Recently in Personal Reflections Category

It's been thirteen months since my father passed away and I feel that a certain period of the mourning process has been completed. I don't have flashbacks of his last moments on a daily basis any more.  After Shivaratri, we took down the altar commemorating him and created a simpler "ancestral guides and helpers" altar, which currently hosts Dad and Rajaram, our cat. Rajaram was in a very nice little frame which I got as a Christmas present from Kate (my sister) and Dad, meanwhile, just had a laminated photo. So we got a nice wooden frame and new photo for Dad and installed him properly on the new altar. He seemed to like that, as he appeared in a dream last night saying, "I'll always be your father and I'll always be there for you." Very comforting!

Ma’s Song

I do not make my abode

On the lofty mountain peaks

For the way of ice and snow

Is not my way.

I have pitched my tent beside you, friend,

In the valley of human experience.

Bring me your tender joys

And I will feed them corn

From my own hands

And take delight as they chirp beside my door.

Give me your mewing sorrows;

I will cradle and stroke them lovingly,

For they are mine.

I hang your tears

As prayer flags in the breeze,

I wear your smiles,

A garland on my breast.

Let me iron the creases of perplexity

And sweep the dust of confusion from your heart.

I will untie your heavy boots of weariness

And worship them on the altar of our longing.

 I pour myself into your thirsty cup,

Offer my grief as ointment for your wounds.

The ringing of your laughter and your cries

Has called me to this holy pilgrimage.

I have come to you from the lofty mountain peaks

For the way of ice and snow is not my way.

Today is my father's birthday so I wanted to post something in memory. Here is a dream I recently had.
I go to a hospital and meet a male nurse dressed in black who tells me Dad is alive. I tell him that I was there when Dad died and all my friends know this. He replies, “He fell asleep for a while but now he’s awake.”  I walk to the hospital cafeteria thinking that we need to proceed with the utmost caution and great boldness. A woman dressed in black walks over and sits opposite me at the table. She has a white and gold name tag saying Dr Alia Moscovitch. (Moscovitch was my grandmothers’ maiden name.) She says to me, “We need to proceed with the utmost caution and great boldness.” I don’t want her to talk down to me so I tell her that I’m also a doctor myself. She replies, “Yes but it’s different because he’s your father and you’re emotionally involved.”
 I get ready to go to see Dad by putting on ‘Sufi order of the West earrings’ which are large oval shaped earrings, white with gold Arabic calligraphy of Quaranic verses.  I also take off the white cotton dervish hat I’m wearing and put on a white felt Mevlevi hat. Then I go down a corridor into a room where there is an elderly Jewish gentleman sitting up in bed. I say, “Is it really you?” “Yes.” “You’re Peter?” “Yes.” “And you’re my Dad?” “Yes”. I give him a hug and then I wake up, not sure whether my father is really dead or not.

Here is the interpretation by Habiba, our Sufi circle leader:
I feel this dream is a confirmation for you that your father has passed safely into the Realm of Beauty and that your grandmother was somehow helpful in this transition.  He is alive, awake and well and resting there. 

It feels as if putting on the Sufi garb somehow allowed you to travel briefly to the other side and make this confirmation for yourself.

It’s been quite a while since I blogged and I’m looking back at all the things that have happened in the last twelve months. First, reconnecting with Sadananda after it became apparent that he wasn’t really going to leave and take up a new life as a householder…meaning that I’m also not going to take up a new life as a sannyasi either! Instead, here we both are in our urban ashram living a rich and humble life just as we have been doing for twenty years.

In the course of taking temporary vows of sannyas I learnt that celibacy is possible—with a lot of prayer and guru’s grace— but I also realised that it is not truly what I desire.  My heart is drawn to the teachings of the path of love, intimacy and communion rather than to the way of solitude.

Then, my father having a heart attack and going to visit him when he was quite weak, yet still, with great determination, taking a little walk every day.

Attending the Swastha Ayurveda conference in London, where I was a ‘special guest speaker,’ talking on spiritual aspects of Ayurveda—specifically, the importance of love, compassion, joy and equanimity as qualities of the physician.

 And a Sufi pilgrimage in Turkey with Sadananda, visiting Istanbul and Konya. It was wonderful to be able not just to visit places like the Blue Mosque but also to join in community prayer in these holy places. And Rumi’s tomb in Konya was a profound experience.

 Soon the first semester of our new Gurukula program started up and the ashram was full of happy, excited students making potions, cooking, giving oil massages, assisting in clinic and attending classes. It was a fulfilling experience, yet coloured at the same time with painful news from home. In November both my parents had open heart surgery at Papworth National Heart Hospital in the UK. My mother made a good recovery but not so my father. As it turned out, open heart surgery re-awakened the TB he had as a young man. He was in intensive respiratory care for six weeks.

In the winter holidays I went to Ipswich to visit my father, arriving just in time to sit and hold his hand as he was passing on. We worked together with a Dzog Chen (Buddhist) practice of the triple ah, “Ah, ah, aaah,” dissolving with the ‘aaah’ into the vast expense of reality. As he was dying we did the triple ‘ah’ and he dissolved on the final ‘aaah’ and didn’t take another breath. It was a very special moment. He left his body on New Years Eve and as we left the hospital it was the stroke of midnight. The sky filled with fireworks and all the church bells rang. It was quite a send-off.

After the funeral I returned to Boulder dealing with jet lag, school, clinic, running the ashram and the grief process. Being a Ma does not make one immune to grief. If anything it makes feelings more poignant and intense. As if that were not enough to deal with I slipped on black ice and snapped the head off my left radius, (I’m a leftie) and had to have surgery. Now my arm is out of the cast and I’m in hand therapy. Not yet fully functional by any means.

At one moment I burst into tears declaring, “This year is half over and all it has consisted of is my father dying and me breaking my arm!” This, in a way, was true. It’s hard to follow the usual routines when your energy is low and your arm is in a cast. But, it’s also true that, “My life is my retreat,” and retreat practice isn’t always easy. Best to take the sacrament of the present moment even when it appears in unpleasant forms, as De Caussade reminds us in Self Abandonment to Divine Providence. Aside from the fact that my own problems are quite insignificant compared to the lives of people in Darfur or the Svat Valley or Baghdad, I understand that these are simply purifications along the way.

And today we had a beautiful community garden day, planting summer squash, zucchinis, winter squash, pumpkins, purple haze carrots, cucumbers and nasturtiums.

Last week I did panchakarma, a week of Ayurvedic cleansing and seclusion. During this sacred time I received the following dream.

I am by the side door of the ashram talking to a man when I realize I am completely naked. Although neither of us is embarrassed it seems odd so I go to my room and dress. Two men appear at the door of my room. One of them wears a red t-shirt and is naked from the waist down. I shout at him to go away. Then I look at the dresser in the room and see that there is  a large parcel there from my sister. At once I realize the men were angels, because the parcel appeared mysteriously. Now I dream that I wake up. I am playing the radio loudly in the early morning and it wakes Sadananda up. I realize that I turned it on in my sleep. I look at the dresser, the parcel isn't there and I realize I dreamed the angels. Sadananda comes in from outside with five stray children he found outside. One is a boy and the rest are girls and they are half Indian with dark complexions. They are hungry so we go to Matam Fez to eat. Sadananda drives us all there. I am in the restaurant but to find Sadananda and the children I have to climb some rickety stairs and haul myself on to a loft with no hand rail. I am scared of heights and get stuck. A man on the stairway behind me says "What's the problem?" and then he agrees it’s a dangerous climb. I make it to the table with Sadananda and the sleeping children. Sadananda orders granola with yoghurtfor all of us; it is full of bright green chopped chilies and I can't eat it because I am on my panchakarma.  So we leave Matam Fez and go to Himalayas. As I enter the restaurant an old lady holds out her hand, wanting me to help her to her seat, so I help her but this annoys the hostess. We go to our table and two men in flowered shirts come and scold me for helping the old lady. I think this is pretty silly. I can't eat the food there either. We go home but now it is more like my parents house with an upper storey. The children's mother is sitting on the sidewalk. She tells Sadananda that the children are fine on their own and 'need their freedom'; she is a neglectful mother to the extreme and we are still taking care of the children.  I wake up.
 
As I awoke I realized that the two restaurants represented Sufism and Hinduism.  I can’t be nourished by the old paradigm version of either one.

Interpretation by Sufi teacher Habiba Ashki.
 This is an amazing dream:
There is a gift waiting for you that is from your ancestral lineage.  You will receive it when you are willing to stand totally naked before your angels or inner guides.  Nothing can be held back.  This gift will nourish you, your relationship with Sadananda, who will also receive a new level of awakening, and will nourish your spiritual children.  For now it is important to let go of reliance on any spiritual tradition and to totally trust your own inner wisdom.  Let your open heart be your guide.

During this journey I have been on with Sadananda and his love for another woman, I have had to delve deeply into the essence of trust. What is the relationship between trust, love and vulnerability?

There is the naïveté of trust, the childlike belief that this specific person will never harm us, never cause us pain.  A trust like this ignores the basic reality of anitya, anatta and dukha—every compounded entity is impermanent, inherently empty of true existence, and will eventually give rise to pain simply by changing.  If in no other way, the ones will love will one day die and leave us bereft.

Then there is the trust we place in our dream or fantasy of happily ever after. This fantasy is a powerful imagination that our needs for love, safety, connection, security, stability, and so on can and will be met only in this specific way, with this specific person. We narrow our sense of true vision into the tunnel-vision of this fantasy and are devastated when our dream turns out to be an illusion. In my work as an Ayurvedic practitioner and spiritual guide, I have seen the immense disappointment people suffer when their dream of family falls apart.

Once our naïveté of trust is shipwrecked on the rocks of emptiness and impermanence, once the dream of happily ever after reveals itself as a nightmare, we can easily swing into distrust and self-protection. We decide to trust only ourselves and seek ways to close the chinks in our armour to make ourselves invulnerable. Yet at this point we become our own worst enemies because we deny our need for connection. We are so determined not to let others cause us misery that we become the authors of our own misery and isolation.  Simon and Garfunkel sum this one up:

“If I never loved I never would have cried…
I am a rock,
I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.”

In the depth of my own experience of pain, loss and immense disappointment, a light of what is fundamentally trustworthy and true shines in the darkness. That light is bodhichitta—awakened heart. Bodhichitta shows me that true love is not a contract, not a deal and not a bargain. It is not about, “I love you so you have to love me,”or “I do these things for you, you have to keep your side of the bargain.”  True love is not a peace treaty, and does not depend upon our loved one’s ability not to cause us pain. True love is absolutely unconditional and is not involved in any way with treaties or contracts. Trust arises in me today as trust in my own basis goodness and trust in the basic goodness of those I love. Although their actions may give rise to a transitory experience of pain, basic goodness resides within them as an urge for my welfare and the welfare of all beings. Placing my trust in this deeper level, the Buddha nature level, I remain open and vulnerable. I am not a rock or an island; I am a tender, fully alive human heart. To love is to be vulnerable. Choosing tenderness, choosing vulnerability, I choose to live and to love. The beauty of this love which has shed naïveté and illusions is incomparable. Instead of saying, “I love you, so you aren’t allowed to hurt me,”   I can truly say, “Having been hurt by your actions, I finally know what it is to love you unconditionally. Thank you for this gift I would never have received without your actions and the sorrow they generated.” 

Here’s a doha I wrote that catches some of this flavour.

On the thin ice of concepts

 I walked the shining lake of knowledge.

Summer came, melting the ice.

I drowned

And walk on water.

One of the names of Divine Mother in Lalita Sahasranama is “om nirvikaryai namaha: salutations to Her who is the unchanging basis of all change.” It appears that at this time in life I am being called upon to actualise this aspect of Ma’s potency.

The more profound the inner stillness in which I reside, the more rapidly seem to fly the changes all around. In terms of the major life changes, the features of this transition are ever shifting and changing in themselves. And change is in the air at the ashram too. Yesterday alone, a resident who was due to move in on the first of this month suddenly decided not to move in after all…a resident who was slated to move out decided he couldn’t bear to leave… and the ever supportive Rivkah, ashram manager and personal assistant to Ma, handed in her resignation in order to focus on her massage practice. The illusion of permanence has, it seems, no breathing space here at Alandi Ashram.

Last week in Ayurvedic Fundamentals class we were studying Shad Darshan (Philosopy). As I read from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to the students, I came to sutra 16 in the first chapter. “Supreme freedom is that complete liberation from the world of change which comes from knowing the unbounded Self.”  Words read before, intellectually known before, pondered before suddenly took the form of a thunderbolt launching from the page and striking me in the heart. “O my God,” I gasped, “this is it! This is the truth! I am actually going through this right now…but I didn’t have the words.”

 Indeed, this is the true, absolute brahmacharya, this is the genuine sannyas, to renounce the world of change effortlessly and spontaneously, through knowing the unbounded One without a second. I feel and know the human woman within my being and give voice to her feelings, concerns and vulnerabilities, yet she is no longer I, because the focus of being has shifted to paramatman, the Supreme Self.  And, yes, it is bewildering at times to be on the journey to changeless being, because from one perspective this can appear to be a massive change. I am no longer the one I thought I was. om nirvikaryai namaha!