Suffering Too Insignificant for the Majority to See

By Alice Walker


In this groundbreaking talk to participants at the first-ever African-American Buddhist retreat, Alice Walker describes the great toll, both personal and societal, of racism in America, and how Buddhism has helped her heal its wounds.


This was not an area of large plantations, since the land is hilly with some bottoms of rich soil. Whites usually had small or medium-sized farms with slaves, but one pervasive thread of “southern life” ran through Leake County history. White masters raped black slave women who bore their children. The treatment of these children varied, and sometimes they were accepted or acknowledged as relatives of the white families.
And other perversity was always looming. Percy Sanders, a descendent of an early black family in the area, recalled hearing as a child about George Slaughter, a white farmer’s son by a black woman, who came to a horrible death because he “didn’t keep his place.” Ambushed by white men, including his own father, he was shot while riding his horse because the saddle horse was “too fine.” The story goes that when he was found, “the horse was drinking his blood.”
—From Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, by Winson Hudson and Constance Curry

When I went to live in Mississippi in the sixties and to work in the Civil Rights movement, whose aim was to emancipate and empower African Americans who were still, thousands of them, treated as badly as and sometimes worse than slaves, I met Winson Hudson. She was trying to write the story of her life. I helped her, until I left Mississippi to live in New England. We sat under a tree and I wrote what she dictated. Today her story has become a book.

I begin with this harrowing quote simply to ground us all in the reality of being African Americans, African Indians, African Amerindians. We are that mixture of peoples, brought together very often and for centuries in the most intense racial confusion, hatred, and violence. This horrible story, which has haunted me since I read it, is typical of the kind of psychic assault we endure, while it is exactly the kind of assault today’s white majority takes no notice of, just as it took no notice one and two and three hundred years ago. This story, so chilling—The horse was drinking his blood? His own father was one of the assassins? His crime was that his horse was too “fine”?—unfortunately is one in a storehouse of such stories those of us present might hear or expect to hear, on any given day of our lives. What do we do with the shock? What do we do with the anger? The rage? What do we do with the pain?

When I read this story recently I was sitting in a federal courthouse, preparing to do jury duty. I felt ill immediately. But not as ill as I would feel an hour later upon entering the courtroom, when I was confronted with the fact that three young men of color, one Asian, two Latino, were to be tried for the murder of a policeman, whom they allegedly killed when he interrupted their burglary of a steak house. One glance at the accused trio revealed the faces of malnourished youths, barely out of their teens. The choice before the jury would be life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty. The judge, white and middle-class, well-fed and well-educated, seemed prepared to impose either choice.

Here were the contemporary brothers of George Slaughter.



My first version of this talk began with a poem by Basho:

Sitting quietly
Doing nothing
Spring comes
And the grass
Grows
By itself.

I was thinking of how I found my way from the backwoods of Georgia as a young woman into the company of the finest poets. It was a route of unbelievable, serious magic. When I was a child my family had no money to buy books, though all of us loved to read. Because I was injured as a child and blinded in one eye, the state gave me a stipend that meant I could buy all the books I wanted. When I went north to college, my first stop after settling in my room was the bookstore, where I entered a state of ecstasy seeing before me all the books of poetry I was hungering to read. It was there in the Sarah Lawrence College bookstore that I encountered Basho and Buson and Issa, Japanese Buddhist haiku poets who had lived centuries before. And also a book called Zen Telegrams by Paul Reps. We connected on the profound level of Nature. That is to say, in these poets I discovered a kindred sensibility that respected Nature itself as profound, magical, creative, and intelligent. There was no hint, as there is in other poetry, that simply because humans are able to write about Nature, they are somehow, therefore, superior to it.

So this is the way I was going to start the talk. But then I thought: it is more honest to start with the harder, more collective stuff. The stuff that makes addicts and slaves of Africans a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. For I knew while sitting in that courtroom, having read the story of George Slaughter and acknowledging the young men before me as today’s version of him, that the pain I was feeling is the same pain that sends our people reeling into streets and alleys looking for a “fix” to fix all that is wrong with this gruesome picture. It is the pain that undermines our every attempt to relieve ourselves of external and internalized white domination. The pain that murders our every wish to be free. It is a pain that seems unrelenting. A pain that seems to have no stopping and no end. A pain that is ultimately, insidiously, turning a generous, life-loving people into a people who no longer feel empathy for the world. We need only listen to some of our African American comedians to see that our traditional compassion for life has turned into the most egregious cynicism.

We are being consumed by our suffering.

We are a people who have always loved life and loved the earth. We have noticed earth. How responsive and alive it is. We have appreciated it. We have been a nation of creators and farmers who adored the earth even when we were not permitted to own any part of it larger than our graves. And then only until a highway needed to be built or a condominium constructed on top of them.

I remember distinctly the joy I witnessed on the faces of my parents and grandparents as they savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh liveliness of wind.

This compassionate, generous, life-affirming nature of ours, that can be heard in so much of our music, is our buddhanature. It is how we innately are. It is too precious to lose, even to disappointment and grief.

Looking about at the wreck and ruin of America, which all our forced, unpaid labor over five centuries was unable to avert, we cannot help wanting our people, who have suffered so grievously and held the faith so long, to at last experience lives of freedom, lives of joy. And so those of us chosen by life to blaze different trails than the ones forced on our ancestors have explored the known universe in search of that which brings the most peace, self-acceptance, and liberation. We have found much to inspire us in Nature. In the sheer persistence and wonder of Creation Itself. In Indigenous wisdom. In the popular struggles for liberation around the world, notably in Cuba, where the people demonstrate a generosity of spirit and an understanding and love of humankind that, given their isolation and oppression by our country, is almost incomprehensible. We have been strengthened by the inevitable rise of the Feminine, brought forward so brilliantly by women’s insistence in our own time. And of course by our own African American struggle for dignity and freedom, which has inspired the world. In addition, many of us have discovered in the teachings of the Buddha wise, true, beautiful guidance on the treacherous path life and history set us upon.



Having said this, let me emphasize that I did not come to the study and practice of Buddhism to become a Buddhist. In fact, I am not a Buddhist. And the Buddha would not have minded this in the least. He would have been happy to hear it. He was not, himself, a Buddhist. He was the thing Itself: an enlightened being. Just as Jesus Christ was not a Christian, but a Christ, an enlightened being.

The challenge for me is not to be a follower of Something but to embody it; I am willing to try for that. This is how I understand the meaning of both the Christ and the Buddha. When the Buddha, dying, entreated his followers to “be a lamp unto your self,” I understood he was willing to free his followers even from his own teachings. He had done all he could do, taught them everything he had learned. Now, their own enlightenment was up to them. He was also warning them not to claim him as the sole route to their salvation, thereby robbing themselves of responsibility for their own choices, behavior, and lives.

I came to meditation after a particularly painful divorce. Painful because I never ceased to care for the man I divorced. I married him because he was one of the best people I’d ever encountered. However, life had other plans for us both. I left my home, as the Buddha left his two thousand and five hundred years ago, to see if I could discover how I at least could be happy. If I could be happy in a land where torture of my kind was commonplace, then perhaps there was a general happiness to be found.

The person who taught me Transcendental Meditation was teaching out of the Hindu tradition and never mentioned the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths (about the fact of human suffering, its causes, and the necessity to engage, endure, and transform it) or the Eightfold Path, which provides a guide to moral, conscious living. What she did teach me was the deeper value of sitting quietly. Doing nothing. Breathing. This took me back to childhood days when I did this without thinking. Days when I was aware I was not separate from the cosmos. Days when I was happy. This was actually a place where poets, time out of mind, have frequently lived. No wonder I felt at home there.

And so I laughed. The laughter bubbled up, irrepressible. I saw the path to happiness and to liberation at a glance. It was inside myself.

Now I understand that all great teachers love us. This is essentially what makes them great. I also understand that it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love. The Buddha, presumably raised as a Hindu, was no doubt disheartened by its racism; i.e., the caste system that today blights the lives of one hundred and sixty million Indians. Indians who were once called “untouchables” and now call themselves Dalits, “those broken to pieces.” They are not allowed to own land. They cannot enter the same doors, attend the schools, or drink from the same wells as the so-called “higher” castes. Their shadow must never fall on those above them. They are brutalized and the women raped at will. Niggers of India, they are.

Traditionally it is taught that the Buddha discovered someone old, someone sick, and someone dying, after having lived a very sheltered life, and that because of this suffering, inherent to all humankind, he struck out into the world to find a remedy. There’s no mention, usually, of the horrible caste system, everywhere in place in his area, which I personally find impossible to imagine the Buddha ignoring.

I like to think of the young prince, Siddhartha, observing this hypocrisy of his native religion, perhaps touching or loving an “untouchable,” and deciding there had to be a better way. A higher truth. I like to think of him leaving his cushy home and delightful family, his loving wife and adorable son, and striking out into the wilderness. Searching for a way humans could rid themselves of the hideous affliction of spirit that forced division and degradation of part of the human family imposes.

Which is to say, I felt the Buddha’s spirit long before I began to study his words. I felt him not as a god or as the son of a god but as a human being who looked around, as any of us might do, and said to himself: Something here is very wrong. People are such beautiful and wondrous creations, why are they being tortured? What have they done that this should be so? How can there be an end to their suffering?

The Buddha sat down.

Most of the representations of the Buddha show him sitting down. Sometimes he is lying down. Sometimes he is walking, though this is rare. Sometimes he is shown leaping to his feet and flinging up his arms in joy. Anyone who meditates recognizes these states. First, the sitting. The concentration on the breath. Sometimes the lying down, feeling our connection to the Mother, the great support of Earth. There is the walking, which integrates our bodies with our mind state. Then there is the feeling of exuberance when we realize we have freed ourselves. Again.

How does this happen?

I imagine there are people who turn to the Buddha because they’ve lost a lot of money. My experience, however, is that almost everyone I’ve met who has turned to the Buddha did so because they have suffered the end of a love affair. They have lost someone they loved. Perhaps they have lost a country, as well, or parents or siblings or some function of their bodies. But very often, people turn to the Buddha because they have been carried so deeply into their suffering by the loss of a loved one that without major help they fear they will never recover. (I actually love this about Buddhists: that though their reputation is all about suffering and meditating and being a bit low-key sexually and spiritually languid, they are in fact a band of hopeful lovers who risk their hearts in places a Methodist would rarely dare to tread.)

This is what happened to me. I had lost my own beloved. The pain of this experience seemed bottomless and endless. Enter my teacher for that moment of my life, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön and her teachings on a set of tapes called “Awakening Compassion.” Under her guidance, far in the country away from everyone, on my own retreat of one, I learned an ancient Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice called tonglen, along with the teachings that accompanied it, called lojong. This involved, during meditation, learning to breathe in the pain I was feeling, not to attempt to avoid or flee it. It involved making my heart bigger and bigger just to be able to hold it all. It involved breathing out relief and happiness for myself and for everyone on Earth who was feeling as miserable as I was. I stayed at this practice for a year.

It worked. So that today I sometimes wonder what my suffering over the loss of a loved one was really about. I have almost concluded that it was the love of the Buddha reaching through two thousand and five hundred years wanting me to understand that I had some control over how much suffering I endure. Wanting me to try a remedy he had found and to see for myself whether it works.

My novel The Color Purple was actually my Buddha novel without Buddhism. In the face of unbearable suffering following the assassinations and betrayals of the Civil Rights movement, I too sat down upon the Earth and asked its permission to posit a different way from that in which I was raised. Just as the Buddha did, when Mara, the king of delusion, asked what gave him the right to think he could direct humankind away from the suffering they had always endured. When Mara queried him, the Buddha touched the Earth. This is the single most important act, to my mind, of the Buddha. Because it acknowledges where he came from. It is a humble recognition of his true heritage, his true lineage. Though Buddhist monks would spend millennia pretending all wisdom evolves from the masculine and would consequently treat Buddhist nuns abominably, the Buddha clearly placed himself in the lap of the Earth Mother and affirmed Her wisdom and Her support.

It has been enormously helpful to me to learn that the Buddha’s wife and son eventually joined him in the wilderness and that she became both a follower and a teacher. There was love between them. How I wish we had a record of her thoughts. The male effort to separate Wisdom from the realm of the Feminine is not only brutal and unattractive but it will always fail, though this may take, as with Buddhism, thousands of years. This is simply because the Feminine is Wisdom; it is also the Soul. Since each and every person is born with an internal as well as an eternal Feminine, just as everyone is born with an internal and eternal Masculine, this is not a problem except for those who insist on forcing humans into gender roles, which makes it easier for them to be controlled.

Sometimes, as African Americans, African Indians, African Amerindians, people of color, it appears we are being removed from the planet. Fascism and Nazism, visibly on the rise in the world, have always been our experience of white supremacy in America, and this has barely let up. Plagues such as AIDS seem incredibly convenient for the forces that have enslaved and abused us over the centuries and who today are as blatant in their attempts to seize our native homelands and their resources as Columbus was five hundred years ago. Following the suffering and exhilaration of the sixties, a pharmacopia of drugs suddenly appeared just as we were becoming used to enjoying our own minds. “Citizen Television,” which keeps relentless watch over each and every home, claims the uniqueness and individuality of the majority of our children from birth. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and so many other defenders of humanity, known and unknown, around the globe, we find ourselves with an unelected president who came to office by disenfranchising black voters, just as was done, routinely, before Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rest of us were born. This is a major suffering for black people and must not be overlooked. I myself, on realizing what had happened, felt a soul sickness I had not experienced in decades. Those who wanted power beyond anything else—oil and the money to be made from oil (which is the Earth Mother’s blood)—were contemptuous of the sacrifices generations of our ancestors made. The suffering of our people, especially of our children, with their bright, hopeful eyes, is of no significance to them. George Slaughter—the surname would have been his master/father’s, and deadly accurate —was not killed, we intuit, because his “saddle horse was too fine”; he was killed because he was too fine.

This is the bind we are in.

There is a private riddle I ask myself: Why did Europeans enslave us in Africa and take us to the United States?

The answer: Because we would not go voluntarily.

The African Americans who are aiding and abetting the rape and pillage of Earth, helping literally to direct the bombs that fall on the innocent and the exquisite, are still another cause of our suffering. We look into their eyes and experience a great fright. They appear so familiar, and yet, somehow, we feel they are not. I do not call their names because essentially they are, as we are, energies. They are familiar because they have been around just as long as we have. It is also necessary to acknowledge that some of those energies we find so frightening exist within ourselves.

This poem, which I think of as one of my “bitter” poems, expresses something of their position, when they can bear to acknowledge it, throughout the long centuries:

They Helped Their Own

They helped their own
They did not
Help us

We helped
Them
Help
Themselves

Beggars
That
We are.

Underneath what is sometimes glibly labeled racism or sexism or caste-ism, there lurk covetousness, envy, and greed. All these human states can, through practice, be worked with and transformed. This is the good news for our oppressors, as it is for humans generally, since we all have these qualities to a degree. The equally good news for us is that we can turn our attention away from our oppressors—unless they are directly endangering us to our faces—and work on the issue of our suffering without attaching them to it. The teaching that supports that idea is this:

Suppose someone shot you with an arrow, right in the heart. Would you spend your time screaming at the archer, or even trying to locate him? Or would you try to pull the arrow out of your heart? White racism, that is to say, envy, covetousness, and greed (incredible sloth and laziness in the case of enslaving others to work for you), is the arrow that has pierced our collective heart. For centuries we have tried to get the white archer even to notice where his arrow has landed; to connect himself, even for a moment, to what he has done. Maybe even to consider apologizing, which he hates to do. To make reparations, which he considers absurd.

This teaching says: enough. Screaming at the archer is a sure way to remain attached to your suffering rather than easing or eliminating it. A better way is to learn, through meditation, through study and practice, a way to free yourself from the pain of being shot, no matter who the archer might be.

There is also the incredibly useful assurance that everything is change. Everything is impermanent. The country, the laws, the Fascists and Nazis, the archer and the arrow. Our lives and their lives. Life. Looking about at the wreckage, it is clear to all that in enslaving us, torturing us, trying to get “ahead” on the basis of our misery, our oppressors in the past had no idea at all what they were doing. They still don’t. As we practice, let this thought deeply root. From this perspective, our compassion for their ignorance seems the only just tribute to our survival.

Who or What knows what is really going on around here, anyway? Only the Tao, or Life or Creation or That Which Is Beyond Human Expression.

Sitting quietly.

This place of peace, of serenity and gratitude, does exist. It is available to all. In a way, this place of quiet and peacefulness could be said to be our shadow. Our deserved shadow. Our African Amerindian shadow. In European thought the shadow is rarely understood as positive, because it is dark, because it is frequently behind us, because we cannot see it; but for us, ultrasensitive to the blinding glare of racism and suffering daily the searing effects of incomprehensible behavior, our shadow of peace, that we so rarely see, can be thought of as welcoming shade, the shade of an internal tree. A tree that grows beside an internal river that bathes us in peace. Meditation is the path that leads to this internal glade. To share that certainty is the greatest privilege and joy.

I am grateful for the opportunity to join you in this first-ever African American Buddhist retreat in North America. Though not a Buddhist, I have found a support in the teachings of the Buddha that is beyond measure, as I have found comfort and support also in those teachings I have received from Ancient Africans and Indigenous people of my native continent and from the Earth itself. The teacher who has been most helpful to me, in addition to Pema Chödrön, is Jack Kornfield, an extraordinary guide and human being, whose books and tapes, among them A Path with Heart, After the Ecstasy the Laundry, and The Roots of Buddhist Psychology, I would recommend to anyone who seeks a better understanding of the enspirited life. Sharon Salzberg’s book Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness has been an incomparable gift. In a book called Knee Deep in Grace, I discovered the teachings of the Indian female yogi, householder, and mother Dipa Ma. Her instructions and observations seem endlessly potent.

I am deeply grateful to all the teachers who came before these four that I have mentioned. Teachers from Vietnam (Thich Nhat Hahn has been a beloved teacher), Thailand, Burma, India, China, and especially Tibet. I thank the Dalai Lama for allowing himself to be a symbol of good in a world that seems, at times, hopelessly tilted toward evil. I thank Martin Luther King, Jr., for the warm, brotherly touch of his hand when I was young and seeking a way to live, with dignity, in my native land in the South, and for the sound of his voice, which was so full of our experience. I thank him for loving us. If he had been able to live and teach, as the Buddha did, until the age of eighty, how different our world would be. It is such a gift to have his books and recordings of his words, and to be able to understand his death as a teaching on both the preciousness of human existence and impermanence.

And, as always, I thank the ancestors, those who have gone on and those who are always arriving. It is because our global spiritual ancestors have loved us very dearly that we today sit together practicing ways to embody peace and create a better world. I feel personally ever-bathed in that love.

Let us sit for ten minutes.

Let us bring our attention to the life of our young brother, our murdered ancestor, George Slaughter. We know he was a beautiful young man, and that it was this beauty and his freedom expressing it that caused his father, himself unfree, to seek his death. We can see George sitting on his stunning saddle horse. We do not know if his half-sister, white, confused by her liking for her darker brother, gave it to him. We do not know if his mother, dark and irresistible, as so many black women are, gave it to him. We do not know if he bought it himself. All we know is that he is sitting there, happy. And the horse, too, is happy.

George Slaughter, an English name. We might think of Bob Marley, half-English, with his English name; perhaps George had a similar spirit. A kindred look and attitude.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to George’s father. He who trails the murder of his lovely boy throughout what remains of time.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to those who rode with the father, whose silence and whose violence caused so much suffering that continues in the world today.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

And now let us bring our attention to George’s horse. With its big dark eyes. Who drank George’s blood in grief after the horror of his companion’s bitter death. We know by now that the other animals on the planet watch us and know us and sometimes love us. How they express that love is often mysterious.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

I cherish the study and practice of Buddhism because it is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the work of healing our ancestors.

Both George and his father are our ancestors. What heals ancestors is understanding them. And understanding as well that it is not in heaven or in hell that the ancestors are healed. They can only be healed inside us. Buddhist practice, sent by ancestors we didn’t even know we had, has arrived, as all things do, just in time.



This is not a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful, self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion. Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry, or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world.


In addition to contemplating the Hopi message “Know your garden and where is your water,” we must also ask: What is my practice? What is steering this boat that is my fragile human life?
Take some time to contemplate what sort of practice appeals to you. If you are Christian, the words and actions of Jesus are excellent guides; especially the words and actions discovered during the past century in the Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi Scrolls. If you are an animist, there is all of Existence to be inspired by. Everything has life, everything has spirit! Perhaps singing in the choir of your church or trance dancing with friends is a connector to the All for you. Whatever it is, now is the time to look for it, to locate it, definitely, and to put it to use.

Excerpted from Alice Walker’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (The New Press, 2006). Reprinted by permission of The Wendy Weil Agency, Inc. © 2006 Alice Walker.












Alice Walker's poems, novels, and short stories deal with themes of violence, isolation, troubled relationships, multi-generational perspectives, sexisim and racism.

Suffering Too Insignificant for the Majority to See, Alice Walker, Shambhala Sun, May 2007.

Michael Jackson - Earth Song

"Earth Song"

What about sunrise
What about rain
What about all the things
That you said we were to gain...
What about killing fields
Is there a time
What about all the things
That you said was yours and mine...
Did you ever stop to notice
All the blood we've shed before
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth the weeping shores?

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah

What have we done to the world
Look what we've done
What about all the peace
That you pledge your only son...
What about flowering fields
Is there a time
What about all the dreams
That you said was yours and mine...
Did you ever stop to notice
All the children dead from war
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth the weeping shores

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah

I used to dream
I used to glance beyond the stars
Now I don't know where we are
Although I know we've drifted far

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah

Hey, what about yesterday
(What about us)
What about the seas
(What about us)
The heavens are falling down
(What about us)
I can't even breathe
(What about us)
What about apathy
(What about us)
I need you
(What about us)
What about nature's worth
(ooo, ooo)
It's our planet's womb
(What about us)
What about animals
(What about it)
We've turned kingdoms to dust
(What about us)
What about elephants
(What about us)
Have we lost their trust
(What about us)
What about crying whales
(What about us)
We're ravaging the seas
(What about us)
What about forest trails
(ooo, ooo)
Burnt despite our pleas
(What about us)
What about the holy land
(What about it)
Torn apart by creed
(What about us)
What about the common man
(What about us)
Can't we set him free
(What about us)
What about children dying
(What about us)
Can't you hear them cry
(What about us)
Where did we go wrong
(ooo, ooo)
Someone tell me why
(What about us)
What about babies
(What about it)
What about the days
(What about us)
What about all their joy
(What about us)
What about the man
(What about us)
What about the crying man
(What about us)
What about Abraham
(What was us)
What about death again
(ooo, ooo)
Do we give a damn

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah



Im writing an article about death and wanted to find something that would invoke how heartbroken we are about our planet and the earth changes happening now.Death of a relationship divorce losing something or someone you love very much. After my divorce, there were so many days of absolute grief and wailing. Nothing had ever hurt me so much.I wasnt sure I was gonna make it. Yeah what about us? what about me?

What about all the dreams
That you said was yours and mine...

I have been trying to feel this hurt and this song is a good start. Thanks Micheal. It must of hurt you so much you had to leave us.

Whenever I Say Your Name

This is how I always feel about you... even if ......we have a sacred contract.


Whenever I say your name,
whenever I call to mind your face
Whatever bread's in my mouth,
whatever the sweetest wine that I taste
Whenever your memory feeds my soul,
whatever got broken becomes whole
Whenever I'm filled with doubts that we will be together

Wherever I lay me down,
wherever I put my head to sleep
Whenever I hurt and cry,
whenever I got to lie awake and weep
Whenever I kneel to pray,
whenever I need to find a way
I'm calling out your name

Whenever those dark clouds hide the moon
Whenever this world has gotten so strange
I know that something's gonna change
Something's gonna change

Whenever I say your name,
Whenever I say your name,
I'm already praying, I'm already praying
I'm already filled with a joy that I can't explain
Wherever I lay me down,
wherever I rest my weary head to sleep
Whenever I hurt and cry,
whenever I got to lie awake and weep
Whenever I'm on the floor
Whatever it was that I believed before
Whenever I say your name, whenever I say it loud, I'm already praying

Whenever this world has got me down,
whenever I shed a tear
Whenever the TV makes me mad,
whenever I'm paralyzed with fear
Whenever those dark clouds fill the sky,
whenever I lose the reason why
Whenever I'm filled with doubts that we will be together

Whenever the sun refuse to shine, whenever the skies are pouring rain
Whatever I lost I thought was mine whenever I close my eyes in pain
Whenever I kneel to pray, whenever I need to find a way
I'm calling out your name

Whenever this dark begins to fall
Whenever I'm vulnerable and small
Whenever I feel like I could die
Whenever I'm holding back the tears that I cry

Whenever I say your name,
whenever I call to mind your face,
I'm already praying
Whatever bread's in my mouth,
whatever the sweetest wine that I taste
Wherever I lay me down,
wherever I rest my weary head to sleep
Whenever I hurt and cry,
whenever I'm forced to lie awake and have to weep
Whenever I'm on the floor
Whatever it was that I believed before
Whenever I say your name, whenever I say it loud, I'm already praying

Whenever I say your name,
No matter how long it takes,
One day we'll be together

Whenever I say your name,
let there be no mistake
that day will last forever

Stevie Wonder - Overjoyed

Ah Stevie Wonder...I thought this song would make me cry. I hadnt heard it in a long time. I used to listen to this in my early twenties and think of the person I longed to meet that I would finally call HOME. And how in love I would be and was already in love with long before we had met. There are some connections we have with another soul like that. In such moments if we are lucky to meet them in our lifetime, we connect in the 4th dimension where time and space are irrelevant unimportant ..time and space seem to stop linger slow and is in a ever present NOW.
If such a connection should change form or energy what should remain is a love that is deeper but is not about possession or ownership but more about freedom.
Now there are friends and then there are companeras.Companeras or Companions on the good red road as my teacher would say. And so today I find myself more in love and overjoyed .....

Con Toda Palabra

It is so rare that I meet humans that live a full authentic expression of themselves. I am in awe and long to be in such peoples presence. They are like flowers in full bloom. A flower doesnt hold back its color or scent.It simply IS what IT IS and has no limits in its expression. Its not afraid to be what it is. Such is what this song speaks about. Con toda palabra means with all meaning and expression of THE WORD.



Con toda palabra
Con toda sonrisa
Con toda mirada
Con toda caricia

Me acerco al agua
Bebiendo tu beso
La luz de tu cara
La luz de tu cuerpo

Es ruego el quererte
Es canto de mudo
Mirada de ciego
Secreto desnudo

Me entrego a tus brazos
Con miedo y con calma
Y un ruego en la boca
Y un ruego en el alma

Con toda palabra
Con toda sonrisa
Con toda mirada
Con toda caricia

Me acerco al fuego
Que todo lo quema
La luz de tu cara
La luz de tu cuerpo

Es ruego el quererte
Es canto de mudo
Mirada de ciego
Secreto desnudo

Me entrego a tus brazos
Con miedo y con calma
Y un ruego en la boca
Y un ruego en el alma


Lhasa de Sela (September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010), also known by the mononym Lhasa, was an American-born singer-songwriter who was raised in Mexico and the United States and divided her adult life between Canada and France.

WOMEN SEX ADDICTS

From http://www.sexualrecovery.com/resources/articles/women.php

Adapted from The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity

A fine line exists between what may be considered by most people acceptable sexual behavior and what is sexually addictive or compulsive. This is especially true for women in a society such as ours where sex is often treated as a commodity. Our culture discourages women from being assertive and direct in the expression of their sexual needs, thereby encouraging a less direct and potentially seductive or manipulative style. Some women go beyond these culturally-sanctioned behaviors and use sex compulsively as a means of gaining power and love.

The idea of being "love addicted" may be preferred by sexually addicted women because it fits the romantic, nurturer model of woman, whereas the term "sex addict" connotes an image of a "nymphomaniac", "slut", or "whore". The "love" that these women describe is often an addiction to the yearning or euphoria of romance, but has little to do with love.

The elements of sex addiction in women are the same as in any addiction: compulsion, continuation despite adverse consequences, and preoccupation or obsession.

The following behaviors when taken to excess are suggestive of sex addiction in women:



1. Compulsion, or unsuccessful attempts to control a sexual behavior:

changing relationships to control sexual fantasy and/or activities
swearing off relationships, only to give in to the next "right" lover
breaking promises to self or others to stop abusive fantasy or sexual behaviors
switching to caretaking others, workaholism, overeating, or romance novels to take the place of a sexual relationship
2. Continued behavior despite negative consequences:

unplanned pregnancies, abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, or violence
terror or shame resulting from sexual activities
decreased productivity at work due to sexual behavior with self or others
relationship problems resulting from extramarital affairs or excessive time spent on sex-related activities
depression related to inability to change sexual patterns or their consequences
substance abuse or eating disorders to numb shame and other negative feelings related to sexual activities
3. Obsessive thoughts in planning or obtaining sex:

neglecting family, relationship, or career because of time spent preoccupied with sex or sexual partners
Some sexually addictive behavior patterns in women may include: excessive flirting, dancing, or personal grooming to be seductive; wearing provocative clothing whenever possible [a form of exhibitionism]; changing one's appearance via excessive dieting, excessive exercise, and/or reconstructive surgery to be seductive; exposing oneself in a window or car; making sexual advances to younger siblings, clients, or others in subordinate power positions; seeking sexual partners in high-risk locations; multiple extramarital affairs; disregard of appropriate sexual boundaries, e.g. considering a married man, one's boss, or one's personal physician as appropriate objects of romantic involvement; trading sex for drugs, help, affection, money, social access, or power; having sex with someone they just met at a party, bar or on the internet [forms of anonymous sex]; compulsive masturbation; and exchanging sex for pain or pain for sex. For most people, sexual relationships, fantasies, and activities are normal behavior, but for the sex addict, they cause problems.

Most sexually addicted women have not had parental role modeling for how to have emotional intimacy in nonsexual ways. Research has shown that there often is a combination of rigidity and lack of emotional support in the sex addict's family of origin. The majority of women sex addicts were sexually abused in childhood -- 78% in one study.

Women sex addicts may have long periods of inactivity in their sexual addiction. At such times, they may become sexually anorexic, the opposite end of the sexual dysfunction spectrum. During periods of sexual anorexia, they may become excessive in other areas, for example eating.

Many sexually addicted women have sought professional help for psychological problems, but their sexual compulsivity was never addressed. Therapists who understand sex addiction, believe the client's sexual history, and can help the client stop the behaviors and deal with the underlying feelings, are the most helpful. In addition, 12 step programs such as SLAA, Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), Sexual Recovery Anonymous (SRA) and Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) can help women manage periods of abstinence and can teach them how to integrate healthy sexual behavior into their lives.

Madonna - Frozen

Love is a bird, she needs to fly
Let all the hurt inside of you die
You're frozen
When your heart's not open

Haiku Mind, An Interview With Clark Strand

Clark Strand is a writer, haiku teacher and poet, and formerly a Zen Buddhist monk and senior editor at Tricycle. His first book, Seeds From a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey, is due out in July from Hyperion. He recently spoke with Tricycle about haiku, writing, and meditation.

Tricycle: What relationship have you discovered between haiku and mediation?

Clark Strand: A certain kind of hokum accompanies much of haiku today. People imagine it to be something other than it is in spiritual terms. But haiku is very, very simple. In the same way that you make yourself very simple by following the breath. You clear your mind, let go of everything else. In the same way, writing haiku takes you right to the heart of the moment. That’s the Zen of haiku, really. Being able to let go of everything and enter into this space. Haiku is seventeen syllables long, so it seems very small.

Tricycle: Do you consider haiku to be part of your meditation practice, or is it a practice unto itself?

Clark Strand: I think it’s a practice unto itself. It’s not a formula that you can just practice and attain the desired results. You have to really throw your heart into it, with no remainder. It’s certainly not scary. It’s just this delightful little poem, really. The haiku mind and the Zen mind are ultimately not different from one another.

Tricycle: Do you have a strict discipline for practicing haiku?

Clark Strand: I did for many years. From the time of my elementary school days, I walked every day—two or three hours a day. Toward the end of high school, I started combining it with haiku, because I found that I could write haiku while I was on these walks. And so then, for almost twenty years, haiku was the thing I did when I was walking. That was my daily discipline. But I didn’t realize that this was a spiritual practice for a long time, I just did it for its own sake, almost as a hobby. I didn’t take it very seriously until I discovered that when everything else was gone, that was what remained. When I left the monkhood, when my first marriage was gone, when my first teacher had died. When there was nothing left, haiku was there—sort of a treasure that had been there all along and I had not taken it to heart.

Tricycle: You have taught haiku for years, and you have taught meditation. Do you see a similar transformation with students of each?

Clark Strand: Sometimes I see deeper transformation in my haiku students. The problem is that when people practice meditation—especially since we’re all almost all converts—of necessity that involves, at least in the early years, a sort of neurotic investment of energy. It doesn’t accomplish anything. You sort of overshoot the mark. My haiku students are able to absorb the teaching and find the teaching within themselves, almost without realizing that they have or that it’s coming.

Tricycle: How does haiku do that?

Clark Strand: It drops you right off at the doorstep [laughs]. You just knock and see for yourself. Sometimes, aiming lower you accomplish more, and haiku is something that, if you like it and practice it as a hobby, you may find that you are doing it all the time. So that this is a meditative awareness training you are engaging in constantly, all day long. How many people can really meditate or follow their breath all day long? How effective is that, really? I don’t know. I tend to think that people often have truer, deeper results when they approach their life or their lifestyle on a realistic level. Haiku does that for a lot of people, I think.

—Mary Talbot

check out how to write Haiki
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Haiku-Poem

Regaining Confidence in Artwork « Super-protective Factor

Regaining Confidence in Artwork « Super-protective Factor: "My daughter asked me to draw a princess for her. She had been drawing herself often, and recently she had stopped. She had begun asking me or my husband to do it for her every time. I knew that she was judging herself harshly, and I wanted to see if she could work through it.
I heard her request and told her, “No, honey. I know you can do this.” She whined and cried, “No, all I do is scribble-scrabble!” I asked her if someone had told her that and she said it came from school. I just stayed with her, letting her know I love her and that I believe in her and I know she can draw a princess. She cried and wailed and screamed “scribble-scrabble!” for 30 minutes. I kept loving her and reaffirming my belief in her. Finally, she picked up a crayon and started drawing. She was happy, willing and confident the rest of night.
I did question myself at first. And of course, I would love to draw a princess, but I know she loves to draw and it was painful to see her being so hard on herself.
Staylistening was a really comfortable way for me to set a limit without feeling like I was walking away or giving myself away. I knew I could really help her through this. It was really great to see her release that hurt – I didn’t want to jump in and save her. I had confidence in both of us.
After her cry, she was happy and confident. She has been drawing princesses, and more, ever since and has been giving them to me as presents. She hasn’t described her work as “scribble-scrabble” since. I even heard her sticking up for her little brother when another kid told him he was coloring scribble-scrabble.
–a mother in San Francisco, CA"
from the blog
http://superprotectivefactor.wordpress.com/
Stories from HAND TO HAND

Rocio Durcal - Amor Eterno

TRUE LOVE FOR ANOTHER COMES FROM SELF LOVE

As a teenager, I used to listen to Rocio's album over and over. Ah, how I spent many days singing along with her on other Juan Gabriel's songs. Juan Gabriel is an openly Mexican gay songwriter and singer who is well loved everywhere. Music is music and people dont care really.
After coming out, I learned so many jotos/as loved her. I wasnt the only one. Mention Rocio to latina lesbians and sale un swoon.
When I did a pilgrimage to Mexico and in San Juan de Los Lagos, Jalisco, we did a special mass and procession for our people. We all pitched in to pay for the church service and the conjunto band of teens to play music for us while we walked around the plaza. When we got to the steps of the church, Mrs.Aguallo, who had lost her husband a few years before, requested they sing "Amor Eterno". This was their song. This is my song for you, my lost one. May you find you way home soon.You are loved. Eres amor.

Tu eres la tristeza de mis ojos
que lloran en silencio por tu amor
me miro en el espejo y veo en mi rostro
el tiempo que he sufrido por tu adios

Obligo a que te olvide el pensamiento
pues siempre estoy pensando en el ayer
prefiero estar dormida que despierta
de tanto que me duele que no estes

Como quisiera ahhh que tu vivieras
que tus ojitos jamas se hubieran
cerrado nunca y estar mirandolos

Amor eterno e inolvidable
tarde o temprano estare contigo
para seguir amandonos

Yo he sufrido tanto por tu ausencia
que desde ese dia hasta hoy no soy feliz
y aunque tengo tranquila mi conciencia
se que pude haber yo hecho mas por ti

Oscura soledad estoy viviendo
la misma soledad de tu sepulcro
tu eres el amor del cual yo tengo
el mas triste recuerdo de Acapulco

Como quisiera ahhh que tu vivieras
que tus ojitos jamas se hubieran
cerrado nunca y estar mirandolos
amor eterno e inolvidable
tarde o temprano estare contigo
para seguir amandonos

Amor eterno (amore eterno) eterno....

Eternal Love
You are the sadness in my eyes
silently crying for your love
I look in the mirror and see my face
the time I have suffered for your goodbye

Force myself to forget the thought
I'm always thinking about it yesterday
I'd rather be asleep than awake
it hurts so much that your are not here with me

Ahhh I'm wanting you to be alive
your eyes never have been
never be closed and watching

Eternal love and unforgettable
sooner or later I will be with you
to continue loving you again

I have suffered so much for your absence
that from that day till today I am not happy
and although I quiet my conscience
I know I could have done more for you

Dark living loneliness
the same solitude of your grave
you are the love of which I have
The saddest memory of Acapulco

Ahhh I'm wanting to be alive with you
your eyes never have been
never be closed and watching
eternal love and unforgettable
sooner or later I will be with you
to continue loving you

Eternal Love (amore eterno) eternal .

Marcell and the Truth YOU SAVED ME

Need I say more?...Te mando mas healing..may you find peace and your way home

As

Dont you know that true love ask for nothing.

This is originally by Stevie Wonder but I also love this version by George Micheal and Mary J Blige.
This is what I define as suavecito/a. I like that Mary J is wearing a suit and that GM is all in his gayness.Its all about staying in love and loving yourself. Its about soul, self respect and self love of all of that you are good or bad. Its not about being somebody's else fake concept of cool or playing somebody's role or script. No formulas. Pure creativity is within them and their gifts.Being themselves...
I love that they are dancing with themselves and each other.
I sing this song all the time. Yeah I sing maybe not perfect but I sing. I just feel like this for the most part in everything I do. You cant take my joy away.. not now... not ever... even when Im sad..joy right here inside me.
Ill be loving you always even when I am being cabrona...maybe loving you means I have to be cabrona. Ill be loving you always..winkwink

AND SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

-John Lennon

I actually wrote this last year at Christmas, Monday, December 29, 2008

I woke up with this song in head and while I may be having a good time with family and friends this Christmas, the question today must be answered. What have I done?
The song is John Lennon’s Christmas Card to his beloved planet. Its more than a “I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” tralalalala song. It has the background singers and Yoko Ono singing, “War is over if you want it”
So John gave his planet a song wishing us well. John Lennon also left us reminder that if we really want war to be over, we can have it. So I begin to think of war.
If I think of what my country has done to other people in other countries or even within itself-a civil war I think about civil rights, apartheid and specifically apartheid with indigenous people and their descendents. I think about me and my Mexican people. I think of anti- immigration and gay hate. I think of self hate.I also think of conflicts between me and people in my community. In all my hurt, have I waged war against people, or have I waged war against the hurt between people? I have waged war with the hate and hurt within me and between us. I hate we cant get it together and be together. Togetherness is all I am after. Not together as in I own you. But a belonging. I belong to somebody. Somebody cares a lot about me is all about what I am about!! Have I gone to war against someone or something? Who and what am I fighting? And what is a good fight?
War is over if I want it.
So my war is over with you.
If no one is my enemy. Then what is destroying me and you? What keeps me from loving you? It brings me to my final conclusion that I am my own worst enemy. I have done my best to transform my hurt and I still remain in love. I want to master hurt -both mine and yours . I want to have the mastery to not walk away from a fight, but to face a fight by not fighting at all. I want to fight IT the things that divide us..no not you.
I just want to be able to wave my hand or say the right things to open your heart, or better yet by my mere presence transform hurt. So
I must remain in love to wage war against the hurt between us. This in turn will become effortless and then I will have learned the lesson of
Unconditional Love.
Now, then this turns into a good fight not war.
And so now this is Christmas and my question is:
And what have you done for love?
War is over.

AJUA! ITS BEGINNING TO LOOK LIKE CHREEZMAS!!!

I can eat 6 easy all by myself. But gringo version would be two each. Chubby gringos would eat 6 easy. Im hungry. I love toasting tamales on a griddle where the corn husk is slightly charred with hot coffee or chocolate in the morning with my beloved and family all beside me and good friends.....maybe with some homemade salsista y eggs with chorizo....makes see God all over again.add some mezcal in my coffee...ummm.
Ora Si its beginning to look like CHREEZMAS. I love you baby! Eres Dios!
P.S You can only see God, if you are really in love.

You'll Lose A Good Thing

I awoke the other morning with the song in a dream called,"You'll Lose a Good Thing". At first I didnt think about what it all meant but I started to sing it in the dream and I sounded good of course.So, I think this is a lot on peoples minds or at least on my jedi knights minds lately. Or of the awakened minds I know,we have this to ask of our beloved. If you lose me, you'll lose a GOOD thing.
Jessica, my Jedi knight friend says, MO BETTA.
i had found different versions, but I thought since Im Tejana, how perfect than Freddy Fenders version of soul song. I love it. Here is the version of it and yeah I am a GOOD person.

Archangel Tzaphkiel
B107 - Turquoise/Deep Magenta
Born - 14th December 2009 at 11.00am
The deeper aspects of the Divine Feminine
The watery aspects of the whole of Creation
Dwelling within Binah on the Tree of Life
Ruler of the order of the Angels called Aralin
Guardian of the Akashic Chronicles and their mysteries
The holding of an eternal ocean of compassion
The deeper aspect of intuition, the inner tuition of the heart
The overcoming of obstacles and the healing of strengths
An invitation to inner disarmament in order to reveal the True Gold
The death of what was and the purification of Myrrh
A love that asks us not to "get out of the Way,"
but to become the Way
A glimpse, and a call, from deeper realities and dimensions
An expansion of personal individuation into the collective
Through this bottle She comes to protect the light workers in the temples of their bodies

Dear fRIENDS

The birthing of TZAPHKIEL commenced on the 19th November, the morning after Linda Tucker and I completed the White Lion Aura-Soma® workshop at Dev Aura. In the birthing processes of the Equilibrium bottles, it has been the longest we have experienced so far. When the understanding was given that the birthing would be complete on the 14th December, we realised that this day also corresponds in the Angelic realm to the Angel Ariel, whose name means "Lion of God." In addition, the function of Ariel as "perceiver and revealer of Divine mysteries" further relates to TZAPHKIEL as guardian of the Akashic Records, also called the Book of Life, in which the story of each soul is said to be written. TZAPHKIEL is offering us access to the ancient-future mysteries of Love and Truth so that more of the totality of who we are might become manifest in our present lifetime. As we progress from the energies of B106 to B107, we are approaching the end of a long tunnel that has been filled with shadows. As the new light of personal and interpersonal harmony dawns, we can begin to see the peace that beckons to us from the spaciousness of a transformed future.

Since 14 December corresponds to the heart influence of Ariel, the connection between the Lion and Ariel (which relates to B23 of the Equilibrium bottles) with the emergence of TZAPHKIEL suggests that what comes to us through the birth of B107 is the power and purpose of a compassionate Lion-Hearted Love -- a love come to alchemize us further toward the golden-beingness of personal and collective individuation. Thus, TZAPHKIEL invites us to expand the feeling of love into the purpose and commitment of love. This expanded love holds an ocean of compassion in which we may bring all we have ever been into reconciliation and harmony with all we might become. It is a love that asks us not to get out of the way, but to become the Way. It is a love with the presence to not only energize the little things in our daily activities -- events, encounters and the why and how of what we do -- but also to propel and expand our personal individuation into collaboration with the individuations of those around us, and ultimately to all in the evolution of the collective Earth-Heart.

In our personal journey of individuation we often respond from the mental plane rather than listening more to the star within, the shining essence of our being which speaks to us an "inner tuition" ever reminding us of who we are. As we go along in a direction where decisions are made and perceptions understood mainly from the intellect, the inner light may seem to dim. Thus when we sense a "call" from a more profound level or dimension, at first we may feel an uneasiness or anxiety. The Deep Magenta in TZAPHKIEL is the depth that is being stirred as the soul asks us for deeper acknowledgement. Each of us is a gossamer light-being, fragile within the density of our physicality. We often push at our physicality too hard, and in our striving the gossamer may seem to shrink as we begin to feel our vulnerabilities, which we can mistake for weaknesses. However, when difficulties surface and give us a feeling of being over-exposed, they are actually asking to be healed, and ultimately revealed as our greatest strengths.

When we look at the numerical correspondences of 107, we are given also the sense of a test -- a test in relation to the karmic patterns of B10, the Wheel of Fortune, and B7, the Garden of Gethsemane, the final test of faith. B10 is about the karmic seeds and the consequence of what we plant, and the 7 is the test which is always amplified to maximise our opportunity as we plant the seeds. When these two bottles or understandings come together in the Green/Violet of the Troubadour, B17 (10 + 7), then we are reminded of the colours of the B106, Misty Pale Olive/Misty Lilac, and we see the progression from the muted light of B106 to the soul-stirred illumination of the Turquoise in B107. The B17 Troubadour bottle represents the outward journey of B95, Archangel Gabriel, messenger of the star. This reminds us of the soul/ incarnational star connection that enables us to bring down that which is above us through that which is before us: the information, energy and raw materials of the conditioned patterns needed to commence the transmutation toward the gold within us.

Since we tend to identify more with the dense material of our being, TZAPHKIEL as the Divine Mother comes in compassion to help us birth the light body from within the chemistry of our physical bodies. In this way we are offered the "light-support" needed to respond to the soul-stuff within and above. As we engage the deeper within-realms, the energetic presence of the soul star above us is drawn closer to our physicality. The "base mettle" of our humanity is transformed by the commingling of the human and the divine within us. We ultimately become "temples of light," as the fullness of who we are and what we are here to do is illuminated and expressed.

It might be said that if Truth is the "What" of our purpose, then Love is the "Way" which can illuminate how our Truth is to be expressed. TZAPHKIEL comes to help birth and accelerate us into alignment with our mission and purpose. Change and loss are experiences that create space in us quickly for the taking in of something new. As we become lion-hearted, with the courage to allow rather than resist difficult events or circumstances, we begin to see them as the contraction of energy that necessarily occurs before the bursting forth of new life. And when we are truly ready, some ordinary event will suddenly -- and yet naturally -- occur, leading to a remarkable encounter or opportunity that will seem to draw together all the elements of our creativity and life experiences as if we had been prepared our whole lives for this moment by some prescient future. As this occurs, TZAPHKIEL can help to ease us out of old karmic patterns as well as the contrivances of effort - the pushing and pulling at life to achieve this thing or that. Where we have become over-identified and fatigued by circumstance -- losing sight of our bigger purpose -- the rescue aspect of the Turquoise of B107 invites us into the grace of unfoldment and the wonder of allowing ourselves to simply step into the flow of our fulfilment.

The numerology of B107 further illuminates the rescue aspects of the Turquoise that are related to our individuation. 107 reduces to the single digit 8, the numerical correspondence for manifestation, and we must not forget that this is connected to the whole of the Aura-Soma® ("light-body") system (the letters of Aura-Soma numerically correspond to 8 as well). B8 (Anubis) relates the story of how the heart is weighed against the feather for lightness of being. As this story affirms, when love propels us we often move through our lives with a sense of flying or "floating on air." A heart that is not heard or expressed becomes heavy and wing-tethered. TZAPHKIEL calls forth the questions of Love and Truth that determine how much our hearts are heeded in our life choices: Do we love what we do, or are we doing something other than what we love, or are we unable to put our love into what we do because we are out of love with ourselves?

TZAPHKIEL therefore comes as the Divine Mother to support us with compassion and protection so that we might allow our hearts to return to expressing love through what we do and the way in which we do it. This support is offered in the Clear/Turquoise combination of B86, which is the return journey of the 8, relating to Titania, the Queen of the devas and the fairy realm. Titania's story of "release from misplaced love to a remembrance of her true feelings" invites us to activate the "colour code" of Love and Truth residing within our own hearts to create a life that matters -- a life that is utterly expressive of our own unique being and purpose. To help us with this, Titania's winged devic realm offers to be our intermediaries to the angelic realm in order to bring messages from above to the Earth plane. In this way, the Earth of our personal and collective physicalities, as well as our planetary dwelling, may be healed and evolved by the resonance and acknowledgement that human interaction with the devic world brings. Supporting this interconnection is also part of the mission of TZAPHKIEL.

TZAPHKIEL brings the first bottle to contain the essential oil of myrrh. This month commemorates the long-ago birth of a new Light of the Divine, heralded by the Nativity Star of the Christ. Paradoxically, myrrh -- long associated with funeral preparation -- was one of the three gifts given to the newborn Jesus. This correlates with the concept that the birth of the Christ in physical form began mankind's transition from the "old covenant" to the "new covenant" -- as the birthing of a Love that would ultimately transcend the aspects of dogma and law that held humanity in old Self-defeating patterns. Thus, a new birthing may be said to signify the death of what was so that what will be can be born. Myrrh's anti-microbial properties also suggest a support against subtle energies, as well as societal constructs and manipulations, which can sabotage us as we begin to birth more of the eternal totality of ourselves into the present life.

This energy of TZAPHKIEL, expressing the deepest aspects of the Divine Feminine to nurture and protect, does not have to be pushed or pulled, but rather allowed and accepted as an expression of the I AM of Life Itself ever-birthing within, through and as us. On the outside, it is Love living out loud with lyricism of heart and a joyful roar of purposefulness as we crawl, walk, leap and fly through our days and dreams upon this Earth. It is Love with the lightness of being that is so naturally expressed when it no longer has to strain against fear, unwillingness, shame or feelings of unworthiness that usurp our most precious birthright, which is to be Love Itself. This is indeed the time of emergence for the particular and unique hue of Love-in-Beingness which each of us has come to shine forth into this world, a world which so needs the full Love-and-Truth of us all.

In Love and Light
Mike Booth, with thanks to Terah Cox


AURA-SOMA Products Limited
Tetford, Horncastle, Lincs. LN9 6QB
T: +44 (0) 1507 533581 F: + 44 (0) 1507 533412
E: info@aura-soma.co.uk W: www.aura-soma.net
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Winter Solstice Monday Dec 21 2009

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, eden@13moon.com wrote:

From: eden@13moon.com
Subject: Soul-Stice 3 Year Phaselock with 2012!
To: locamotion1320@yahoo.com
Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009, 7:10 AM

Greetings Tribe of Light

WE ARE FAST APPROACHING SOUL-STICE - THE 3-YEAR PHASELOCK WITH 2012!

Please tune in, esp at the precise moment:
Monday Dec 21 9:47AM PST, Yellow Solar Human day, 13Kan

but also, know that during Solstice the Sun stands still for 3 days
before the Return of the Light - so it is an auspicious window of time!

While these are important times to gather with our family and communities, these are also important times to go deep within ourselves and to let go of the old, making space for new life and new creativity to blossom.

In this regard, I would like to share with you a message I found very inspiring, in the hopes it might also move you to engage in personal ceremony during this 3 day window.

The following message is from my dear friend and cosmic ally, Ariel Spilsbury (author of The Mayan Factor and the 13-Moon Oracle):

"Dear Beloveds,

What a powerful "Duir" door this Winter Solstice offers! Solstice means Sol-sun and stice..stands still. Far from the frenetic energy that is promulgated by the culture, the three days around Winter Solstice are a time to go inward, to "stand still" in the darkest time, to deeply inquire into what shadow baggage is calling to be totally released before you enter into the cycle of the Return of the Light. Some things are true, and sometimes they are truer still. This is one of those times. We have been personally and culturally in a process of dissolution of our baggage for many years now, and THIS solstice is time to look at what single shadow you have carried in your life that is like a "curse" or "spell" that you have "been under", that you are truly ready to take FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITS CREATION AND FULL RESPONSIBILTY FOR ITS RELEASE!

What pattern has come down your family line that you have felt to be completely unable to be changed, so powerful was its "spell"? And by spell i mean the strength and tenacity of the belief system or pattern. Reaction is a portable prison.* Culturally this is a potent time to break the spell and break free! These dark days during Solstice are particularly powerful for that process, so please consider taking time to do a deep contemplation to discover what the spell has been and do an intentional ceremony to release it for yourself and the collective One!

This does not have to be a "heads down, serious, un-fun" process. It can be as easy as asking yourself, "I wonder why I would cast this spell in my life and who is the character in me who is continuing to perpetrate it in my movie and further more "I think i will just make a new casting call and REWRITE THE SCRIPT of my life movie without that pattern!! That could be a lot more fun way to look at doing this process. "How can I animate and amplify the most desirable story/script for my life? What NEW VOW do I want to put into motion in my life?" For moving through the "duir" of the new year, these are questions worth answering in a Solstice Ceremony. As starhawk says in a wonderful chant you can use, "The Wheel is Turning, What Will You Give to the Night? Response: _____________ is gone with the night. Answer that and truly give it to the Dark Mother to be transmuted, that the Divine Child in you may be birthed this Solstice!!!

Starhawk's traditional Solstice Greeting: "This is the night of Solstice, the longest night of the year. Now darkness triumphs; and yet, gives way and changes into light. The breath of nature is suspended; all waits while within the Cauldron, The Dark King is transformed into the Infant Light. We watch for the coming of dawn, when the Great Mother again gives birth to the divine Child Sun, who is the bringer of hope and the promise of summer. This is the stillness behind motion, when time itself stops; the center which is also the circumference of all. We are awake in the night. We turn the Wheel to bring the light. We call the sun from the womb of night. Blessed Be."

"The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year and the longest night, known also as the Mother Night. It is considered to be the start of a new year and the rebirth of the new sun. We honor the power of darkness, the Divine Mother, the womb of creation. Yule is the return of the sun and rebirth of light. It is a time of new beginnings and a great time for dedication to new projects. We celebrate and welcome the rebirth of the sun Goddesses. Winter Solstice is a magical time for visions. Rhiannon rides through the dreams of her people by night, transporting them to the place between the worlds where they can create their own visions, giving them a gift of what they need most, helping them to make their dreams real. Let us collectively dream a new heart-centered world where our visions of Heaven on Earth are manifested."

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And here is an excerpt from my 2012 website to tune in with the larger picture
http://www.13moon.com/prophecy page.htm


2012 - What's the bottom line?

On a collective scale, we are experiencing a time period in which all that has been unconscious is becoming conscious. All that has been hidden is being revealed. Whether we look to our own lives, or to the state of global affairs, the locks are being thrown off of secrets, the wounds, vulnerabilities, shadows and incongruencies are being exposed. Simultaneously, the truth and depths of our authentic beingness is also being revealed. As the Hopi say, we are living in the Time of Great Purification. Simple words, vast meaning.

We are living in precious and precarious times; exciting, fragile and mysterious. Our human population of 7 billion people is unprecedented. According to Wikipedia, by the year 2000, there were 10 times as many people on Earth as there were 300 years ago. According to 2009 data from the CIA's factbook, the world's human population now increases by 220,980 people every day. We are each drops in this sea of humanity, part of the physical and psychic collective. We are remembering our unity by facing our shared challenges. The crises we now face are bringing us together to inspire our constructive creativity. There is no way out of this prophecy, only a way through.

This is now the time to embrace all that has been dishonored or denied, for it is emerging to be purified and sanctified. All that is manifesting on the inner and outer planes reflects the sacred intensity of these prophetic times. The polarities and imbalances within us and around us are becoming clearer. Love, beauty, co-creation, and compassion permeate this world. Multi-faceted victories of art, community support, healing and evolution shine all around us, illumating the spirited grace of our true nature. Meanwhile, this world is steeped in fear, brutality, pain, and disease. Endless anguish of anxiety, separation, disconnection, confusion, isolation - alongside the toxic realities of egoic, callous greed and corruption, materialism, addiction, and dangerous ignorance. Accountability is required on all levels of our existence. In this process of becoming transparent, we are invited to shed egoic programs of fear and limitation, letting go of and transducing old stories about ourselves and our identities.

The 2012 synchronization is reminding us we are on a journey together; the twists and turns of our lives contribute to the collective manifestation taking place. We need to honor the importance of the closing of this cycle without hyping it up with fear and expectations. We need to let go of focusing on dates in the future and embrace the possibilities that live within us, right now, that are here to guide us into the new pages that we can write with our collective consciousness.

Let's drop the script that 2012 is bringing the end of the world and understand that it is bringing the end of a great cycle. Rather than passive victims, we are here to be conscious participants of this world age transition process. Let us perceive 2012 as a code signalling us that these planetary moments are summoning us to align with our deepest potential and access the deepest dimensions of who we truly are, knowing that as a whole we are enduring a great initiation process to learn how to live in harmony with each other and with Nature.

It seems the fundamental question this prophecy is pointing us to is: How can we live and operate in conscious awareness of our Oneness, our Interdependence? We are being asked to deeply understand that our lives are intimately woven together with All of Life. We must embody this comprehension and let it guide our human efforts.

The bottom line is that this world is ours to shepard. This moment lives within us. We are all instruments of culture. We need to focus our attention on our powers of creativity as human players in this planetary equation. Our mental, spiritual, emotional and physical energies are the vivid colors splashing on the canvas of Life. What is the quality of our collective art? How can we refine our contribution?

This is no time to try to figure things out with the mind, but rather to learn to listen from the heart. The more conscious we become of our potential to be conscious, the more our potential finds us; our self-reflective awareness deepens and flowers.

We need to support ourselves in processing the trauma of these times. Rather than furthering the trauma by numbing out and being indifferent, it is important we face the pain and tragedy of our world that is crying out. The medicine this can offer comes when we let it break our hearts into even deeper compassion, opening the channels for more holistic responses.

Ultimately, we can only find a harmonious way through this passage by finding our hearts. That is the message. Why? Because our heart is naturally tuned to the unity of all of life, and therefore lives in respect of it. By finding genuine compassion, we access genuine wisdom. As Jose Arguelles says: "We are the Peacemakers we've been waiting for!"

The moments unfold,
bringing tests and opportunties.
The mystery blooms in our heart,
with petals of innocence and stalks of wisdom.
We shine as fellow rays of light
in an emerging garden of loving awareness.
Basking in each others' abundant colors,
we are One under the Sun.



ALL BLESSINGS OF COURAGE, JOY AND CLEAR KNOWING TO YOU IN THESE POTENT TIMES!
Eden Sky, Red Self-Existing Skywalker

SOLSTICE SYNCHRONIZATION: A New World Is The Song of Heart: http://galacticculture.wordpress.com/


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Grand Elder Grandfather Cirilo Perez Oxlaj | Shift of the Ages

Grand Elder Grandfather Cirilo Perez Oxlaj | Shift of the Ages

Changing Our Attitude Toward Pain

From the book, “Practicing Peace in Times of War” by Pema Chodron -An excerpt from the chapter Changing Our Attitude Toward Pain

According to Buddhist teachings, difficulty is inevitable in human life. For one thing, we cannot escape the reality of death. But there is also the realities of aging, of illness, of not getting what we want, and of getting what we don’t want. These kind of difficulties are facts of life. Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got cut or burned, it would hurt.

But the Buddhist teachings also say that this is not really what causes misery in our lives. What causes misery is always trying to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happenings-this sense of ours that there could be security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.
In this very lifetime we can do ourselves and this planet a great favor and turn this very old way of thinking upside down. As Shantideva points out, suffering has a great deal to teach us. If we use the opportunity when it arises, suffering will motivate us to look for answers. Many people, including myself, came to the spiritual path because of deep unhappiniess.Suffering can also teach us empathy for others who are in the same boat. Furthermore, suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear.

Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there’s been some kind of mistake, or we have lost it. In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real transformation can take place.

As long as we are caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as were always running away from discomfort, were going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and disappointment, and we feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us to develop inner strength. And what’s especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think we have hit bottom, when things are at their worst.

Instead of asking ourselves, “How can I find security and happiness?” we could ask ourselves, “Can I touch the center of my pain?” Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace-disappointment in all its many forms-and let it open me?” This is the trick.

Activism and Mind Training By Pema Chodron

LOJONG
Activism and Mind Training
Gampo Abbey

When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi.

This [lojong slogan] has various translations. I have trouble myself with the word evil. But I think the translations all use the word. What it's getting at is when you find your life situation is causing enormous pain —or even slight pain— it's causing discomfort, not hiding from that, not running from that, in the usual ways we do.

Instead, let it transform you into the path of bodhi, the path of awakening. Let it wake you up.

I imagine on any average day of your life, you have a few you have of these painful emotions, outward situations that cause you to feel a lot of distress, emotional intensity of some kind. Then what is the suggestion? It says, Let it transform you.

First thing is taking the attitude of being curious about what's happening. In other words when there is pain, becoming curious. Just that, letting there be kind of a pause before the chain reaction begins.

Acknowledging
Last week I talked about acknowledging being such a powerful tool. Acknowledging what's happening. You just acknowledge that pain is happening. Sometimes people will use different words they'll say, "My conditioning is kicking in here," or "My usual habits are being triggered here." You don't have to use fancy language. You can just acknowledge that you're feeling pain.

When you're sitting each day, instead of feeling the sitting is a time to chill out and forget about all that- particularly if it's got you in its grips, but little ones are also good to work with because they're not so overwhelming. When you sit down, first thing is you have to train in this extremely difficult and revolutionary advice to just let the words about it go, to let the words about it go, letting the thinking go, the story line. That is the basic instruction. It's not easy to do this. To sit and purposely churn it up a little bit. This is the contemplative part with your sitting practice this particular day- it may wind up being every day- you think about what's bothering you. To get in touch with the clenched quality of it, the sorrow, the grief, the loneliness.

What this is leading to is that first just acknowledge that something feels like a lump in your heart, or your throat, or your stomach, as is the energy if hot and molten, blocked and not moving, hard, but in any case pain, just pain.

Just start getting in touch with your body, find it in your body, find your unhappiness, your pain in your body. Usually we have places where we hold. It's valuable instruction to soften your belly because there is a lot of tension holding there. Just get in touch with it and breathe in and out where the tightness is.

You're trying to get close to it in an experiential way that's not just talking about it to yourself. Anything to get you away from the description of what's going on, who's to blame. Really being fully with the pain. This is somehow part of the pith of lojong is a whole different approach to being with pain, using it as an aid to awakening.

In order to use it as an aid to awakening you have to know it. We just feel this uncomfortableness and then there's a lot of mentally running away. Everything from dissociating so you're actually not there, which is involuntary and there's not a lot you can do about it except notice that you're dissociating. I'm not saying that you're supposed to do a specific thing, except that in your own way, in the way you're capable at that time, just acknowledging what's happening with an attitude of kindness. You can call it an attitude of self-compassion. That doesn't have to have any words to it. It's just a gentle approach to acknowledging that there's pain.

If it's possible to feel it, and the reason I'm stressing it is rather than think about it, you're going to think about it. The stories are going to blossom like a garden going wild, seeds popping out all over the place, flowering with your resentful thoughts, your how I'm going to get even thoughts, how you're going to make it all OK, that's my favorite, that's what I do. Or how I'm not going to do it this time. Whatever. As best you can, let the words go and really feel it as a way of knowing pain in a non-verbal way. Even if it's just for half a second.

If that's all you do, that is revolutionary right there. The heart of lojong is just taking a different attitude towards pain is something that can transform us rather than something we harden around, something that we protect against, we push away, and then the whole ego structure is really based on trying to get away from that pain.

It's kind of fear-based. I gave a teaching in Berkeley over Labor Day just on the subject of fear and I'll just say very briefly here what I taught that whole weekend is if you begin to find the pain, there is fear in it, it's the tension of pushing away, the hardness that you'll find there.

Someone said to me once, "Find the fear." I think the idea was that I was supposed to look and look and I wouldn't find anything. I came back and I said, "I found it. It's this huge painful knot in my solar plexus. And it's undeniably there." Then the teacher said, "That's already the resistance to the pain." What you're experiencing as pain is already the resistance to fear, the clutching, so there are meditations that could be of benefit to you where you breathe in and out of the pain. It's a mindfulness practice for going into the heart of the pain.
This is pain which we may call anger, pain we may call "rejection," pain we may call everything going wrong, stress, We call it a lot of things but if you actually sit down and go into it, you usually find a physically felt thing. Then you get as close as you can.

This is the pith of transforming unfavorable circumstances into the path of awakening, or letting the unfavorable circumstance transform you. People will often say "What does this have to do with the fact that people are living on the streets, people live lives where they are surrounded by violence, where they have no safety, no protection. I want to do something to help this situation. I don't want to just sit on my red or black or brown or whatever colored cushion and get in touch with MY pain."

The point here is that effective action starts with self-knowing, self-understanding of where we're caught.

You don't want to start helping people out of your uptightness, out of your strong sense of you're going to get revenge. It escalates the aggression and even though you may have short term successes, somebody has been so provoked by your aggression that the retaliation comes back. The cycle of aggression continues... century after century after century.

This is sort of like the Buck stops here. If you want to be an activist to work with the suffering of the world, jump right in and when you find that you can't do it, it's over your head, because your own fear, your own aggression, your own resentment, then do this practice.
It's not like either/or. You may be able to jump into a situation and the limits of your open-mindedness may be very wide. But when you meet the limits of your open-mindedness, then all your conditioning, all your uptightness click in.

Then it's like shutting down. You can't help this person anymore. They become your opponent. They're the ones driving you crazy. When you start to do the work of working with the suffering of the world, you find again and again that you can't get it to work out right. It's just people loving people.

It isn't that they turn out the way You want them to, or that the whole situation turn upside down because of your efforts. This is where the selflessness comes in, by jumping right in and being honest about meeting the edge of your open-mindedness and you experience it as pain, as rage, as resentment, as loneliness, as feeling misunderstood. We don't have to be activists to do this practice. It happens right in your own kitchen, your own office, on the streets, on buses, all over. You have plenty of opportunity to feel pain and to feel that we're in unfavorable circumstance or a difficult place...

The traditional lojong instruction is to then breathe in for yourself with the recognition that this pain is globally experienced, experienced by all of humanity, all our brothers and sisters feel this. We are very unique in terms of our personal histories, our stories.

When you get this close to pain, that's universal. Everybody feels fear, anger. Different things may trigger for different people. Breathe out sending relief.

GOOD MEDICINE

Photo by Christine Alicino.
Pema Chödrön in conversation with Alice Walker
San Francisco | September 1999

Alice Walker: About four years ago I was having a very difficult time. I had lost someone I loved deeply and nothing seemed to help. Then a friend sent me a tape set by Pema Chödrön called Awakening Compassion. I stayed in the country and I listened to you, Pema, every night for the next year. I studied lojong mind training and I practiced tonglen.

It was tonglen,the practice of taking in people's pain and sending out whatever you have that is positive, that helped me through this difficult passage. I want to thank you so much, and to ask you a question. In my experience suffering is perennial; there is always suffering. But does suffering really have a use? I used to think there was no use to it, but now I think that there is.

Pema Chödrön: Is there any use in suffering? I think the reason I am so taken by these teachings is that they are based on using suffering as good medicine, like the Buddhist metaphor of using poison as medicine. It's as if there's a moment of suffering that occurs over and over and over again in every human life.

What usually happens in that moment is that it hardens us; it hardens the heart because we don't want any more pain. But the lojong teachings say we can take that very moment and flip it. The very thing that causes us to harden and our suffering to intensify can soften us and make us more decent and kinder people. That takes a lot of courage.

This is a teaching for people who are willing to cultivate their courage. What's wonderful about it is that you have plenty of material to work with. If you're waiting for only the high points to work with, you might give up, but there's an endless succession of suffering. One of the main teachings of the Buddha was the truth of dukha, which is usually translated as "suffering." But a better translation might be "dissatisfaction." Dissatisfaction is inherent in being human; it's not some mistake that you or I have made as individuals. Therefore, if we can learn to catch that moment, to relax with it, dissatisfaction doesn't need to keep escalating. In fact it becomes the seed of compassion, the seed of loving kindness.

Alice Walker: I was surprised how the heart literally responds to this practice. You can feel it responding physically. As you breathe in what is difficult to bear, there is initial resistance, which is the fear, the constriction. That's the time when you really have to be brave. But if you keep going and doing the practice, the heart actually relaxes. That is quite amazing to feel.

Pema Chödrön: When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we're supposed to live up to. We feel we're supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain-breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are-heightens your awareness of exactly where you're stuck. Instead of feeling you need some magic makeover so you can suddenly become some great person, there's much more emotional honesty about where you're stuck.

Alice Walker: Exactly. You see that the work is right ahead of you all the time. Pema Chodron: There is a kind of unstuckness that starts to happen. You develop loving-kindness and compassion for this self that is stuck, which is called maitri. And since you have a sense of all the other sentient beings stuck just like you, it also awakens compassion. Alice Walker: I remember the day I really got it that we're not connected as human beings because of our perfection, but because of our flaws. That was such a relief.
Pema Chödrön: Rumi wrote a poem called Night Travelers. It's about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.

Alice Walker: I like what you say about understanding that the darkness represents our wealth, because that's true. There's so much fixation on the light, as if the darkness can be dispensed with, but of course it cannot. After all, there is night, there is earth; so this is a wonderful acknowledgment of richness. I think the Jamaicans are right when they call each other fellow sufferer, because that's how it feels.

We aren't angels, we aren't saints, we're all down here doing the best we can. We're trying to be good people, but we do get really mad. You talk in your tapes about when you discovered that your former husband was seeing someone else, and you threw a rock at him. This was very helpful (laughter). It was really good to have a humorous, earthy, real person as a teacher. This was great.

Pema Chödrön: When that marriage broke up, I don't know why it devastated me so much but it was really a kind of annihilation. It was the beginning of my spiritual path, definitely, because I was looking for answers. I was in the lowest point in my life and I read this article by Trungpa Rinpoche called Working With Negativity. I was scared by my anger and looking for answers to it. I kept having all these fantasies of destroying my ex-husband and they were hard to shake. There was an enormous feeling of groundlessness and fear that came from not being able to entertain myself out of the pain. The usual exits, the usual ways of distracting myself-nothing was working.

Alice Walker: Nothing worked.

Pema Chödrön: And Trungpa Rinpoche basically said that there's nothing wrong with negativity per se. He said there's a lot you can learn from it, that it's a very strong creative energy. He said the real problem is what he called negative negativity, which is when you don't just stay with negativity but spin off into all the endless cycle of things you can say to yourself about it.

Alice Walker: What gets us is the spinoff. If you could just sit with the basic feeling then you could free yourself, but it's almost impossible if you're caught up in one mental drama after another. That's what happens.

Pema Chödrön: This is an essential understanding of vajrayana, or tantric, Buddhism. In vajrayana Buddhism they talk about how what we call negative energies-such as anger, lust, envy, jealousy, these powerful energies-are all actually wisdoms in disguise. But to experience that you have to not spin off; you have to be able to relax with the energy. So tonglen, which is considered more of a mahayana practice, was my entry into being able to sit with that kind of energy. And it gave me a way to include all the other people, to recognize that so many people were in the same boat as I was. Alice Walker: You do recognize that everybody is in that boat sooner or later, in one form or other. It's good to feel that you're not alone.

Pema Chödrön: I want to ask you about joy. It's all very well to talk about poison as medicine and breathing in the suffering and sending out relief and so forth, but did you find any joy coming out of this?

Alice Walker: Oh Yes! Even just not being so miserable. Part of the joyousness was knowing we have help. It was great to know that this wisdom is so old. That means people have had this pain for a long time, they've been dealing with it, and they had the foresight to leave these practices for us to use. I'm always supported by spirits and ancestors and people in my tribe, whoever they've been and however long ago they lived. So it was like having another tribe of people, of ancestors, come to the rescue with this wisdom that came through you and your way of teaching.

Pema Chödrön: I think the times are ripe for this kind of teaching.

Alice Walker: Oh, I think it's just the right medicine for today. You know, the other really joyous thing is that I feel more open, I feel more openness toward people in my world. It's what you have said about feeling more at home in your world. I think this is the result of going the distance in your own heart-really being disciplined about opening your heart as much as you can. The thing I find, Pema, is that it closes up again. You know?

Pema Chödrön: Oh no! (laughter) One year of listening to me and your heart still closes up?

Alice Walker: Yeah. It's like what you have said about how the ego is like a closed room and our whole life's work is to open the door. You may open the door and then discover that you're not up to keeping it open for long. The work is to keep opening it. You have an epiphany, you understand something, you feel slightly enlightened about something, but then you lose it. That's the reality. So it's not a bad thing.

Pema Chödrön: No.

Alice Walker: But it's frustrating at times, because you think to yourself, I've worked on this, why is it still snagging in the same spot?

Pema Chödrön: That's how life keeps us honest. The inspiration that comes from feeling the openness seems so important, but on the other hand, I'm sure it would eventually turn into some kind of spiritual pride or arrogance. So life has this miraculous ability to smack you in the face with a real humdinger just when you're going over the edge in terms of thinking you've accomplished something. That humbles you; it's some kind of natural balancing that keeps you human. At the same time the sense of joy does get stronger and stronger.

Alice Walker: Because otherwise you feel you're just going to be smacked endlessly, and what's the point? (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: It's about relaxing with the moment, whether it's painful or pleasurable. I teach about that a lot because that's personally how I experience it. The openness brings the smile on my face, the sense of gladness just to be here. And when it gets painful, it's not like there's been some big mistake or something. It just comes and goes.

Alice Walker: That brings me to something else I've discovered in my practice, because I've been doing meditation for many years-not tonglen, but TM and metta practice. There are times when I meditate, really meditate, very on the dot, for a year or so, and then I'll stop. So what happens? Does that ever happen to you?

Pema Chödrön: Yes. (laughter)

Alice Walker: Good!

Pema Chödrön: And I just don't worry about it.

Alice Walker: Good! (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: One of the things I've discovered as the years go on is that there can't be any "shoulds." Even meditation practice can become something you feel you should do, and then it becomes another thing you worry about. So I just let it ebb and flow, because I feel it's always with you in some way, whether you're formally practicing or not.

My hunger for meditation ebbs but the hunger always comes back, and not necessarily because things are going badly. It's like a natural opening and closing, or a natural relaxation and then getting involved in something else, going back and forth.

Alice Walker: I was surprised to discover how easy it was for me to begin meditating many years ago. What I liked was how familiar that state was.

The place that I most love is when I disappear. You know, there's a point where you just disappear. That is so wonderful, because I'm sure that's how it will be after we die, that you're just not here, but it's fine.

Pema Chödrön: What do you mean exactly, you disappear?

Alice Walker: Well, you reach that point where it's just like space, and you don't feel yourself. You're not thinking about what you're going to cook, and you're not thinking about what you're going to wear, and you're not really aware of your body. I like that because as a writer I spend a lot of time in spaces that I've created myself and it's a relief to have another place that is basically empty.

Pema Chödrön: I don't think I have the same experience. It's more like being here —fully and completely here. It's true that meditation practice is liberating and timeless and that, definitely, there is no caught-up-ness. But it is also profoundly simple and immediate. In contrast, everything else feels like fantasy, like it is completely made up by mind.

Alice Walker: Well, I feel like I live a lot of my life in a different realm anyway, especially when I'm out in nature. So meditation takes me to that place when I'm not in nature. It is a place of really feeling the oneness, that you're not kept from it by the fact that you're wearing a suit. You're just in it; that's one of the really good things about meditation for me.

Judy Lief: I assume, Alice, that as an activist your job is to take on situations of extreme suffering and try to alleviate them to some degree. How has this practice affected your approach to activism?

Alice Walker: Well, my activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I really feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.

Judy Lief: This is where you bring together your private practice and your public action.

Alice Walker: Yes. Before I was sort of feeling my way. I went to places like Mississippi and stood with the people and realized the suffering they were experiencing. I shared the danger they put themselves in by demanding their rights. I felt this incredible opening, a feeling of finally being at home in my world, which was what I needed. I needed to feel I could be at home there, and the only way was to actually go and connect with the people.

Pema Chödrön: And the other extreme is when our primary motivation is avoidance of pain. Then the world becomes scarier and scarier.

Alice Walker: Exactly.

Pema Chödrön: That's the really sad thing-the world becomes more and more frightening, and you don't want to go out your door. Sure there's a lot of danger out there, but the tonglen approach makes you more open to the fear it evokes in you, and your world gets bigger.

Judy Lief: When you are practicing tonglen, taking on pain of others, what causes that to flip into something positive, as opposed to being stuck in a negative space or seeing yourself as a martyr?

Alice Walker: I think it's knowing that you're not the only one suffering. That's just what happens on earth. There may be other places in the galaxy where people don't suffer, where beings are just fine, where they never get parking tickets even. But what seems to be happening here is just really heavy duty suffering. I remember years ago, when I was asking myself what was the use of all this suffering.

I was reading the Gnostic Gospels, in which Jesus says something that really struck me. He says basically, learn how to suffer and you will not suffer. That dovetails with this teaching, which is a kind of an acceptance that suffering is the human condition.

Pema Chödrön: It is true people fear tonglen practice. Particularly if people have a lot of depression, they fear it is going to be tough to relate with the suffering so directly. I have found that it's less overwhelming if you start with your own experience of suffering and then generalize to all the other people who are feeling what you do. That gives you a way to work with your pain: instead of feeling like you're increasing your suffering, you're making it meaningful.

If you're taught that you should do tonglen only for other people, that's too big a leap for most people. But if you start with yourself as the reference point and extend out from that, you find that your compassion becomes much more spontaneous and real. You have less fear of the suffering you perceive in the world-yours and other people's.

It's a lot about overcoming the fear of suffering. My experience of working with this practice is that it has brought me a moment by moment sense of wellbeing. That's encouraging to people who are afraid to start the practice-to know that relating directly with your suffering is a doorway to wellbeing for yourself and others, rather than some kind of masochism.

Alice Walker: I would say that is also true for me in going to stand where I feel I need to stand. I feel I get to that same place. I also appreciate the teaching on driving all blame into yourself. We need a teaching on how fruitless it is to always blame the other person.

In my life I can see places where I have not wanted to take my part of the blame. That's a losing proposition. There's no gain in it because you never learn very much about yourself. You don't own all your parts. There are places in each of us that are quite scary, but you have to make friends with them. You have to really get to know them, to say, hello, there you are again. It's very helpful to do that.
Pema Chödrön: One of the things the Buddha pointed out in his early teaching was that everybody wants happiness or freedom from pain, but the methods human beings habitually use are not in sync with the wish. The methods always end up escalating the pain. For example, someone yells at you and then you yell back and then they yell back and it gets worse and worse. You think the reason not to yell back is because, you know, good people don't yell back. But the truth is that by not yelling back you're just getting smart about what's really going to bring you some happiness.

Judy Lief: The lojong slogan says Drive all blames into one, that is, yourself. But there are definitely situations where from the conventional viewpoint there are bad guys and good guys, oppressors and oppressed. How do you combine taking the blame yourself with combating oppression or evil that you encounter?

Alice Walker: Maybe it doesn't work there. (laughter) Pema why don't you take that one. (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: Well, here would be my question: does it help to have a sense of enemy in trying to end oppression?

Alice Walker: No.

Pema Chödrön: So maybe that's it.

Alice Walker: I think it's probably about seeing. As Bob Marley said so beautifully, the biggest bully you ever did see was once a tiny baby. That's true. I mean, I've tried that on Ronald Reagan. I even tried that on Richard Nixon, but it didn't really work that well. But really, when you're standing face to face with someone who just told you to go to the back of the bus, or someone who has said that women aren't allowed here, or whatever, what do you do? I don't know what you do, Pema, but at that moment I always see that they're really miserable people and they need help. Now, of course, I think I would love to send them a copy of "Awakening Compassion."(laughter)

Pema Chödrön: It's seeing that the cause of someone's aggression is their suffering. And you could also realize that your aggression is not going to help anything. So you're standing there, you are being provoked, you are feeling aggression, and what do you do? That's when tonglen becomes very helpful. You breathe in and connect with your own aggression with a lot of honesty. You have such a strong recognition in that moment of all the oppressed people who are provoked and feeling like you do. If you just keep doing that, something different might come out of your mouth. Alice Walker: And war will not be what comes out.

Judy Lief: It seems to me that Dr. Martin Luther King had the quality of a tonglen practitioner. Yet he didn't ask us not to take stands.

Alice Walker: He was from a long line of Baptist preachers, someone who could really get to that place of centeredness through prayer and through love. I think the person who has a great capacity to love, which often flowers when you can see and feel the suffering of other people, can also strategize. I think he was a great strategist. I think he often got very angry and upset, but at the same time he knew what he was up against. Sometimes he was the only really lucid person in a situation, so he knew how much of the load he was carrying and how much depended on him.

As activists, it is really important to have some kind of practice, so that when we go out into the world to confront horrible situations we can do it knowing we're in the right place ourselves. Knowing we're not bringing more fuel to the fire, more anger, more despair. It's difficult but that should not be a deterrent. The more difficult something seems, the more it's possible to give up hope. You approach the situation with the feeling of having already given up hope, but that doesn't stop you. You said we should put that slogan about abandoning hope on our refrigerators.

Pema Chödrön: "Give up all hope of fruition."

Alice Walker: Right. Just do it because you're doing it and it feels like the right thing to do, but without feeling it's necessarily going to change anything.

Pema Chödrön: Something that I heard Trungpa Rinpoche say has been a big help to me. He said to live your life as an experiment, so that you're always experimenting. You could experiment with yelling back and see what happens. You could experiment with tonglen and see how that works. You could see what actually allows some kind of communication to happen. You learn pretty fast what closes down communication, and that's the strong sense of enemy. If the other person feels your hatred, then everyone closes down.

Alice Walker: I feel that fear is what closes people down more than anything, just being afraid. The times when I have really been afraid to go forward, with a relationship or a problem, is because there is fear. I think practice of being with your feelings, letting them come up and not trying to push them away, is incredibly helpful.

Question from the audience: Thank you both for being here and bringing so much pleasure to so many people tonight. I'm asking a question for a friend who couldn't come tonight. She was at Pema's three day seminar and she left on Saturday feeling badly because she had got in touch with her anger and couldn't stay. Now she feels she's a bad Buddhist, a bad practitioner. I've been trying to tell her it's okay but I think she needs to hear your words.

Pema Chödrön: Well, tell her we're used to using everything that we hear against ourselves, so it's really common to take the dharma teachings and use them against yourself. But the fact is we don't have to do that anymore. We don't have to do that. It's just like Alice saying that the heart opens and then it closes, so she has to realize that's how it is forever and ever. She'll get in touch and then she'll lose touch and get in touch and lose touch. So she has to keep on going with herself and not give up on herself.

Question: This is really hard on her because you two are her favorite people in the entire world.

Alice Walker: And she didn't come?

Question: She's so broken-hearted.

Pema Chödrön: She didn't come because she was so ashamed of herself for not being able to stay with it...that's not true, is it?

Question: Yes, it is. Pema Chodron: Really. Wow. You should tell her that she's just an ordinary human being. (laughter) What's a little unusual about her is that she was willing to get in touch with it for even a little bit.

Question: My name is Margaret, and I have practiced Tibetan Buddhism for a number of years. About eighteen months ago, right around the time that for the first time in my life I fell in love with a woman, the Dalai Lama made a number of comments pointing out where the Tibetan tradition did not regard homosexuality as a positive thing, but in fact as an obstacle to spiritual growth. It reached the point that I left the sangha I was connected with and found a different part of the spiritual path that's working for me now.

I have gay and bisexual friends who are interested in Buddhism but some of them have been stopped by what the Dalai Lama had to say and by the lack of coherent answers from other people. I think it would be a big service if you could address that.

Pema Chödrön: Well, listen. I have so much respect for the Dalai Lama and I think that's where people get stuck. I didn't actually hear those comments, and I heard there were also favorable comments. But aside from all that, as Buddhism comes to the West, Western Buddhist teachers simply don't buy that. It's as if Asian teachers said that women were inferior or something. I mean, it's absurd. That's all there is to it. (applause) It's just ridiculous.

Question: Let me ask you to say that often and loud.

Pema Chodron: Sure! I go on record. And I'm not alone, it's not something unique with me. Western teachers, coming from this culture, we see things pretty differently on certain issues and this is one, for sure. But the Dalai Lama is a wonderful man, and I have a feeling that if he were sitting here he'd have something else to say on the subject.

Alice Walker: You know, when he was here at the peace conference he was confronted by gay men and lesbian women and he readily admitted that he really didn't know. He didn't seem rigid on it. But also, when there is wisdom about, we should have it! Wisdom belongs to the people. We must never be kept from wisdom by anybody telling us you can't have it because you're this, that or the other.

Question: I have a question about the connection between tonglen and joy. I kind of understood the moderator's question about when you breathe in so much suffering, how do you avoid becoming so burdened or martyred by it? What I'm understanding about tonglen is that there's something kind of transformative about it, when you breathe in suffering and then you breathe out relief and healing. I keep thinking about that prayer of St. Francis of Assisi about being an instrument of peace, and where there is hatred, let me sow love, and where there is despair, let me sow hope. I'm wondering if joy has a place in the ability to make that transformation.

Alice Walker: I think the practice of tonglen is really revolutionary, because you're taking in what you usually push away with everything you've got, and then you're breathing out what you would rather keep. This is just amazing. I mean, it really shakes you up.

From http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/qa3a.php