32. Time to Be Like Buddha

HAVE YOU EVER FELT YOUR SOUL—OR A PART OF IT—LEAVE YOUR BODY?

Blog 32: Dec. 1997-April 1998—Days turn into weeks, and weeks into months, as I live in a house in Berkeley, California with five other people that seem, for the most part, discontent. Although I long to leave, and even seek out other options, my body won’t cooperate with any kind of movement. The message for me is to “be like Buddha,” so I sit and be with where I am no matter how painful.

I reflect on who I have been in my journal. I write, “I used to feel that I didn’t feel. I used to think that I couldn’t love. I would try so hard to feel love, but I couldn’t. It hurt so much. It hurt me so much to think I could not feel. I did not understand all the tears late at night, all the anguish in trying to tune into my heart.”

Now that I am injured, I feel pain (how can I not?), I feel love, and I realize that it never was true that I couldn’t feel. The truth was that I didn’t honor how I felt. I didn’t know how to listen to my heart, how to trust myself, because I was so busy being strong, proving myself, and on some level, leaving my body, not wanting to be here because it was too painful.

I continue to write in my journal, “This pain, this heat moving through my body takes my soul away. My soul is trying to come back, but for some reason it is scared. My soul is scared to be with me. When I wake up the next morning, I can feel how little power I have in my body. It’s as if my breathing is outside of me. And I sense that my soul has been trying to leave my body since birth. It has little interest in being on this earth, yet another part of me that knows I am meant to be here, and is bringing me back, back, to this place of Buddha that needs to feel the pain, that understands better than this.

HAVE YOU EVER FELT YOUR SOUL—OR A PART OF IT—LEAVE YOUR BODY?

Check out my novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, at Child of Duende website

31. Being Unloved is a Great Poverty

WHEN HAS LOVE HEALED YOU?

Blog 31: Dec. 1997-April 1998—I am sitting in the hot tub outside my home in Berkeley, California, soaking in the delicious water that calms my body’s pain. I look up at the sky, stars pushing through the clouds and past city lights that obscure a few from my view.

“You are a bloodless sky. You love without wanting,” I later write. “Let me hold you in my belly tonight. Let me feel the coolness of your touch, balancing the heat that leaves my body by the seconds. Let me feel your cool heart balancing this fast moving, fast loving belly of mine.”

For weeks now, I have been with Greg, visiting healers, and then sharing passionate evenings together. Being able to hold each other, and to bring joy, laughter, and passion to my life after months of pain and struggle is sweet relief. My pain and debilitation are bearable when I can feel love and support in my life, just like hunger, poverty, or other physical struggles don’t seem so bad when there’s love and care. It reminds me of what Mother Teresa, who gave so much to the hungry and sick in India, once said: “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

For so much of my life I have pushed people away, protecting myself from people getting too close—getting in the way of my independence, influencing me to be someone I was not. I was always so stubborn to do things my way, to find my own way, and to feel again, to feel my own humanity, because I was raised to distrust my heart, to put my head before my heart.

I came into the world with a big heart, though, and a lot of love, and it’s taken me a long time to come home to myself, to feel again, to feel my humanity. It seems my body, so broken, is reflecting the broken pieces of my heart that have been screaming to come home. Maybe this screaming has been for centuries, lifetimes.

Either way, I am here, no longer wishing to battle between my mind and heart. I am here, hearing my heart, pounding loud, heat in my body, in my soul, ready to let go of the old ways of control, of needing answers, of pushing—ready to love and be loved, to be held, to trust, to discover my way home.

(Don’t forget to check out my novel, Child of Duende, a passionate, magical, spiritual journey of coming home in Spain, at Child of Duende )

WHEN HAS LOVE HEALED YOU?

 

 

30. We Circle Around Ourselves Until Landing in the Middle

Blog 30: Dec. 1997-April 1998—Greg is his name. I meet him at the YMCA in downtown Berkeley, not far from home. He’s a trainer, and I go to him, thinking he can bring strength back to this broken body of mine. Instead, he becomes another angel in my long healing journey.

Soon, Greg and I are visiting every healer known to mankind: osteopaths, energy healers, chiropractors, orthopedics, and yes, psychic surgeons. After seeing a psychic surgeon, I’m laid up in bed for days, barely able to lift myself up. Greg is amazed. Having worked as a nurse in the army, he tells me that I’m behaving just like post-surgery patients he’s seen. And yet, it’s just energy work. We are both surprised.

When Greg and I travel from one healer to another, we laugh a lot. We both have a twisted sense of humor, and our time with healers becomes a pleasant relief from my pain and serious attempt to heal. My body and hip issues don’t go away, but my heart begins to heal. I feel held, cared for, and there’s relief in having someone by my side to laugh with despite it all.

I continue to write in my novel and journal, and I find myself reflecting on what it means to be in my center, to be whole no matter what happens.
I write, “If I stand in the center, in the self, and know from this place that I am a part of the whole, then I don’t need to step outside myself. I only need to go deeper inside myself to uncover the universe, because knowing myself is trusting my connection to the whole.”

I draw a circle. Inside the circle, I place a dot somewhere on the right side of the circle. I write, “If I stand here, I am nowhere. I am neither with myself nor the whole.” The center of the circle is where I need to stand, and honor my needs, every day, every minute. “Going inside can take many forms,” I add. “But the first step is stopping, not moving forward, and beginning to move from the center, from myself.”

 

 

29. Woman is the Possibility of a World Unseen

WHEN DID A FEMININE WAY SHOW YOU THE WAY?

Blog 29: Dec. 1997-April 1998—The secondhand of the clock moves slowly here in the lowlands of Oakland, California. Everything is an effort: walking around the block, determined to walk again; going swimming at the YMCA; shopping; cooking.

When I go to the YMCA, I watch another woman who’s there every time, grabbing onto the low wall, painfully taking baby steps, just so she can make it to the pool. I feel compassion, and sudden gratitude for both her courage to keep going, and my capacity to have the little bit of movement I do in my legs.

When I’m done with my errands, I come back home and write my novel and articles, or I write in my journal or rest. As I reflect on where I’ve been, I realize how much I’ve survived almost 29 years of my life by pushing forward, always aiming to become someone important, driven by the outside world pushing, pulling me to be like a man, to accomplish, conquer, prove. Yet, here I am, having injured myself, and this pushing, this masculine way, hurting me.

I sit with who I am as a woman, inside a feminine energy that calls for another way. “A woman is the possibility of a world unseen,” I write in my journal. “She is the invisible that manifests when all else has forgotten how to be. Woman is the power of all that is new in the world.

“The days of moon come and go in a woman’s body. They bring her rage and a kind of roundness that woman understands—a roundness that extends outward and inward at the same time,” I continue to write. “No one truly owns her. This roundness has no measurement, no length, no beginning, nor end. She learns, however, in the fragile skeleton of her body that once imprisoned her, that she must wait. Her fertility, in all its power, must wait for dusk before it can reveal itself.

“While there is this unbelievable surge in her belly, this
child, with features invisible to the world, will not be born to impulse again—to a preeminent death tomorrow. This child is her love, her understanding that grows flowers in her belly. She must first ride this current of self love before this river can meet the sea.”

WHEN DID A FEMININE WAY SHOW YOU THE WAY?

Check out my novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, at  Novel Link!

28. I Am Not Alone

WHEN YOU ARE ALONE, WHERE DO YOU GO?

Blog 28: Dec. 1997-April 1998—There are times when no amount of wanting, willing, or determination will bring us to that place we wish to go. The past lives in every cell of our body—whether from this lifetime or another—until we are able to hear, feel, be with what is trying to speak its voice through us so that we may, one day, be free.

This was my reality when I moved from my idyllic home in the Oakland Hills of California to a house with multiple unhappy people in the lowlands of Berkeley. I didn’t want to move, but my hips were in too much pain to function in the hills, and I needed a place without stairs that I could afford.

In this space of debilitation I wrote poems, one of which I share here:

I am no more than this, I say,

than the wind that crosses through my room,

 than the tenderness of strangers,

than your voice that at times whispers when it is afraid.

I have been there,

I have frozen my gut,

closed my wounds to the world,

too big, too outside myself.

I have wandered and prayed for love,

have forgotten so many times that I am not alone,

only to stand here,

and to feel this—

this nakedness of possibility,

this breeze of flexibility,

this knowing that even in this great weakness,

I am not alone.   

WHEN YOU ARE ALONE, WHERE DO YOU GO?

(Check out my novel, Child of Duende, at NOVEL WEBSITE)