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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I remember when I first heard one of my teachers, Adya Shanti, speak about the relationship between teacher and student.  “It is the teacher’s job to listen to the student, just as much as the student listens to the teacher, “ he said, “and the teacher learns from his students, all the time.” That was something I had not understood until that moment-- that wisdom does not belong to anyone, it’s a living force, an openness of being, that can emerge in anyone at any moment.

At this stage in my life, I find I am learning more and more from the people I work with.  One of my clients, a beautiful woman whom I will call Leila, has been exploring very deeply the nature of her whole relationship to suffering.  When we first began coaching a few months ago, she was in a very difficult time in her life. Old patterns and ways of being were falling away, with nothing to replace them. They were falling away because they were clearly no longer sustainable in any way, but the loss of everything she had been counting on for comfort and security was frightening to her, and her experience was, in her own words, “excruciating.” On one of our calls I said to her. “Do you think that suffering is wrong? Do you think you can actually live here on earth without suffering? Does it mean something about you is lacking, or not good enough, because you are in so much pain right now?”

She took those questions deep into her being and worked with them. That in itself is always a miracle to me. What is it that allows us to begin to question our deepest beliefs and assumptions? Where does that willingness come from? There are no answers to these questions, but they live inside my heart, and I celebrate every single time this willingness emerges, out of nowhere.

On our next call, Leila told me that she had discovered a whole world of resistance inside her—a “militant refusal” to feel the pain of human life. She realized it came from her mother, who decided at one point, with a kind of ferocity, not to suffer like Jesus did on the cross. It was amazing to speak with Leila about this war she had been fighting for her whole life. We were able to explore this part of her conditioning together, without judgment or blame. All she really did was shine the light of her awareness on this way of relating to life itself; and it all began to change. I asked her to spend some time exploring ‘radical acceptance’, to see what would happen if she let go of demanding that the moment be any different than it is. “Just this moment, Leila,” I said to her, “See what it feels like when you do not need it to be different than it is right now.” She had a lot of ideas about how her life should be, how she should be, and heavy feelings of disappointment and loss about how her life had turned out, how she had turned out.  To let go of those ideas, cherished and upheld for so long, seemed at first to her like caving in to a terrible sense of failure.

But just because we think something is true, doesn’t make it true. What actually happened for Leila was nothing like what she was imagining. As she let go of her ideals, ambitions and ‘shoulds’ a whole new sense of herself began to emerge. On one level she was able to open to a sense of herself as nobody, just an open empty space of presence. She has been carrying this sense of herself for a long time, and experienced it as a lack, a void, where other people had a self. But as she allowed herself to be with each moment, no matter how painful, her whole sense of this void inside her began to change. She saw that she was nobody and somebody at the same time, and that the more she allowed the nobody to be there, the more freely and fully she could be herself. We talked about this a lot together, and felt, over and over, how clear the experience was, and how impossible it was for the mind to understand.

As she released her battle with suffering, more and more of her human conditioning—all the ways in which she had been creating her own pain, revealed themselves. It felt like she was truly growing up, taking responsibility for her own life.

It also became clear that she had connected with a totally organic force inside her, an evolutionary movement that was unfolding all by itself, just like a river moves to the sea. Sometimes she would express fear to me about spiralling back into old patterns of helplessness, isolation and defeat. “I wonder,” I asked her one night, “if you are really making all this happen, if you are the one in charge here, or if something else is going on.. Do you think this force, this energy, this awakening, is going to leave you alone, let you go back to your old life now?” “No way, “ she said, “It’s true, I don’t have to make it all happen through a force of will-- now I know there’s no turning back.”

The last time I spoke to her she told me how ‘the great unravelling’ was continuing, and how it was challenging and uprooting so many of her habitual patterns and ways of being. “It’s not easy, “ she said, “but I’m really willing now to open, to be with all of it. I’m moving into a new life, and whatever it takes, that’s what it takes. If there is more pain and suffering, that’s okay too. I say, “Bring it on, I’m ready.”

That moment, when Leila said, “Bring it on,” had the power of a blessing for me.It carried me back to another moment with Adya Shanti, when an older woman in our community asked him how he feels about dying. “I want my death to my long and slow, “ Adya said, “so I can experience every single moment of it.” The whole room got very quiet when he said that. We all sat there, taking in the fact that there is no way to avoid anything, that there is actually a part of our being that does not even want to avoid anything, that has no need for life to be any different than the way it is. Sometimes I call this our unconditioned presence, or nondual awareness, but it doesn’t really matter what we call it. As soon as we begin to recognize it, an opportunity to relate to life in a radically different way emerges. We are no longer hiding from life, hoping that somehow we will be let off easy. We can actually stand on our own two feet and participate fully in whatever life brings to us, without desparately hoping that all the discomfort and suffering will go away and leave us alone. In the words of my daughter, “You can avoid things for a while, but eventually, whatever you are running from, it comes back to bite you in the ass. There is no way out but through.”

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Often we feel frustrated, angry, and bewildered when the person we want to connect with does not respond. They seem to be hiding behind some kind of facade or mask, which can seem difficult to penetrate.  Or perhaps they seem to be avoiding our company. Our longing can propell us into a way of engaging with people that creates a kind of pressure on them—we want to break through their pretensions and get to something real and authentic. The challenge, whenever we find ourselves in this kind of situation, is to learn how to honour ourselves and the other person at exactly the same time.

I honour and respect myself by allowing myself to feel the frustration, and also the longing for connection. Feeling the longing lets my heart soften—it reminds me that there is love at the bottom of all this, a deep and simple caring for the other person and our relationship.

I can honour the other person by realizing that they have a perfect right to be exactly the way they are. If they are not being real with me, if I cannot find their authentic self, it is often because they themselves do not know where or what that is. Or because they feel threatened by me in some way.
If I have an agenda, any kind of agenda with this person, I am imposing something on the openness and freedom of their being, and they will feel it, even if I don’t speak it out loud. These are the silent conversations that go on all the time, especially in families and intimate relationships. I can be having a verbal exchange with someone, and on another level, there is a silent conversation going on that is very different than the verbal one.

So if I am thinking, “I want you to be more authentic, or more open with me, “ I am not accepting you the way you are, and you will feel this, in your body, or in your mind and heart.

There is this possibility of working with the longing for authenticity and deep connection, in such a way that we are not putting that kind of pressure or demand on the other person.

How do I create an environment that nourishes and supports a genuine connection with this person I care about? First of all, I have to be willing to listen to them without any judgment or defensiveness.  If this person says to me, “I feel small and clumsy around you, “ we can really receive that, instead of saying, “No, that’s not how I relate to you.”

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“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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