Seeds of Light

Can I walk each day in a sacred way? Can I start each day in the clear light mind? Can I have my work and play circle around my spiritual practice rather than fitting my spiritual practice into my day? These are the questions that are front and center on returning from my Joshua Tree Vision Quest. The deep nourishment I received from my reflective time on the desert feels almost like waking up again from a long sleep. I want to stay awake. And I want to stay engaged! I feel like I am watering little seeds of light.

At Joshua Tree I connected deeply with what I consider to be my real work, which is to plant and nurture seeds of hope, and to awaken myself so that who I am and what I do supports others waking up.

This work is most engaged with my extended family, and the staff and clients I work with through The Grove, many of whom have left The Grove to start their own businesses and take their learning and insights into new jobs. I spent hours thinking about how the desert plants seed themselves, and appreciated that we humans seed our lives through our projects and stories. When we work side by side with another, we learn from the way they are in life, and these experiences are the deep templates that guide our development.

Here’s an instance. Last week was my assistant Callie’s last week at The Grove. She has a wonderful new job in the health care field in Los Angeles with many new opportunities. She’s wanted to work in health care for a long time. So while I could get into feeling the loss, for Callie is a bright light as many of you know, I found myself deeply excited at the thought of how her two years at The Grove will bloom in her and others lives as she carries the “seed stock” of her experience forward. I feel like her leaving and carrying on is what we are all about.

Another example happened this Wednesday. At Joshua Tree, the fasting and daily meditating, and long hours of slowing down and drinking in every little breath of the wind, brought life back into high relief. It is everywhere and it is wondrous. But to have this feeling continue is even more wonderfous. Last Wednseday ALL seven of us showed up at Elder’s Circle at Chayim Barton’s office in Capitola to tell our vision quest stories to the other members who didn’t go to the desert. This was a first, where an entire group came to the follow-up meeting. It quickened our energy, and magnified the potency of our experiences as others witnessed our insights and changes. I shared my own commitment to begin each day in meditation, and have my day proceed as if the quest sensibility were a permanent state of awakeness. And each day so far I have done that, and the days have been very, very special.

A final seed of light from this quest was planted on the trip back with Sky and Laurie. As I said in my earlier post, they are both students of Chayim Barton, as am I. We are all studying the Mahayana Buddhist teachings and practices of Lama Thubten Yeshe, the Rinpoche who came to Santa Cruz in the 1960s and taught there for years, establishing the Vajrapani Center in Boulder Creek. Chayim studied with Lama Yeshe for over six years, including a year in Nepal at a monastery there. His doctoral thesis compares the Six Yogas of Naropa, at the center of Lama Yeshe’s practice, to the work of Carl Jung. Angelis Arian was one of his facult advisors at California School of Integral Psychology where he received his degree. He is a deep and very knowledgeable lineage holder.

The purpose of the Mahayana teachings is to help practitioners become enlightened in their lifetimes. The meditations are inspired by thousands of years of experience and inner research on the part of the Tibetan lamas, and are very detailed in their intent and structure. I’ve been a fairly serious practitioner, but found a renewed commitment on this quest, as well as a renewed connected with my own experiences with the teachings of Jesus. But those are stories are for another time.

What I would like to share now is Sky and Laurie’s  discovery of some new teachings by Tsultrum Allione, a Tibetan nun, who has written a booked called Feeding Your Demons, which takes traditional Chod practices and translates them into some very practical exercises that one can do without knowing anything about Buddhism or needing to take up that tradition. The traditional practices are about cutting away our attachments and ego fixations. The assumption in this work is that the things that plague us— our hurts, our anxieties, our problems and challenges, are all kinds of demons when they get a grip on us and become fixtures in our lives. They are the source of a lot of the pain and grief we experience. Allione’s contribution is understanding that what our demons and shadow issues need is nurturance and acceptance, not denial and resistance. She goes beyond “cutting away” to actually accepting and feeding the hurtful parts. Nurturance, she has found, transforms demonic energy into useful ally energy in our lives, while resistance makes problems get worse. The implications for organizations, foreign policy, education, and  personal wrestling with things like dieting, drug abuse, work-a-holism, crack berry addiction and the like are staggering if what she has found is true.

All the way up from Joshua Tree, into Barstow and Bakersfield, and on into the night around Watsonville, Laurie was instructing me on this practice. The form is relatively simple. You imagine the problem in detail. You animate it so you can talk to it. You then ask three questions:

1. What do you want?
2. What do you need?
3. What will you feel like if you get what you need?

Upon answering these questions, you then meditate and feed the “demon” honey-nectar and whatever else it needs in you imagination, sitting with that feeling of acceptance and nurturance until the demon changes. And it will morph into something else that can be your ally. When this change happens you ask the new figure some questions:

1. How can you help me?
2. How can you protect me?
3. How can I access you in the future?

This kind of imagination work is something I’m fairly familiar with, having done voice dialogue with my executive coach Vanda Marlow, and done guide meditations for years where I imagine a guide that takes me to talk to different energies represented by archetypes I want to know better. I’m also fairly used to doing dialogue writing in my journal where I ask and answer questions with imaginary people. So I was pretty excited about what I was learning. And something deep inside suggested that this nurturing orientation was important and maybe a missing piece from our  contemporary “problem solving” toolbox.

This “seed” Laurie and Sky planted took root this week! I woke on Friday to a dream of rage. After a week of being very open and light, this was a big surprise. I was yelling at people and even hitting them in my dream. My right arm felt tight and wanted to hit out. I was taken aback, and decided to try chod. I meditated on the feeling and after a while it animated as a dark, dangerous looking moray eel. It wanted to eat and bite something, and said it needed love and acceptance. It would feel charged, and potentiated and be peaceful in its cave if it got what it needed.

I imagined it getting what it needed and feeding on honey-nectar, for a good ten minutes. I wasn’t sure what would happen. The eel really fit with what I was dreaming. Then an amazing thing happened. The darkness began to crumble around the head of the eel, and the topknot of a quail emerged, then the whole quail!

The quail is a very important bird to my father, I realized immediately, and I immediately knew that whatever I was feeling was seated deep in my early relations with this forceful man. But I continued, taking the quail seriously.  It said it could help by keeping me in touch with my vulnerability and innocence! That was what I was working on a lot in the desert! It said it could protect me because it could fly away and could scurry under bushes when things got rought. And it said I could access it by listening for its call, and laughing as I heard it.

I couldn’t believe the feeling I had then—like the sun had come out from behind the clouds. I went to a meeting of the Heartland Circle Thought Leaders at the Presidio and felt wide open, as though I had just come off the quest that day. And the feeling stayed all day.

So this quest is already flowering. There are other stories, but these several give you a flavor of how it’s going. I am more deeply grounded now in knowing that my inner orientation and attitude are foundational in how I move through each day, AND that I can strengthen this foundation more by beginning each day reaching out to my true nature and clear light mind than by reading the newspaper or diving into my computer. I can do these things later – and the chances of my being truly responsive, rather than just asleep and reactive, are many times greater.

I share all this because I think we all benefit by sharing more of our lives and how we are working to cope with the many pressures of our times. My path won’t be your path. But I suspect it’s hopeful to sense that there is a path. It sure is for me.

As I came back to my family and The Grove and my clients and colleagues, I feel so blessed that I can share my life with people who are open to having me be me, and wanting to hear my stories and share theirs back. The Grove’s facilitation work is at root about deep acceptance of others, of listening them into being and into their dreams, of reflecting these dreams in word and image. I come back from the desert with an even greater commitment to this kind of service, and some ideas about how it might be even richer if I keep myself centered in the mystery, and nurturing my seeds of light.