Letting Go, Truth & the Eternal Presence

I will tell a story about awakening in myself and, I think, others who experienced this with me. It is a teaching for me to learn from and ponder over. This experience is not something I did but which came through me–through the openess and willingness I had to let go of all expectation and planning. It’s perhaps one example in just pure being–without contrivance or agenda–and in trust, personal honesty or nakedness. The context is a training of 25 people who came to the Dumas Bay Retreat Center for a weekend training to become facilitators and change agents for the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium developed by the Pachamama Alliance.  I will relate this in the first person to remove, as best I can, any distance between myself and what went on, so that those who read this can “feel” into the actual narrative more clearly.

The Story

I arrive at Dumas Bay Friday evening glad I have only a few pieces to present this weekend with three other facilitators taking more of the role in the training. This gives me an opportunity to observe, take in the collective energy and deepen my own experience of this work with Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium to which I have dedicated much of my time in the last two years. As is my practice I spend a lo of time in self contemplation….not thinking but more focusing on the spirit energy and the chi sensations in my body, especially around my solar plexus and abdomen.

Through Friday evening I maintain this focus on body sensations and my deeper heart, and by Saturday I am noticing that I feel like I am dropping further, deeper into myself. My voice is beginning to sound deeper to me, coming more from my belly and not just my head or throat. The group is having a good time and I love the singing, movement work and appreciate what the other presenter/leaders are doing and saying.I notice I feel good about them and trust their intention and wisdom. It feels safe and heartful.

Sunday comes around, and I realize I will need to speak to the group about relational presence along the lines explained by Lee Glickstein. Lee’s work certainly has a kernel of truth in it, but there is much more wanting to be experienced.  I had been musing during parts of the night on what more wanted to be said and experienced.

Before I am about to speak, I’m hearing the group talk–people are sharing. My consciousness is now deep inside me–perhaps around my heart/belly mind, so their words seem far away, something swimming on the surface of consciousness and not partaking of the deep feeding of soul possible when one gets to greater depths. So I sense a call to take us deeper into the ocean of being by sharing what is going on with me in this present moment. I’ll offer this paraphrase.

” I wonder what we are really doing with the symposium–what the root message and experience is that wants to come through. World healing comes through inner  healing–the better world we wall want comes from inside and then flows outward as a coming together of all the disconnections our modern life has created. Like you and me, the people who come to the symposium are drawn at the deepest part of their being because there is a driving thirst for truth, reality, connection, love. They, like us, may not know this conciously, because we go about with this veneer of OK-ness. After all, we’re priveleged, and have so much compared to others who have little. You see, it is a perception of our essential brokeness and suffering that we are awakening to which has brought us to this place, and we can’t really give ourselves, the people who come to symposiums or Pachamama herself what is due unless we are radically honest and surrendered to all  the truth regarding ourselves, our times and our deep sense of loss.

I was very, very moved by John Robbins when he says “…there’s a great loneliness of spirit today,” or when Paul Hawken says in that same clip “…people will admit in their most poignant moments that it’s really hard right now.” What we and the people who come to symposiums are wanting, what life itself is wanting is for us to show up in our deep and honest presence to ourselves and our own truth. What is going on with you in this very moment–inside of you? What’s happening in me?  Well, you can see I’m in tears right now, and I see many of you holding deep emotion as well. Our sadness, liberated from the constraints of social agreement, looking good, self-protection, just like our spacious joy wants to be free, felt and moved through–so that life, like the Spring, can arise again in our dead souls.

Letting go and giving ourselves over to the truth inside us in the moment–giving of ourselves this way to the participants who come–I think this is the core of our lives right now, and the place from which the better world arises. This is where we start to be real, make deeper connections and from which the grace to realize the things we need to do emanates from.

So when we move through our daily lives, are with our kids, friends, co-workers and also when we get up in front of others doing a symposium, we bring bring this deep transparency, this child-like openness with us always. This is an undefended, undefined, unrehearsed space of possibility, where what want wants to happen is not under your control and does not belong to you or me. If you look at your arm, leg, torso, face and say to yourself “This arm, this leg, this body does not belong to me, but to life itself.” Or you might substitute for “life” words like Christ, Buddha, the universe, the great Spirit–then you are moving closer to the realization that your life, our lives are not our own, but belong to, are part of and serve the whole. And being free of “me”, “Mine,” “I,” in this way is such a liberating and new feeling, like shucking off a pair of ill-fitting shoes or pants, and then afterwards wondering why it took so long to let go of what never really did fit in the first place. Only that we were too ignorant to know that until we were free, looked back and laughed at our prior folly.

Presence in Conversation

I had a wonderful experience last night attending a Conversation Cafe which was originated by my good friend Vicki Robin and facilitated by her with a small group of five altogether. What I will write about in this post has everything to do with Awakening and showing up in our authentic, being, as opposed to where most people are most of the time–caught in some roles that create distance, alienation and suffering–even if the suffering is not recognized as such.

I won’t go into all the mechanics of CC, as you can get that from the web address I gave, other than to say that the first few rounds of sharing one person at a time (others are listening without comment) really opens a space for the heart to be present. Vicki did a wonderful thing when she talked about what a hard time she had been having getting connected to people, especially since there are so many great people in South Whidbey Island where we live. I think so many of us today have had that same experience of feeling isolated, not in community with others in a deep way. I and lots of folks I know are tired of the same old way of relating which stays on the surface and doesn’t really brings us into communal, deep being together.

We did the first few structured rounds of sharing and I felt myself relaxing into my body and heart. I would often close my eyes and really listen to others, which helped me to take in the essence under the words coming from them. We got on a theme of how this disconnection from others comes–for many of us–from having been in disconnected families where there is still a lot of distance and pain. I then had a chance to share my own version of that.

I love my older brother and sister, but we’re on different coasts and are not really all that compatible in terms of lifestyles, philosophies to where we spend much time together. I shared about just having got a reading from a psychic in which I got a message about the need to mend some family of origin relationships. I couldn’t really imagine what that meant, since I felt my relationship with brother and sister were OK, even if not very close.

I talked about just having called each of them last week and having a wonderful insight and new feeling of closeness. I have just left a marriage of 16 years, and so they were concerned about how I was doing. I found myself sharing with them in an open way which completely changed the nature and drift of our conversation. Usually when we talk on the phone, the content and direction of the conversation is completely predictable and boring. But this time when I opened up, it was so much more satisfying and alive. My sister even sent me an email afterward saying how much she enjoyed our talk. With my brother, it was similar. He spoke about buying a wooden kayak kit and building his kayak, and I mentioned how I love kayaking and wouldn’t it be great if I came a visited and we did some kayaking together.

So for the first time in years, allowing myself to be emotionally present with them totally changed the relationship at a feeling level.

I realized too how I have been holding a hurt at them rarely ever visiting me here in Washington State where I moved from New England 30 years ago.I have never shared with them my hurt, and am not sure how to do that. But if there is an opportunity to do so without making them out to be bad, I will. 

So, thank you Vicki for the Conversation Cafe last night and for the opportunity it gave me to be present once again with my being and connect with some others where I live in this precious way.

I’m wondering how absolutely healing and liberated the world would be if all our conversations were as translucent and heartful as ours was last night.

 

Making Sense of Awakening

However connectedness to the great unity comes about, it is really important to take note that something unique has happened. This suggests the importance of an on-going awareness of what is happening within our mind and body, undistracted by incessant thinking. Some form of contemplative practice is the only way I know of maintaining mindfulness. I once listened to a tape by a English meditation teacher Christopher Titmuss who said that awakenings happen routinely in people’s lives, but they are so preoccupied with the busyness of outer living that these experiences–if noticed–are not fully unpacked and reflected on. And therefore the liberating power of the awakening mind is not fully integrated into our conscious living.

Reflection is not so much a “thinking about,” as when you analyze, dissect subject an idea or experience to a taking apart process. I like to keep what I’m reflecting on in its wholeness. Rather I will “think on” by wondering, asking myself or my higher guidance questions and seeing what comes back. 

Reflecting in this way can bring amazing revelations that help to bring the separate pieces of our lives into a wholeness. Here’s two very different experiences in my life that mirror one another. I was able to appreciate the symmetry upon reflection after the second one happened at a Vipassana meditation retreat in 1997. The first occurred when was a child at a time I had been having terrible nightmares over a period of years.

Inner Sanctum

North Andover, Mass.

Circa 1948-1951

     In this dream, I’m in a small town, like in the old west, with two and three story wooden buildings.  I am supposed to meet my family.  I see a hotel and go inside and am received by a woman who tells me my room is on the second floor.

     Upon going up to the second floor, I find my room and have a sense of foreboding.  After settling in, I open my door and feel a strange pull to go to the left, to the end of the long, narrow hallway.  I walk to the end where there is a door.  I open the door and my fear is mounting.  The room is dimly lit and has nothing in it except a small round table draped in a red cloth, the kind mediums use to hold their crystal ball.  The room is hung with thick red, velvet cloth and the light is a low and filtered, giving the room a blood-red cast.  I feel something evil in the room, but can see nothing.  The evil presence seems to penetrate me and my terror becomes inconceivable.  My whole body breaks up and atomizes into millions of tiny particles. 

And then the experience on my meditation retreat:

Bunga 

Ethel, Wa.

March, 1997

Day two of my first, 10-day Vipassana meditation course is not quite hell, but getting close.  An obsession about not being able to sit without pain and looking bad or disturbing other meditators grips me in a press of anxiety that won’t let go.  I go into day three having struggled with only a few hours of sleep and worrying that my exhaustion would undo me, or, worse, send me home defeated.  

   A visit with the course teacher serves only slightly to lessen my fear, my life-long companion since being shut in the closet as an infant, chased by witches in my childhood dreams and dogged by intimidating people who bullied their way through business while I was trying to be polite. “This is your particular sankara,” the teacher says, referring to the Pali word which we translate as complex, or habit pattern of the mind.  No great revelation here.  I had known for years that fear loomed as the main villain in my inner world.  But somehow to have my fear addressed as “sankara” gives the spin doctors in my brain some measure of control in this otherwise new and unsettling environment of twelve-hour meditation days and noble silence. 

   Day four seemed a miracle as I awoke from my first good sleep anxiety-free and with a fresh calm.  I was ready to begin the shift from anapana (breath-meditation) to vipassana meditation when we would focus on sensations up and down the body. Instead of the subtle sensations I had expected, I feel a pulsing wherever I focused.  Later this turns into a throb like someone is palpating my body wherever I place my attention. 

   As I go to bed that night, the throbbing increases as does my concern that this meditation may be getting out of control.  But refreshed from the day, I am curious and adventuresome and decide to let the process go forward. It seems to have a wisdom of its own.  Two hours pass as I am lying still, hands at my sides scanning my body and noticing a rush of tiny sensations flowing out from each throb.  Head to feet, feet to head for more hours until I notice a strange energy break as the throbbing stops and blends into a cascade of the tiny, subtle vibrations all over my body. 

   My out-breath sends a wave of vibrations down my body, and my in-breath brings a wave back from toe to head.  I am encased in an energy envelope and have lost the distinct outlines of my body as my awareness merges with a larger energy field surrounding me. 

   It was only after the course that I learn this experience has a Pali name, bunga, meaning dissolution.  Then, for the first time, I reflect on the similarity between this disolving of my body and the childhood nightmare in which fear so penetrated me that I atomize into tiny pieces. 

   Then it felt like death.  Now dissolution seems like life. Was the first darker prophecy calling for its lighter twin? 

It wasn’t until well after this retreat that I wrote down this and many other awakenings in a journal I call Inside Stories.  Seeing the parallels between the ecstatic dissolution during the vipassana retreat compared to the nightmare gave me additional evidence of the beautiful wisdom in life that our deepest wounds are springboards for our liberation. You see the terror I had experienced as a child–of being left in a closet because my mother couldn’t stand to hear me cry–had created a node of intense psychic force which not only had been crippling in many areas of my life, but had also become a lightning rod for my meditation. That space of fear is really a gift, for it was the portal through which I was and still am able to transit into a greater spaciousness.

Knowing this has helped me to embrace the difficult and painful experiences in my life with greater peace of mind and compassion. In fact, I have learned to let go more deeply, say “Thank you” to the reversals and losses, knowing all things are working together for our awakening and ultimate freedom–if we will only have the understanding that this is so. 

Day 1: Greetings Fellow Pathfinders

This is my first post on this blog and I’m excited to get started. I hope those of you on the path toward a bigger self will join me on this part of your journey, share your own insights, challenges and inner growth. I think the best way to start is by way of a personal story–a breakthrough and certainly one of a number of defining moments in my life. By defining moment I mean something out of the ordinary in terms of my state of consciousness which taught me something and has helped me to understand myself in a deeper way.

Here’s how I described an experience that happened to me about 25 years ago:

Being Moved Tacoma, Wa. Summer, 1985

It’s Saturday, and my wife is working overtime at the mail service store she opened a few years earlier. I am now the main caretaker for our two boys, Malcolm, five, and David, four. I’ve almost gotten over my resentment at her prolonged absences, and find great joy in spending so much time with my boys whom I love more than I can put into words.

I’m in the kitchen making food, standing at the window that looks over a line of birch trees and the driveway we share with our neighbors. Malcolm and David show that serious appearance only children can have when deeply absorbed in play. I follow them walking up the drive, one behind the other. I notice their purposeful strides and instantly perceive the mature man in their movements. A wave of nostalgia rises in my body as I realize one day they will no longer be my little boys, but men of their own.

I start on the tabouli salad and soak the bulgur wheat in water. I pull out the Henckles knife to cut the tomatoes, and admire the strong, hefty feel of this magnificent instrument. Next come the green onions which I first wash and then bunch up after cutting off the ends. I chop carefully and make deliberate movements to slice tiny sections. My hands move slowly.

Then I notice the movements of my arms, as I lift the knife, bring it up and come down again. I feel like I’m in a dream, because I have this distinct sense that I am not doing the moving.

I am being moved.

Careful not to disturb this most exquisite moment, I gently explore with my consciousness the boundary between this moving body and the “other” energy presence outside of me. I give myself over to the “other” and sense my body being held up not by my own will, but by something bigger. My skin begins to feel more permeable, thinning and merging with the larger energy envelope. I am floating in an ocean of energy.

I want to preserve this ecstasy, this promise of what life can be like in a state of grace-“…the God in whom we live, and move and move and have our being,” as the Apostle Paul explains. I move purposefully downstairs as the boys have now come inside and are watching TV.

I move into their play space aware of the grace-filled movements of my head, hands and legs as I sit down next to them. I suggest they turn off the TV. “Let’s talk about what we want to do today,” flows out of my mouth. There’s the usual suggestions, but none of the sharp edges of difference. I’ll speak and sense the energy rolling from my body along lines of force and see their bodies move to receive. Then they speak and the energy comes back to me again as I feel their words and being inside. I think of Carlos Casteneda when Dan Juan explains to him about energy lines of force connecting all things.

We are moving, dancing together. I feel supreme joy.

 

Growing numbers of people have these kinds of awakening experiences, characterized often by a felt sense of being dynamically connected to something vast, wonderful and alive that gives our lives meaning. Call it God, the great unity, Christ or Buddha-mind, the One, cosmic consciousness. While all these phrases have their own particular meanings, growing numbers of us are using these terms interchanegably, recognizing that words can’t describe the unknowable and infinite. 

The more we experience this spacious presence, the less we identify with a smaller and limiting identity, intuiting instead our fundamental larger, perhaps even cosmic being. 

I think we are in a process of awakening to a world, a universe where we know at the soul and cellular level that everything is connected; in fact, that we are the world, the cosmos in particular form. In other words, I am not just “Mike,” this body, mind and life, but I am everything that is, was and will be. Now as I say those words, I honestly don’t live in that realization fully. But I do feel that knowing dawning in me.

With that comes a deep reverence for all that is, and will be in the future. And with that too comes transcendence of the ways of the current world of suffering–the individual pain body; the world of social injustice where a few have much at great cost to the many; the human desecration of the natural world, with disregard for our Earth family; the sense of spiritual malaise, inner hollowness and lack of deep community with others characteristic of a civilization out of balance with the wisdom and rhythms of the cosmos and our own deepest nature.

As the human presence on Earth becomes ever more unsustainable–creating huge disturbances in global systems (climate change)–we are all feeling the pressure to change in a variety of ways, depending on our level of consciousness development, age, culture and general situation in life. Nobody is left out. 

So, this is the context for the AwakeningSelf blog. I will be addressing this subject from lots of viewpoints. First, I want to share what this means at the level of personal evolution. We’ll also look at what this means for relationships today–which have been going through their own transition for the last 40+ years. As a father of two boys, I am vitally interested in parenting for the emergence of a new consciousness. As an educator of other educators, I have a big stake in our schools, educational systems and modes of thinking and how those are both falling apart (Every Child Left Behind) or morphing into new life-giving forms.

I want this space to be open to those of you like me who are seekers of truth and are vitally invested in your own and the world’s emergence. Please join me with your own reflections and sharing.

Peace & blessings on this great journey.

 

Mike