Fire

Thanks to everyone who contacted us last week with concerns about the fires in San Diego county. We are fine, and Manzanita Village is unscathed, though we are now hearing from friends who lost their homes.

I am also hearing that for the most part people are in amazingly good spirits. There were reports last week of people evacuated to the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego who were singing together and dancing, and enjoying each other's company, even though some knew that their house had burned to the ground.

Someone I know said, "It's okay, I've been through things much worse than this. The family is safe, we're okay!" As if it takes a fire like this to remind us of our priorities and to bring us back to our basic appreciation and gratitude for what we have.

What I do now

To see the world anew, to change old responses, to disentangle from singular points of view. To let rigidity turn to flexibility. To breathe. To rely on kindness . . .

What I learned when I was first studying gestalt and hypnotherapy twenty years ago was that the client tells you everything you need to know.

Now I extend that to mean: let the world tell you what you need to know. Everything is a sign, both of itself, and of something beyond itself. So, as a coach, as a teacher, as a human being, my task is to learn to read the magic of the world. Magic, because it is not visible at first. Then, as each layer peels away, it’s hard to imagine that what is underneath was ever invisible.

I don't want to assign any special power to myself. What I am describing is available to anyone who takes the trouble to look.

Now as a coach and hypnotherapist, and as a teacher and workshop leader, my basic work is to turn this process into a collaboration, and to transmit as fully as I can the understanding that change is absolutely possible, and that entirely new ways of being, thinking, and feeling are actually available. All you need is enough commitment to begin the process.

The work has become so effective that clients have sometimes forgotten why they came to it in the first place. In a few short weeks they have transformed their life, and now wonder why they ever had the notion that they needed help<

I have to remind them why they came, then tell them how truly capable they are, and how brilliant they are at solving problems!

Drive Yourself Sane!

After years of pulling against the elastic chains of a Buddhist identity I succumbed last June to the exquisite recognition (not that I hadn’t been exploring this, writing about it, teaching it – for years!) that no single idea is fundamentally better than any other; that perceptions, and the ideas that we derive from them, are overlays, projections, extraneous extras!

I understood on some new, and much deeper level, that identity/ies really are overlays. We can simply peel them away. You’d think that after decades of Buddhist practice, and after changing my sex, I would have understood something about this. Now doubt I did; it's just that such things are like journeys, always inviting you further into uncharted lands.

It’s strange and interesting how change itself gets reified, charted, fossilized into the constructs we make of it – ‘impermanence’ as an item of faith among Buddhist dogmatists, or gender deconstruction as its own version of tyranny in the hands of certain feminists and gender queer folks.

And still we live in a world of monumental violence and destruction, oppression, denial and mind-boggling stupidity. So I have also come to appreciate, more than ever, the essential need for exquisite and complete accountability and flawless integrity.

And that’s another can of worms right there!

Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski
Drive Yourself Same by Susan and Bruce Kodish

Chris Howard

So . . . I was listening to the radio in April – KPFK –The Aware Show, which is sometimes interesting and sometimes incredibly annoying (all that new age guff!) I was listening to someone talking about his problem with The Secret – how it got people stuck in the idea that they were to blame for their misfortune. Indeed The Secret embodies assumptions of privilege that make most of my friends avoid it like the plague.

(Actually, there are some valuable suppositions in the movie, such as that very Buddhist understanding that we create the world through our thinking, and that how we do so is very much dependent on emotional states. Unfortunately, they are couched in assumptions of privilege and entitlement that obscure the complexity of our collective circumstance – Empire and global destruction . . . but I digress)

So . . . this person, who turns out to be a man named Chris Howard, begins to speak of how, if he were to talk to someone at Darfur or to someone who had been badly abused as a child, and if he got the chance to bring up the subject, he would ask, “If you could imagine that there was a positive lesson that you could carry with you from this what would it be?”

So my partner and I decided to go to the free three day workshop being offered in LA. “We need a kick in the butt,” she said.

We were reluctant participants, kicking and screaming from the start. “By a show of hands who would like more money in their lives?” Twelve hundred people put up their hands. Oh Lord! I'm way too cool for this! Then in the breaks there was dancing in the aisles. Oh No! I’m a Buddhist teacher I just don’t do this kind of stuff! It took us a day and a half to stop whining and to decide we were actually learning a lot, and to admit that Chris Howard is actually a brilliant teacher. So we decided to fly up to San José to take the workshop again the following month; and not to waste the first half of it complaining!

At that second workshop we danced in the aisles a lot, and signed up for a full program of training with the Chris Howard folks. In the process we spent more money than we though we had. And that was okay. It was a breakthrough to take care of ourselves in this way.

It is the end of June and I have now just finished three weeks of the training. What I am learning is astonishing and delightful. My work as a life coach is utterly transformed and rejuvenated. I am revising everything I am doing, not only as a coach, but as a Buddhist teacher, as a facilitator of change, as an activist, as a human-being. . . .

The website doesn't really convey the spirit of this work. Regardless, I must say, I do trust the integrity of this company Chris Howard Seminars

Image of Darfur at top of page from
shalomrav.wordpress.com/category/darfur/

Rhythms laid down before human memory

What enters the conscious mind is such a small part of our life. We draw from depths that are hidden to us, depths we feed and that feed us; disturb or are disturbed by us; depths that allow us to connect to life, or cut us off from life.

Most of what we are is determined by elements within ourselves that we have been unconscious of. Yet the invitation is always there to open, to trust, to soar.

So it is with the wild world that surrounds us. We imagined it was subdued by the twentieth century, yet it remains, in the movement of the wind, in the eye of bird, and always in our own hearts, and in the hearts of those we meet

And our hearts still beats with a rhythm that was laid down before human memory. Through this continuing emergency of wars and global devastations there is a natural capacity for healing and self-remembering that draws us home to those ancient roots, a power and wisdom that we know in our bones.

The Buddha spoke of it, and pointed the way, though it is not exclusively Buddhist in nature. That rhythm is still open to us. Perhaps now, more than ever before, there is a calling to come home to that rhythm, to come home to more than who we have been.