Everyday Awakening

“If I can engage with people in this very naked and direct way, I can learn so much from anyone.” (Valerie Bouchet, Mass. US)

This is an invitation to the Free Intro Telecall on Jan. 4th at 5:30pm pacific, for ‘Mutual Evolution’ -Waking up Together-- The 8 week online intensive

When we join together, when we are really here for each other, everything is so much easier. We can stop postponing the authentic life that wants to be lived, now. This intensive is simply a place to open, with your whole being, to this precious opportunity. This is the time when you can awaken to a clear, loving, and natural way of being. At home with yourself, at home in the universe.

To register for this call:  Mutual Evolution-Free Intro Telecall

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Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.

Rumi

Last summer I was part of a group of people who engaged in a 6 day retreat, focused on healing and awakening. We were bringing together practices from the shamanic and the nondual traditions. A beautiful young woman named Heather was one of our facilitators. One of her most powerful offerings to all of us was something that she communicated with great energy and clarity: “When you need help, just call out to me, and I’ll be there.”

Because of her experience working in this field, she knew that it is not so easy to actually reach out in this way. To call out for what we need is not something that most human beings have learned to do. A good deal of our training, both explicit and implicit, has taught us just the opposite: to appear strong, independent, self-contained--and to carry on struggling by ourselves.

I felt this too, every time I heard Heather make this offer. I know the pressure of this conditioning from my own adult life, from my early life with my family, and from a lifetime of working with people. So I was wondering how we were actually going to do what Heather was inviting us to do. To actually embody this capacity to reach out and ask for help.

Then Heather came up with a brilliant idea, just before an evening in which we would be participating in some rigorous practices, all night long. “Just try it,” she said, “just call out and ask for help, even if you think you don’t need it. Practice doing this now, so that you’ll know how, when you really do need help.”

I remember something swinging open inside me, when I heard her say these words. She had somehow made it easy for me-I realized that I would be able to do it. I felt joy about this, and a deep sense of relief.

Later on that evening, I found myself in a difficult place. I noticed the tendency to withdraw into myself, to pull back, to isolate. To sit there and wait until I was desperate.  And so I just called out, across the room, “Heather, are you there? I need your help.”

What I noticed, in the moment of calling out, was something extraordinary. That I was totally empowered, even before Heather came. And I also noticed that I was blessing the whole field of our consciousness, by making that clear and lucid request. This was confirmed to me later on, when many people in the room spoke about what happened to them when they heard me call out to Heather.

Of course, once we call out for help, we have to know how to receive the help that comes. Because it’s usually not what we are expecting or hoping for. Real help does not collude with the helpless child within us. Real help does not feel sorry for us. Real help awakens our inner capacities- our clarity, our patience, our humility, our wisdom.

But we can only learn how to receive help after we have learned how to ask for it. The mind thinks that reaching out like this is a terrible risk. That it leaves us helpless, and vulnerable. Kind of like hanging off the edge of a cliff, blowing in the wind.

What I experienced that night was just the opposite. So much of life is like this. We are living our lives upside down. When I called out to Heather I felt supported, before the help even appeared.  How could this be?  How can we make sense of this?

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This year
I let Christmas in.

And it occurs to me that
every year
the spirit of Christmas goes wandering
looking for room at the inn
of my heart

turned aside
by the hurry of business
the demands of desires
the walls of grudge, bitterness

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Tonight, we pass through the Winter Solstice. What happens to us when this great shift takes place? When the movement into darkness turns around?

The return of the light sounds very dramatic,

and I am more and more interested in the how this light actually emerges in our everyday lives.

I see it these days as the possibility, in the field of relationship, for small, courageous acts of change.

Not just with our partners or our lovers, but in all of our relationships--with family, friends, and community.

With ourselves, and with the world. With life, and with death.

The mind wants to take these great leaps forward, to experience immense breakthroughs, with no turning back.

Look at the Solstice-how slowly the light comes back.

The basic sanity we are longing for in our relationships is like this: The moment when I refrain from giving advice, because I realized you never asked me, and I am not the expert on your life.

The moment when I let you know how vulnerable I am feeling, when I am used to being the competent one, the one who keeps it all together.

The moment when I take my attention away from you and how I want you to be, and turn back to my own immediate experience in the body.

The moment when the bitterness and regret in my heart for all the things that never happened opens up,

and allows a drop of deep grateful sweetness.

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I was speaking with someone this morning on a non-dual coaching call. My client, whom I’ll call Bob, said to me, “I still feel separate most of the time. So I have this idea that something should change, there’s another place where I could be that is better than this. I’m just never clear about whether I exist or not.

Sometimes I lose my sense of separation, but a lot of the time it’s still here. I’ve been wondering about this question for a long time.”

“Okay, “ I said to him. “Let’s stop right here for now. In non-dual practice, one of our main pointers is “What is natural?” Unconditioned awareness is the most natural state of all—totally uncontrived and unstructured. If I really appreciate this, then I can align my practice with something that is quite spontaneous and authentic, something arising from within me, rather than a set of instructions from outside.”

“If you, Bob, are experiencing this as a recurring question, then I hear that life is giving you this inquiry, offering this question to you as your natural koan: ‘Am I separate or not’?

What you can do is really make a lot of room in your being, and in your life, for this question. Welcome it, live with it, engage with it. Don’t try to find an answer with your mind. Take the question and drop it into your body.

Release the energy from the head and let it flow down into your heart and belly. Feel the question: Am I separate? Where do I feel the separation? Don‘t grasp for a thought—just listen with your whole body.”

Bob sat for a minute in silence. Then he said, “That’s interesting. Something just arose in my awareness—a sense that there is this sense of myself, here, and it is distinct, but not separate. Just like the chest of drawers in my room. I see it, and it is distinct, but that doesn’t make it separate.”

“If I just let myself experience the distinctness of things, there is no problem. It’s when I add on the thought, “Oh I’m feeling separate and I shouldn’t be separate, that there is immediately a problem.”

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In the last few years, I have been exploring the relationship between awakening to the nature of awareness, or presence, and the natural embodiment of this in my human life.

The more fully and clearly I realize that I am not a separate solid self, the more my whole life realigns itself with this clarity.

The ways in which this natural realignment happens can be quite surprising and sometimes disturbing. I notice that presence is fine with all of it, even the chaos and suffering that seem to result from this realignment.

I’ve been looking very deeply at the whole field of relationship, and how our relationships evolve when we are not holding ourselves as separate. It seems possible at this time to envision a radically different way of being with each other. Sometimes I call this ‘an evolutionary’ kind of community. In this community, our relationships do not rest on or function within the ancient and habitual agreements and conditions that have been with us for thousands of years.

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is this: How do we have fun together? How do we celebrate this incredible gift of life? How do we celebrate?

The other night a group of friends asked me to come and play a game with them which is a form of dominoes. I have never been interested in such pastimes, so I decided to approach the evening with an open mind, and see what emerged.

In this game, there are solitary players, each one trying to accumulate as few points as possible. As we began to play, I decided to throw myself into the spirit of the game, which was based, as many games are, on trying to win, or trying not to lose. As the game progressed, one of the players became more and more successful, while some of us began to lose quite spectacularly. I let myself lean right into the whole experience of wanting to be the winner, and trying to prevent the one who was winning from her continuing success.

I noticed that it was difficult to play such a role without feeling a contraction in my body. I also noticed that the woman who was winning was also playing her role all-out. I really didn’t know how real all of it was to her. I did notice that when she was celebrating her victories, she did not look as beautiful to me as when her face was at rest.

When she raised her fist in the gesture of victory, something lean and pinched looking came into her face. I could feel the same feeling run through my body as I got more and more into the spirit of trying to win. It was a kind of adrenaline rush, that I used to enjoy quite a lot.

The man beside me, who was involved in a big streak of losing until the very end of the game, became more and more appealing. His graciousness in the face of defeat was very attractive, even though it was only a game.

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