About how you’re not following your dharma, your dharma is following you.
( or why your damn dharma won’t leave you alone)

I’m looking back now at what’s happened in my life over the last six months.

On one level I feel like I went to sleep and then woke up in a new world. Things in this new world seem to be operating in miraculous ways, on a daily basis. It’s not that I didn’t know about all this before, but it felt like there was a glass wall, separating me from stepping into and embracing this other universe. Now I’ve stepped through, and I’m really not quite sure how it happened. I could shrug my shoulders and say it’s all part of the great mystery. But I don’t really want to do that. I’d like to understand a bit more of what happened as I worked with you, so that I can pass some of this on to my friends, students and clients. That’s one reason I’m writing all this down-I’m tracking back, following the thread that joins the moments that seemed to really make the difference.

The first moment I remember was quite early on in our coaching relationship. You asked me about writing a newsletter, and I told you I didn’t have time for that kind of regular, committed writing. You said, “There’s no such thing as not having time for something. We find the time for what we really want to do, every single day of our lives.”

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment. It’s not that what you said was new to me. I’ve said it many times to my students and clients. But in that moment, your statement was an arrow that hit its mark, dead center. I felt it going in, deeper and deeper. It was literally a physical feeling of being pierced by the truth of it. And I had no resistance. I felt the presence of all my habitual excuses and evasions about writing, and I saw what they had cost me. And I let them go. Something in me was ready. That’s a very interesting thing to me. It reminds me of Hamlet: “Ripeness is all.” In that moment, I was ripe. The apple was ready to fall, and it did.

When I look back now, I realize that all my life I have not only wanted to write, but I’ve known that it was my ‘dharma,’ something I should be doing. That’s how I understand dharma right now-it’s the union of passion and necessity. And there has never been a time in my life when some teacher, friend or colleague was not urging me to write. What held me back for so long? What holds us all back from doing the things we long to do, need to do, are born to do? I think it’s because we have not been able to clear the field of our intention. We are blocked, covered by our desires and aversions. The very thing we most want is the thing we are afraid of. So that attraction/aversion process you took me through at the beginning, which is so much a part of the Radiant Mind Course and my own work, cleared the field for me. That was the hardest part of our work together. I couldn’t believe how much resistance I had to really engaging in those exercises. It was like looking deep into my subconscious mind, shining the light of my awareness down into these subterranean regions of my own being.  As I was doing them, I didn’t realize how much was being clarified, freed up and released. That only revealed itself later on.

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The completeness
is here,
the fulfillment
is not something
I can get,
reach, earn,
grasp,
grab, package,
imagine.
It’s so soft,
so empty
and invisible.

My mother never told me
it would be
like this.
My father must have
suspected it-
that’s why he had to drink
and drink.

Because then,
lying on his back,
at night
in the snow
of our front yard,
out of his mind,
out of his body,

It was then
he could rest,
and get right off
the crazy
merry-go round
of desire
that was eating at him
from inside.

And not even
his own desires,
but my mother’s.
He inhaled them all-
her voracious consuming vision
of the good life.

Deep inside,
he knew better.
After the war,
after all the madness,
he knew

It’s just rest
that calls us,
the alive silence.

We all just
want to stop
right here.

Two kinds of Gratitude

It seems to me that gratitude, real gratitude, is something that springs directly from our true nature, our unconditioned being. It’s not something we can force, or produce, just because it seems like a good idea. But we can cultivate it, call it forth, invite it. And when we do this, gratitude has the power of a transforming force.

A few years ago I was exchanging gratitude emails with a friend. Every day we would send each other an email, expressing gratitude for something. It was fun. One day she told me how grateful she was for her clean sheets. Another day I told her how grateful I was for the chickadees on my bird feeder. I was feeling more and more open to the little things, the ‘ordinary magic’ of my life.

One evening I went out with some friends to a celebration. When I got home I realized I had taken a new purse with me, and that my house keys were in my backpack, inside the house. I was not happy to be locked out of my house. It was late and I was tired. I just wanted to go to bed. I realized I would have to drive 20 minutes out to my partner’s house, wake him up, and get the spare key from him, and then drive 20 minutes back. I went out to my car and just sat there, feeling more and more annoyed. Then a little, very quiet voice inside me asked this question: “Why can’t you be grateful for this?”

I was really surprised. It was clear to me, sitting in my car that night, that all of my gratitude was conditional, limited, based on my desires and preferences. I was only really grateful for what felt good to me, what I liked, what pleased me. All the rest were things I just put up with, barely tolerating them.

Since that evening I started following a new thread of inquiry. What is unconditional gratitude? What would life be like if I just welcomed everything, said yes to it all? What if life is really always bringing me everything I need?

Here’s what I notice. If I go through my day with a willingness to be open to this possibility, that life is bringing me what I need, I experience everything from a very different place. I don’t have to know this, I just have to be willing to entertain the possibility that Mick Jagger was right:

‘You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need.’

‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending the night with a mosquito.’

In the spiritual traditions, there has always been talk of transmission, the recognition that the freedom, love and wisdom of the teachings can be transmitted through a living human being. Most of the time this person is understood to be the teacher; but the truth is actually much bigger than that. We are all transmitters. Whatever our state of consciousness is, we are transmitting it all the time. And we are all receivers. In the indigenous traditions, they recognize nature as a great, unending transmitter. So there is wolf medicine, hummingbird medicine, the medicine of the elements and of the plants. Anyone who has ever heard the cry of an eagle, or seen one soaring through the sky, knows intuitively what this medicine is. You don’t have to be a shaman to receive this kind of transmission.

When my mother was dying, she would listen to a video of the great Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, over and over. He was talking about the enormous power we have to influence each other, in every minute of the day. ‘Please,’ he would say, ‘remember this-even ten minutes in a taxi can be a moment of transmission for that driver, if you are connected to your basic goodness and sanity.’

The reason I’ve been contemplating this lately is because of the immense helplessness and despair that so many people are feeling right now. I read an article recently about a top secret meeting that was held in the U.S. about a month ago. Scientists, engineers, environmentalists and political leaders all gathered together to discuss the fact that the polar ice caps are melting at a rate none of the scientists ever anticipated. Unless something changes, within the next decade many of our coastal cities will be under water. Somehow that shook me, even more than Al Gore’s movie about global warming, because the American policies in relation to our environment seem to be based on a profound level of denial. When I read that article I realized that they do know what is going on- we all know. As Joanna Macy says, “The body knows, because it is intimately connected with the larger body of the earth.”

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It’s no secret that the emotion of anger is one of the most challenging things we have to deal with as human beings. In the work I do with people on communication, I see a lot of deep confusion about anger. And it’s a very natural confusion. Most people, especially ones involved in any kind of work on themselves, or in a spiritual practice, want to be kind and loving human beings. As our awareness of our oneness grows, there’s an implicit understanding that arises in our heart: if I hurt you, I hurt me. We are not separate, on the level of our true nature.

The problem with all these wonderful intentions arises when something happens to trigger our anger. Anger seems wrong, bad, divisive and destructive. There has been a lot of research done in the last ten years about how emotions affect us. The Dalai Lama talks about it a lot, and people like Candace Pert, who writes about the way emotions affect every cell in our bodies. This research has shown conclusively that if we hold on to anger, it has a very destructive effect on our health.  It even changes the shape of our brains. Our brain turns out to be a very soft and pliable thing. (See the articles on ‘neuro-plasticity’ )

Here is the key. Anger that is held onto is what is destructive. It is anger suppressed and denied that creates all the violence we see in our world. I’ve noticed again and again that whenever they interview the neighbors or co-workers of serial killers or mass murderers, they usually all say the same thing: “He seemed like a nice enough man-very quiet, a little withdrawn. I could never have imagined him being this violent!”

What does this mean? That we should all go out and vent our anger and frustration on the first person we meet? Obviously not. It means that when anger arises in you, it never works to condemn it, judge it as bad or wrong. Anything that arises in us needs to be met and experienced directly, just as it is. If we blame someone else for our anger, or if we blame ourselves, we will not be able to meet our anger and open to the inner experience of it.
And that is the only way we can learn to deal with it.
(More in the next blog)

I spoke to my ‘Heart of Communication’ class last night about what an enormous thing it is to learn how to communicate authentically and skillfully. There is so much to learn, and so many different aspects and dimensions of our experience to be aware of, that it can be a truly daunting process. The only way to approach it is with immense compassion and patience. As human beings, we haven’t really learned to communicate very well.  Look at the news. Look at the divorce rate. Look at what happens at family gatherings, in the work place, on vacations. There is a Zen saying that has really helped me over the years. It describes this life on earth as ‘one continuous mistake.’

Maybe a lot of us don’t want to experience life that way. We’re hoping to get wiser as we go. If we’re open and flexible and truly willing to learn and let go, that will happen. But in the field of communication, the learning never stops, because the challenges are so great. So if I stop and remember ‘one continuous mistake,’ I can forgive myself right away for my lack of skill. I can fall down and get right back up, over and over again, with great respect and kindness for my own efforts and intentions. And for those of everyone around me!

One of the constant challenges, which we were discussing last night, is the union of truth and kindness. To communicate in a good way, I need to be honest, totally willing to remain loyal to the living truth of my own experience. If I am in a situation, and my body says, “No,” I hear and respect that No, even though my conditioning is telling me to say Yes.

And then I have to learn how to be kind, even though the truth is tough sometimes- tough to speak and tough to hear. One of the women in our session asked last night, “How can you be kind, when you need to speak the truth? Does that mean dressing it up a little, making it more palatable? I don’t want to do that.” What a great question.

I told her that kindness lives in the power of our intention. Even when I have to say a difficult thing, if I begin by acknowledging in my heart that you and I are the same being at the core, I will be speaking from a very different place than when I see you as totally separate. I can see you as completely worthy of my love and respect, even when I am angry with you. And if I feel that deep, unconditional respect for you, you will feel it, even if I don’t spell it out. Although sometimes it really helps to express our love and respect in words.

That happened to me a few years ago, with my daughter. We were in a café, having lunch, and she told me that she thought if would be fun to hitchhike through the Middle East. As a mother, I was pretty triggered by that idea! I got quite angry with her, and my voice rose several decibels. After I finished speaking, she said, “Hey Mum, I could feel your love, right at the same time as I felt your anger.”

That was a turning point for me. It helped me understand that there is nothing wrong with anger, just with the ways that we express it. A huge number of our human problems arise from the way we react to anger, both in ourselves and other people.

More about this in the next blog.

I’ve been teaching and practicing yoga for the past 30 years. I notice, with more compassion that I had when I was young, that it’s not always easy to be alive as this human body. There are constant challenges that arise. Even the most wonderful body has weak areas, places that remain tight, contracted or shut down after years of practice. Sometimes I look at my students and see them struggling so bravely with a hip, a knee or a shoulder that just doesn’t seem to respond to their efforts and intentions.

Because this happens more as we grow older, I’ve been carried into a much broader and more expansive view of what yoga is, and what it means to live in this body. Our post-modern technological world does not encourage us to live as embodied beings! Think of the way our grandparents might have lived. I know people from that generation who walked, or rode horses every day of their lives. They grew their own food, and paid attention to what their bodies were telling them about the weather.  When I was in New Zealand, we lived for a while among the aboriginal people there-the Maoris. We were a group of white hippies, trying to learn how to live on the land. Our experiment was actually a grand failure, rich with deep learning and transformation.

Every morning, our white boys and the Maoris would get into their boats and go out to fish.  Every day, the Maoris would paddle to one place in the water, put down their anchor and start pulling in the fish. In the beginning our boys would drop anchor somewhere else. But the fish were always where the Maoris were. It was incredible to us- they really knew where those fish were! We asked them many times to tell us how they knew this-was it the weather, the wind, the sky, the water? They couldn’t tell us-we were still trying to understand with our minds. They used to laugh and tease us about it, with great kindness. One day, one of the elders finally told us, “Listen to your bodies. The body holds the secrets you are looking for.”

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I was at a workshop last week with some people who were looking for their ‘vocation.’ One man spoke with a lot of energy about global warming, the environment, and teaching people about sustainable living. I kept encouraging him to look at this as something that was really calling him, since this topic was the only thing that made him light up and come alive. He had a lot of reasons for not getting engaged with it.  One of them was: “The majority of people in Canada are not ready to change the way they live, or even to consider how serious the situation is. We are losing vast tracks of forest now to the pine beetle and other beetles, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

I heard myself replying to him in this way:

“When was any great idea, project or initiative ever supported by the majority of people? If you wait for them, you’ll wait forever.”
I spoke to my partner about it that night, and he said, “The only thing that the majority of people have consistently agreed upon is going to war.”

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