–Mary O’Malley, The Magical Forest of Aliveness, pp. 24-25

A dear friend was in a major transition time.  An important relationship, her job and her home were all changing.  These are the times where our deepest grief can slip through the cracks of our vulnerability.  On the way home from a particularly trying day, she witnessed a family of ducks heading onto the freeway directly in front of a speeding bus.  Because there was a fence between her and the freeway, there was nothing she could do.  She pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed a river of tears.  Instead of being cleansed by this upwelling, she found herself caught in confusion, panic and self-judgment, hating herself for her vulnerability.

Sitting in misery in front of her fireplace that evening, a memory from her childhood surfaced.  She saw herself sitting on a stool in a warm and cozy kitchen, while her favorite aunt made her cocoa and toast.  She was filled with the care and tenderness of that act.  This moved her into the same level of tenderness and mercy with herself.  She said that the transition was so dramatic that it was as if all of the heartache and despair of the past few weeks had been a dream and she was finally awake.  The ability to meet herself as if she were a beloved child, even in the most vulnerable of places, transformed her experience.

Just as with kindness and compassion, the most powerful place we can learn mercy is with ourselves.

from Belonging to Life: The Journey of Awakening, Second Edition, p. 200

For most of us this is a scary thing to do.  Our bodies felt feelings when we were young that were both terrifying (rage, longing, sadness and fear) and socially inappropriate (exuberance and sexuality, to name a few).  So we learned to live from the forehead up, freezing these feelings in our bodies.  In order to stay unconscious, we only give our bodies fleeting attention and then abuse them with extremes of food, inactivity, overwork and the social drugs of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and sugar.  When our bodies give us the feedback that all is not in balance, we rail at these demands and often flood them with even more toxicity.  In our unconsciousness, we experience this gift of a body as an alien object that resides in the realms below who we really are.

Usually we only listen to our bodies when they call out in pain.  Because we’re not at home, the body is a repository for our emotional pain, becoming the enemy and a scapegoat for all sorts of problems.  Many religions see it as something less than, a defilement of the spirit.  It is interesting to note that most of our swear words are a judgment about some function of this exquisite creation.  No wonder we move through our lives in such a disconnected way.

To come back into our bodies is to come back into our wholeness and into a deeper experience of Life.  To be present in our bodies is to access the health and energy we have yearned for, allowing us to consciously engage with the reservoir of wisdom that is always there.

from Belonging to Life: The Journey of Awakening, Second Edition, p.32

–Jaun Ramon Jimenez

To explore the possibility of death opening us to joy, I would like to pull on a metaphor from my new book, What’s In The Way IS The Way (it is almost done!)  Imagine a beautiful meadow on a sunlit morning.  In this meadow is a rainbow of wildflowers, along with the heart opening music of birds. The smells of the heather and the pristine beauty of the surrounding mountains all bring forth a deep sense of peace.   There is also death here as one moment dies into the next and everything in the meadow – absolutely everything –eventually dissolves back into the great mystery of life.  In the ongoing unfolding of this meadow, everything flows and nothing resists that flow.  The grass doesn’t say, “I don’t want winter to come.”  The trees are not trying to be better trees!  The animals aren’t afraid to die.

The meadow represents your natural state of open, alive connection with life that you lived in when you were very young.  You hadn’t yet learned how to see life as a problem, and thus it flowed through you – the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful.

But there came a time when you left the flow of life and got caught in your mind.  In our metaphor, the clouds in the air began to circle around your head. At first they were just wispy clouds that didn’t fully block your experience of the meadow.  But overtime, usually by adolescence, the clouds completely surrounded and filled your head, so much so that you could no longer see the meadow.  All you could see were the clouds of your mind that were about good/bad, right/wrong.

The storyteller in your head that is always trying to do life and do it right constantly struggles with life, cutting you off from the meadow of your own being. This is where most people live, lost in ideas about life rather than the direct experience of it.  Rumi speaks directly to this in his poem The Glance:

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing,
there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

In other words, right beyond the cloud bank of your mind is another world.  It was this field that our friend Vaughan opened to as he was dying.  His wife Lyn speaks eloquently about the five days between the moment when he was told that there was nothing more that the medical world could offer him and the day that they took him off of life support.  She said he was lucid and luminous to the end.  The room was filled with light, and there was so much love pouring out of his eyes that she now knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that the field Rumi is talking about is the truth of her being. When Vaughan let go of any need to resist what was unfolding in his life, a door opened and he recognized the field of love that is always here.

There is also no accident that the last words of Steve Jobs were, “Oh wow!  Oh, Wow!  Oh wow!”  He recognized the field!  But it isn’t necessary to wait until you die to experience this.  You are not the cloudbank of your mind.  You are the field!  And it is a very powerful moment in your life when you come across something you can’t control – something your mind can’t fix – for therein lies the possibility of opening again into the field of love that you are.  The challenges of your life offer the opportunity to see how much your mind resists life and to discover the amazing healing that happens when you open into whatever life is offering you.

So what would it be like if you understood that the deepest of challenges in your life are for you?  They are not here because you have done something wrong or God fell asleep on the job.  They are here as an invitation to see through the cloud bank of struggle and come back to the meadow of love that is always here.  For you have never left the meadow; you just think you have.

Look.  To actually look at what is going on right now, especially inside of ourselves, is the most powerful tool we have as human beings.  What stories are running through our mind; what emotions are we identified with; and what are the sensations in our body like?  You can ask yourself, “What am I experiencing right now?”  Or” Who is here?”

Allow.  As soon as you give something 100% permission to be, it can move through you and it ceases to have power over you. If it doesn’t yet move, allowing enables you to look, giving it the powerful healing of your own attention. If you are resisting you can’t really see what you are experiencing,   You can say to any sensation, thought or feeling, “It is okay that you are here.”

Listen.  This is what all the parts of us really want – to be seen and heard. You can say to whatever is here, “Tell me about it.”

Open:  That is what this is all about – letting go of the ‘mind made me’ so we can open to life right here, right now.

May you be fascinated by whatever shows up in your life!

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things.

We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes.

These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete…

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe,because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a cent.

Remember, to say, ‘I love you’ to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love; give time to listen! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

And always remember…
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

– George Carlin

What stays with me the most is 16 amazing women opening their hearts to themselves and to each other more and more each day.  Such joy!  At the end of the retreat, the Hui’s resident artist and manager of the gallery said to me, ”I want whatever you all shared together.  All of these women came here in their ordinary, everyday selves and are leaving just glowing.”

What was it that allowed us all to open into the joy and aliveness that is our birthright?  We first discovered that we all have a storyteller in our head that is based on fear and glued together with self-judgment.  For many of the women, there was a radical shift in perception when they saw that everybody was telling themselves the same story:  “I can’t trust life so I have to ‘do it and ‘do it right’,” secretly believing that it was never quite right enough!  Then, step by step, we learned how to unhook from these oftentimes subtle stories of fear and self-judgment so that we could simply open to life.

The theme of the retreat was All Is Welcome Here!  When our stories are met with curiosity and compassion, they let go of their hold on us, and what is left is life in all of its magical mystery, right here, right now.  What is left is the re-membering we knew when we were very young – that all of the joy and love we long for is to be found here and now. The more we individually and collectively unhooked from the storyteller in our heads, the more we discovered that it is safe to open to life – not an idea of it, but the living experience.

A few days into the retreat, one of the women said that whenever she heard the phrase All is welcome here, she heard All is well.  Come here.  That is the heart of what we remembered together – All is well.  In fact, all is unbelievably well.  It is only the storyteller in our heads that turns things into problems.  When we realize that life is in charge of life and it does a much better job than we can, our bellies soften, our hearts open, and we become very curious and engaged with exactly what life is giving us right now!

So I invite you to play with All is Welcome Here and notice what your mind does not want to welcome.  That is your edge, and as you explore it, it will become a doorway back into life.  Then take it one step further and play with All is Well.  Any part of you that doesn’t agree with this is just the fear and self-judgment you were conditioned into when you were young.  Know it is possible to unhook from these stories and truly become alive!

This PowerPoint (link below) contains some awe-inspiring images that put our problems in perspective.  Enjoy!

Be light, Mary

Astronomy lesson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erqJF_ppqbk&sns=em