An Excerpt from Lifeletter #7

One of my teachers had a wonderful way of contemplating the preciousness of time: imagine for a moment how much time you spend just taking care of this body: working, driving, cleaning, cooking, eating and sleeping. If you take two minutes to brush your teeth, and you live until you are 75, by the end of your life you will have spent 76 days just brushing your teeth! How much time does that leave you to celebrate life, the mystery of being human, of being alive as this body? And what about your unconditioned being, your awake, alive core--that which is much more than a body, a fleeting form? How much time do you spend celebrating that? How would it be if we could celebrate it all? Both the temporal and the timeless nature of this moment?

Let’s take a moment now, to lie down in the grass with Walt Whitman, one of the great masters of celebration, and listen to him sing a few words from his ‘Song of Myself’:

‘I celebrate myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

…And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait.

I believe in you, my Soul..
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.’

with love
Shayla

Photo by Jannaca Chick

Email to a nondual coaching client:

I want to begin by focusing on and acknowledging the power and force with which you are willing to inquire into your own true nature, into awareness itself.  As you told me on the phone, you thought, in the beginning that this practice was all about losing weight, and now that does not appear to be true at all!

So the nature of inquiry is very very simple, because it is not happening in the mind. And it is not based on anything you think you know, because whatever you think you know is a concept, a mental formulation, and not awareness, which is unknowable by the mind, because it is not an object.

I suggest you begin your inquiry, every time, with this: Do I really understand that awareness is not an object? What kind of assumptions am I making about the nature of awareness?

And then, when a thought feeling of emotion arises, just ask, “What is feeling this?” or “What is perceiving this?”

And if you want to approach it from a slightly different angle, just ask, “What is this awareness? This awareness that is right here, now, that I cannot taste or touch or grasp with my mind? What is it?”

And notice that any ideas you have about where it might or might not be located are simply ideas..and come back to resting in not-knowing..Just resting in the simple feeling of not-knowing.

“ The complete faith of the Pygmies in the goodness of their forest world is perhaps best of all expressed in one of their great Molimo songs, one of the songs that is sung fully only when someone has died.
At no time do their songs ask for this or that to be done, for the hunt to be made better or for someone’s illness to be cured; it is not necessary. All that is needed is to awaken the forest and everything will come right.

But suppose it does not, suppose that someone dies, then what? Then the men sit around their evening fire...and they sing songs of devotion, songs of praise, to wake up the forest and rejoice it, to make it happy again. Of the disaster that has befallen them they sing, in this one great song, “There is darkness all around us; but if the darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.”
(Colin Turnbull, in his study of the Pygmies of the Congo)

Raising Windhorse
The abrupt and spontaneous process that brings authentic presence (Chogyam Trungpa)

Raising windhorse is a practice that comes from the Shambhala lineage of Chogyam Trungpa, a radical Tibetan spiritual teacher. In the Shambhala teaching, he began to open a view of our human nature and our spiritual nature as completely non-separate. We are no longer aspiring to attain some rare state of awakened magnificence. We just want to discover what it is to be fully human. And fully awakened. Because they are not two things.

Windhorse is an expression of our authentic being—the dynamic aspect of who we are, the energy that sails through obstacles. Connecting with windhorse is something we can all learn how to do. We can do this because windhorse is our birthright, this dynamic and powerful capacity to work with every situation life brings us, just as it is. Windhorse is who we are when we have not contracted into a limited and confined identity. Windhorse emerges when we are fully and freely being ourselves, without trying to please anyone, or get away from anything, or prove anything to anyone. In Shambhala, they describe windhorse as arising from an ‘abrupt and sponteous process that brings authentic presence.’

Why would this process be abrupt and spontaneous? Because windhorse is already who we are. Windhorse is our primordial energy—it is not an effect that is produced by a cause. Our authentic presence never abandons us-- we have just forgotten, we have abandoned our true nature, and picked up a whole lot of ideas about who we are. So this presence, this liberating energy, gets covered, hidden, locked away, and we want to do something to bring it back. But the place we left it is right here. And the minute we turn towards it, the moment we acknowledge it, this living energy begins to emerge, as bright and fresh and pure and open as ever. As if nothing ever happened to it.

This is very good news. And it flies in the face of many of our belief structures, those systems of thought that tell us, again and again, that we have to work hard, struggle, push, understand, attain, get somewhere, become someone else.

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