This blog, which began as a piece I started writing around the end of 2009, is meant for those who already know me. I wanted to be able to speak with my own voice, rather than to spend a lot of time and effort trying to create an appropriately beautiful and felicitous expression. I didn’t think I could do it anyway, so what you will get is my regular voice with its sometimes pompous dissertations on my favorite ideas, its sometimes self-deprecating emotional pieces and its jumping around from one thing to another without proper transitions. I have given up on the idea of “writing a book” in favor of just telling my story. Hopefully it will convey the sense of process, since it is the inner process of spiritual unfolding that interests me.

I have received some feedback from old friends who take exception to some of my characterizations of Siddha Yoga and the Buddhist teachings. I do not claim to be right - it is just my story.

I wanted to show how an apparently inexplicable set of events in an apparently inexplicable order can somehow end up with a happy outcome. I believe that the mystery of life, present always and in all things, is ever working its divine magic in our lives, however ordinary they may appear.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Chapter 10: Embodiment

Bringing Light to Dark Places

Adyashanti, a major influence, speaks of the process of embodiment. After spiritual awakening to the truth of one’s being, one goes back into the personality and brings the light of Awareness to all the dark and unconscious parts of one’s being. This is difficult work and there are numerous temptations to flee into the light, but it is a kind of bodhisattva activity to bring light to any place there is darkness, not only to the dark places of your own psyche, but to the dark places in the outer world as well.

This teaching made perfect sense to me and provided me with a more positive way to regard the negative experiences in my life. I could see them as part of a task rather than something to be repressed, conquered or overcome. There was work to be done - to reclaim dark territory for the light - an approach which appealed to my warrior nature.

Because it is the unraveling of karma, the embodiment process is unique to each traveler on the path. My personal sharing in this chapter is offered as an example of how the process can proceed. Although others are involved in my story, it really is not about them but only about myself and my own karma, doubtlessly accrued over many lifetimes.

T-Square as Koan

In the early days of my sadhana, or spiritual practice, one of my favorite models was astrological. These days in my astrological work, I pay particular attention to the nodes of the moon, the ascendant and Saturn. These features point to the direction of growth, the lessons to be learned and the obstacles to be overcome.

I have north node and ascendant in Scorpio, the sign of transformation. My south node, representing past karma, is conjunct Saturn, which is in a T square with Mars and Pluto, the rulers of Scorpio. The “villain” in the chart is Mars, which opposes Pluto. Over the years, I have found that when things are most difficult, there is always a difficult Mars transit or aspect.

Mars represents self will, while Pluto, its higher octave, represents divine will. The T square with both of these planets squaring Saturn appears to represent all of my heavy issues. I think of this T square as the koan or dilemma of my life and sadhana.

Baba had Mars and Pluto joined in conjunction. One way to interpret this is to say that his personal will and divine will were one, or that he manifested the divine through his personal will. My task is to somehow join Mars to Pluto and end the war between them.

I was unable to appreciate the way Baba acted because my Mars is opposite Pluto, divorced from divine will, separate and unregenerate. When I saw his Mars manifesting without constraint, it felt wrong and bad, because it always has been for me. I think this projection is at the root of my difficulties with Baba. As always, it comes back to me.

For many years, my solution was to deny the reality of the ego – Mars - and to focus on God’s will - Pluto. When Mars made a transit of my natal Pluto, I began this piece. When I saw that this transit occurred at the time I began to write this, something fell into place. I saw then how I could use my Mars energy to express – to share with others about my process. That Mars certainly does want to express. After all, it is in an air house (according to Placidus and Koch) and the air sign of Aquarius.

Denying my Mars energy was not the solution, although I spent plenty of time using repression as a tactic. But it never really solved the problem, for Mars does not just go away. Bringing some light or awareness to this dark piece is the answer. I had to withdraw from the old patterns of self will, and at the same time proceed more positively by moving to gather up all the discarded pieces and fit them into the puzzle of my life in an integrated or holistic way. Moving into the gonpa gave me the immediate opportunity to withdraw from the old patterns of willfulness and ambition.

The Yoga of Seeking Challenge

There were situations I struggled with in my early days at the gonpa, but there came a time when my life seemed to be fairly challenge-free. I didn’t have any relationships which were difficult or stressful. Life was easy. It was about this time that I began to consider the one old relationship which was still stressful and that was the one with my ex-husband.

They say that yogis at a certain point find delight and happiness in difficulties because it provides an opportunity to practice. Difficulties and challenges are the fuel which can make the flame of Awareness burn brighter. I can’t say that I was quite at the point of taking delight in the stress, but I saw it as an undigested part of my psyche and was eager to deal with it in a more proactive way.

In the whole sign system, which is coming increasingly into vogue, my Saturn is in the 7th house, the house of marriage. As I pointed out, it is conjunct the south node in a T-square with Mars and Pluto, which oppose each other. Sitting in the house of marriage and conjunct to Saturn, the south node seems to describe the difficult aspects of my marriage. I had often felt oppressed, stuck, bound.

This was not the only aspect of my marriage. I also have Uranus in my 7th house and it makes a very close sextile to my Sun and a very close trine to Neptune. This minor grand trine of Sun, Neptune and Uranus, also describes my marriage perfectly. It was a wonderful spiritual union and to a man with Sun in Pisces (ruled by Neptune) and Moon in Aquarius (ruled by Uranus). This fit perfectly with the two planets exactly sextiling my Sun.

In the decades before I decided that I wanted to deal with this part of my past, my tactic had been to distance myself from the situation as much as I could. After years of not corresponding with him, Swami Shankarananda pointed out that he was not going to go away.

By then I had been at the gonpa a number of years and felt that as a bodhisattva wannabe, it was not right to reject anyone. So I began to correspond, setting off the great Hindu/Buddhist debates. I sent reams of material from the texts I was studying in the hopes of showing him the light.

Then one day in 2007, in retreat, I had a profound realization that I had only hated my ex-husband because I loved him. That realization was hard to bear. I rejected it for a while but it stayed in the back of my mind. The realization that I loved him made me feel disempowered, weak, sad, even pathetic. It was a very vulnerable feeling and I did not want to go there - at all.

After mulling it over and seeing that I could not avoid this, I wrote to him saying I would finally like to visit. He was overjoyed and welcomed me with great love. He and Devi invited me to move to Australia and live in the Shiva Ashram. I could feel all my rational defenses warning me, but I had decided to go with the flow of the irrational and follow what was apparently being directed by some higher or greater force.

It could have been grace, karma or delusion. Whatever it was, I knew I had to follow and make the move. Again, it was like the Sufi story of the man with the inexplicable life. The universe was conspiring to have me move to Australia and live in his ashram. How bizarre!

In my mind, he embodied a lot of the qualities I had had difficulty with in my relationship with Baba. And yet I loved him. Of course I saw his good qualities too – his love, humor, spiritual awareness, charm, and brilliance - but my focus during my first 11 years at the gonpa was more on what I perceived as flaws. Even though I was aware that it was all my projection, still the projection caused suffering. Clearly this was a piece that had to be reclaimed, transmuted. It had to be the outer manifestation of my T square.

This was not clear to me when I decided to move to Australia. Then, I had been moved to bring what had been for me the life-transforming teachings of the way of the bodhisattva to benefit him and Devi.. I went to Australia with the motive to share what I had gained. In some part of my mind there was the agenda to impart something great which would enable him to rise to greater heights. I was aware that he too had an agenda to transform me. I felt that if I could embody the principles of the bodhisattva path fully enough, I could prevail, but not in a competitive way. This was my idealistic way of thinking, which I did share with them.

The Stage of Failure

They too, however, had their agendas. After some months, I became overwhelmed by the situation. With Devi’s support, the two of them seemed bent on making me surrender to their vision and path. All my old feelings of being trapped, bullied, and suffocated arose. I struggled but got nowhere, so I just did what I had always done in the past which was to just eat my feelings.

I had had lumpy or cystic breasts for most of my adult life so I was on intimate terms with the lump that began to grow larger in late March, 2009. I figured it might be too much caffeine, a factor which had exacerbated the cysts in the past. I cut down, but it did not reduce. By May, it was much larger and the nipple had begun to invert. I went to the doctor who immediately sent me to a breast surgeon. After tests, it was diagnosed as breast cancer which had metastasized to the lymph nodes, and I had surgery on my birthday in July.

As with any illness, there are many causes and conditions that combine to bring it about. There was the factor of emotional stress and there were other factors as well. I had been taking estrogen replacement therapy for about 20 years, way longer than most doctors consider safe.

I was aware that it was auspicious to get ill when I was in a situation in which I was very well taken care of. The ashram had been paying for a health insurance policy for me and Swamiji paid for what was not covered. The cancer could not have been timed more perfectly.

As with so many who get a cancer diagnosis, it was a huge wake up call and brought a totally different consciousness. I was plunged into a meditative state which went on for weeks. I saw that it was very likely that I could die soon. It was time to get real and deal with emotional stress in a proactive way. I was well aware of the connection between cancer and emotional stress. I had also read numerous magazine articles, sitting in waiting rooms, of women whose cancer had been a boon and a blessing. This was the way I felt from the moment of diagnosis.

The entire ashram rallied to care for me in the most supportive and kind way. Swamiji and Devi responded with great love and concern and the pressures lessened considerably. I thought that perhaps my purpose was to show them the greatness of the path which had transformed me by my conscious death. Maybe my dying well would convey something which my personality could not. I surrendered to it. I have always wanted my life to be of some value and while with the Buddhists, I had embraced the teachings of pure motivation and sincerely aspired to be of benefit to beings in whatever way I could.

I was not afraid of death, and had never been, though I do have fears of physical suffering. The greatest fear of all is that I would not be able to fulfill my spiritual destiny. If it were to enter a deep retreat, meditate profoundly and leave my body without much fuss, then I was willing to surrender to this scenario.

I did not want, however, to be weakened by chemotherapy. I was dead set against it. I had seen so many people become ghost-like with no immune systems and with permanent damage. At the age of 70 I did not have the vitality of my youth and felt strongly that I could not endure the “slash, poison, burn” protocol of the medical profession. I was content to have surgery, but no more.

I read up on chemotherapy and the more I read, the more convinced I became that I could not and would not do it. Devi and Swamiji wanted me to be healed and believed that chemotherapy would help me. I just didn’t agree. Thus began a fight for what seemed to me to be even more important than my life. It was my potential to be of benefit to others. I printed out scads of research showing the ill effects of chemo and the negligible benefits. The doctors helped by presenting me with statistics showing that there was only a 4% benefit with chemotherapy for someone my age and with my type of cancer.

Finally they agreed with me. Then we went through it again over radiation and hormone therapy, but it was easier. I began a regimen of alternative techniques, therapies and remedies which Swamiji graciously and with great love offered to support. Both the ashram and he personally spent thousands of dollars on my health.

As I began to gain strength, it occurred to me that perhaps dying was not my great purpose or great teaching after all. It was not going to be that easy. I had to smile at how exquisitely the universe arranged everything. I was going to have to deal with the T-square after all.

I used to weep to Lama Drimed saying that I didn’t understand how I could live my chart in a positive way. It seemed so negative. To say that I don’t like conflict and upsetting people is an understatement. It so goes against my grain that my habitual mode of operating was to just go along and eat my feelings.

As an enneagram type Two, I want to express and embody love and love only. I want to accept everyone as they are. Before taking sannyas, Baba had given me the title “Mother Girija” and I felt that he saw, beneath my willful exterior, that divine motherly quality that I have always worshipped and wanted to express. For me, the divine mother is the one who accepts me totally - as I am at every moment. She is the ultimate refuge, beyond all concepts and beyond all situations in the world. She is comforting, accepting, compassion personified.

And yet here I was, clearly not yet dead, feeling resistant and despairing. It did not match my cherished persona. I was not yet able to be that compassionate being I so aspired to be. Clearly I had found a situation in which the need for transformation was crucial. Well, wasn’t that what I had wanted when I embraced the teachings on embodiment? Exactly.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Girija

    This dichotomy of light vs. darkness thang you're talking about seems to start out at least as a choice of one over the other. Maybe as you go on you seem to be talking about bringing pure awareness (Rigpa in Buddhist terms) to your own daily machinations of your deluded mind (Ordinary Mind in Buddhist terms)somehow. At least that's how I'm interpreting what you are saying. I've thought about this for a long time. I've watched different teachers such as Baba, Chagdud Rinpoche and Lama Drimed and it seems that, no matter how high and clear they seem to be from one perspective they also seem to also be (sometimes at least) engaged in day to day and moment to moment mundane concerns just like the rest of us. With often mixed results just like the rest of us. For a lot of years my fantasy of the results of high spiritual attainment was that at some point everything just gets all good and just fine. This does not seem to be the case from where I stand these days.

    I read an account of one famous Tibetan lama whose root lama's life was one big mess while the younger lama's life was one favorable circumstance after another. When the younger lama asked his root lama how this could be the elder lama just shrugged his shoulders and said something like,"That's the way of karma..."

    I'm sure many of us on this "spiritual" path have read or heard that the closer you get to enlightenment the less karma (both negative and positive) unfolds in your life. I distinctly remember Baba saying that, in the end, one will not have any karma to deal with, the positive and negative having been completely consumed by the fire we go through on the path toward enlightenment.

    My current beliefs on this are that the good and the bad and everything in between just keep unfolding in an unending way and the best we can hope for is to not lose our connection to pure awareness as best as we can.

    What do you think....?


    Milind

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  2. I've thought about that a lot also over my life time. And .. though I wasn't asked, this is what I have concluded - spiritual attainment - awareness or whatever else you want to call it is like anything else that you want - the more you practice it - focus on it - the better at it you get. Its hard work and most of us do not have the drive - desire - energy - whatever it takes to "get really good at it". Other than that we are all and will always remain human beings living in this body with our weaknesses and strengths - greatness and pettiness - selflessness and selfishness.

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  3. Hi Girija - I stumbled on your blog by accident. I don't know if you remember me from my visits to the gonpa - Simon Zalkind. I was always very fussy and demanding but you were always kind. Like you, the trajectory of my life has taken me to places I could not have imagined and would not have wished for. But I'm well and - for the most part - thriving. I see that you are too. Spiritually speaking, I maintain a very "essentialized" (no rituals or mumbling) Buddhist practice but I have also returned to the hoary and despised religion of my youth - Judaism. I am blessed with wonderful teachers and an astonishingly wise legacy. My daughter Fanny - who is ours through the blessing (?) of Chagdud Rinpoche and the behind-the-scenes machinations of Lisa Leghorn - is 9 years old and so gorgeous that it makes me nervous to look at her. I've been considering visiting the gonpa again. I'm not sure why. If I did I would love to have the chance to visit with you. God bless you! - Simon

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  4. Dear Simon,
    I don't have an email address for you. Send it to me at girijamoran@hotmail.com. Thanks! Lovely to hear from you.

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