching did overlap with some dynamics that were unfolding in my little corner.
After I posted and received a few comments,I became uncomfortable. I debated about removing the video, but the comments section became full of interesting takes on teachers and words and individual paths…The energy there made me leave this teaching up. In a 27 minute video, there are many words spoken; some of these words resonate, some now seem discordant to me in a new day and new light.
The part that resonates with me is the concept of sitting deeply within for that is what had been on my small fractal menu lately, a pointing to a field beyond wanting. It seems there does come a point when all attainment begins to be seen as nice but still ephemeral in its relation to the core flow. Attainment and loss are naturally arising in life. Beyond this cycle, there seems to be an awareness that the self sits with the self in rain and snow, and in tears and ache, and in sun and breeze, and in welling up and lazy stillness, and in booming pain and gentle ease. The perception of anything is allowed to play through while the self remains, no matter what, come what may.
In light of this sitting with anything that arises, sorrow or joy – I sit with the moment of posting this video and the moment of moving on. I sit with ones who will listen and respond to me with open hearts without judgement. I sit with myself when I am full of ideas and when I can empty myself out of these ideas. It is saturday morning, the 21st, solstice, and a particularly clear and simple bird song is coming through my window with the morning light – that sun light that will illuminate my corner of the world for a longest day of the year. Love to you who venture here.
but you can’t quite get out for the stratosphere view –
when you are in a tub of goo –
ask.
You are love but it can be hard to remember.
Lately I’ve been asking, stilling and then
arrives a song from 1984 🙂 on the breeze.
“Show Me”
Show me the meaning of the word
Show me the meaning of the word
‘Cause I’ve heard so much about it
They say you can’t live without it
Welcome to the human race
With it’s wars, disease and brutality
You with your innocence and grace
Restore some pride and dignity
To a world in decline
Welcome to a special place
In a heart of stone that’s cold and grey
You with your angel face
Keep the despair at bay
Send it away, and
Show me the meaning of the word
Show me the meaning of the word
‘Cause I’ve heard so much about it
I don’t want to live without it
I don’t want to live without it
Oh, I want love, I want love, I want loveWelcome here from outer space
The milky way still in your eyes
You found yourself a hopeless case
One seeking perfection on earth
That’s some kind of rebirth, so
Show me the meaning of the word
Show me the meaning of the word
‘Cause I’ve heard so much about it
Don’t make me live without it
Don’t make me live without it
Oh, love, I want love, I want love, I want love
As I was getting ready for my shower this morning, I had a flash thought of my cousin Susan. The reason she came into my head was for a funny thing she revealed to me about herself many, many years ago. It was a good thought.
She once told me that before she got into the shower, she made herself do something like 10 push ups and 10 other difficult rotating exercises vigorously, then she rewarded herself with a shower. She valued the appearance of her body and played this game with herself in her busy life at that time to keep herself in shape. She has come to my mind often for this one single truth sharing over 20 years ago.
The knob on our shower is sticking, making turning on the water a difficulty. I got myself in an athletic lunge position and pulled mightily away from the shower wall to get the water flowing. This position brought the thought of Susan and her exercises and made me smile. I see that behind this nice thought of Susan is a cascade of sorrowful thoughts as well, that I choose not to follow. I bowed to her after my lunge this morning, encasing the sorrow to give equal time to the sides of her that contained beauty and truth and love.
In the past 10 years, many lives have changed drastically in my family and acquaintances. It has been quite a rocky avalanche of downfall, tragedy, unveiling of hidden lives, pain, separation and destruction —> through the lens of appearances. HOWEVER, through another lens altogether ——-> the happenings seemed to bring truth to a head, giving each of us the opportunity to pop the abscesses and heal, or to allow the disease to sink deeper into our vessel and take us out for good.
Susan had such a story and in the examination of the spiral down, there are avenues of thought that can take that dead end into judgment, self-righteousness, alluring despair, hopelessness, anger. This morning I recognize that I consciously do not go down any avenue except the one of grace today with my thoughts. I honor the pain – but also choose to remember the good things that became harder to see. I honor the funny, quirky, light and beautiful threads that were woven into the delicate thread of her life. I do a few lunges and some push ups before the reward of the shower in her honor and with a smile.
Thinking of her this way allows me also to dwell on the immensity of choice and the truth of grace. In the tie to this wordily reality, the body seems the whole shebang, and death seems a final defeat. Yet through a longer, zoomed back view, death is such a tender release and restart button for the journey. Grace – shanti -love – OM – blessings of life and death as just inhales and exhales of a much larger path.
Those 10 pushups this morning strengthen my arms and soften my heart!
We often have little bugaboos that are particular to each particular body suit: recurring sinus infections, celiacs, migraines, asthma, insomnia, allergies; we all know about these sort of things! There are challenges that are particular to each of us, yet also shared in a commonality of annoyance or dread or danger: a thorn in the side, to tie it to a more ancient character, Paul. I remember endless debate about what Paul’s thorn in the side was referring to when I was a child, immersed in a Christian world, which can get fuzzy to me now after all these years. I remember speculation about his thorn being poor eye sight, a chronic disease, a sinful desire, mental anguish. How cool that he didn’t come right out and reveal his cause of suffering! By not doing so, he raised an awareness of a universal challenge of being a human in a body.
After having worked through the handful of accepted modern medical suggestions without results for one of my little body bugaboos, I moved on to the gazzilion of alternative and wacky suggestions found on the grab bag of the internet 🙂 ! I also have taken many days of separation and quiet to address the issue through mediation, spiritual causes, prayer, stopping short of dancing around a fire, naked, howling at the full moon…Okay, I admit it; I tried that too! 😉
In the midst of my working through, This article about Rinpoche’s gangrene and year of healing came to my attention. Some of the wisdom that I garnered from this article was not the actual end result of healing, but rather, the process and acceptance seen in the being of Rinpoche. Gangrene is a gladiator match compared to my playground argument as far as body challenges go, so through this article, I became immediately aware of SCALE. Gangrene, loss of limb, oozing discomfort, risk of infection throughout the body, sure quick death and decay knocking on your doorstep every morning upon waking, every night upon sleep, every opening from empty mind, a road of scary thoughts beckoning one down the path of fear. The big bad wolf is a smelly guest who may not ever leave.
And while there was mediation and spaciousness with Lama Rinpoche, the symptoms did not disappear over night from the sheer strength of his trust and fearlessness and detachment. It took a bloody year. Every day of that year were symptoms and sensations, changes that could be taken for doom. Putrid ooze, my gracious!
How does he approach this? First, he is accepting. He is not banking on anything. He is not proclaiming healing from day one. What is the worst that can happen, he asks? He looses this one life. Hmmm. That’s the worst? He is awareness observing what is unfolding.
Through Rinpoche’s example, I became aware of triggers that small symptoms of my discomfort could bring about – as quick as lightning, thought behind thoughts. A negative thought can be hidden behind a positive affirmation. This is hard to describe, but it can go something like this. When I might get a small symptom after thinking the problem was getting better, I realized that I had been attached to getting better, and any indication to the contrary, sent me into a remembrance of the thought everything I have tried has not helped which led to the thoughtthis will not get better which led to a self pity crescendo I will have to live with this until the end of my days… Oye, such a pity :)…but it is just a flash, just a flash of that negativity, covered up by another plan quickly, another solution, a mask of positivity instead of an examination of the powerful flash of negativity – still bouncing in the playing field of polarity of thinking.
I’m trying not to get bogged down here in my explanation, but it is hard to describe the momentary workings of the brain and thinking.
There is this truth: I already know what the healing is like. I am releasing outcome – and that is what healing is…not the physical manifestation. I can walk through the symptoms without attachment because I know that this is exactly what is right for right now; healing is the thoughts, not the body.
Rinpoche woke every morning for a year with symptoms and seemingly did nothing but observe and continue on his path. When the symptoms appear momentarily for me now, I am becoming aware of a shift within. I often catch myself before the spiral down, and I remember the way it feels to be well. I remember wellness in a bodily way without attachment.
I even question the thought that “it” should even go away – that is not really my concern, is it? I even have found the positives for if it continues for forever. Staying present in the discomfort and not following a negative path of thoughts wakes me up to blessing that are existing right in the moment. When I followed the negative thought trail, even for a moment, I was blinding me to the moment. I couldn’t feel the very air around me, the presence of others, the things that are going well, all the amazing things I am able to do, the blessings raining down! The symptoms could momentarily trigger in me a blindness. The contrast of my very endurable symptoms to Rinpoche’s diseased leg woke me up to some very subtle levels of thoughts.
I am observing, sharing, I have no beautiful summing up for what is unfolding currently in the now – and I think this is a valuable place to be, in the now, without words of wisdom but glimmers of Ahah! Ahah! Ahah! on a beautiful morning this new year. Love and blessings and remembrance sent to you, wherever you may be, experiencing the twinges and discomforts of living in a body, awakening to the blessings present in every moment!
Absolutely profound teaching here from Katie: Could we ever imagine a reason for the challenges? Do we want the blessings found even in perceived suffering to end? Never!
I once resided in a matrix built on the idea that a marriage had to survive no matter what. Who built this grid? I did. Granted, the master designs for this planned community were laid out long before I came along. I built onto a long tradition with my own dead ended ideas of right and wrong. With the strong pressure for staying married, for following the social conventions, I can totally understand why I held on to those ideas for so long, 20 years in earth time 🙂
I came to smell the foul breath of dying from within. From a deadend stop where I left myself no options, I wished that All would be over soon. There are lenses through which the cake has always been too sweet, the dance chaotic, the dress stained, the milk turned sour, and the flowers faded and browning. Oye. What a sketchy neighborhood this is!
In this box, the only legitimate reasons to leave a marriage were simple: physical abuse, infidelity or drug addiction. I was blind to any other options in my own reality even in the midst of a crumbling relationship and unreasonable conditions for long years of spiraling down. I kept a smile on my face through misery and worked my diligent magic trying to fix everything that was being broken on purpose one step ahead of me. The moment of realization was a toggle switch, I can’t fix this. My job was to walk away in love. Oh my, the light came on and my feet did walk in the direction that I needed to go. The matrix crumbled in an instant and all the previous madness disappeared like the illusion that it was. Gone. Pooof!
Welcome to a tiny borough that once existed in an overgrown and dying city within my little head.
Imagine the worlds we have all created, patterns of thoughts with neon signs and imagined progressions from one place to another, when all the while we are within a false grid with high walls at the edges. Add them all together and see them overlaid with the years of matrices before we got here, overlaid by some people who wish us no good, overlaid by the patterns of shadows made from some hidden darkness, overlaid by the game board we agreed upon before we came into our identities. This is one damned beautiful and complicated basement game of Dungeons and Dragons – this life! I made it all, or agreed to dwell within this mess, until I was miserable enough to say phew, this sucks; I am going to figure out what is wrong here.
The exit out does not have to be as uncomfortable as this birth scene, eh?
The game board was constructed before I even came here, yet it is added upon by me whenever I am unconsciously creating with my thoughts. I am one of the builders of the Matrix. I see myself spinning my little corner web, yet from my new angle, I also see the grand design of unfathomable size and elaboration. We are born into practices, constructions, conditioning, cultures, religions, mindsets that we absorb as naturally as we breath. I fell into living life in each and every constructed path set before me. I’m was a good girl, I was.
Grids exist through beliefs; there are brilliant systems created for limiting human potential. In these systems I have read about and sense oversight, myself, slight of hand, smoke and mirrors, distraction. Who laid the patterns? Who uses us to fill in the material with our divine spark, usurping our goodness wittingly.
This is the part I go full out woo. You may want to stop here 🙂
Could some of these matrices we live in come from something beyond that which we can comprehend, but we can sense? Yes, we know of greed, we know of control, power, selfishness, psychotics, narcissists. Humans do have the potential for wrong. But in a world of mostly good and kind people from my 47 years of walking around this world, how do we end up with a structured path set out that leads us through a world of disease? Could some of the matrices come from eons of time, creations set out for the specific purpose of trapping our creative powers? Who are the Archons, the Nagas, the Annunaki? Why are the beasts afraid to show themselves, only acting from behind a veil, puppeting such clownish villains down here?
More interesting to me, though, is the idea that all of these elaborate games are in agreement for our growth. The dark shadows we can explore collectively can overwhelm us into fear, paranoia, and powerless feelings, yet with just a little step back, we can come to the knowledge we are in a game, a game with high stakes. Perhaps we need it to feel real so real growth can be made.
The more ways in which we can know ourselves truly, ease the suffering of others, wake up, fear less, laugh often and realize all is under control, ultimately, the more we will be able to dissolve and recreate anew. We have chosen and designed our game.
There really isn’t a wall around me. There is no path except to reject the one worn by conformity, conditioning, repetition. There aren’t boundaries and acceptable routes. Everything is open to fresh new choices in every moment. How do we escape from the middle of the maze once we know this?
When I can catch myself headed down the deadend streets, I stop and just be. The present moment and dropped identity are the trumpets of truth to disintegrate my walls. I see my own personal version of the Walls of Jerico come tumbling down.
The little matrices I spin and add to the whole world of delusion are getting caught and stopped more and more before they begin. When I stop the incorrect thinking, all of the sudden color is brighter, smells are overwhelming, life is not an HD movie; my daughters are living breathing beings interacting with me here and now, what did she just say? oh my god, how delightful and i almost missed it weaving my world of thoughts over here.
Sometimes I even imagine I’ve just arrived, fresh from the other side, full of the truth of the game from the skybox. I am a quarterback dropped into a living body in the 4th quarter. Any move is possible without the weight of my story or imagined limitations. I am Bill Murray in Groundhog Day; I am new and without chains, here changing the game, dissolving the walls, spinning no webs.
Often, there is just a walking through, no thinking-flow going on in my moment to moment existence for which I am deeply grateful. Sailing through life from this place is a joy.
Sometimes, though, there is a heavy familiar sadness that wells up that is not tied to anything particularly but an overall way of being that shades my eyes. That familiar feeling is so out of place in my flow anymore. I see my own brand of sad, circling around, looking for a way in. When it comes over me, I have a hard time feeling any hope, or purpose for continuing to walk about in this world. It is heavy. So heavy, I am amazed how it ever can blow over and leave the sky clear for joy to flow again.
So I ask myself, what is this? What is there to uncover and learn? What silly stairs do i stumble down, sometimes? What song plays in the distance to help me remember to dance – dance back into the true lightness of being. Heavy is a smothering blanket best dealt a laughing blow.
Awake and knowing, asleep and seeking, asleep and suffering, remembering, awake and dancing: round-and-round: macabre and delight – all of it. I am doing this life. Watching this life. Lingering in bed on a Saturday morning.
While waiting for dance rehearsal to finish at 10:30 last night, watching the dashboard clock creep ever closer to 11, I was so tired, I could have entered deep sleep there under the streetlight blaze behind the steering wheel. As i sat in the car waiting, I realized once again that there were no pressing thoughts.
How I sink into this wonderful thoughtless space! There is the seeing that when I carry on with my life from this place, I carry on with ease.
The sadness seems to start when I find a snaggy string playing at the corners of the door to this space. Thoughts, like busy hands, seek out the messy strings distracting the entrance to bliss and they accidentally unravel a whole mess of thread which mounts up in piles. Buried down under the piles of thoughts, I look up but cannot see what once looked like endless blue sky; the blue is obscured by the opaque nature of the mess I’ve pulled down upon myself. Rising again seems impossible.
Where is that spacious place that felt like home now?
Why should I stay at the bottom of a well, when a strong rope is in my hand? — Rumi
Thoughts are string, but truth is a rope, a rope out.
Each time through the confusion, I see more clearly. Each time I remember more quickly of the opaque nature of unclear thinking. Each time I get still a bit sooner; I ride the storm out with a little more assuredness.
But dear, sweet, efforting girl, do not miss the large recycling bin at the entrance to spaceousness just waiting for those knotted mounds. Drop them off. Do not sort them or roll them up on spools to be brought out again another day. Leave them and move on.
From this spacious place, it is clear: home is inside and beyond the moving vessel of me – home enjoys the ride through storm and soft breeze, music and imagined loss, luxury and stark beauty. The true home is free of noise, confusion, dust, clutter.
Home is not the vessel; the vessel is a springy, high platform from which I can swan dive into the sea of everything. I don’t know even a tiny sliver of what is, but I am given just what I need to push those boundaries out and out and out as I can handle more without quaking in fear.
While I lived on a boat for several years (which actually didn’t move all that much as it was tied up to a dock), I resisted the idea of a moving home.
But now I can see that my real home is much more clearly all ways with me and always in motion, even in the bed on a saturday morning.
Home is where i want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb – burn with a weak heart
(so i) guess i must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok i know nothing’s wrong . . nothing
Hi yo i got plenty of time
Hi yoyou got light in your eyes
And you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up + say goodnight . . . say goodnight
Home – is where i want to be
But i guess i’m already there
I come home – -she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can’t tell one from another
Did i find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this where i’ll be . . . where i’ll be
Hi yo we drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all tose kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I’m just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till i’m dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head ah ooh
In november when I started this blog experiment, I was able to point through words to the pain that was playing out in my daughter’s heart. I didn’t have solutions; I didn’t know what was going to happen. While we were trying to find experts and work with their solutions to such things, I also leaned heavily on whomever and whatever I could find that could point me to the deeper thread of this difficulty.
A word like difficulty doesn’t match what I am trying to say. This raging time was messy, embarrassing, painful, relentless, hopeless in appearance. Scenes of terror and rage played out in cars, parking lots, closets, mirrors, public places: scenes of thrashing, smashing, ugly pain at top of the lung out of control hystaria.
My daughter had stepped beyond my reach. I had never been one for Freudian theories, but truly, as the miraculous visit to a sane Psychiatrist revealed, a classic case of Transference. Freud did know a few things. 🙂
Eden was unable to rage at her father because he could not listen nor understand her. He also was not a safe person with whom to work things out. He has a delusion of who he is, and in this insanity, he is unable to parent, especially in her crisis. So she took the full weight of her rage and placed it solely on herself and me – the two most critical people who could help save her. She took her rage to the brink of destruction over and over. It felt like standing on the edge of the grand canyon, while she tied a rope around my waist and proceeded to jump and take me with her into the abyss.
We would resolve and come together but the relief would be short-lived when a word, a look, a call from her father would set it off all over again.
I am putting words to this chapter, not to relive the past, but to recognize where we are today in contrast to the place we were in November. Now I can look it full in the face because we have moved into a new space. I also visit from my now place on the path with assurance to the frightened me and to any frightened souls of anywhere where the road gets tough.
Eden has rounded more corners than I can count without the aid of the pills they wanted to prescribe. She has beat the diagnosis they wanted to pin on her, marched into her rage and out again. She now relies on her own strength and the strength I am so willing to lend as needed. This was not the only path through – it is the one that Eden chose.
I am grateful that I walk this earth to be here to see that hope can blossom out of hopelessness in our little story.
On our walk yesterday, she stopped to watch a worm making its way across the cement sidewalk in the noonday sun. I asked if she was going to pick it up to help it not fry as so many worm corpses had done all around where we stooped.
She said no, i want to watch it, to see if it makes it.
And so we watched it make its way. I was doubtful it would survive. I was wondering if we were just going to watch it die. But wiggle it did and eventually it slithered into the clean line of grass on the other side, free from the relentless sun, free from the army of hungry ants, finally burrowing into the cool dirt.
I expressed dismay while she shared her knowing that it would make it all along.
Here now – I express my dismay and knowing that exist side by side in me. What we walk through! How we help each other!
thank you. thank you. thank you.
Frying on the sidewalk or sinking into the earth, wiggling our worm bodies in joy – we make our way.
Who would you be in people’s presence without, for example, the story that anyone should care about you, ever? You would be love itself. When you believe the myth that people should care, you’re too needy to care about people or about yourself. The experience of love can’t come from anyone else; it can come only from inside you.
I was once walking in the desert with a man who began to have a stroke. We sat down, and he said, “Oh my God, I’m dying. DO something!” He was talking through one side of his mouth because the other side had become paralyzed. What I did was just sit there beside him, loving him, looking into his eyes, knowing that we were miles from a phone or car. He said, “You don’t even care, do you?” I said, “No.” And through his tears, he started to laugh, and I did, too. And eventually his faculties returned; the stroke had come to pass, not to stay. This is the power of love. I wouldn’t leave him for a caring.[…]
If you move into situations of loss in a spirit of surrender to what is, all you experience is a profound sweetness and an excitement about what can come out of the apparent loss. And once you question the mind, once the stressful story is seen for what it is, there’s nothing you can do to make it hurt. You see the worst loss you’ve experienced is the greatest gift you can have. When the story arises again – “She shouldn’t have died” or “He shouldn’t have left” – it’s experienced with a little humor, a little joy. Life is joy, and if you understand the illusion arising, you understand that it’s you arising, as joy.
What does compassion look like? At a funeral, just eat the cake! You don’t have to know what to do. It’s revealed to you.
(the absurdity of the play of this life seems conveyed in this visual/time/music juxtaposition – expletive warning)
Life as Improv 