The Transformation of Consciousness

Dear friends
I’m just sending this out to those of you who might have known of the work and teachings of John Daido Loori, the Zen teacher, who passed away very recently.

It’s amazing to me how much we can receive from someone without ever having met them in person.

John Daido was a great lover of nature, and of creativity, and he taught me much, especially about listening to the invisible transmission of rivers and mountains. He asked us all to love the earth, to care for this beautiful earth, with a sense of indivisibility.

In Buddhist scriptures they speak of prajna paramita, the perfection of wisdom, as crossing the river: “Go, go, hurry, cross over to the other side.”

John Daido invited us to understand that crossing over in many ways: “We can understand the other shore as being none other than this shore. We can also understand that the other shore crosses over to us...”

In our work in Radiant Mind and The NDTT, it feels like the crossing over has happened, and that it continues to happen, and that the other shore crosses over to us in each moment....all of the above!

with love
Shayla

This is a favourite poem of mine...it demonstrates the innate capacity of our authentic being to completely open to a moment, or a few moments, and allow those moments to carry us into the mystery of life itself.

Arrivals

Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor
just before immigration at Washington Dulles
airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid
a sea of familiar international plastic blandness,
entering America for the first time. Think of
their undulating multi-colored turbans raised
atop graceful heads, transforming us,
a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers
and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed
and perplexed attendants to their bright,
excited, chattered arrival.
Imagine a sharp plexi-gass turn left and suddenly
before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical
red sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from
The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before the ladder,
a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,
a way to go up they’d never seen before, its steel grey
interlocking invitation on and up to who knows what,
bringing them and everyone behind them, to a bemused,
complete, and utter standstill.
So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it
and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,
and involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.
An incredible surprise. And you knew, even through
your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands
to their mouths, why it made them give low breathy
screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it
as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking
beckoning hands asking them to rise up
independent of their history, their legs or their wills.
And we stopped as we knew we had to now
and watched the first delighted be-turbaned
woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey
plain at the foot of the moving stair and sure
enough quickly withdraw it with a strangled scream,
leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her
into heaven, into America, into her new life.

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Dialogue with a coaching client Dear Janet, I am wanting to write something to you about this whole issue arising for you around friendship, and the big questions we all need to answer about What is love? What is friendship? and How do I really want to be in relationship?

Just like you, I find it so difficult when people I think of as good friends do not come through for me when I am sick..

This has probably been one of my biggest challenges, because it’s such a vulnerable, helpless place, where we actually do need love and support. So I’m not speaking to you as though I expect you to rise up one fine morning and not have these feelings anymore. Not at all.

I think, for me, what has happened with my daughter over the past year has shown me that we can actually transform our deepest patterns and conditions, but only when we really see that they are no longer sustainable, and when we take complete responsiblity for how we create our own suffering, moment to moment.

I see myself falling back into familiar places, again and again with my daughter, but I know now that I can’t stay there. I am committed to calling on awareness itself to allow me to see what is going on, and to let the suffering release, by itself.

I can’t control what arises inside me, and sometimes the feelings are very intense. I feel hurt, abandoned, misunderstood, separate, invisible...all the feelings I’ve been trying to avoid my whole life are right there in front of me in such moments.

I can’t control these feelings and I can’t control what the other person is doing or thinking or feeling. But I can choose what I will give my energy and attention to. I already know what my conditioned mind will try to do with these difficult feelings. It will try to avoid them, change them, or it will give them energy, indulge in them.

Those are really the only 3 options I have on the level of my human conditioning. But there is always another possibility, I can stand present as awareness, and ask for help, ask for wisdom, ask for guidance. I can open myself to being with this person in a way I have never been before, and I can honour and respect myself enough to realize that this is possible.

Not only possible, but that this is what is calling me forward, what I am longing for, what so many human beings right now are hearing: “The old ways of being with each other are unravelling at a tremendous speed. Something from a new dimension is required, another state of consciousness, something quite different from what my conditioned mind tells me is possible. I cannot possibly know what this new way is from where I am now. All I can do is be willing to stay open, stay present, and let go, again and again, of what is not working.”

Janet: “Why is it always me that has to take responsibility? Why is it always me who has to let go of the old and embrace the new? What about them? Why don’t they change? Why don’t they wake up and smell the coffee?”

Shayla: The answer is so obvious isn’t it?  I have no control over the other person and what they may or may not see, do or understand..

And please remember, that the new way may very well include taking responsiblity for the fact that you no longer want to be in this relationship. Taking responsibility for ourselves does not mean that we have to put up with someone else’s crap. It’s actually the reverse of that. We put up with ridiculous behaviour only because we are not strong and clear enough to stand by our own boundaries and limits. We hold on to relationships for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with deep love and wisdom.

You know all of this, and so do I, but putting it into practice is something else!

We are in the middle of a very powerful time this summer. I'm noticing that something potent and challenging is happening with a great many people right now. We are being pushed to our edge, right up against our deepest patterns and core conditioning. The abundance of light on an outer level corresponds to an abundance of awareness that is awakening on an inner level. So we have an opportunity to see many things about our patterns and the way we live, that we may never have seen before, or even wanted to! How to respond to such an opportunity? It's crucial that we align with a deep willingness to take full responsibility for our lives, our conditioning, and for the power of awareness to illuminate and dissolve what is obstructing and limiting us. There are 2 key questions that we can use for self-inquiry, very simple questions that we can take with us into our daily lives. 1)Am I willing to give up the right to be a victim to both outer and inner circumstances? Am I willing to give up the right to be a victim to the moods and thoughts that arise in the field of my awareness? 2)Am I willing to give up the right to not take care of myself? Or to put it another way: Am I willing to do what I need to do to create a good environment for myself, one that really nourishes and sustains me? If we are really willing to work with these questions, we can tap into the fluidity of this time, the power that all this heat and light has to liberate us from outmoded structures of thought, belief, and behaviour. May we all find ways to support ourselves and each other in healing, transforming and awakening. love Shayla

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

“ 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)

“Radiant mind is where love and wisdom intersect. When we connect with it, we open to an effortless radiance that ripples positively into all of life and supports the natural emergence of compassion and understanding for the human condition

On the level of our conditioned mind, we experience ourselves as separate and quite distinct from the world. In fact the boundary between ourselves and others, even those we are intimate and familiar with, may seem quite solid and indisputable.

If you examine this boundary a little more carefully, you’ll notice that it is quite hard to find. Of course there is a boundary between your body and your environment, which is defined by the surface of your skin. But what about you? Where do you actually stop? Where is the boundary between your self and the world? It can be startling to experience how ephemeral it actually is, when you begin to look at it directly. You move through your days, assuming the existence of this boundary between you and everything else. And yet when you try and find it, it’s not really there.”

(From “Radiant Mind, Awakening Unconditioned Awareness” by Peter Fenner, Phd)

This is an email I have written to a group of people I am working with around our fears of survival. These folks are leaning to take care of themselves, to move through obstacle and challenges, and to trust that they can do this in a good way, in spite of the major challenges we are all facing on that level right now.

There are so many people right now, feeling just the same kind of survival fear that is arising for you. I have this strong feeling that this is a big gateway for so many of of us right now, and that we can really learn to work with this fear, step by step, call ourselves back into the present moment, and start to see how many of our difficulties are based on inner blockages, not what is going on in the outside world. It’s extraordinarily empowering to realize this--in the face of our whole economy unravelling...that if we remain open, and clear, and focused on our goals in a sane and responsible way, we will actually be able to take care of ourselves. And that involves becoming more and more aware of how our thoughts and beliefs create our experience, over and over again.

I was speaking with someone last night about this kind of fear, and she said everytime she thinks about finding a good job, the thought arises, “It’s not going to happen.” I asked her to drop into her body and see if she could feel how that kind of thinking is related to our desire to be in control. She felt that instantly, and replied, “Oh, yeah, these kind of thoughts let me be the boss..because I know what’s going to happen.”

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