·Freedom and Truth-2 core aspects of love
The nature of love is that it gives total freedom to the other person. This does not mean that they can do whatever they want, when they want. This is a very immature understanding of freedom.
The kind of freedom we are speaking of respects their basic human rights:
Their right to keep private whatever they want to
Their right to speak or remain silent.
Their right to take their own space when they need to-ie leave the room , even when you are wanting to engage them in conversation
Their right to go out and spend time with friends, without having to report back to you.

· Building trust-another key aspect of love
Every time we promise something, or make an agreement with our partner, and do not come through, we erode the space of trust between us. Healing broken trust can sometimes take a long time, but the process is very simple:
Do not make a single promise that you do not intend to keep.
And be sure that both you and your partner are clear about the specific nature of the promise or agreement.
For example, don’t just say you will call. Specify the day and time.

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It was a lovely afternoon, so invigorating, so celebratory, so nourishing.
Naida Hyde-Nov. 06

It was wonderful to spend the day with you.  It was my and Amy’s Christmas gift to one another - time together- and was well worth it.
Kiersten Packham-Dec. 06

The spiritual training and teaching I have been engaged in for most of my life comes from the ‘non-dual’ teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. I notice that most people’s eyes go a bit glassy when I mention the word ‘non-dual.’ It’s a difficult concept to grasp with the mind, because the mind functions in the field of polarity, of opposites.  I’ve found the simplest way to approach the non-dual understanding is to invite people to let go of their ‘either/or’ thinking.  Non-dual is more like both/and.  Either/or thinking is black and white thinking. AA calls it ‘stinkin’ thinkin’, because it leads to pain, suffering and confusion. Why? Because it divides our world and our experience up into opposites that oppose one another. And this opposition exists only in our conditioned mind. When we confine ourselves to a world that exists only in our minds, we run into trouble.

I began to contemplate this many years ago in India, after having a conversation with my teacher one day. We were standing on a mountain road, looking down at the great river Vyas, roaring through our valley. I was asking him to help me deal with a situation in my life. “I can’t help you in that way,” he told me, “that’s not the way human beings are. What you are now calling your greatest strength, will one day be your greatest weakness. And what you call your greatest weakness, you will recognize as your greatest strength.” I was stunned by that, and spent many years exploring the depth of it. But it wasn’t until I left India that it really came home to me. Then I started to hear it everywhere: “ Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.”
- Moshe Feldenkrais

It was like waking up from a dream, realizing that I had been living in a black and white world. At first it was confusing and frightening to leave that world behind. Then I began to appreciate the depth, complexity and richness of life when I was not putting everything into those boxes of human/divine, good/bad, strong/weak, matter/spirit. In the non-dual understanding, your true nature is something that embraces everything as it is. As long as we live in a world of polarities, we cling to one side and try and push the other side away. Life becomes an endless struggle.

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Tell me, does the night fall because it wants to,

Or because it has to?

It’s the same thing.

It may be risky for the bud to blossom, but what

the heck else is a bud going to do?

You may think you’re able to hold yourself back

from blossoming,

hold yourself in the bud.

But your blossoming is as inevitable as the night falling

And as wanted.

Jillian Harvey, Dec. 2. 06

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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