Despite the Voices

As I lay awake this morning the message came from within me. Despite the voices in my head (Mara), despite the messages I thought I was getting from the outside world (Jesus), I always listened to the voice within (buddhanature, Christ within). If the moral of Judas' story is that he had a choice, it wasn't the choice of betraying Jesus for the money, it was that he had a choice to listen to that space of love within himself. That instead of running away from the pain and uneasiness we can choose to stay with it. To turn and face it, offer ourselves to it, to climb down the monsters throat and watch it dissolve.

We can let circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

~ Pema Chödrön

Judas and the Butterfly

The story of Judas as the betrayer had me riled up this last week. As Pema would say I was completely hooked. In the story of Jesus, from the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, I was pretty much enjoying the correlations I was finding between my learnings and understandings found in Buddhism and this Christian story. But as I read further, I became irritated and angry with Jesus. His insistence on faith, his abandonment of John the Harbinger and finally he actually told Judas to go kill himself. I know it is just a story, but too many people on this earth believe in this story. We have wars, discrimination and fear over this story; it is taken as absolute truth. I don't get it. How can people not question this story? Even I believe that God loves us all as his children and would not tell any of us that we are so wrong that we should go kill ourselves.

I too am feeling anger over my unanswered prayers as a child. A child's unanswered prayers, are an atrocity in my book. My prayers never made it past the ceiling. Reading this story made me remember my anger with God, with my parents, my teachers and doctors. No one was willing to step up to the plate and address the abuse. All turned a blind eye. This created a deep penetrating sense of abandonment and isolation...a sense that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. This despair turned inward for me. I was not an exploder, I was an imploder. At the age of 12 I held a gun to my head but it was my brothers voice that brought me back. At the age of 20, razor blades but I was too drunk and passed out. And at 45 pills but collapsed in a heap and was checked into a hospital. To me Judas was the brave one. He did it. I was the coward. I never had the nerve to make the final cut (Pink Floyd song).

So this silly story really got to me. It brought up a bunch of stuff. Yesterday, I met with Bill and we talked a little bit about the cognitive side but we didn't really get the the emotion. Before I left he gave me the story of the young girl who finds a cocoon and sees inside a butterfly struggling to get out. She wants to help and tears open the cocoon to let the butterfly out. But it keels over and dies. He said you see the butterfly survives because of its struggle to get out. The fight to get out strengthens its wings so it can fly. This is the only way it can live. A very good story don't you think. But I left his office raw. Which brings me back to why Buddhism has become my source of inner strength. It has given me something I have never had or perhaps I should say I could not find. It is pushing me to reclaim my innate buddhanature within. I am seeing the habitual thinking patterns and I am gently practicing renunciation. And I am touching that love for the first time. I really really down to my toes am touching this love that is who I am. And I cry and let go and at the same moment I want to share that love but wonder why it is so damn hard to find and feel hopeless and angry. Why does it have to be so hard.

But I digress. What I wanted to say is that after leaving Bill's office I felt raw. I was still wondering why Jesus and God guilted Judas into killing himself. And then it came to me ever so gently. Not like a smack upside the head but this gentle settling in of a smile. Judas did kill himself. I didn't. I was saved by my own love for myself. What I have always felt was cowardice for not going through with my plan was really my buddhanature coming forth. I had chosen love each time. Living with suicidal thoughts is perhaps the most harrowing thing I have ever done and it came to me that this is the bravery that Pema and Trungpa talk about. That each time Mara presented me with doubt, fear and anxiety, I have been able to say "Mara I see you." And when Mara says, "Who do you think you are to deserve this love?" I have reached to the earth as my witness. The earth is my witness that I am worthy, I am brave, I am on the path.

From Audacity of Hope

If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

Barack Obama

Serendipity

So being still somewhat reflective yesterday but not nearly as emotional as I was on Tuesday, I tapped into the Shambhala SunSpace Blog. I scrolled down and saw an article about Sharon Salzberg - To Love Abundantly by Trish Deitch Rohrer. I relate so much with Sharon. Trish does an excellent job of capturing Salzberg and incorporates her observations as well as commentary from folks like Joseph Goldstein, Ram Dass and another of my favorites Amita Schmidt. Sharon's book, Faith, is one of my all time favorites. This article was published just after Faith came out in 2003.  Anyway, it was perfect to hear her talk of her mindset, struggles and desires. But the quote that hit home for me and summed up my feelings these last few days was this:

"That in order to be free from suffering - and therefore to be able to give abundantly to others - one must endeavor to love oneself abundantly."

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Touching Love of Self

Soon after my last post and just before going to bed, I had the realization that my guardedness was a habit. A habit of thought, reaction, posturing. What was different with this realization was that I didn't beat myself up for this inbred habit, but down to my toes believed that through my practice I could change this habit. The positive spin Carolyn had put on my understanding of fear-that my sense of fear was really awareness with a guarded quality- again set in motion my yearning to want to learn to change. I went to bed wondering how I could relax this guardedness.

I awoke a bit before 3 am. Awoke myself with a start, I was in the midst of a lesson. This will be my third such lesson I have received from the dream state. I was being taken back, remembering when my mother had died and the guilty feelings I had realizing that in fact mom had died miserable and lonely and this sense of rage I had with God for letting this happen. I had known all my life that if my mom didn't get what she needed she would die before her time. I knew it. I had tried everything in my power to take care of her, but short of moving in to be her care taker and provider, this would not happen. So what I had feared probably from infancy had indeed happened.

And then I was pushed to a remembering of when Crystal died. From the moment we had learned of her terminal prognosis, I knew she would be afraid of death. Every week I would ask her if she was afraid and for almost nine months she would adamantly reiterate that she was not afraid. This insistence on her part had me fully coming to believe and admire her heroic journey through the death process. But a week before she died she lay in bed and I beside her. She turned to me and said "Patty I don't feel a thing, I don't feel God" My heart broke. I tried to console her but I had no words for I myself had lost that connection with God. I put my arm around her and we quietly cried. From that point on she suffered from what Hospice called "Terminal Agitation". It had gotten to the point where she asked me to kill her with an overdose of morphine. I was so empathetic with her suffering that I told her I would help. Hospice figured this out and was swift with intervention. They drugged her up, brought the chaplain in, and took me to the side to say that this was not the way. Crystal died but the thought of the fear she felt remained burning with me.

In the span of about five minutes, these rememberings put me smack dab in the middle of my most intense fears which in turn made me realize the guarded nature I had felt for most of my life. The sense of suffering we go through when we contemplate our mortality. I had even realized how this knowledge or groundlessness of not really knowing what happens after we die and the fear of losing our (ego) self was the basis of drive in my life. I had written a small poem about it.

Heaven may close my eyes

So I need to build my bridges

I got out of bed and had to go cry hard. I cried deeply at the arising of this old pain but as I cried and stayed with the pain I became gradually aware of my own beautifully deep sensitivity for others pain. And for a moment I felt my buddhanature, my bodhisattva and that indeed fear and love where two sides of the same coin. I experienced for the first time ever in my life a profound sense of love for who I was as a person.

For the next hour I sat, in and out of meditation riding the realizations I was having. I felt an acceptance of my intuitive self. I no longer saw myself as an emotional basket case. I began to get a sense of purpose and understanding about the happenings of my life and the dots began to connect and take shape as my path within the dharma of this my life time.

I became acutely aware I needed to share with my father the love I felt from him as a young infant when he would come home from work and hold me over his heart and rock me in the rocking chair for an hour each night. How he had saved me from my postpartum alcoholic mother who refused to hold me and give me love the first months of my life. I knew that my father felt really really bad for abandoning my brother and me. I needed to let him know that that love was his redemption. That he no longer needed to feel the guilt. That love he shared with me then was in fact who he is now. I could forgive him for leaving us with her, my mother, the raging, abusive, alcoholic, nightmare. As I sat I felt his suffering and knew it to be real and now. I needed to break through my fear and uncomfortableness and share this with him now. On February 1, he turned 72. I need to spend time with my daddy.

Finally, I felt the suffering and fear my partner feels about being alone. And I knew the burn of anxiety that races through her body when she senses her aloneness. I did not know what to do but to continue to meet her, to be with her in the moment and make her feel that I am her with her now.

I crawled back to bed about 4:30 and half dozed until the alarm went off at 5. I arose exhausted but relaxed. For the rest of the day I was teary eyed at this acceptance of self and love I had found beneath the waves of fear. That even though I have been ice, my nature is water. That even though I have been frozen with fear and guardedness my nature is of the Buddha... buddhanature. I am beginning to melt.

Carolyn Rose Gimian

Yesterday I posted a question to her via the Shambhala SunSpace Blog. I asked her to talk more on groundlessness and how it relates to fear. Today she posted a response that I felt was very perceptive. She noted that my state of mind had a guarded quality and suggested I relax that "slightly".  Her response can be read in its entirety. I found it amazing that based on my question she picked up on my urgency and anxiety regarding the terror I often feel. It came to me that being raised by an alcoholic could have a little to do with that mind set. The way she said guarded is something I can work with in my daily awarenesses. In fact perhaps we can talk about it tomorrow in therapy.

Cool Weirdness

I'm going to go to the internet and read about this Maitreya now.  This life is so interesting. I love it!

John

"For lo unto ye a man has come"... 

These are the words I heard after my meditation tonight. I was pulled to write them here. I have the ... to indicate there is more to follow. 

So last week I spun myself out of control, used meditation to find my center again, called and visited my therapist to hash it over and look at the good of the experience and within a few days felt right back to normal. Good work for me. Strengthening my confidence. The romance associated with psychic phenomenon is and has been another core issue for me throughout my life. But I have also had a strong fear of it too. Nothing really in this life has happened which would raise such a guard for me so I have always felt perhaps in a past life some how the psychic path ended not so well for me. In the last two years I have had amazing things happen which have been a test to my sanity. Literally. So the "over reaction" to last weeks anticipation at being given a message from my dead Grandmother brought up a whirlpool of emotions. Finding buddhism has been a godsend. (Is that an irony or what?) Here in much of the literature and talks I've been to are sane, rational, spiritual people talking about the reality of "unseen forces" about images and voices but the emphases is on de-emphasizing these phenomenon. Treat them like the wondering mind, with kindness, gentleness and bring yourself back to the breath. Even when you are completely lost gently come back to the breath. This is sage advice for this ego clinging, want-to-be psychic, householder.  

Okay, so the books John had given me last Wednesday, didn't resonate at all with me. I mean if the books had been about Edgar Cayce talking about his experiences of tapping into his psychic abilities, what he did to connect to ground etc I would have been all over it. But instead these were accounts of his readings and their content. I did however hear the possibility that if this was a message from my grandmother that perhaps my dad or brother would be interested in the books so when I met with them over the weekend for my dad's 72nd birthday lunch, I handed them off. I was surprised they both took the books but I think they just wanted to make me feel good. We'll see. 

Okay so I'm going along meditating doing everything fine when Wednesday (one week later) John is there in the parking lot in his red and white truck. My heart sank. I did not want to talk to him. But I took a breath and composed myself and was able to go up and talk to him. He asked what I felt of the books and I was honest and told him they didn't resonate with me but that I had given them to my father and brother just in case we were only messengers. He agreed with that. Then he reached over in the cab of his truck and grabbed another book and handed to me. I saw words Jesus Christ on the cover and could feel myself shut down again. God definitely is out of the picture for me these days and never have I even had an urge to study the bible or any of that stuff. My spiritual connection with God earlier in my life came from AA. It was clean and pure and most of all it worked. I was able to believe that a power greater than myself would restore me to sanity. But 20 years later, staying sober really not an issue anymore, there were just too many holes in the God thing. This is how I found Buddhism in the spring of 2007 (which is another kind of "unseen forces" story), took a formal meditation class in the fall and now here I am sitting at least 10 minutes every day, reading everything I can get my hands on and finally feeling peace. I have come home. 

So John hands me this book called "The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ" by Levi Dowling. He told me to have an open mind. I reluctantly took the book. That night I started to read thinking I would skim a few pages here and there and then just give it back in a week or so but what instead I found was an interesting story that actually I understood and enjoyed. I kind of somehow forgot about the Bible thing and was able to get in to the story. I read far enough to realize that the book was going to tell the story of Jesus and of a man called John the Harbinger. I had to look up harbinger. I went to bed smiling at myself. The following morning I was in and out of the realization that a man named John had given me this book. I also remembered that in the Summer of 2007 a concerned friend gave me The Living Water Edition of the Holy Bible and had requested that I read the book of John, he had thoughtfully placed the cloth tassel bookmark at it's place in the New Testament. So easy for my brain to go flying off the handle with thoughts of grandeur of being a chosen one. To receive a message. But I breathed in and calmed down and instead picked up the book and began to read some more. Well, it is amazing at the similarities between what I have learned in Buddhism and this Gospel. Now I am not going to go off and go to church but it really is fun for me to read to have it resonate. What is really weird is that I went on to the internet to read about this Levi Dowling and found this site where it talks that....are you ready for this.... Jesus during his travels had a guide, a spirit guide, guess who? Maitreya.  Is this just to weird? But I like it. 

Okay so what do you think? What do you think the words at the top of this post (that I heard after my meditation) mean?  

Historical Day

Today I got an email from President Obama. I got an email from him. When was the last time some one got an email from the President? What was inspiring is that he called us to action and gave us a means of carrying out the mission. 

Check it out: What Recovery Means To You